Friday, May 15, 2009

MODERN CREEDS: A DISCUSSION OF KARL RAHNER’S “BRIEF FORMULATIONS” OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF.

Introduction: What are creeds for?
At the conclusion of his Foundations of Christian Faith (1976), a work which he regarded more than any other as the summation of his lifetime’s theological reflection, Karl Rahner includes three short modern creeds. He presents them as a summation of a summation, a distillation of his effort to convey the ‘idea’ of Christianity. The first of the three he describes as theological, the second as anthropological, and the last as ‘future-oriented’. But they all attempt to convey the same faith to the world of the later twentieth century. Though Rahner does not offer them as replacements for the historic creeds (which he sees as irreplaceable within the public life of the Church), they nevertheless provide an opportunity to consider what might be involved in devising a modern creed. Such a creed would be understood not as a rewording of a traditional creed, but as a fresh statement of faith in contemporary terms. But that effort would presume a certain understanding of the significance of creeds.

What are creeds for? They appear to have originated very early as statements of belief within a liturgical context, primarily within the liturgy of baptism. Used in that way, they fulfil a practical and even performative function, declaring to the participants the meaning of the liturgical action and at the same time binding them explicitly to that meaning. But the creeds eventually moved outside the liturgical setting to become definitions of faith used in a broader context. They told Christians and others what the faith involved in succinct and normative form.

As normative statements, it was natural that creeds would be used for catechetical purposes. The instruction of converts and children could be built around them in the confidence that false teaching would not be given. Their normative status also made them instrumental for the unity of the Church. The Church could know its unity in the common acceptance of agreed creedal statements. The attempts in the fourth century to establish definitive creedal formulae were part of a struggle for the unity of the Church against the divisive pressures of the time.

Rahner acknowledges these functions, but has another centrally in mind. He is looking for a formulation that can be directed outside the community of faith to an unbelieving world. For this two things are important. First, the creed must provide a point of entry to the faith, a point from which all of the essence of faith is accessible. To do this it does not need to include the whole content of belief; enough for it to contain “what is of fundamental importance and what provides a basic starting-point for reaching the whole of the faith.” Second, its language must be comprehensible to those to whom it is addressed. For Rahner, as a philosopher-theologian, this means a language rooted in the philosophical concepts of the twentieth century.

Creeds and language
Rahner is clear that the historic creeds derive from an intellectual world that is no longer our own, and use a language that has little leverage on what he calls the “modern ‘pagan’” (FCF, p. 449). The historic creeds function on common assumptions between speaker and hearer, principally that when we say “I believe in one God” we know what kind of thing we are talking about. But this assumption no longer holds. In the historic creeds “the existence of a God who transcends the world, or at least the meaning of the word ‘God,’ is presupposed … This is obviously impossible in an age of anti-metaphysical pragmatism and of worldwide atheism.” (FCF, p. 449).

The problem has to do with the non-currency in the contemporary world of metaphysical language. The creeds place our world within a further, describable reality (“came down from heaven”), populated by identifiable beings (God the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit). They appear to be offering information about a ‘trans-world’ that surrounds our own. For many contemporary hearers this procedure will be read as mythological, and so will be dismissed without consideration.

Rahner’s attempt to ground Christian truth anew in the twentieth century uses the language of the 20th century phenomenological-existentialist tradition as it derives from Heidegger. This is certainly a contemporary language, but it may not always be an accessible one. And his choice has a further effect. By moving away from the narrative-mythological form of the traditional creeds, he raises the suspicion that something like demythologising is going on, that we have strayed on to the terrain of Bultmann and Tillich. The objection to their approach is broadly that it appears to lift Christianity out of history and reconstruct it in an area of inwardness, in the inner zone of existential decision. Rahner may also be vulnerable to this accusation. What may save him is his insistence on the centrality of the historical, on history as the vehicle of God’s self-communication. If it is true that Bultmann and Tillich, in their aggiornamento, effectively dehistoricize Christianity, the same accusation cannot, overall, be laid against Rahner.

