¹ Karl Rahner's term for the various areas of knowledge which, when taken together, comprise the totality of human knowledge of the real world; see his Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity (New York: Seabury, 1978)Google Scholar, Introduction.

² At first glance it might appear that both Carnell and Rahner fit more comfortably in the apologetic camps, at least as evidenced by the subtitles to Foundations and to Carnell's work of primary interest to our study, Christian Commitment: An Apologetic (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1957).Google Scholar This impression is understandable, but we believe that it is not correct. Since we shall spend much of the remainder of the essay defending this view, here we may simply say that our appraisal of their basic orientation is determined by their use of “the believing subject” as their shared beginning point.

³ See the author's 1984 University of Notre Dame doctoral dissertation, Evangelical Theories of Bible Inspiration: A Review and Proposal and also his “Biblical Inspiration and the Believing Community: A New Look,” The Evangelical Quarterly, forthcoming.

⁴ It would lengthen the present essay unbearably were we to discuss the immediately following material in the detail it deserves. Thus the reader is directed elsewhere for such discussions. For Rahner, see the introductory materials by Dudley, Martin, “On Reading Rahner,” Scottish Journal of Theology 37/1 (1984), 81–96;CrossRefGoogle ScholarWeger, Karl-Heinz, Karl Rahner: An Introduction to His Theology (New York: Seabury, 1980), chap. 2;Google ScholarCarr, Anne E., “Starting With the Human” in O'Donovan, Leo J., ed., A World of Grace: An Introduction to the Themes and Foundations of Karl Rahner's Theology (New York: Seabury, 1980), pp. 17–30;Google Scholar and Newman, Paul W., “Humanity With Spirit,” Scottish Journal of Theology 34/5 (1981), 415–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The wealth of Rahner material contrasts sharply with the paucity of Carnellian counterparts. We are presently working on an article summarizing the theological anthropology of the later Carnell whom we would interpret as a “transcendentalist” in the ways that the present article defines and uses that term. Most published works on him focus instead on his earlier apologetic works; see, e.g., Harper, Kenneth, “Edward John Carnell: An Evaluation of His Apologetics,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 20 (1977), 133–45;Google ScholarSims, John A., The Problem of Knowledge in the Apologetical Concerns of Edwin Lewis and Edward John Carnell (Doctoral Dissertation, Florida State University, 1975), Pt. II;Google Scholar and our dissertation cited above, pp. 74-90.

⁵ See Nelson, Rudolph L., “Fundamentalism at Harvard: The Case of Edward John Carnell,” Quarterly Review 2/2 (1982), 79–98.Google Scholar

⁶ In plain English, this debate centered on the question of whether Kant's analysis of the process of human thought presumed that thinking preceded actuality, or on the other hand that actuality preceded thinking.

⁷ Rahner addresses christology in many of his works, and we can scarcely hope to reflect them all. The following account is accordingly taken primarily from Foundations and from Theological Investigations 5 (Baltimore: Helicon, 1966), Pt. IIIGoogle Scholar, “Christology” (Theological Investigations henceforth TI).

⁸ Rahner, , Foundations, p. 128.Google Scholar

⁹ Rahner, , TI, 5:159Google Scholar, emphasis in original. We will retain Rahner's male-exclusive language when quoting him.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 175, emphasis in original.

¹¹ Here we use the definition of “historic” reflected in Perrin, Norman and Duling, Dennis, The New Testament: An Introduction (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982, 2nd ed.), pp. 55f.Google Scholar The category of “historical” includes everything that has ever occurred, and thus is critically interesting only as a category. The category of “historic,” however, includes those “historical” facts which are interpreted as significant beyond their own times. For example, as an historical fact three persons were crucified on Golgotha on Good Friday, but as an historic fact only one was. The latter category thus constitutively includes “the present observer”; for a Christian believer the death of Jesus is both an historical and an historic fact, whereas for an atheist it is only an historical fact.

¹² The reader will notice that we are here distinguishing between “Jesus the concrete human” and “a being who functions in a certain way.” Rahner calls this latter figure “the absolute savior,” i.e., the conceptual savior. The success of his christology will thus be measured by his ability to identify these two figures.

¹³ In Foundations, for example, Rahner says that “A transcendental Christology as such cannot presume for itself the task and the possibility of saying that the absolute saviour … is to be found … in Jesus of Nazareth. [This statement belongs] to the experience of history itself which cannot be deduced” (p. 211, emphasis in original). All of this is simply to say that Christian faith cannot logically prove its own truthfulness because it is not the kind of thing which can be proved at all. The place occupied by verifiable premises in a provable argument is occupied instead by commitments and self-disclosing confessions in a Christian's life. Thus Rahner's reader can expect no more from him than the effort to make sense of what Christians are doing when they exercise faith in God. The question of whether Christianity is logically true is not only much more complicated but, we suspect, ultimately much less interesting as well.

¹⁴ Since God's self-transcending acts are not forced but instead are completely gracious, then those whom he meets are objects of his gracious acceptance. It follows then that the person whom he meets in uninterrupted grace participates in these acts of acceptance in a manner fundamentally different than the rest of us, a manner which qualifies Him to be called “Savior.”

¹⁵ It should not be thought that Rahner is a positivist for whom empirical observations are incontrovertible simply because they are empirical. Instead, they are what we might clumsily call “minimally conditionally controvertible,” meaning that nothing within the human purview is absolutely unconditioned but that we still need to act as though some things were. Within that category of things which we may accept as though they were absolutely incontrovertible, then, empirical observations are generally conceded to head the list.

