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Grasping after truth

This is the best briefintroduction to Karl Rahner I’ve read, says Jeremy Sheehy

The SPCK Introduction to Karl Rahner
Karen Kilby

SPCK £9.99 (978-0-281-05842-6)
Church Times Bookshop £9

SOME YEARS back, in the Fount Christian Thinkers series, Karen Kilby wrote on Karl Rahner. Now that book has been thoroughly expanded and revised, and appears published by SPCK. Even if you have the Fount book, it will be well worth getting this, because it is the best brief introduction to Rahner that I have come across.

There are eight chapters. These do not deal only with central themes of his theology — grace, Christ, sacraments, and that sort of thing — but with such topics as “Rahner the man” and “Spirituality and Rahner’s theology”. And it is much easier to understand than Rahner’s own work often is.

Kilby emphasises how, although we might broadly describe what Rahner does as being “systematic theology”, he chose “not to produce large systematic works of theology, but instead to write hundreds and hundreds of brief essays”. He is, in this sense, an unsystematic system-atic theologian. And then she tries to show us how there are none the less some common threads and themes, “something like a system-atic core to Rahner’s thought”. I found this helpful.

I was particularly interested and informed by her stress on the importance of the experiential for Rahner, and by what she says about Rahner’s concern to explain the uniqueness of Christ. She also says some wise things about what

Rahner has to tell us about Christian spirituality; and she brings out the high level of integration in his work between the so-called spiritual and the so-called theological.

When I was reading the book, I had something to mull over which made what she says (and what Rahner says) about indifference particularly significant. When I read that what is required in indifference (a quality to be cultivated so as to make us alert to the will of God) is that “we turn from what we under-stand to the incomprehensible, from what we are enjoying to what is promised, from the present to the future, from what we can grasp to what we cannot grasp”, it came to me almost as if a word from the Lord (and perhaps it was — time will tell).

I also found the quotations from Rahner in the last few pages of the book very moving and illuminating.

I would have liked, I must admit, to hear a bit about Rahner during the years of Nazi rule and the Second World War — but you can’t have everything in a bare 100 pages.

The Revd Dr Sheehy is Team Rector in the Swinton and Pendlebury Team Ministry, and a former Principal of St Stephen’s House, Oxford.

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