Rahner’s “Brief Theological Creed.”
In looking at Rahner’s creeds, it is important to bear in mind what creeds have, traditionally, been expected to do. They should at least point to the essence of faith. They should be normative, and so the statement of a community, not an individual. They will often be suitable for public and liturgical use. They should also respect certain structural expectations. The form of the creeds is Trinitarian; first they speak of the Father, then of the Son, and then of the Spirit. A creed that did not reflect that would be doubtfully Christian.

Rahner’s first, “brief theological,” creed reads as follows:

The incomprehensible term of human transcendence, which takes place in man’s existentiell and original being and not only in theoretical or merely conceptual reflection, is called God, and he communicates himself in forgiving love to man both existentielly [sic] and historically as man’s own fulfilment. The eschatological climax of God’s historical self-communication, in which this self-communication becomes manifest as irreversible and victorious, is called Jesus Christ. (FCF, p. 454)

Whether or not this short formulation contains the essence of Christianity, it does contain the essence of Rahner’s theology. His central themes—transcendence as existentially involved in all experience, the free self-communication of God in history, the culmination of that self-giving in Christ—are all here. The question, however, is how far this very personal summation amounts to a creed for our time.

Rahner wants to bring the truth of faith very close to his hearers; and to do that, he uses the resources of the phenomenological tradition, with its concern for what is directly offered to us in experience. His argument is that the truth of faith—the reality of God—already is very close to us, in the texture of all experience, in the implication of the infinite that all finite beings carry with them. God is not a remote entity in a mythological trans-world; he is a dimension of being that all being points us toward. It might be said that Rahner is offering a natural theology for the twentieth century, one that begins not in arguments about causes but in a close inspection of the content of experience before we begin to conceptualise our world.

This is the great strength of Rahner’s theology. He takes enormously seriously the difficulty of faith in his time. He does not ask his contemporaries to weigh the respectability of the old word, God, but to look hard at what is under their noses: the texture of everything they know, and to see where that directs them. But the strength of his approach is also its weakness. There is the general theological point that if God is known as an implication of everything, rather than of certain things in particular, then he threatens to become indistinguishable, as though the whole world were coloured blue.

The more immediate difficulty as far as the creed is concerned is Rahner’s treatment of the historical. Yes, he is offering a theological formulation, and one would expect a degree of abstraction. But the historic creeds (certainly the Apostle’s and the Nicene: less so the Athanasian) manage to keep the theological and the historical in some balance; or, manage to make the history theology at the same time. This is something that a Christian creed really must do. The awkward reality of Christianity is its inseparability from event. It is pinned irremovably to the historical. The fact that the Nicene Creed is for the most part a narrative is not some concession to a ‘simpler age’ (whatever that might have been) but the essence of the matter. We know God and Christ in history.

All this Rahner would, on the broader stage of his thinking, enthusiastically accept. But this is not the effect of his first creedal formulation. Though he attempts to preserve the historical by stressing that God’s self-communication is historical as well as existenziell, and that the culmination of this self-communication is Christ (and therefore historical), there remains the impression that the historical is hardly needed. If the ‘term’ (Woraufhin, ‘the there-on-which,’ the ultimate goal) of human transcendence (that which is given in human experience) is really existenziell and original and not the product of concept and theory, if God’s self-communication really begins in the implication of the commonplace, then why do we need history and Christ?

The effect of Rahner’s way of putting things is to make Christ more the culminating term of an argument than a historical figure. Christ as “the eschatological climax of God’s historical self-communication” has a different ring to the Christ who “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.” Nor is this just a matter of style. Rahner’s attempt to bring God close in a phenomenological way has the paradoxical effect of making Christ more distant in another sense. Instead of the flesh-and-blood actor within history we have Christ as the supreme expression of an essentially subjective reality, the inner encounter with the transcendent that suffuses our lives.

