Chapter Six: Jesus Christ

Part 4: What Does It Mean to Say: "God Became Man"?

In this section, Rahner asks how the notion of absolute saviour can be identified with the incarnate Logos and Son whom Christianity calls Jesus of Nazareth. He begins with a sustained meditation on the meaning of "incarnation." He notes that the Church's traditional teaching--the "descending Christology" according to which God descended to earth and became man--is a starting point and point of departure (A). He then foreshadows his own approach to the Trinity. His approach insists that the Logos is distinct, not just in terms of its inner relation to the Father, but because only the Logos became incarnate (B). 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 (C). God "became" the human nature which God had prepared for the Logos, so that human nature might be divinized (D). The "lesser" (i.e., human nature) finds its foundation and goal in the "greater" (i.e., the Logos) (E). Hence we can say that humanity is a cipher or abbreviation for the Word of God. Divinized human nature expresses God's intention for us (F). For a true Christology, the affirmation of a dogmatic formula is less important than an existential decision. The important decision is to accept existence as an expression of God's love, and love extends beyond death (G).

A. The Question of the "Incarnation of God" (VI.4.A, p. 212). The incarnation makes accessible the Trinity and our participation in the divine nature. That is its central importance. Because God became a human being, the gulf between divinity and humanity collapsed. We have been enabled to share God’s own life. Rahner’s goal is not to “prove” the teaching of the Church. But in this section he starts with the Church’s traditional teaching of a “descending Christology,” the idea that God “descended” to earth and became man.

The official teaching is, for Rahner, a point of departure. His goal is to reinterpret the faith. Only in a reinterpretation does one know if one has rightly understood (made comprehensible for today) the ancient formulas of faith. The mystery of the incarnation is not something to be "solved." Rather, it is the very mystery which encompasses us. It spurs our efforts to understand.

B. The "Word" of God (VI.4.B, p. 214). God’s “Word” or Logos is not the only person of the Godhead who could become flesh. The “Father” or the “Spirit” could have become incarnate, but did not. Rahner finds in the early Patristic or pre-Augustinian tradition an explanation. According to that tradition, only the Word has a relation to history. Only the Word made human history God’s own. The Word is more than a part of the inner life of God (as in Augustine’s “psychological” theory). We know the Logos most completely in history. We know it through its incarnation in a historical figure, Jesus of Nazareth.

C. Became "Man" (VI.4.C, p. 215). People could simply assume that we know what “the human being” is. We could assume that “man” is a “human nature,” the human nature that the Word took on. If we were to do that, we could approach human nature in a pragmatic and definable (and not metaphysical) way.

Rahner, however, rejects the idea of simply assuming what "man" is. The "rational animal" of Aristotle, the zoon logikon, is a concept without bounds. Why boundless? Because the human being is concerned about what is nameless and impossible to grasp, namely, the mystery of God. The human being is oriented toward the fullness of God. But in order to realize God's fullness, we must allow ourselves to be "grasped" by God.

We define ourselves, Rahner says, by accepting or rejecting the mystery we are. This mystery is not a puzzle to be solved, but a "horizon." It is the horizon of all which is within our sight, the horizon which marks the limits of our knowledge. We are promised the immediacy of the vision of God, but that immediacy lies beyond our horizon. The promise is there, however, as something immediate. It is the immediacy of the incomprehensible God.

So when we think of God becoming human, we mean that God has assumed the human being's very orientation toward infinite mystery. That orientation has been taken by God as God's own reality. Thus our human nature, when God takes it over, has reached the very point to which it is always moving. "This nature of man . .. so gives itself to the mystery of fullness and so empties itself that it becomes the nature of God himself' (218). The potential to obey God is thus identical with the human essence. The potential to obey God is the human nature whom God becomes.

Is this, Rahner asks, a heretical "consciousness Christology," an understanding of Jesus as the one who "became Christ" by his consciousness of his closeness to God? No, he says, it is an ontological Christology. It has to do with the unique being of Jesus Christ. The potential to obey was fulfilled only once in human history, and the hypostatic union took place only once.

This Rahnerian kind of "ontological" Christology enables us to avoid a certain mistake. It avoids the mythological impression that God put on human trappings extrinsically, remaining God but "donning" human form. God did not simply enter human history and "set things right" in the person of Jesus of Nazareth because God could not accomplish them from heaven.

D. Can the Immutable "Become" Something? (VI.4.D, p. 221). The incarnation forces a question upon us: how can the unchangeable God “become” something? The immutability of God is a well-established doctrine. So how can the Word become flesh?

Rahner's answer is this: the Logos assumes the reality of something which is capable of becoming. That "something" is the human reality of Jesus. The one who is not subject to change (i.e., the Logos) can be subject to change in something else (the man, Jesus of Nazareth). The history of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection is "the event and history of God himself" (221).

So God's immutability has to be understood dialectically. Immutability is not the only characteristic of God. It must be understood in relation to other qualities, such as God's willingness to become incarnate. We understand the tension between immutability and incarnation the way we understand the tension between the unity and plurality of God in the Trinity. God, who is immutable, can "become"; God can become "less than" what God remains.

In the incarnation, God "becomes" what has come from God. God becomes, but without changing the divine self. Rahner puts it this way: God "creates the human reality by the very fact that he assumes it as his own" (222). God goes out of the divine self, becomes empty, and is in the emptying--in it as love. God does not just create in order for the creation to be separate. God creates in order to make creatures who are capable of being assumed by God. God creates human beings who can become part of God's own history.

E. The "Word" Became Man (VI.4.E, p. 223). Why was it only the Logos who could and did become man? First, we must affirm that the Word can and does express God’s very self. That is why we call the divine person the “Word.” Next, we must assert that, when God chooses to express the divine self, God does not do so by adopting a disguise. No, God is not putting on a human mask, but actually becoming a human being. Finally, we assert that this Logos, God’s very own expression, is incarnate. Only the Logos (and not the Father or the Spirit) was incarnate.

Does the humanity of the Logos express who God is? Yes, Rahner says. Although the Word did not have to become flesh, nevertheless humanity is what it is because of the incarnation. The lesser (i.e., humanity) is grounded in the greater (i.e., God's self-expression in the Logos who became a creature). Without Jesus Christ, we would not know what God intends for human beings.

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).