The struggle that prompted Bonhoeffer’s “unconscious Christianity” offers a concrete illustration of the commonsensical in Rahner’s “anonymous Christian.” Thus Rahner’s theory adds theological coherence to what Bonhoeffer intuited. While Bonhoeffer faced the seeming ineffectiveness of Jesus’ teaching for the majority of Christians in Germany, Rahner faced his church’s view of Augustine’s “massa damnata” through a reexamination of church mission and theological categories. In both theologians, Jesus the God-man is the symbol of God’s communion with “the human” in God’s care for all peoples. The article concludes by asking whether the advent of such Christologies signals an approaching time of greater humility with regard to the Christian path to salvation.

The personal tragedies of life as well as the horrors of genocide and plague leave many people wondering whether Christian hope is not an empty sentiment. Despite the strong incarnational thrust of his Christology which led to a kind of optimism about the human prospect, Karl Rahner recognized the problems of falsereligious hope. His “optimism” is therefore framed within a stark realism, or “pessimism” about a human condition marked by guilt, suffering and death. Hope is found not in pious escapism, in evasion of darkness, but in standing squarely within and facing the tragic dimensions of life. A comprehensive understanding ofRahner’s Christian pessimism opens up both the history of human entanglement in guilt (Rahner’s rendering of original sin), and the implication of God in darkness of death (the classic issues of providence and divine suffering). Rahner’s incarnationalism is offset in his later work by a theology of the cross, where theincomprehensibility of human suffering rests in the incomprehensibility of God. An eschatological hope is thus rooted in the suffering and death of Jesus. The Christian is one who can dare to hope in the face of tragedy because the cross is where God’s saving presence is most realistically revealed.

Karl Rahner’s analysis of genetic manipulation is found most explicitly in two articles written in 1966 and 1968: “The Experiment with Man,” and “The Problem of Genetic Manipulation.” The articles have received some attention in ethical literature. The present paper analyzes Rahner’s use of theological and ethical principles, comparing and contrasting the two articles. In the first article, Rahner emphasizes humankind’s essential openness to self-creativity. What has always been true on the transcendental level—-we choose our final destiny and thus create ourselves—-may now be possible as well on the categorial or historical level. Thus we Christians have no a-priori theological warrant for rejecting genetic manipulation.But there is a considerable difference in Rahner’s second article. Whereas in the first he makes no immediate ethical application, in the second he introduces both a normative principle—-there ought never be a fundamental separation of procreation and marital intercourse—-and a metaethical concept--his “moral instinct of faith”—-to enable him to deal specifically with artificial insemination by third party donor, a procedure he rejects. There is also a shift in emphasis in his anthropological approach from the first to the second article.A close analysis of his method here discloses some difficulties concerning the “moral instinct of faith” and forces us to ask how principles of theological anthropology are and ought to be applied to questions like genetic manipulation. I conclude with my own proposal for the use of theological principles in medical ethics.

The essay reviews the evolution of Rahner’s understanding of sacrament and evaluates his contribution to the renewal of sacramentology. By elaborating the notion of the Church as basic sacrament of the world and by doing so in light of the theology of the Word, Rahner rescued sacramentology from the discussion of dead-end controversies about the number of sacraments and about the institution of the Church by Christ. This has provided the basis for a most promising model of sacrament for the ecumenical project.

This essay is a response to Ron Highfield’s critique of Rahner’s doctrine of sin and freedom. Highfield holds that Rahner’s doctrine of sin is erroneous because it is rooted in Rahner’s attribution of a divine-like character (i.e., definitiveness) to human freedom. This attribution, according to Highfield, leads to Rahner’s misunderstanding of biblical and dogmatic texts on human freedom, internal contradictions in his doctrine of sin, and the blurring of the distinction between Creator and creature, nature and grace, philosophy and theology.The essay rebuts these charges by drawing attention to Rahner’s emphasis on the analogical character of our discourse about human freedom, to his theology of death, to the difference between absoluteness and definitiveness, to the distinction between liberum arbitrium and libertas, and to Rahner’s theology of time andhistoricity.