Rahner’s “Brief Anthropological Creed”
The (literal as well as metaphorical) bloodlessness of Rahner’s first, theological, creed may perhaps be remedied in his second statement, formulated explicitly from the human perspective:

A person really discovers his true self in a genuine act of self-realization only if he risks himself radically for another. If he does this, he grasps unthematically or explicitly what we mean by God as the horizon, the guarantor and the radical depths of this love, the God who in his existentiell and historical self-communication made himself the realm within which such love is possible. This love is meant in both an interpersonal and a social sense, and in the radical unity of both of these elements it is the ground and the essence of the Church. (FCF, p. 456)

A first point to be noticed is that, if the first of Rahner’s creeds foregrounds the Father (as transcendence communicating itself in forgiving love), this second foregrounds the Son. This might have been expected given that it is ‘anthropological.’ It seems as though Rahner is conforming to the Trinitarian structure of the creeds, not within each statement, but between them.

This second statement centres on an act: the act of the God who “made himself the realm” for the risk that is taken in love, and did so, it is implied, through Christ’s living and dying. Here, somewhat veiled, is Rahner’s affirmation of the passion and the cross. In this act God necessarily establishes himself within history, which is the only place for acts. So the historical is more central than it was in the first formulation, and some hesitations are beginning to be met.

Again there is much to be said in favour of Rahner’s approach. As in the first creed, he is trying to bring the reality of God close to his hearers. Just as there he insisted that God is already available in the structure of our experience, in the existentiality of what it is to be a person experiencing the world, so now he suggests that God is there with the same immediacy in moral action. To risk oneself for another is already to know that there is a context in which that action has meaning; and that context is God. Once again Rahner turns the word ‘God’ from a metaphysical inheritance into a way of speaking about what is transcendent but most immediate, existentially constitutive of what we are as moral agents.

Nevertheless, there are still problems. A central difficulty has to do with the action of Christ. Though Rahner, at least by implication, locates this action where it is traditionally located, in Christ’s suffering and death, he does so in a way that is significantly different from that of the historic creeds. The Nicene and the Athanasian creeds both state that Christ’s action was “for our salvation.” How that act achieved its end has been the subject of much subsequent debate; but there has been a general agreement that something was done in Christ’s suffering and death, whether by satisfaction or substitution or some other means.

In Rahner’s formulation, even if we give his phrase “made himself the realm within which such love is possible” a strict historical identification with the work of Christ, what emerges is less an action than the disclosure of something that was always the case. Nothing new is done; what was always true—that to risk oneself radically in love for another is already to grasp the reality of God—is made apparent, definitively, in the death of Jesus. If anything is changed, it is our understanding of how we relate to God, not the relation itself. This may be a preferable reading of the Passion and Crucifixion; but it is not in continuity with the teaching of the historic creeds. Again what is at issue is a weakening of the historical, a movement from event to consciousness and subjectivity.

Rahner’s “Brief Future-Oriented Creed”
Rahner’s third creed reads as follows:

Christianity is the religion which keeps open the question about the absolute future which wills to give itself in its own reality by self-communication, and which has established this will as eschatologically irreversible in Jesus Christ, and this future is called God. (FCF, p. 457)

Rahner confirms our expectation that this formulation relates most directly to the Holy Spirit: “the absolute future of man, who is God and who communicates himself in his free Lordship over history, is in a special way the ‘Spirit’ of God because he can be characterized as love and as freedom and as ever new and surprising” (FCF, p. 459).

