Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions
Author: Karl
Rahner
Reflection by John Lee
“Dialogue and
openness” of the church to the world arose as slogans at the time of Vatican
II. Rahner was convinced that truth and morality are to be found outside the
church and Christianity and both can learn from those outside. Rahner was
earnest in dialogue and claims that dialogue is the only possible mode of
co-existence. Rahner states that no one can completely have all the knowledge
relevant to a world view possessed by the other. Therefore, dialogue is
characterized by the fact that the partners in dialogue whole different views
and represent opposite viewpoints, but even before this by the fact that no one
any longer knows or can know everything his controversial partner knows.
Dialogue thus is possible when man accepts himself in the incomprehensibility
of this existence whose depth is God. Rahner further claims that dialogue must
be supported by love: patient, kind, never jealous or boastful, never seeking
one’s own.
Rahner states that
salvation understood as an absolutely transcendent mystery is one of the most
basic concepts of Christianity, hence salvation-history takes place within the
history of this world, therefore salvation for the Christian is not a future
which is still to come or has not yet started at all; but it takes place now.
For Rahner salvation is understood more in terms of self-realization than of
total conversion. There is one
history of the world in which both the Christians and the non-Christians live
in one and the same situation and face each other in dialogue, and thus the
question of the theological meaning of the other religion arises once more and
with even greater urgency. Rahner states in
“Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions,” on the basis in the Christian
faith of the theological understanding of other religions that “Open
Catholicism” means that a certain outlook on the world to overcome the
pluralism that opposes the Church by understanding herself as a higher unity of
this opposition.
Rahner sees
non-Christian religion as the one which does not merely contain elements of a
natural knowledge of God, moreover mixed up with human depravity which the
result of original sin and later aberrations. It also contains supernatural
elements arising out of the grace which is given to men as a gratuitous gift on
account of Christ. For this reason, Rahner claims, a non-Christian religion can
be recognized as a lawful religion without denying the error and depravity
contained in it. Rahner regards
grace as a reality which is given by God in a free dynamic relationship and
which is therefore supernatural. At the same time grace is also a reality that
is always present at the very centre of man’s existence in knowledge and
freedom and in the mode of an offer which can be accepted or rejected. Rahner
insists that it is existentially present to such an extent that man is not able
in any way to abandon this transcendental peculiarity of his very being, hence
anonymous Christianity exists everywhere.
Christianity is
God’s action on men, which is God’s free self-revelation by communicating
himself to man. God’s relationship to man is freely instituted by God and
revealed by God in this institution. This relationship of God to man is basically
the same for all men, because it rests on the Incarnation, death and
resurrection of the one Word of God become flesh. Rahner sees the non-Christian
pagan religion as not the actual refusal to accept the Christian religion but
the absence of any sufficient historical encounter with Christianity which
would have enough historical power to render the Christian religion really
present in this pagan society and in the history of the people concerned. The necessity of a
social form for salvation is realized when Christianity presents itself as the
only still valid religion for man, a necessary means for his salvation and not
merely an obligation with the necessity of a precept. wherever, in practice,
Christianity reaches man in the real urgency and rigour of his actual
existence. Hence the nature of religion itself must include a social
constitution. Therefore that man who is commanded to have a religion, is also
commanded to seek and accept a social form of religion.
Nevertheless
the Christ and
his continual historical presence in the world is the religion which binds man
to God thus the Christianity is the absolute. Nevertheless Christianity has a
beginning in history, and it has not always everywhere been the way of
salvation for men. Until the moment when the gospel really enters into the
historical situation of an individual, a non-Christian religion does not merely
contain elements of a natural knowledge of God. Anonymous
Christianity is demanded by the incarnational and social structure of grace and
of Christianity. If the message of the Church is directed to someone who is
non-Christian only in the sense of living by an anonymous Christianity not as
yet fully conscious of itself, then her missionary work must take this fact
into account and must draw the necessary conclusions when deciding on its
missionary strategy and tactics.
We know from the
gospel, Rahner points out, that the opposition to Christ and to the Church will
not disappear until the end of time. If this Christianity, while always facing
with opposition, believes in God’s universal salvific will by his secret grace,
then this church cannot feel herself to be just one dialectic moment in the
whole of history but has already overcome this opposition by her faith, because
the others who oppose her are anonymous Christians and the Church is not the
communion of those who possess God’s grace as opposed to those who lack it, but
with communion with those who can explicitly confess what they and the others
hope to be. There is no religion of any kind in which God’s grace does not
reveal itself in one way or another, thus the transcendental aspect of
historical revelation is present in the world. Rahner states that there are
grace as a particular and regional reality which may well be absent in the
sinner or the non-believer.
Rahner claims that no one can
completely possess all the knowledge relevant to a world-view possessed by the
other. The dialogue of today is not only characterized by the fact that the
partners on this dialogue hold different views and represent opposite
viewpoints. This makes dialogue more difficult; but it also gives it a meaning
even before any agreement is reached. God is greater than man and Church,
Rahner declares, and therefore the church will go out to meet the non-Christian
of tomorrow with the tolerant, humble and yet firm attitude towards all
non-Christian religions.
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