ABSTRACT
In the early 1950s, critical questions began to be raised about Catholic scholastic theology. Many held that the content in the Catholic dogmas had become inaccessible to people in general because of the old-fashioned, rigid forms of expression. A new consciousness of the problems involved had made it urgently necessary for the believing Christian not only to learn the articles of faith, but also to understand them. It was necessary now to construct a bridge from the doctrine of faith to ordinary people’s experiences, because faith had increasingly become a foreign element – something for Sundays, but irrelevant as a basis for the human person’s faith in everyday life. Rahner’s theology can be understood as a response to the crisis of faith that had been brewing for a long time in the Catholic church. The challenge he faced was to make faith once again acceptable as a basis for the human person’s understanding of life. A central theme in all his writings is thus how historical events of two thousand years ago can be recognized as obligating truths today. Accordingly, we may rightly say that Rahner seeks an intellectually obligating justification of faith that, at the same time, makes faith an existential truth that can be experienced. His writings are characterized by the combination of theory and praxis, of academic training and theological spirituality, in a way that is matched by few other theologians in the twentieth century. As we shall see, this means that Rahner makes the “edifying” element in his writings an integrated part of the academic.
