Chapter Five: The History of Salvation and Revelation

This chapter has six parts. In Part 1, Rahner explains how Christianity is both a "historical" religion, made concrete in history, and the "absolute" religion. It is historical in that it was founded upon the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. It is absolute because, in the history of Jesus Christ, Christianity proclaims the transcendental experience of humanity with God. Part 2 shows that our experience of transcendence always takes place in history, that transcendental acts of freedom and conscience make history possible, and that the "supernatural existential" enables human beings to "make" salvation history with God. In Part 3, Rahner describes the relation between world history and salvation history. When human beings respond to God's call, world history becomes salvific. It is the history of revelation, because every individual expression of the encounter with God is a kind of revelation.

Scanned photo printed after Rahner's "Foreword" in William J. Kelly, Editor, Theology and Discovery: Essays in Honor of Karl Rahner, S.J. (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Marquette University Press, 1980.

Part 4 explains the relationship between the transcendental revelation of God (available to all people at least as an offer) and the special revelation of God in history (for example, the history of Israel). In Part 5, Rahner describes the structure of the actual history of revelation. The Adam and Eve story, says Rahner, represents the transcendental encounter of humanity with God, as do all of the stories of Israelite history. Part 6 summarizes the notion of revelation. It notes that categorical and historical revelation mediates transcendental revelation.

Part 1: Preliminary Reflections on the Problem

(V.1, p. 138). The transcendental experience of human beings has a history. It does not just exist in a static manner, but takes place in a constant dynamism. Christianity proclaims this transcendental experience as the encounter with God in Jesus Christ. This encounter is not a reality that is always the same. It is an ongoing history, a history borne by the freedom of God and of us.

How can Christianity claim to be both the "absolute" religion and a "historical" religion? In other words, how can it be both unsurpassable and still in process? Further, what can it mean to say that revelation has a history? It cannot simply mean that, in history, some events have revealed God and others have not. Salvation history cannot be just another aspect of history, given the Christian claim that God has communicated the divine self as the "center of everything which can be history at all" (139). Nor can it be merely the expression in words and deeds of a revelatory experience which is ultimately transcendental, interior, and ineffable. It has to be more than "the process of limiting and mythologizing and reducing to a human level something which was already present . . . from the outset" (139).

Part 2:

The Historical Mediation of Transcendentality and Transcendence

(V.2, p. 140). In this brief section, Rahner wants to show (1) that our experience of transcendence always takes place in the arena of human belief and action, (2) that our transcendental acts of freedom and conscience are what makes history possible as an interpretation of reality, and (3) that the “supernatural existential” is a gift of God, given over time, which enables human beings to “make” salvation history with God.

A. History as the Event of Transcendence. (V.2.A, p. 140). The foundational principle is that the human being is “historical” as a “transcendental subject.” We experience transcendence as God’s call to us, a summons to freedom and responsibility, a summons that takes place in history. It takes place in our day-to-day struggle for self-knowledge and self-realization. But it remains transcendent. We cannot reduce transcendental experience to any one historical moment. It is not, for example, the moment when we first realized the call of conscience, first celebrated Holy Communion, or first fell in love. But each of those historical moments can be said to have “mediated” transcendental experience.

The problem is that we no longer understand that our transcendental experience makes history possible. Without our concrete choices, choices to act and not act, choices responsible and irresponsible, choices which express our yearnings for or refusal of transcendence--there would be no history. We human beings are the only creatures who acknowledge such a thing as history. We postulate it. And we are able to do so because we recall and interpret human events from a certain standpoint. It is the hypothetical standpoint of the completion of history (140). Although history is still underway, we hazard a belief about how things will all turn out. And from this hypothetical viewpoint, we interpret past and current events that are still in process.

The "supernatural existential" (see IV.3 above) itself has a history. This existential, defined as that which orients the human being toward God's self-communication, is a divine gift. It was given over time. It began in the obscurity of prehistory and has developed along with the development of human self-understanding and conscience. Thanks to that supernatural existential, human beings are able to hear and respond to God's call. That listening and response is the history of revelation. When we speak of the supernatural existential as a divine gift, we mean that God is free to give or not to give the divine self. We mean also that human beings are free to receive the divine self-communication or to mourn the absence of God's holy mystery. The salvific acts of God are mediated by history, and so are also the salvific acts of humanity (142).

Part 3:

The History of Salvation and Revelation as Coextensive with the Whole of World History

(V.3, p. 142). What is the difference between world history and salvation history? That is the question with which we begin. Rahner says that the two histories are “co-existent.” When the human being responds to God’s call, he or she “makes” salvation history (A). Indeed, we can say that the history of salvation is the history of revelation. Every individual expression in word and deed of the encounter with God is a kind of revelation (B). Although it is commonly said that revelation “ended” with the death of the last disciple and the close of the NT, nevertheless it is fair to say (given a slightly different meaning of revelation) that revelation continues as it comes to self-awareness (C). Revelation is not just the expression, in Scripture and tradition, of the “facts” of salvation, but the appropriation of them by the person in whom God enables the “facts” to become the word of God (D). And we experience the call of God, not just in the explicitly religious realm of worship and belief, but everywhere that God calls us to respond in freedom and responsibility (E).

A. History of Salvation and World History (V.3.A, p. 142). Human history is co-existent, but not identical, with salvation history. Why not identical? Because human history is not only the history of our salvation. It is also the history of our guilt and rejection of God. But God did not intend salvation merely for the few. Everyone finds salvation, says Rahner, “who does not close himself to God in an ultimate act of his life and his freedom” (143). God wills to save all.

