Part 1: The Interlocking of Philosophy and Theology

(I.1, p. 24). There is no philosophy that is absolutely free of theology, says Rahner. Whenever we say, “One person is capable of hearing another person,” we mean that God has created us with the ability to hear. Persons are shaped by history. In history Christianity confronts them, Christianity not just as an institution, but as God’s grace and message. So the philosophy that presumes that the human being is able to hear is not absolutely free of theology. In fact, it is an implicit theology.

And theology presupposes anthropology. Anthropology understands the human being as one created with the ability to hear God’s Word. This anthropology enables us to understand how the Christian message can be heard and understood. When Christianity encounters people, it encounters them as hearers. People who encounter Christianity can be asked, “Do you recognize yourself in what Christianity says?”

Part 2: Man as Person and Subject

(I.2, p. 26). In this section, Rahner defines what he means by “person” (A). This concept is essential, for Christianity is addressed to the human person. One needs to know what a person is, that is, to know the being with whom God speaks, in order to understand Christianity (B). And the chief characteristic of human “persons” is that they can put their very being in question, and so can transcend it (C).

A. Personhood as Presupposition of the Christian Message
(I.2.A, p. 26). When we Christians speak of the human being as a “person,” we mean something specific. We mean that the human being is capable of transcendence, responsibility, freedom, honesty in history, openness to mystery. The Christian message presupposes that its hearers are people with these capacities – in a word, are persons.

B. The Hiddenness and Risk of Personal Experience
(I.2.B, p. 27). In the personal experience of hearing God’s Word, the Word remains hidden. It is implicit in, for example, the Bible, dogmatics, ecclesiology, but not contained immediately in them. In them, God addresses the Christian believers. They hear God’s Word in the media that we call the Word of God.
When we say that, we acknowledge that we are saying something general about the human being. We are creating a Christian anthropology. And like any anthropology, Rahner’s is limited. In its general statements, anthropology attempts to view the human being as the effect of this or that cause. It may even tempt human beings to shift responsibility for their choices to something else – to history, let us say, or to nature. But the risk of shifting responsibility is worth taking. It is worth taking in order to say something about the human being as a whole, something true, however incomplete.

C. The Specific Character of Personal Experience
(I.2.C, p. 28). The character of personal experience is this: we “have” it in all that we do, but we do not always consciously reflect on it. In Rahner’s anthropology, human beings experience themselves as “persons,” as beings capable of transcendence. We are more than what a mechanistic anthropology says we are. And it is precisely that “more” that Rahner invites us to bring to conscious expression.

Once we recognize that we are products of history, psychology, etc., products of what is foreign to us, we then can put ourselves in question. We can ask about our true self. And that is what a “subject” is, namely, one who can put his or her very self in question.

The sciences tempt us to think that we can fully explain ourselves. But this is illusory. Transcendental experience suggests that I myself encompass every effort by science to explain me. The person transcends all attempts to reduce him or her to a system or to full comprehension.

Part 3: Man as Transcendent Being

(I.3, p. 31). In this part, Rahner explains what he means by transcendence. This is the central concept in his “transcendental theology.” God “calls” human beings to imagine those possibilities for the good that would realize their potential. In so doing, God enables them to transcend themselves (A). Although it is possible for persons to refuse to reflect on their experience (B), nevertheless the capacity for such a reflection is constitutive of being human. By reflecting on our limits, we begin to imagine new possibilities for ourselves (C) and to transcend our limits (D).

A. The Transcendent Structure of Knowledge
(I.3.A, p. 31). Whenever a person affirms the possibility that he or she can question things, even in a finite way, that person surpasses the finitude. Why? Because the horizon of finitude is always receding as one discovers more. And as the person experiences that horizon receding, the person experiences himself or herself as spirit. One is spirit whenever one acknowledges one’s limits. In that acknowledgment, one has already surpassed the limits, at least as a possibility. Whenever we seek advice, guidance, or forgiveness, we are recognizing our limits and the possibility of surpassing them.

B. The Possibility of Evading the Experience of Transcendence
(I.3.B, p. 32). One can evade the experience of transcendence in a variety of ways. One can naively say, “Self reflection is a waste of time – why should I worry about it?” Or one can dully and unimaginatively “accept” one’s existence without curiosity. This happens when we acknowledge that existence poses a question, but nevertheless refuse to pursue it. We may even despair. Despair arises when we stop pursuing the question because we disbelieve that there is any meaning to it.

C. The Pre-Apprehension of Being
(I.3.C, p. 33). Being: Rahner says that we experience it in hope, in the movement toward freedom, in the assumption of responsibility. What does he mean? He means that, whenever we imagine a possibility for ourselves, we presuppose that there are such possibilities. They are the infinity of reality, the infinity of being. We grasp them as possibilities of the human spirit.
Yes, we are ourselves limited. But in our limits, we are connected to what is absolute. And that absolute (at this point Rahner calls it being, but he means God) can accomplish something – can accomplish in us what we hope for and desire. In short, we apprehend being because we are open to it. And whenever we ask about the mystery of our lives, we understand ourselves as persons who “receive” being. We receive it as a grace, the grace of freedom.

