29 Facts About Karl Rahner

Karl Rahner was a German Jesuit priest and theologian who, alongside Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Yves Congar, is considered to be one of the most influential Roman Catholic theologians of the 20th century.

Karl Rahner was the brother of Hugo Rahner, a Jesuit scholar.

Karl Rahner's father was a professor in a local college and his mother had a profound religious personality, which influenced the home atmosphere.

Karl Rahner attended primary and secondary school in Freiburg, entering the Society of Jesus upon graduation; he began his Jesuit formation in the North German Province of the Jesuits in 1922, four years after his older brother Hugo entered the same order.

Karl Rahner was ordained a priest on 26 July 1932, and then made his final year of tertianship, the study and taking of Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises, at St Andra in Austria's Lavanttal Valley.

In 1936 Karl Rahner was sent to Innsbruck to continue his theological studies and there he completed his habilitation.

In 1939 the Nazis took over the university and Karl Rahner, while staying in Austria, was invited to Vienna to work in the Pastoral Institute, where he both taught and became active in pastoral work until 1949.

Karl Rahner then returned to the theology faculty at Innsbruck and taught on a variety of topics which later became the essays published in Schriften zur Theologie : the collection is not a systematic presentation of Rahner's views, but, rather a diverse series of essays on theological matters characterised by his probing, questioning search for truth.

Karl Rahner then moved to Munich and in 1981 to Innsbruck, where he remained for the next 3 years as an active writer and lecturer, continuing his active pastoral ministry.

Karl Rahner published several volumes of collected essays for the Schriften zur Theologie, expanded the Kleines theologisches Worterbuch, co-authored other texts such as Unity of the Churches: An Actual Possibility with Heinrich Fries, and in 1976 he completed the long-promised systematic work, Foundations of Christian Faith.

Karl Rahner fell ill from exhaustion and died on 30 March 1984 at the age of 80, after a birthday celebration that honoured his scholarship.

Karl Rahner was buried at the Jesuit Church of the Holy Trinity in Innsbruck.

The basis for Karl Rahner's theology is that all human beings have a latent experience of God in any perception of meaning or "transcendental experience".

Karl Rahner's theology influenced the Second Vatican Council and was ground-breaking for the development of what is generally seen as the modern understanding of Catholicism.

Karl Rahner was emphatic that the identity between "economic" Trinity and "immanent" Trinity does not lead to Modalism, because God could not communicate Himself to humanity as threefold unless He were threefold in reality.

Karl Rahner maintained that the fulfillment of human existence consists in receiving God's self-communication, and that the human being is actually constituted by this divine self-communication.

Karl Rahner was a critic of substance theory and was concerned about the finality of liturgy.

The basis for Karl Rahner's theology is that all human beings have a latent awareness of God in any experiences of limitation in knowledge or freedom as finite subjects.

Karl Rahner often prefers the term "mystery" to that of "God".

Karl Rahner identifies the God of Absolute Being as Absolute Mystery.

Karl Rahner then continues in the next sections to propound "fundamental theology" in order to elucidate the background or foundation of church teaching.

Central for Karl Rahner is the theological doctrine of grace, which for Karl Rahner is a constituent element of man's existence, so that grace is a permanent modification of human nature in a supernatural "existential", to use a Heidegger term.

Karl Rahner has been open to the prospect of extraterrestrial intelligence, the idea that cosmic evolution has yielded sentient life forms in other galaxies.

Karl Rahner's particular interpretation of the mode in which grace makes itself present is that grace is a permanent modification of human nature in a supernatural existential.

Karl Rahner criticised Jesusism, despite his stated respect for the position.

Karl Rahner significantly affirms that the character of the saviour is exemplary and absolute: given the unity of the world and of history from the view point of both God and the world, such an "individual" destiny has "exemplary" significance for the world as a whole.

Karl Rahner believes that the saviour described by his transcendental Christology is not diverse from the one presented by the classic Christological formulations of Chalcedon, which used a concept of hypostatic union to claim Jesus as the Christ.

Karl Rahner creates the human reality by the very fact that he assumes it as his own.

Therefore, it is legitimate for Karl Rahner to assert that God "who is not subject to change in himself can himself be subject to change in something else".