Finding God in a World Come of Age: Karl Rahner and Johann Baptist Metz (Past Light on Present Life: Theology, Ethics, and Spirituality)

During his days in prison in Berlin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer had time to read and reflect on the Enlight­enment and to ask the question of how Christians might live in a world come of age. One can interpret Karl Rahner’s theological and pastoral writing as addressing that question. Born in 1904, he lived through both World Wars to a ripe age of 80 and wrote 1651 published works. Although his writing had a unique historical genesis and intellectual setting, along with a technical vocabulary, he consistently wrote out of pastoral concern in an effort to make Christian faith and belief credible in his Western European culture and the new post–WWII context. Probably his most important student was Johann Baptist Metz who was born in Germany 1928, conscripted into the army as a teenager, and after it, turned to the seminary and to theology. He studied with Rahner in Innsbruck and received his doctorate in theology in 1961 and taught at the University of Münster for thirty years. As Dorothee Soelle converted Bultmann’s existential analysis into social commitments, so did Metz give new social meaning to Rahner’s “transcendental” theology in a time of social cataclysm. Thus, together, Rahner and Metz, not in competition but as complementary, offer a distinctive response to the spiritual question of finding God in the present-day secular world. This volume directs attention to the teaching of Jesus; it introduces the question of how the imagination has to work in order to retrieve the teaching of Jesus and apply it to actual life in our day. Teachers and preachers are engaged in this work all the time, but upon examination it involves a process that bears reflection. We live in a world that is so different from the world in which Jesus taught that many ask about its practicability relative to our complex everyday lives. The volume turns to three authors who work at this, have thought through present-day theory of interpretation, and respond to basic questions that explain the adjustments that allow us to apply Jesuss teaching to our dilemmas with interpretation that remain faithful to the content that He proposed. Sandra Schneiders turns to modern hermeneuticsthe theory of interpretationand explains what is going on in the human mind that allows us to say that present-day interpretation, while different from that of Jesus because our worlds are different, corresponds to what Jesus communicated in the past relative to His world. William Spohn pushes the same idea further to concrete examples of how analogy, sameness, and difference together bind the imagination to Jesus and frees us to see new relevance for Jesuss actual teaching. And Lisa Sowle Cahill takes the spirit of the other two into the social order to show how Jesuss teaching has a real relevance for the highly complex societies in which we live today. The logics of these three authors offer models for what is going on in all of the Past Light on Present Life volumes as they represent different historical periods and distinct themes in Western Christian spirituality. During his days in prison in Berlin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer had time to read and reflect on the Enlightenment and to ask the question of how Christians might live in a world come of age. One can interpret Karl Rahner's theological and pastoral writing as addressing that question. Born in 1904, he lived through both World Wars to a ripe age of 80 and wrote 1651 published works. Although his writing had a unique historical genesis and intellectual setting, along with a technical vocabulary, he consistently wrote out of pastoral concern in an effort to make Christian faith and belief credible in his Western European culture and the new post WWII context. Probably his most important student was Johann Baptist Metz who was born in Germany 1928, conscripted into the army as a teenager and, after it, turned to the seminary and to theology. He studied with Rahner in Innsbruck and received his doctorate in theology in 1961 and taught at the University of Münster for thirty years. As Dorothee Soelle converted Bultmann's existential analysis into social commitments, so did Metz give new social meaning to Rahner's "transcendental" theology in a time of social cataclysm. Thus, together, Rahner and Metz, not in competition but as complementary, offer a distinctive response to the spiritual question of finding God in the present-day secular world. Cover Series Editors Title Page Copyright Contents I. Introduction to the Lives and Works of Karl Rahner and Johann Baptist Metz II. The Texts Reflections on the Unity of the Love of Neighbor and the Love of God Considerations on the Active Role of the Person in the Sacramental Event Transcendental-Idealist or Narrative-Practical Christianity?: Theology and Christianity’s Contemporary Identity Crisis III. Theological Grounding for a Spirituality of Life Engaged with the World Further Reading About the Series About the Editors Series Titles