Karl Rahner On The Death Of Christ -- By: John W. Williams

Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 14:1 (Winter 1971)
Article: Karl Rahner On The Death Of Christ
Author: John W. Williams


Karl Rahner On The Death Of Christ

John W. Williams*

Karl Rahner is one of the most popular and influential voices in Roman Catholicism today. He is a prolific writer with wide acceptance and a description of the direction in which he is headed gives some indication as to the likely direction of future Catholicism.

The death of Christ is the center of one of the most crucial and important doctrines of Christianity. Rahner’s teaching on this subject is highly significant. He states: “The cross of the Lord is and remains the fork in the road of world history.”1 With these words Rahner suggests something of his estimation of the death of Christ. The purpose of this essay is to examine Karl Rahner’s many references to the Cross and to give some critical evaluation of them.

In his On the Theology of Death2 and also in the Theological Dictionary3 before the meaning of the death of Christ is discussed a basic theology of death is elaborated. Death is considered as an event concerning man as a whole and as the consequence of sin. After this preliminary study Rahner examines the salvific meaning of the death of Christ.

1. The Climactic Event—Death

In the first part of his book on the theology of death, Rahner considers death as the decisive event for sinful man effecting the whole of man. Man is a totality, a union of nature and person. It is man’s nature to exist antecedent to his free personal decision and subject to the necessary laws of material beings. On the other hand, man is a person spiritually free and able to make decisions. Thus death is at once a natural and a personal event.

Traditionally, human death has been described as the separation of the soul from the body. This is a description of death rather than a definition as it says nothing of death as a personal and specifically human event. A definition of death must not only include the separation of the soul from the body but also it must express the effects of death on the soul itself as well as death as the ultimate and definitive act of a person.

*Instructor in Homiletics, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

According to Rahner, when the soul leaves the body it does not lose its relationship to the material. Following Thomistic philosophy, Rahner argues that the soul after death retains a transcendental relationship to the body which it possessed in life and which it will one day possess again in the final resurrection. To this point few Christians would want to differ...

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