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Bibliography Gutierrez, M. “El monogenismo en la doctrina de los teólogos católicos desde el Concilio Vaticano I hasta nuestros dias”, Diss. theol. Pont. Univ. Gregor. 1957 (see Liber Annuus 1957, p. 405). Rost, L. “Theologische Grundgedanken der Urgeschichte” in Theologische Literaturzeitung 82 (1957) pp. 321-6 Zimmerli, W. Die Urgeschichte (Gen. I, 1-11) Zurich 21957. Arin …
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Change (implying a terminus ad quem) is intelligible only if we know the terminus a quo (the starting point). For me as an American Catholic theologian, that terminus a quo was the immigrant Catholic Church, the kind of church nostalgically memorialized in some of Andrew Greeley’s novels. I was raised in that church, and some …
Continue reading “Changing My Mind about the Changeable Church”
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The image of a self-emptying, fully relational God seems to lie at the very heart of Christian revelation. It is the underlying dynamism of the doctrine of the Trinity.
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By our faith in the God who identifies with Jesus, the God who is inseparable from the man forsaken and abandoned on the cross, we announce not only a revolution in our fundamental image of mystery, but also a drastic revision of our self-understanding.
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To admit that our ideas require public verification does not mean that the scientific forum, or any academic context for that matter, is the best one in which to test the truth of revelation’s substance. An ecclesial community would be more appropriate.
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Catholic revelation theology is outlined. Today most Catholic theologians, along with an increasing number of Protestants, interpret revelation fundamentally as God’s personal self-gift to the world.
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It is at the limits of our experience and problem-oriented questioning that we consciously come up against the truly incomprehensible and uncontrollable mystery to which our lives are inherently open.
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Religion in its entirety can be viewed as the disclosure of a transcendent mystery. In our culture we call this mystery “God.”
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The revelatory image of a self-emptying God explains not only the fact of reality’s mysterious openness but also why mystery presents itself to us in the mode of a promising future.
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We are first brought to an explicit sense of sacred mystery through sacraments or symbols. To Christian faith, Jesus himself is the primary sacrament of our encounter with the divine mystery of promise.
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Biblical inspiration is the effect of God’s promise on individuals writing within the context of a community of faith brought into existence and sustained by a vision of promise emanating from the Spirit of hope.
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If we could learn to see the universe as the story of the unfolding of God’s promise we could then integrate our hope in the promise with the vigorous environmental concern that is needed today if life is to survive on this planet.
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The revelation of God is experienced in connection with significant historical events that take place in the life of the faith community. But it is the "word of God" that interprets these events and allows us to see in them a promise of future fulfillment.
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The manifestation of God’s being in our world cannot occur apart from situations of social and economic inclusiveness. The glory of God is obscured and remains unrevealed to the extent that poverty, division, and oppression still reign. Where justice, unity, and love prevail, there God is revealed.
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Query: Who wrote: A Christian is identified as a follower of Jesus, and reflection on the experience of following constitutes the central theme of any solid theology. The experience and the reflection alike have for their subject a community that under the movement of the Spirit focuses its life on the proclamation of the good …
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When I ran into a friend from divinity school recently, we asked each other the normal catch-up questions. Then, in the same casual tone, she said, "So are you going to become Catholic?" It’s not that odd a question these days in theological circles. Last year a string of theologians left their Protestant denominations for …
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(ENTIRE BOOK) A collection of Professor Rahner’s speeches and radio talks, dealing with the relationship between grace and freedom as understood in the Catholic Church. Chapters include the Catholic’s responsibility after Vatican II, the nature of the Christian faith, ecumenical perspectives, the church and personal freedom, the nature of “God,” and the nature of freedom and morality.
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I am now learning what I suppose ecumenical pioneers have known for decades — that religious integration is both the simplest and the most complicated of human endeavors: simple in design, complicated in detail. This is true of all kinds of integration – racial, social, sexual, but most of all religious. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, …
Continue reading “Helping Omega Make Its Point: The Pitfalls and Promise of Understanding Catholics”
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(ENTIRE BOOK) A famous Catholic theologian deals with the position of Catholic theology in regard to hominisation, the theory of man’s evolutionary origins.
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The protestant responses to the “Declaration on the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church” recently issued by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s Office for the Doctrine of the Faith (ODF) have been mostly pained surprise, sometimes anger. Leaders in other world religions had a similar reaction. Even Catholics were taken aback by what …
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(ENTIRE BOOK) The author deals with revelation from within a Roman Catholic perspective. Revelation comes in the form of a divine promise which upon reflection turns out to be nothing less than God’s own self-donation to the world. It is the gift of an image of divine humility which renders reality intelligible in an unprecedented way.
