Is Rahner obsolete? What his critics get wrong.

It was 1974. Karl Rahner, SJ, sat across from me in his small, book-lined room in the Jesuit residence near Munich. As part of a wide-ranging conversation, I asked the renowned Vatican II theologian what his most profound religious experience had been. "Immersion in the incomprehensibility of God and the death of Christ," he replied. Had this been a mystical experience that occurred during meditation? "No," he answered quickly, firmly. "In life, in the ordinary things."

Rahner (1904-84) was doubtless one of the most important Catholic theologians since Aquinas and Bonaventure in the thirteenth century. It would be tough to keep him off the list of the ten most influential theologians in church history. He played a crucial role in drafting the documents of Vatican II, and his creative reinterpretation of the Christian faith in dialogue with the modern world produced a new theological paradigm that made the faith more credible and inspiring for many, including me. And yet here he was, a man known for building complex theological systems, articulating a simple spiritual truth: the experience of God's grace in everyday life, in "ordinary things."

Ordinary is not the first word most readers of Rahner would use to describe his thinking--or his writing. In fact, his famously difficult theological tracts (it's said they're "easier in translation") have been the butt of jokes for decades by students and scholars alike. He was, as many have noted, a theologian's theologian. Does that mean his theology doesn't have legs, that it won't endure? Recently, some critics have said as much.

Neoconservative writer George Weigel, for example, has claimed that "the future of Catholic theology will not be Rahnerian." According to Weigel, Rahner's writings were too narrowly directed to German academics and fail to resonate with the broader Christian audience. Likewise, followers of the prolific Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, echoing their mentor, criticize Rahner for putting too much emphasis on the orientation of all human beings to the holy mystery rather than on the distinctive message of Christianity centered on the concrete historical figure Jesus of Nazareth.

Such criticisms are neither convincing nor accurate. Rahner's extensive writings on the spiritual life provide a strong response to the neoconservative and Balthasarian critiques, offering proof of Rahner's enduring role in theology. Yes, it's possible to read Rahner's academic articles in Theological Investigations and wonder if his thought can move a popular audience. Still, it's hard to read his prayers in Encounters with Silence and not be touched in the heart and the head. Clearly, his Foundations of Christian Faith can provide a raft of fodder for critics in search of limpid prose, and might lead some to conclude (mistakenly, I believe) that Rahner's transcendental philosophy overwhelmed the particularity of the gospel message. Yet any reader who has engaged Rahner's homilies in The Great Church Year cannot but be moved by his profoundly Christocentric piety. In fact, it is Rahner's spiritual writings that reveal the wellspring of his whole theology, not merely one aspect of it, and highlight the dynamic interplay between his philosophy of human existence and the particularity of Christianity. In this mutual exchange, the gospel remains norm and judge, as Rahner explicitly affirmed and consistently practiced.

Rahner's insistence on the organic unity between theology and spirituality constitutes, I believe, his lasting contribution to the spiritual quest in the twenty-first century. In his own time, Rahner recognized the great dangers of the "rift, all too common, even today, between lived piety and abstract theology." Such perils are intensified in our postmodern world, which celebrates multiple perspectives and fosters superficial, faddish approaches to spirituality. We have even witnessed the growth of a distinct academic discipline called "spirituality," which ought to engage systematic theology as its primary dialogue partner, but often fails to do so. Rahner's whole theological enterprise was in fact an effort to bridge the gap between spirituality and the academic work of professional theologians. He had great confidence that a theology true to its nature and calling would help people achieve a closer personal relationship with Christ. The more scientific theology is (that is, responsive to the questions of the age while drawing on the Christian tradition), Rahner held, the better guidance it provides for the spiritual quest. In his reading, theology's task is to correlate the Christian tradition with contemporary experience. It must demonstrate how Scripture guides the human adventure, and how specific Christian doctrines illuminate the major questions of the day.

Rahner's confidence in theology as spiritually relevant is most apparent in his published prayers and homilies. His small book On Prayer presents a theology of grace as the basis for making our everyday life a form of prayer, one that allows us to transform the "soul-killing monotony" of mundane tasks into praise of God and love of neighbor. "We cannot find a better means for growing spiritually than through our everyday life," he wrote.

When I teach graduate theology courses on Rahner's spirituality, I have the students read his Foundations of Christian Faith, which provides a solid theoretical basis and a broad perspective for discussing contemporary spiritual issues. When I present the same material to adult learners, I have them read excerpts from Rahner's spiritual writings, which contain his fundamental theological insights, expressed in more accessible language with more explicit applications to the spiritual journey. By studying just a few examples of this approach (Rahner's insights into anthropology, doctrine of God, and Christology), students can get a sense of the resonating power of his spiritual meditations.

