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Years and years ago, when I was a wild-eyed undergraduate, a teacher told me I should find theologians whose work rings true and commit to reading anything and everything by them—until I knew their work inside and out, until I could think with them. I’ve stayed on that plan, and for the last few years I’ve been reading anything and everything I can by Karl Rahner, much as I had done for the previous decade or so with Robert Jenson.
A few days ago, I came on this paper, which explores the theology of the resurrection. In it, Rahner laments that the significance of the resurrection has been cut down to nothing or next-to-nothing in Catholic dogmatics. He asks why that should be and concludes it has something to do with the fact that since the 18th century, when apologetics and fundamental theology were separated from dogmatics (in an attempt to deal with the threats and pressures of modernity), the meaning of the resurrection has been reduced to a proof of the validity of the Christian message.
But there are deeper reasons for this “shrinkage” in doctrine, and older. On this side of the Council of Trent, Rahner finds, theologians in the West have become more and more comfortable with passing over the mysteries of Christ’s life— circumcision, baptism, temptation, and transfiguration, as well as teaching—focusing instead on his passion. Why? Because, Rahner believes, theology fell under the spell of the legal and forensic:
If God only confers salvation upon us because having demanded a satisfactio condigna for the guilt of mankind, he prepared it for himself in the death of Christ on the cross, all other events of the life of Christ can naturally only be regarded as mere preparatives for this salvific action of God, which is formally concentrated on the cross alone. The one decisive event is Good Friday alone, as such. One can no doubt still pay tribute to the older liturgical tradition and celebrate Easter as the chief feast of Christianity, but the real “feast-day” of Christianity is Good Friday, and the crucified, the man of sorrows, is the object of piety, love and contemplation.1
The most troubling problem with the “juridicial theory of satisfaction,” Rahner argues, is the “silent presupposition”that any work done by the God-man would have been acceptable so long as it was the one decreed beforehand by God. If, as this theory holds, death-by-crucifixion was selected from the beginning as the thing that would count for the price of our redemption, then resurrection can mean nothing more than that the plan worked, demonstrating dramatically that the Father has indeed accepted the price the Son paid on our behalf to satisfy the charges against us and to pay the penalties our sins have incurred.
But that, Rahner holds, simply cannot be right. Something along the lines of what is argued in the neo-Chalcedonian tradition must be true instead: Jesus’ death and resurrection are, as they must be, two sides of a “strictly unitary event,” each definitive for the other. If we understand this, then the real significance of Easter begins to come to light.
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In Rahner’s account, influenced as it is by neo-Chalcedonian logic, the emphasis falls on two points: (a) the reality of death as the one and only act of “self-mastery” possible to human beings, the “total acceptance” of our dependence on God and need for salvation, and (b) the integrity of Christ’s humanity and freedom of will. If these two truths are borne in mind, then the picture comes clear:
[T]he world is such a unity, physically, spiritually and morally, that the decision of the man Christ, as a real component of the physical world, as a member of the biological family of humanity (born of a woman as a child of Adam), as a member of the human community in its history of light and shadow, is ontologically, and not merely by a juridical disposition of God, the irreversible and embryonically final beginning of the glorification and divinization of the whole reality. This is not to deny, but rather to affirm positively, that the unity of the world in all its dimensions and Christ’s real ontological participation in this world is freely constituted by God. But then he does not just assign the world a juridical status in his mind. He creates its real, intrinsic and proper structure.2
This, then, is why Jesus’ resurrection matters: the events of that first Easter have accomplished not only the renewal of all things, but constituted the very ground and guide and goal of their being as the being of God’s own life. In Rahner’s words,
The resurrection of Christ is essentially, and not merely through being juridically accepted by God, the event in which God irrevocably adopts the creature as his own reality, by his own divine primordial act, as he had “already” done in the incarnation of the Logos. It is likewise the event in which God so divinizes and transfigures the creature that this glorification is accomplished as the total acceptance of this divine assumption by the freedom of the creature itself.3
If the resurrection of Jesus is how God is God, “the event in which God irrevocably adopts the creature as his own reality,” then it is also how creation is itself—divinized and transfigured and so free and self-determining. In other words, Christ’s resurrection is not only the culmination and consummation of the incarnation but also the culmination and consummation of creation itself, which is made by and for the Incarnate One whose free self-determination as the Son is both the revelation of God and the truth that makes and sustains all things by bringing them toward the fulfillment only God the Spirit can be.
Obviously, to think resurrection in such terms requires a serious rethinking of what we think we know about “nature.” Indeed, it requires us to pass beyond the philosophical altogether—into prayer, which is theology at its truest. But that is as it should be.
