“We are afraid of the Spirit. In a word, he is too incalculable for us. We believe only in theory and not in practical life that God is infinite incomprehensibility into which the Holy Spirit wants to hurl us. We make our permanent home in what should be merely the starting point or take-off runway for this movement of human beings through faith, hope, and love into the immense incomprehensibility of God.
“It is no better when we give the name of church to this country which we don’t want to leave, when we forget that the church too has validity before God and human beings only to the extent that she produces through word and sacrament this hope and faith and the love in which human persons entrust themselves unconditionally to the Holy Spirit of God.
“Even in the life of the church as such this fear of the Holy Spirit can be found. Fear can be perceived among the ‘traditionalists.’ They fear risks and experiments the results of which are not known in advance. They don’t want to hear any formulations of faith with which they have not been familiar from childhood onward, as if a proposition and the Spirit which it attests were simply identical. They want to have unity in the variety of the church in such a way that they can thoroughly understand this unity and take it under their own control. The tradition which they defend—as such, rightly—is for them the land of the fathers, now definitely acquired and only needing to be inhabited and governed, not a station on a pilgrimage, beckoning them on further, even though of course in the direction in which they had hitherto been moving. And if they admit and process in theory the doctrine of divine unrest in the church, known as the Holy Spirit, it is only in order really to have the right to refuse the demands of this incalculable Spirit in practical life.
“On the other hand, we get he impression that those also are often afraid of the Holy Spirit who proudly call themselves or are suspected by others of being ‘progressives.’ For real confidence in the power of the Holy Spirit in his church implies also the hopeful faith that he constantly prevails in this church with his power of renewal. But why then are these ‘progressives’ so often irritated and impatient? How is the faith in God’s Spirit constantly renewing ‘the face of the earth’ of the church compatible with the peevish threat to leave the church if she does not soon undergo a thorough change, while granting her somewhat optimistically a brief period in which to become again a home which they don’t want to leave?
“Don’t the ‘progressives’ also dictate to the Holy Spirit where he has to be active? Namely, at a critical distance from the church which is identified with office and tradition, in purely social commitment, in the will for the unity of Christians at all costs. Not, however, in worship of God, in love for a real, concretely existing neighbor, in fraternal patience and magnanimous understanding for those of his brethren who have to serve the church in an office to which they never quite do justice (how could it be otherwise?), with goodwill and an open mind even toward initiatives which emerge from official sources in the church, in an open-mindedness without which, whether we admit it or not, we remain complacently and autocratically entangled in our own subjectivity. Are the ‘progressives’ not often afraid of the Holy Spirit when they fear death, which means here fear of the mute, unrewarded sacrifice in the service of the church and of her mission, a sacrifice which cannot be justified in terms of a will for a merely intra-mundane future?
“If the question is put to ‘traditionalists’ and ‘progressives’ in this way, as to whether they are not both afraid of the Spirit, the double question must not be suspected as a cheap, dialectical reconciliation of the two standpoints, nor be misused by professors and, today, by bishops who are inclined to advise a cheap ‘both this and that’ or a ‘golden mean.’ Of course there are appropriate middle ways, and certainly the extremes of the terribles simplificateurs are stupid and can lead only to disaster. Certainly among the Christian virtues are moderation, patience, and the realism which is not fanatical and does not want to turn the world too quickly into a paradise soon to become a concentration camp of universal forced happiness.
“But the Holy Spirit is simply not a compromise between intra-mundane antagonisms, not the golden mean, not the holiness of narrow-minded mediocrity. The Holy Spirit in particular must not be understood as one side of a dialectic, the other being made up of the letter, the law, the institution, rational calculation. Rather he is the one who constantly blasts open all such empirical, dialectical unities of opposites (although these have their justification) and sweeps them into the movement directed toward the incomprehensible God, who is not merely another particular factor in the world and in the counter-and interplay of its forces.
“If, then, all are asked if they are not afraid of the Spirit, this does not mean striving after the golden mean with the secret intention of smoothing everything out so that all remains as before and each one sticks to his opinion and attitude. The prayer to the Holy Spirit, the appeal to leave everything to him, means rather a readiness to admit into life the incalculable, the new that becomes old, the old becoming new; it often means having no clearly worked out answer in the concrete situation, but, with a secret confidence on which adequate reflection is impossible, leaving the existing and enduring question itself to count as the answer; it means continuing, because the past provides enough reason for hope, but in fact only for hope.
“The word of the Holy Spirit does not provide prescriptions which we merely need to carry out. It commands boldness, experiment, decision, which cannot be justified by general principles (the law and the letter). The word of the Holy Spirit is the question to each individual in his irreplaceable uniqueness as to whether he has the courage to venture, to experiment, to endure the opposition of the great mass (whether traditionalist or progressive); whether he trusts in something which in the last resort cannot be rationally proved, but which is of course supremely rational wisdom—that is, in the Holy Spirit.”1
Karl Rahner, “Pentecost: Fear of the Spirit,” The Great Church Year (New York: Crossroads, 1995), 217-219.
So good. I’ve been drinking in the waters of Rahner over the last 2-3 weeks. Every time I return to truly engage with him, I always wonder why I don’t drink here more often…!? Few modern 20th century theologians have moved me the way he does.
Rahner reminds us that some of our greatest pneumatologists live in the Catholic magisterium. They truly grasp the role of the Spirit in ecclesiology as he demonstrates here.