¹⁶ Intention is an important concept in this context for it includes the aspects of both direction or orientation and motivation or will-power. A person's intention to perform a certain action thus presumes that she know both the action she wishes to perform and the motivational means needed to do it. The concept of intention does not, however, presume that either aspect is native to her; both the orientation and the motivation may come from “outside” of her, from the horizon.

¹⁷ Rahner, , Theological investigations (Baltimore: Helicon, 1966), 4:245.Google Scholar His discussion of symbol in this volume constitutes Part V, “The Sacraments,” in which we pay special attention to section 9, “The Theology of the Symbol.”

¹⁸ We are not interested here in the epistemology of Rahner's transcendentalism, but it should be noted in passing that knowledge of others is rooted in being's knowledge of itself. Something cannot be known unless it is knowable, but this presumes self-knowability as logically prior to hetero-knowability. Rahner's task here is primarily to discuss the conditions of the possibility of self-knowledge.

¹⁹ Rahner thus calls God's creative character “a derivative, restricted and secondary possibility … ultimately based on [love]” (“On the Theology of the Incarnation,” TI, 4:115).

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Ibid., pp. 109f, emphasis in original.

²² Ibid., pp. 212ff.

²³ Ibid., p. 229, emphasis in original.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 230.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 242, emphasis added. This restates what we noted earlier, namely, that a transcendental analysis applied to the facts of actual history yields an account of those facts which does not change their historicalness but does provide the context both in which they themselves may be seen to be grounded and in relation to surrounding facts of history.

²⁶ This latter sentence might be misunderstood to mean that “my beliefs about Jesus determine what kind of life He could have lived.” This is putting the cart before the horse precisely because one of the characteristics of the person in whom I believe as savior is that he exists before me and that his life has significantly altered mine. Thus, in addition to the conceptual fact that the past cannot be changed by the present, it is also not a part of my actual belief that my life has altered his.

²⁷ The reason that this is only theoretically possible is made clear in Ian T. Ramsey's analysis of “significant tautologies.” Ramsey identifies as significant tautologies those bits of our self-knowledge about which we cannot be fundamentally deceived, for example, that I enjoy chocolate chip ice cream more than okra. The “significant” aspect of these bits of knowledge is that we need not give any rationale for holding them other than “but that is who I am; that is a part of my character.” A fortiori, then, given the absence of external constraints we also cannot be fundamentally deceived about our knowledge of our own salvation. A person who asks us to account for such elements of knowledge beyond this deliberately tautologous defense is in reality asking us an illegitimate question to which we need not give an answer; such tautologies are “ultimates of explanation.” See Ramsey, , Religious Language: An Empirical Placing of Theological Phrases (London: SCM, 1967), pp. 40–44.Google Scholar It is well to note here that while we may not be fundamentally deceived about our own salvation, we may be deceived about whether or not our salvation is Christian. Since what counts as “Christian” is in large part a corporate matter, the church has the ultimate earthly authority to define what counts as such and what does not. Our assumption here, which we share with Ramsey, is that we wish to be Christianly saved, and thus that we are willing to accept as our own the corporate designation of what constitutes Christian salvation. This does not, it should be emphasized, deny the centrality of belief to salvation; that is, we are not turning salvation from a matter of belief into a matter of certitude. Instead, we are considering our knowledge of our belief about salvation. We may be certain that we believe something without turning that thing itself into an object of certitude.

²⁸ Rahner, , Foundations, pp. 279f.Google Scholar We are not here claiming that the primary significance of the resurrection is its resolution of the problems of finitude and moral failure. Rather, we are saying that those problems are adequately resolved in the resurrection of Jesus.

²⁹ Commitment, p. 246. Most of the following analysis of Carnell is taken from the fourth and final part of this work. We limit ourselves to this work of Carnell because his earlier ones do not reveal the transcendentalist approach to which he came only later in his life.

³⁰ Ibid., p. 284.

³¹ Ibid.

³² Ibid., p. 285, emphasis in original.

³³ It might be thought here that we are considering the esoteric before the plain, i.e., that rather than how we have just proceeded we should instead move from our knowledge of the Tightness of our own sense of offense to our knowledge of the Tightness of the sense of offense of others. But this move would not satisfy Carnell precisely because it presumes the legitimacy of what he intended to demonstrate, namely, the Tightness of our sense of offense.

³⁴ Note that we are not asking here why Jesus rather than anyone else is central to the Christian notion of salvation. That question is logically equivalent to “Why did Lincoln rather than anyone else give the Gettysburg Address?” The form of such a question calls for a conceptually universal response, and no universal explanation can or need be given for a particular historical event. Instead, the question we are asking is why any christological figure is necessarily involved in the Christian notion of salvation. This question does legitimately call for a conceptually universal response. Although he does not do it as cleanly as Rahner, Carnell is here raising the same issue that Rahner did when he spoke of “the absolute savior.”

³⁵ Commitment, p. 262.

³⁶ Ibid., p. 250.

³⁷ Ibid., p. 251, emphasis in original.

³⁸ Ibid., p. 252.

³⁹ Ibid., p. 251.

⁴⁰ Ibid., pp. 251, 253.

⁴¹ We do not claim originality in noticing this. It lies at the heart of what Terrence Tilley calls the “personalist-empiricist” school of theology, and thus includes among Protestants such figures as Dallas High, Ian Ramsey and William Abraham. See Tilley, , Talking of God (New York: Paulist, 1978), esp. chaps. 4 and 5.Google Scholar

⁴² Rahner, , “Dogmatic Questions on Easter,” TI, 4:123f.Google Scholar

⁴³ In Rahner's terms, it is not “really only interesting with regard to the private destiny of Jesus” because according to this view, “The happiness of his humanity in heaven [would seem] … to mean no more than his own personal bliss” (ibid.).