All history is the history of salvation insofar as all history is "the concrete, historical actualization of the acceptance or rejection of God's self-communication" (143). Everything else is merely the "history of nature." There are two "moments" in salvation history. First, it is the event of God's self-communication. God communicates the divine self to us transcendentally, in the summons to transcend who we are and become what we are in potential. The second moment in salvation history is the moment of human response. When we respond to God's invitation, we "make" history. When the human being accepts or rejects God's offer, the offer can be seen in history. Thus the self-communication of God, originally transcendental, is historical as well. And it does not have to be explicitly religious. Every response of the human being to God's call belongs to the history of the divine-human communication and relationship.

B. The Universal History of Salvation Is Also the History of Revelation (V.3.B, p. 144). No matter how popular, it is “careless” to identify the Biblical history of revelation with the history of revelation in its entirety. There is more to the history of revelation, Rahner says, than what is in the Bible. Salvation history did not just begin with Abraham. The history of revelation takes place wherever human history takes place. Every individual’s history of faith is part of the history of revelation. This is not the “natural” revelation of God that St. Paul describes in the first chapter of Romans, but a transcendental encounter with God. One cannot even approach God in the Church or in the Bible without being already led by God’s grace – without an invitation from God which may be called a revelation. Whatever is due to grace is an aspect of revelation.

The history of religion includes the history of true and false religions. And even the false ones can be said to exist in the order of grace, to be made possible by God, and to be practiced by people who accept or reject God. Why? Because one cannot even begin to have anything to do with God without first being "borne" or led by God's grace. Revelation is doubtless "beyond" merely natural knowledge, even the knowledge of the learned. But it cannot be reduced to the Scripture and Tradition of Catholicism. It is accessible, Rahner says, in every human experience. To be sure, that experience must be "gratuitously elevated"; that is, it must be the inner experience of God's own call. The experience is not merely God speaking "from without."

C. The Foundation of the Thesis in the Data of Catholic Dogmatics (V.3.C, p. 146). Some would say that Rahner’s thesis – the thesis that revelation cannot be limited to the explicit and official revelation of the Church – is not “Catholic.” But that is an inadequate understanding of Christianity. Christianity really does understand itself as an ongoing process, not a once-and-for-all deposit of faith. It is “the process by which the history of revelation reaches a quite definite and successful level of historical reflection” (146). Christian faith has always understood itself as a process by which the history of revelation comes to self-awareness.

Contrary to the arguments of St. Augustine and Jean Calvin, Christians believe that salvation is promised to all. No one is "kept" from being lost. To be sure, one can forfeit salvation through personal guilt. But it is wrong to understand God as "producing" salvation in a person.

The history of salvation, the Church's official history, must be accepted in freedom. And it cannot be accepted unless it is known as a history of salvation. To be sure, the person's acceptance of salvation history need not be an acceptance of dogmatic propositions. Salvation may occur outside the Christian context when an encounter with God is accepted freely and as known, even if not known explicitly. But it must be an acceptance in faith, a faith in God's own Word, a word that reveals God.

D. Supplementary Theological and Speculative Foundation (V.3.D, p. 148). How does Rahner’s thesis harmonize with official revelation? How does his idea of a “universal but still supernatural revelation” harmonize with the NT and OT? Rahner’s answer is that our ability to hear God’s invitation and respond to it is given by God. “Man’s transcendence is ‘elevated’ by God’s self-communication as an offer to man’s freedom” (148-49). This is not just an “ontic” or theoretical possibility, not just a statement of facts beyond our personhood and conscience. Nor is it the thematic and worked-out expression of a philosopher of religion. It is rather an essential and living reality, an “ontological” reality. One can even say that explicitly Christian teaching, produced by God, may be reduced to a merely human word if it is not carried and led by God’s own self-communication.

Thomism would say that whenever our intentional acts are elevated by supernatural grace, their their object or goal is itself supernatural. So the intentionally pious acts of the Buddhist or Hindu are themselves supernatural. To be sure, they cannot reach their explicitly religious goal by a merely natural act. But the Buddhist or Hindu, moved by God, experiences "revelation."

E. On the Categorical Mediation of Supernaturally Elevated Transcendentality (V.3.E, p. 151). Can we only experience transcendence in an encounter with specifically religious themes? At first sight, one might say yes. People experience the supernatural horizon, one might say, only if they use the word “God,” only if they speak of God’s law, only if they want to do God’s will.

But no, that is false. "It is not the case," says Rahner, "that we have nothing to do with God until we make God conceptual and thematic to some extent" (151). On the contrary, there is an original experience of God which is not explicitly religious. It is not thematic, not even an object of reflection. We experience it whenever we become for ourselves a free subject, free to respond to the possibilities which God offers. This happens when we experience ourselves before the holy mystery which transcends us. This experience is our "supernatural transcendentality." As a consequence of it, we can be said to experience God not just in religion, but everywhere.

There is for Christians no sacred realm where alone God is found. Even when we act morally for purely natural reasons, that moral action is supernaturally elevated. The observance of the natural moral law is "supernaturally elevated and salvific in itself" (152).

The possibility of encountering God everywhere, not just in the traditionally sacred spaces, is implicit in the Vatican II teaching that all can be saved. To be sure, faith is necessary for salvation. But this faith cannot be defined narrowly as the explicit content of a tradition of revelation in the OT and the NT. The faith necessary for salvation is nothing other than "the obedient acceptance of man's supernaturally elevated self-transcendence" (152). Whenever one accepts one's own basic orientation toward God, one experiences a revelation of God.

To read the remainder of this text, please order the printed version of The Foundations of Karl Rahner by Mark F. Fischer, published in 2005 by Crossroad Publishing (ISBN 0824523423).