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The Transcendental or the Political Kingdom?—I: Reflexions on a theological dispute

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Peter Mann O.S.B.
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It is no longer possible to speak as if Catholic theology were a selfevident unified whole. There are many Catholic theologies now being constructed within the Church community, and there are correspondingly many philosophies being presupposed by this pluralism of theological languages. Neoscholastic philosophy and theology, despite the still considerable authority behind them, now form just one language among many: the evidence mounts that this ‘privileged’ language is increasingly a dead language for students of theology. The refusal to face this pluralistic situation is dangerous, the inability to face it tragic: one need only reflect on recent papal encyclicals to see what occurs when the ideology of the one language gropes and flails about in the room of the many languages like Nabokov’s blind man.

The existence of a theological pluralism merely poses the problem, it does not solve it. The problem is that of theological meaning generally. How can theology perform its task of communicating between Church and world, gospel and life, when organized religion appears to many increasingly irrelevant and atheism has become less a particular mode of thought than a normal mode of existence? This question, if taken seriously, would bring the various emergent theologies out of that peaceful coexistence with each other which is often just the other side of their encapsulation from the real problems of life. Certainly, the kind of confrontation envisaged here presupposes certain rules. The language of the opposed and opposing theology would have to be understood—the lack of this understanding vitiates, to my mind, the attacks of Maritain and Von Hildebrand on the so-called ‘new theology’.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 50 , Issue 595 , December 1969 , pp. 805 - 812
Copyright
Copyright © 1969 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

page 806 note 1 On Neo‐thomism as an ideology, see the fascinatingly instructive, if perhaps a little too one‐sided, analysis of Adrian Cunningham, ‘Culture and Catholicism: an historical analysis’, in From Culture to Revolution (SW 1968), 111–147. The Revue Thomiste provides continual evidence of the schizophrenic gap between precritical and postcritical Thomism, and between biblical analysis and scholastic speculations.

page 808 note 1 This global description is suitable here. The philosophical background of Rahner is complex, and insufficiently studied, for a judgment to be possible on his relationship, not only to Kant and to Heidegger, but also to Fichte and Hegel. The critique of Rahner's philosophy by McCool, Lakebrink, Simon, Gerken cannot be properly discussed here, nor the whole problematik of Maréchalian Thomism.

page 808 note 2 Rahner does not himself use the term ‘transcendental kingdom’—if understood properly (not spiritualistically), it does, however, I think, hit off what he means. It remains true that ‘intercommunication’ (intersubjectivity) is explicitly developed far more in Rahner‘s theological writings than in his philosophical work: there is a philosophical development in Rahner's later theological work which would have to be examined here: whether this development answers Metz's critique is, however, doubtful.

page 809 note 1 On the relationship between ‘transcendental’ and ‘categorical’ revelation, see especially Rahner/Ratzinger, Offenbarung und Uberlieferung: Questiones Disputatae 25 (1965), esp. 11–24: also, Schriften zur Theologie V, 115–182.

page 809 note 2 Rahner develops the notion of a self‐transcendence or a self‐surpassing (Selbstüberbietung) especially in Das Problem der Hominisation Quaestiones Disputatae 12/13) (1965): cf. Schriften VI, 185–214, ‘Die Einheit von Geist und Materie im christlichen Glaubens‐verständnis’.

page 810 note 1 It is in this area of the ‘redemption’ that the objection is most often made against a transcendental method in theology that it surrenders the ‘historical’, and especially the Cross in favour of a non‐historical, idealist and indeed unconsciously gnostic and docetic ‘system’. (Balthasar's Cordula, passim.) To this it can be said: 1. The transcendental method, at least in Rahner's usage, is a reflection on the uniqueness of historical event, a fortiori the Christ‐event, and affirms throughout that God can be truly encountered only in history. 2. An event of the past can be witnessed to effectively, i.e. without ‘mythology’, only when it is shown to be universally present, accessible in human experience—hence the need for a hermeneutic, a context of meaning.

page 812 note 1 The phrase, the ‘Christ‐event’, is used to bring out the eschatological significance of what took place in Jesus of Nazareth—together with the need to articulate this in terms of an evolutionary Christology, an existential and ontological Christology, etc.

N.B. All references to the eight volumes of Schriften are to the German original, since they have not yet all been translated into English. Vol. VI of Theological Investigations has, however, just been published by Darton, Longman & Todd, and the interested reader will need to make his own adjustments.