Rahner has been labelled a ‘transcendental thomist’. His failed doctoral thesis on Thomas Aquinas (later published as Spirit in the World) read Thomas through the lens of the German idealist tradition. His account was inspired in part by earlier philosophers such as Maurice Blondel and Joseph Marechal. His basic philosophical presupposition is that all categorical knowledge is possible because of an openness to being itself as the horizon for this knowledge. Being here is taken to be God. For Rahner, humankind is ‘transcendental’ in that it searches for answers to the question of its own finitude – in the long run this answer can only be “the mystery of being” itself. This openness to being is prior to any categorical knowledge (since it is its presupposition). It can be described in a “nutshell” by saying that in recognising his finitude, man has an implicit knowledge of the infinite (God). It is on the basis of his early work in Spririt in the World that Rahner is seen to build the edifice of his theology. Rahner’s position is held to be a form of the ‘experiential-expressivist’ approach to religion which George Lindbeck identifies. Thus he begins with the subject, conceived as existing within a noumenal realm divorced from the phenomenal world and thus ultimately transcending such factors as culture, language, and history (the Kantian inheritance). Indeed, Fergus Kerr, in his Theology after Wittgenstein, points to what he views as the basic Cartesian position that Rahner holds, presenting us with a self which has a “standpoint beyond his immersion in the bodily, the historical and the institutional.”
John Milbank is another influential theologian who does not have much time for Rahner, believing that he was not as successful in overcoming the dichotomy between nature and grace that had developed in neo-scholasticism. In Theology and Social Theory, Milbank characterises Rahner’s ‘solution’, in a self-confessed “crude” fashion as “naturalising the supernatural” whereas de Lubac “supernaturalised the natural”. The distinction may seem slight to many, but according to Milbank it has disastrous consequences: no less than the relegation of religious faith to a private realm which allows the public and secular realm to continue its reign unabated. In fact it it this factor which undergirds Milbank’s critique of Liberation Theology, which he sees as having followed Rahner’s line. Rahner’s solution to the nature/grace problematic retained the concept of a “pure nature” as a formal distinction in order to guarantee the gratuity of grace. For Milbank this entails an undermining of the rejection of extrinsicism despite Rahner’s insistence that in concrete history this “pure nature” is nowhere to be found. The “Supernatural existential” which is a constitutive element in all human beings is already a gift of grace. The desire for the beatific vision is itself already grace, it is not a ‘natural’ aspect of human beings. But this “remainder concept” ensures the retention of a dual end for mankind, one supernatural, the other natural and the way towards secularisation remains open. Milbank acknowledges his debt to Balthasar’s reading of Rahner: once again, it is Rahner’s “transcendental” approach which is identified as the cause of the problems. The philosophical presuppositions Rahner is alleged to hold are responsible for the downplaying of the concrete in this theology, for “the encounter with grace is situated at the margins of every individual’s knowing” and not in specific texts and images (as for de Lubac and Balthasar).J.B. Metz also shares these reservations about Rahner, arguing that his theology is too individualistic and too privatised to render a truly effective political theology possible.
The transcendental approach adopted by Rahner, therefore, trades on a Cartesio-Kantian understanding on the self, it fails to locate the site of God’s revelation in concrete beings within history and is therefore prone to a relativisation of the specific revelation of God in Jesus Christ, the importance of the Church and so forth. It is also too individualistic, failing to truly ground humanity’s inter-subjective nature, in a way that Balthasar’s theology of the person does (e.g. his emphasis on the mother’s smile as the awakening of the experience of love in the child etc).
As regards the question of other religions; the self is seen to share a common religious experience with the rest of humanity and the religions are seen to be expressions of this prior experience. Although Rahner would never have gone as far as someone such as John Hick in this direction, it may be asked whether Rahner’s theory of the “anonymous Christian” does not already tend in that direction. It is the notion of the “anonymous Christian” which drew the most ire from Balthasar. I will explore the problems with the notion of “anonymous Christians” in my next post.