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The resurrection, for Rahner, also guarantees that Christ is the mediator of God’s immediacy for each and every creature—visible and invisible, earthly and heavenly. As he puts it, “the transfigured human reality of the Logos remains truly and perpetually the mediator to the immediacy of God.”4 The glory of Easter is that Christ’s Spirit-saturated humanity has become the priestly heart and soul of creation, the prophetic reality of all things. As Rahner puts it elsewhere:
What we call his resurrection and unthinkingly regard as his own personal destiny, is simply, on the surface of reality as a whole, the first symptom in experience of the fact that behind so-called experience (which we take so seriously) everything has already become different in the true and decisive depth of all things. His resurrection is like the first eruption of a volcano which shows that in the interior of the world God's fire is already burning, and this will bring everything to blessed ardor in his light. He has risen to show that that has already begun. Already from the heart of the world into which he descended in death, the new forces of a transfigured earth are at work. Already in the innermost center of all reality, futility, sin, and death are vanquished and all that is needed is the short space of time which we call history after the birth of Christ, until everywhere and not only in the body of Jesus what has really already begun will be manifest.5
Having ascended to the Father, Christ has not withdrawn from the world or distanced himself form it (as if such a thing were possible), but entered freely and fully into it, descending down once-for all, as the Scriptures say, to its deepest depths, claiming them as his own. Thus, Rahner concludes,
The risen and exalted Lord must be the permanent and ever-active access to God, which is always being used anew and can never be left as something passed over and past. He must always show the Father. Only when we have understood this, have we understood Easter as it is: the consummation of the world which gives access to God, who is really all in all through the Easter event, which has already begun but is still reaching completion in us.6
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All that leads Rahner back again to what is meant when Easter is said to be an “eschatological event.” This paragraph, the last in the essay, needs to be quoted in full:
The relationship between an event and its effects, between a process and its results is not always the same. The event in which something eschatologically final comes to pass is infinitely closer to the result than an event which produces something which then continues to exist in the same process of time in which it came about. In the former case, the result does not go ‘on’, but is definitively what happened there. And in such a case, the event cannot recede into the past: it cannot become merely something that has been there, because the state of having been something only ensues when what remains takes on a new and different future, which is no longer that which came about by the event in question. A closer exposition of these observations must lead to the insight that the Easter feast refers to the event of Easter in an anamnesis or memorial which really celebrates it, since the event has remained present in an ontologically unique and unsurpassable manner. But this again determines the unique character of the celebration itself. Anamnesis and that which is made present by it in its celebration condition each other reciprocally. On this basis one might show how every eucharistic celebration is essentially an Easter feast, not merely because it refers back to a “past” event, but because it is the presence of that which came to be at Easter, to be finally the validity of the event itself. And then the feast of Easter would be merely a higher degree of expressiveness of what is always celebrated in the Eucharist in veritable anamnesis: the one event composed of the death and resurrection of Christ, which is of course past in the physical world and which indeed had really to pass, in order that the definitive could come and stay, but which ‘remains’ in what is proper to it and hence can be enacted in its celebration.7
The resurrection, in other words, happened not in time but to it, determining—as its true end and therefore its only real beginning—what was, what is, and what shall be.
A friend of mine, Samuel Marks, is working now on his Master’s thesis, arguing against one of his former instructors that is not anachronistic to speak of Christ appearing in Israel’s stories. He sent this note to me just yesterday: “To speak anachronistically of Jesus is to speak Eucharistically.” Yes. And we can add this: to speak of Christ Eucharistically is to speak of time’s resurrection—and ours as well.
Karl Rahner, “Dogmatic Questions on Easter,” Theological Investigations Vol 4 (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), 121-133 (123).
Rahner, “Dogmatic Questions on Easter,” 129.
Rahner, “Dogmatic Questions on Easter,” 129.
Rahner, “Dogmatic Questions on Easter,” 131.
Karl Rahner, The Content of Faith (New York: Crossroads, 2000), 321.
Rahner, “Dogmatic Questions on Easter,” 132-33.
Rahner, “Dogmatic Questions on Easter,” 133.
Thinking about the gospel lectionary for next Sunday (John 20:19ff), I wonder if the fact that Jesus appears in the upper room and “shows them his wounds” is a moment in which cross and resurrection become a single reality. And when we eat and drink the body and blood of Christ it also unites cross and resurrection. The bread and wine emerge from the wounds of the cross, which are now present to us in the Eucharistic feast.
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