In his homilies and prayers, Rahner makes it clear that his anthropology does not derive merely from a philosophical analysis of human existence, but is rooted in the Christian conviction that we are hearers of a saving word from the Lord. In Prayers and Meditations, for example, Rahner writes that we are a "frightful puzzle" to ourselves and that "no amount of questioning" can fathom the depths of our relationship to "the God of free favors." Like Augustine, Rahner understands the restless heart. "We are all pilgrims on the wearisome roads of our life. Every end becomes a beginning. There is no resting place or abiding city. Every answer is a new question. Every good fortune is a new longing." Responding to the Freudian emphasis on the power of our unconscious drives, Rahner explains that the "writhing coil" of our human cravings really points to "a thirst for infinity," which God placed "in the very depths of our nature." It takes eyes of faith "to see behind and through all these dark forces a much more powerful force--the power of the presence of the Holy Spirit."

In The Love of Jesus and the Love of Neighbor, Rahner rejects "an autonomous anthropology"--one that informs the individualism plaguing Western society--in favor of "a communion anthropology," one which recognizes both the solidarity and interdependent character of humanity. This way of thinking sees love of neighbor as "a sacred inexorably enjoined duty" that is always "embraced and borne up by the absolute mystery of the infinite God." This Christian anthropology has "the improbable optimism" to assert that average human beings who "ply their way through life" can rise above "the miserable narrow anxiety of their existence" and "the banality of everyday life" by loving others through simple, unselfish acts of kindness, understanding, and compassion. By "daring to risk" our own autonomy and freedom in genuine acts of love, we enter "into the unfathomable, unbounded dwelling place of God." This anthropology provides a powerful alternative to the ambient culture in which self-contained humanism and excessive individualism reign supreme.

Rahner's doctrine of God, often poetically expressed in his spiritual meditations, insists on the ultimately mysterious character of the one who is beyond all words and images. The incomprehensible God is the "nameless Beyond behind all that is familiar to us," the "infinite Enigma that conceals all other enigmas." And yet Rahner can pray to this God in familiar terms: "Thanks to your mercy, O Infinite God, I know something about you not only through concepts and words, but through experience. I have actually known you through living contact. I have met you in joy and in suffering. For you are the first and last experience of my life. You have seized me; I have not grasped you. You have given me yourself, not just a distant fuzzy report of yourself in human words. And that is why I can never forget you, because you have become the very center of my being" (Encounters with Silence). Representing the long tradition that recognizes the limitations of religious language, Rahner provides a critical challenge to the rapidly expanding fundamentalism that claims direct access to God and detailed knowledge of the divine will for the whole world. Rahner's consistent emphasis on the ultimately mysterious nature of God provides a solid foundation for the postmodern impulse to name God in various ways without pretending to exhaust the divine reality.

Rahner's Christology, summarized in his Foundations of Christian Faith, takes on its most concrete face in his spiritual writings. He invites us to engage Jesus of the Gospels "in the way two lovers gaze at one another in the living of their daily life together." In this experience, we meet the real Jesus who communicates truths to us "that otherwise we should not have known." Drawing on the experience of his later life, Rahner invites us "to throw our arms around Jesus in an act of love," made possible by the Resurrection, which obliterated the distance of time and space. Rahner consistently insists on the humanity of Jesus, the man who could pray, act humbly, be obedient, have new experiences, and "fall mute before the incomprehensibility of God." In his Spiritual Exercises, based on the eighty-day Ignatian retreats he often gave, Rahner vividly portrays Jesus in action. In his commentary on the Agony in the Garden, Rahner notes that Jesus accepts his Father's will and therefore "lets his strength trickle out in weakness, his courage drown in fear, and his love sink into the darkness of Godforsakenness." He is "immersed in deadly anxiety" and "overpowered by something he apparently cannot control." Jesus' cry for help is "drowned in silence." The Father "leaves his son crushed, covered with bloody sweat, powerless." And yet out of that "mute nothingness, into which the agony of his cry disappears, comes something wonderful." Jesus receives the energy to rise up and accept his cross.

This is, in fact, the heart of Rahner's theology: meeting the gracious mystery, revealed definitively in the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, in the mix of daily life. Contrary to his critics' claims, Rahner will remain an important spiritual and theological guide for Christians in the years ahead, precisely because both his spiritual meditations and his Christology provide a potent source of inspiration for those seeking a closer personal relationship with Jesus the risen Lord. What could be more enduring?

Rev. James Bacik, a priest of the Diocese of Toledo, Ohio, is a campus minister and adjunct professor of humanities at the University of Toledo. His most recent book is Catholic Spirituality, It's History and Challenge (Paulist).