Again, Rahner is thinking of his ‘modern pagans’ and of how they can be released into a fresh recognition of God’s reality. He is thinking of the degree to which, for the world at large, Christianity and the Church are about the past, preoccupied with events two thousand years ago, constantly trying to apply the brakes to the future. For most of our contemporaries, faith looks backward and secularity looks forward. Again he tries to bring God close by asking what we are really doing when we look ahead to the future as something open and free, when we look ahead in hope. We cannot do that, he suggests, if that future is “an indefinite series of finite and partial futures.” Hope depends on “the absolute future” which is not just an infinite extent of time but a giving, a communicating, of that which is to be hoped for, which can only be God. Just as moral action requires a frame in which love makes sense, so action toward the future—which is the whole of human action—requires a frame in which hope makes sense.

Once again Rahner finds God in the immediate texture of experience, in the very conditions that allow us to act humanly. But here, more successfully perhaps than in his earlier creeds, the historical is firmly tied in. He makes it clear that the “absolute future” is still, as far as we are concerned, historical; this is not some trans-time, some mode of futurity in which history has ceased. Rather it “is still in the process of historical realization” (FCF, p. 458); just as revelation and Christ are known to us through history, so the absolute of human hope will be fulfilled historically.

Here we might see Rahner as offering a gloss on the later clauses of the creeds, those that deal with Resurrection and eternal life. It is in his treatment of this aspect of faith that his anti-metaphysical bent is most apparent. The historic creeds suggest a point at which history passes over into something else; where the world known to us is abrogated in favour of another world. As his writing on death shows, Rahner is suspicious of the dependence of all this on a certain kind of metaphysics, in which this world and this time stand against other worlds and the suspension of time. We can, as human beings, make very little sense of this, given that we are, in his view, pervasively and radically worldly and historical. What we have is not the assurance of our elevation from one world into another, but hope. And hope is posited on an absolute future, which is not just given by God, but is God himself. For God can give nothing but himself.

Conclusion: the possibility of a modern creed
How successful has Rahner been in his short creedal statements? In all three there is a pervasive problem to do with the relation between the content of faith and history, a problem grounded in the phenomenological roots of Rahner’s theology. And there are certain functions that his creeds clearly do not fulfil. They would be of no liturgical use. They would be of limited catechetical use, at least without a crash course in Aquinas and Heidegger. They are hardly the kind of statements around which Christians of different traditions could discover their unity. They are, finally, too personal, too much the outflow of one man’s thinking, to be creeds in anything like the traditional sense.

But some things they do achieve. Rahner says that a creed should be a point of entry to the faith, a point from which the fullness of faith is accessible. He takes the reality of God out of its traditional metaphysical world, a world that most of our contemporaries find rather less plausible than the world of astrology, and invites the ‘modern pagans’ to take a fresh look, a look that is centred on their own experience. He points to the implications of that experience: how our finitude is defined by infinity, how our most familiar acts are grounded in a confidence that the world cannot support.

Rahner’s project emphasises how historic formulation can become a barrier to truth. But what does it suggest about the possibility of a modern creed? His example is not, on the whole, encouraging. Though creeds have always had philosophical antecedents—none more so than the classic formulations of the fourth century—the attempt to make creedal use of a twentieth century philosophical language results in statements which, if in one sense close to the thinking of the age, are at the same time distant from the main current of its discourse. It seems to have been possible for the theologians of Nicea and Constantinople to find a language which, as a language of image as well as abstraction, was able to enter the public life of the Church. Modern theology seems not to have access to that kind of language. And the attempt to construct a modern creed in imagistic-mythological terms without a sound underpinning in theology could only result in a crudification of the faith. (This is what happens in many contemporary evangelical statements).

Where does that leave us? Happily or unhappily, with the ancient creeds. Perhaps what the Church needs to do is not to change the creeds, but to be properly conscious of what they are and how they may be spoken. They are, as I suggested at the outset, metaphysical in a particular way, imagistic-mythological utterances that can reach God in their power to declare the truth of our relation to him, but do not describe some further world, let alone God himself. Which is to say that the modern Church, in its day-to-day practice, would benefit from an injection of that scepticism about religious language that distinguishes the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius and Aquinas.

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