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The Preface describes the limits within which the book must deal as it concentrates on the position of Catholic theology in regard to hominisation, the theory of man’s evolutionary origins. The central concern is the relation of the Catholic scientist and his/her findings to the official teaching of the Church. The Church’s toleration of a moderate theory of evolution leaves many questions unanswered and raises new ones. The book attempts a small advance toward some answers and a clearer recognition of what is still open to question.
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Is it heredity, is it fate, is it the school of hard knocks? Somewhere along the road of life one develops a predisposition to believe or to doubt. St. Thomas Aquinas, in his monumental work Summa Theologia, offered five proofs for the existence, not the nature but the existence, of God: Proof from Efficient Causality, …
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Issues of sexual morality, always significant ones in the Christian tradition, are among the most vital topics of debate and concern within the Roman Catholic Church today. The content of official Roman Catholic teaching in sexual matters is generally well known. It is equally well known that most Catholic believers disagree with the hierarchy’s absolute …
Continue reading “Roman Catholic Sexual Ethics: A Dissenting View”
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Subjects include the Christians’ responsibility after Vatican Council II, present tasks of the Catholic, personal faith, the necessity of ecclesiastical action, courage and self-confidence of preachers, educating mature Christians, and individual morality.
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Faith and religion are often judged today by their usefulness in our world of experience. Are not faith and religion much more than this? Rahner examines faith and culture, then the nature of Christian character in a secular world.
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Is Christianity an “Absolute Religion”? While the multiplicity of religions today threatens the individual Christian more than at any other time, still non-Christian religions can be channels of grace. Hence Christians must be tolerant and humble towards all non-Christian religions. Rahner also discussed medical ethics here.
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Catholics believe that confession of the solely justifying grace of God is a fundamental truth of the Christian faith, so they profess the sola gratia of the Protestant Reformers. Ecclesial unity of Christians is the inexorable demand of the Lord of the Church, but none of the Churches has as yet the will to unity which they all ought to have.
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Much is said about our misery with a note of knowing not where we go. There is a difference in whether we mourn for ourselves or whether another mourns for us. So it is that Christ mourns for us, and we remember to commemorate His death.
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There is no law against the man who truly has faith, hope and love and who genuinely loves his neighbor and can surrender himself. In this love the law and freedom merge into the freedom of God’s grace. Rahner expounds a Catholic view about three subjects: prayer, democracy in the church, and the new relationship between theology and the church.
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God is a mystery and also infinite. Consideration of Him is difficult yet meditation on and about Him is worthwhile.
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The essence of freedom is not to be understood as the mere possibility of choosing between a number of objects, one of which is God. It is seen as freedom from social, economic and political constraints, the opposite of slavery and serfdom. Rahner looks at various aspects of freedom: historical, paradoxical, the role of grace, self-realization, capacity for love, moral judgment and freedom in relation to Christ.
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This section aims is to show clearly from the declarations of the Catholic Church what a Catholic scientist may or may not say as a Christian in the matter of evolution.
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The third section, fifty percent longer than the first two together, considers several theological and philosophical questions raised by the relation between sacred theology and contemporary evolutionary theory, They include the distinction between spirit and matter, the unity of spirit and matter, the concepts of becoming, of cause and of operation, the creation of the spiritual soul, the insights of Aristotelian scholasticism, and the biblical narrative of man’s origin as it relates to the theory of evolution.
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This section examines the reasons for the official teachings of the church presented in the previous section. These reasons are linked with what Scripture has to say about the origins of man that allow a neutral or even permissive attitude to modern evolutionary theory. The question is what is the source of the knowledge that the author of Genesis had of what he reports, or how was it known to the sources which he incorporated into his work under the light and protective guarantee of inspiration? Rahner’s answer is that he knew it as historical aetiology. The meaning of that term is presented at length as is its application to Genesis.
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Those who experienced the pontificate of Pope John XXIII will understand me when I say: it was easier in those years to speak of the Petrine ministry as God’s gift to the church. Only a Pope could have initiated such fundamental changes in the church — changes which many had hoped for. John shocked the …
Continue reading “The Petrine Ministry in a Changing Church”
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"Koinonia/communio" and "dialogue and reception": These are the key terms on which theologians are today focusing their thinking about the ongoing ecumenical process. Koinonia/communio describe the form of Christian unity; "dialogue and reception" describe the way to unity. The two themes are closely connected. The way must correspond to the goal. If the goal is …
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In February the Jesuit theologian Roger Haight, former professor at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, received notification that the Vatican had found "serious doctrinal errors" in his 1999 book Jesus: Symbol of God (Orbis) and that he was forbidden to teach as a Catholic theologian. The news did not come as a …
