¹ Lennan, Richard, The Ecclesiology of Karl Rahner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 10Google Scholar.

² In ‘The Sinful Church in the Decrees of Vatican II’, Rahner writes “It might even be said that the parenetic impulse of the texts…is in almost every case movement from what is good to what is better in virtue, not from sin and its recognition to an ever renewed reaching out towards pardoning grace…” (Theological Investigations 6, p. 280).

³ In ‘Christian living formerly and today’ Rahner writes that the Council's pronouncements on “modes of Christian living appropriate to the layman, the priest, the religious” are significant even though they “may strike one as somewhat traditional and cliché-ridden” (TI 7, p. 6).

⁴ Rahner, , The Shape of the Church to Come (London: SPCK, 1974), p. 13Google Scholar.

⁵ This four-fold classification is mine rather than Rahner's.

⁶ ‘Basic Theological Interpretation of the Second Vatican Council’, in TI 20, p. 78.

⁷ This notion that the Council represents a fundamental caesura is explored in ‘Basic Theological Interpretation’, particularly on pp. 82–87.

⁸ Rahner himself distinguishes in the opening passage of the essay ‘The abiding significance of the Second Vatican Council’ (TI 20) between the indicative and the imperative, suggesting that the Council is not just something to be described but that it sets a task for the Church.

⁹ See ‘The Struggle for the Council’, a collection of essays which compose the final part of Nicholas Lash's Theology for Pilgrims (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008)Google Scholar, for a portrait of these forces.

¹⁰ See for instance p. 50. See also his discussion of the ‘Church of non-simultaneity’ (pp. 35–37) exploring the notion that the German society and therefore Church contains groups which exist at the same time and yet in socially and culturally different epochs. In this chapter at least pluralism in Church and society is construed in terms of before and after, earlier and later.

¹¹ TI 20 p. 148.

¹² Ibid, 149.

¹³ I am here paraphrasing from Harvey Egan's title, Karl Rahner: Mystic of Everyday Life (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1998Google Scholar).

¹⁴ That Rahner's deepest optimism, his optimism about the hope for universal salvation, is not something shallow and easy, becomes clear if one takes seriously passages like the following: “It [the hope that all may be saved] is an attitude which may seem obvious to the liberalistic, bourgeois philistine…. But if someone has even a remote idea of who God is, is really aware of the terrible darkness of the history of humanity, he will find the optimism of universal salvation which the Church has struggled to acquire an almost frightening message to which he has to respond with the ultimate resources of his faith” (TI 20, pp. 101–2).

¹⁵ C.f. especially Karl Rahner: Theology and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2004)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ This is addressed particularly in two essays in the sixth volume of the Theological Investigations.

¹⁷ There is also a choice to be made at times whether to retain practices that originated in a different period and no longer mean what they once did. To keep these practices may be legitimate, but it is nevertheless a choice to be a particular way in our own world.

¹⁸ The case with Hans Urs von Balthasar, I think, is exactly the reverse: there is much rich material to mine, much that can be borrowed and put to use in various ways, but he ought definitely not be a guide when it comes to questions of tone, manner, method, questions of overall orientation and underlying presupposition. I try to make the case for this in the forthcoming Eerdmans volume Balthasar: a very critical introduction.