Chapter Six: Jesus Christ

(VI, p. 176). This chapter, the longest in the book, shows the unity of Jesus of Nazareth with the eternal Logos or Word. In this Word, God intended from all eternity to reconcile us to the divine self. The chapter has ten parts. Part 1 presents Christology within an evolutionary view of the world. In this view, human beings evolve and transcend themselves in response to God’s Word. Part 2 shows how transcendental Christology is based on an “absolute” relationship with God’s offer of salvation. God does not save human beings from a distance. No, God saves humanity by offering a participation in the divine self.

Photo scanned from the back cover of Karl Rahner, Curso fundamental sobre la fe: Introducción al concepto de cristianismo, trans. by Raúl Gabás Pallás, 1989 fourth edition (Barcelona: Editorial Herder S.A., 1979).

Part 3 presents a transcendental Christology. It understands Jesus Christ as the one who enables human beings to transcend themselves. Jesus enjoyed a union with his heavenly Father, a union so complete that God finally and irrevocably affirmed Jesus’ transcendence – and now offers transcendence to us as well.

In Part 4, Rahner explains the incarnation. He says that, by becoming incarnate, the Logos made the human reality God’s own reality. When God took a human nature, human nature reached the goal toward which it had always tended. The 35-page-long Part 5 focuses on the theological understanding of the history of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. Rahner’s main point is to show that Jesus knew himself to be the actual incarnation of God’s offer of salvation. Part 6 focuses in twenty pages on the death and resurrection of Jesus. Rahner argues that the death of Jesus should not be understood as propitiation of divine anger, but rather as a sacrament of God’s saving will for us. It is a sacrament that accomplished what it showed forth.

In Part 7, Rahner reconciles his transcendental Christology with classical Christology. He wants to show that the death and resurrection of Jesus – in which God permanently validated the earthly life of Jesus – constitute an event in which all humanity may hope to participate. Part 8 aims to show the unity of Rahner’s transcendental Christology with orthodox faith. God intended to reconcile all people through Jesus Christ by extending through him the offer to share God’s very life. When people accept God’s invitation to respond to life’s possibilities, they express the hope that God will affirm them as God affirmed Jesus. Part 9 describes the personal relation of a Christian to Jesus Christ. Rahner says that the Christian’s relation to Jesus Christ is identical with his or her life-work and destiny, i.e., to the way one accepts God’s offer of life and lives it freely and responsibly. Part 10 explores the topic of Jesus Christ in non-Christian religions. Christ is present in those religions, Rahner says, through the Holy Spirit. That Spirit can be said to have “caused” the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ. By analogy, Christ himself can be said to be the “final cause” of God’s self-communication to humanity. Just as the two causes are united, so the explicit Christology of Christians is united with the implicit Christology of the non-Christian. It is implicit because the non-Christian (who may not know Jesus Christ) still may respond to God’s transcendent Word.

The entire paraphrase of Chapter VI is available in the printed version of The Foundations of Karl Rahner, now available from the Crossroad Publishing Company.