D. The Pre-Apprehension as Constitutive of Person
(I.3.D, p. 34). This openness to being makes us what we are, i.e., persons. By being open, we experience ourselves as participating in the infinity of possibilities. This participation enables us to anticipate our own fulfillment. And that is a form of transcendence. We transcend what we are by being open to what being offers. This does not happen by deliberately trying to “think” transcendence. No, it happens indirectly. It may happen in a rare mystical experience, for example, or in the commonplace experience of loneliness.

Part 4: Man as Responsible and Free

(I.4, p. 35). In this section Rahner defines freedom. For him, it is not a psychological phenomenon, but a “transcendental experience” (A). We “know” it as the presupposition underlying our thinking and choices (B). Whenever we choose to act “responsibly,” reflecting on our ability to make choices and deliberately choosing one course over another as more responsible, we experience freedom (C).

A. Freedom as Non-Particular Datum
(I.4.A, p. 35). One cannot discover freedom as a given. This was the attempt of scholastic psychology, and contradicts the essence of freedom. Freedom is not one phenomenon among others in the realm of psychology. It is rather a transcendental experience. Such an experience grounds the concrete experience of freedom in, for example, jurisprudence and the philosophy of law. We do not discover freedom as a given, but rather as a presupposition. It lies behind all our questioning about whether we are free and responsible. Our very questioning presupposes the freedom to question.

B. The Concrete Mediation of Freedom
(I.4.B, p. 36). Transcendental freedom is what classical philosophy called an idea. We reflect on it when it is objectified in the world in free choice and decisions, but cannot be reduced to them. It lies behind every free act and thought, and so cannot remain unintelligible. We know originating freedom in the experience of objectified freedom. So one cannot point to a given act in history and say, “That is a pure product of freedom.” Freedom is not a datum but an idea.

C. Responsibility and Freedom as Realities of Transcendental Experience
(I.4.C, p. 37). One’s freedom is limited. But within those limits, one can act. And the recognition of that freedom is the recognition of transcendental experience. I experience myself as one who can assume responsibility and act freely, that is, as a “subject” within the horizon of being. To be sure, one can try to evade responsibility and pretend that one is merely a product of forces outside oneself. But that is a lie. Human beings are able to decide about themselves and to actualize themselves. The spiritual work of deciding and actualizing (rather than the concrete ability to do this or that) is the exercise of true freedom.

Part 5: The Question of Personal Existence as a Question of Salvation

Is there such a thing as one’s true self? Rahner says that there is, and whenever we choose to become what we are “called” to be, we become self-conscious agents in the history of salvation.

A. The Theological and Anthropological Starting Point for an Understanding of “Salvation”
(I.5.A, p. 39). Salvation is not a future that befalls someone from the outside. Nor is it something bestowed by moral judgment. Rather, salvation is the truth of ourselves before God. We are invited to understand ourselves truly and to realize our true selves. This is done “before God,” i.e., when we acknowledge who we are as God has created us. We are “saved” when we freely develop ourselves as God has allowed us to do. In that way we fulfill our destiny, we as persons destined to transcend ourselves. Such transcendence is invited by God and takes place in union with God.

B. Salvation in History
(I.5.B, p. 40). Our being, says Rahner, is not something we “have.” Rather, it is experienced in all things, most of which are beyond our control: time, world, and history. Our experience of being is not at our disposal. But in the multitude of experiences, we encounter what is at our disposal. We encounter our own subjectivity and freedom.

Our experience of being in the world includes our feeling that we are alien and different. In that feeling, we discover ourselves and affirm ourselves. We attempt to become ourselves, to become what we are called to be. And the sum total of this human effort can be called the history of salvation. It is the effort of humanity to respond to the invitation to know itself as the being that can transcend itself. It does so in the fulfillment of the possibilities with which it was created, and in the attempt to realize its destiny. This history is the history of God, the God who calls human beings to recognize themselves for what they are and to become what they are meant to be.

Part 6: Man as Dependent

(I.6, p. 42). Human beings are dependent upon the world and upon history, says Rahner in this brief section. But within that dependence, we exercise freedom and experience transcendence.

A. The Presence of Mystery
(I.6.A, p. 42). We human beings experience ourselves as not being in control of our lives, but in being at the disposal of other things. In that experience, however, we imagine other possibilities, and so have a measure of freedom. That too is what we call transcendence. Hence we are both free and dependent upon those things that limit our choices.

Even our transcendence is experienced as something we do not make for ourselves. It was established by another. Who is the other who enables us to transcend ourselves? We call that other the ineffable mystery.

B. Man as Conditioned by World and by History
(I.6.B, p. 42). It is true to say that, in the very experience of ourselves as conditioned, we have moved beyond that conditioning. Whenever we recognize ourselves as being at the disposal of others, as being conditioned and burdened, we take flight into the imagination, imagining ourselves as free. We experience spiritual freedom. But we cannot leave the limiting conditions behind. And that is the human condition: to be conditioned and limited, and yet to have transcended those conditions in freedom.

We experience freedom whenever we make choices. Yet that freedom is never wholly at our disposal. Rather, we make decisions as a synthesis: a synthesis of possibilities and choices. Only some things are possible to us. Every choice edges out other possible choices. And we come to the truth of reality by enduring and accepting the knowledge that reality is not in our hands. Yet we hope and persevere, knowing that we are, and are called to be, more than what we are.