Chapter Eight: Remarks on the Christian Life

This chapter has two parts. In the first, Rahner describes the general features of Christian life. It is not one aspect of human life in general, says Rahner, but human life as it really is--open to the fullness of reality, including the reality of God. To be sure, Christians have a "pessimistic realism," for the Christian recognizes the inevitability of death and the final meaning of the individual's life. But Christians ultimately put their hope in God, confident that they have a share in God's future. In the second part of this chapter, Rahner presents a basic catechesis on the seven sacraments. He does so in light of the basic sacrament which is Church. In sacraments the Church manifests itself as God's saving will throughout history in a tangible, official, and unsurpassable way.

Cover photo scanned from Robert Kress, A Rahner Handbook (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982).

The sacraments are God's offer of salvation in the Church. When Christians receive the sacraments, they are responding to the offer that God has made. The Christian life is not a special kind of life but rather life as it really is, the life that God has given.

Part 1: General Characteristics of Christian Life

In this section, Rahner describes the relationship between the life of inner freedom and adherence to Christian moral norms. Accepting reality is the basis of freedom. When we accept reality, we freely accept its burdens and responsibilities as a gift from God (A). Hence our realism is pessimistic. It acknowledges death, not just as the passage to eternal life, but also as a harsh fate that we all must endure (B). On the other side of death, however, is God's future. It belongs to every Christian who regards the future as God's gift to humanity (C). Life is a plurality, but it is God's plurality, and its unity and purpose lie with God (D). Christians recognize the difference between what they are and what they are called to be. For that reason, their acceptance of reality is not passive resignation but active obedience to God. We distinguish between this obedience to God and obedience to concrete moral norms. The moral norms are conditioned by time and they express (but are no substitute for) a transcendental encounter with God. Although they are secondary expressions, moral norms accord with an existential knowledge of God (E).

A. The Freedom of Christians (p. 402).

The "basic and ultimate thrust" of Christian life is not that the Christian is a special instance of humanity. Rather, Christian life is human life as it really is. Christian life accepts reality in its fullness. The Christian, even the anonymous Christian, "accepts without reservation the whole of concrete human life" (402). Non-Christians lack this acceptance. They want to escape burdens and responsibilities of life that they claim to have been unjustly imposed on humanity. The Christian sees these burdens and responsibilities as part of humanity's common task.

Christian life is the life of freedom, says Rahner, freedom as openness to the whole of reality, including God. The person without freedom is not open. He or she wants to avoid reality, to escape the forces that determine our existence. To be sure, part of our task is to struggle to free humanity from forces that oppress us. God has given us gifts and abilities, and we use them well when we put them at the service of human liberation. But it is impossible to be free of all burdens and responsibilities. True freedom lies in the gift of God's own self, says Rahner, "throughout all the imprisonments of existence" (403).

B. The Realism of Christians (p. 403).

Christian life is characterized by what Rahner calls "pessimistic realism." It is realism in its openness to the whole of reality. It is pessimistic because it sees existence "as dark and bitter and hard," that is, a "risk" that leads to death. The Christian is an existentialist in that he or she makes a decision about existence--a decision to accept reality. Reality includes the hope that God will triumph over the risks of this world with divine love.

The Christian realist knows that human existence has "to pass through death" (404). Facing death means acknowledging the hardness and darkness of death. It means recognizing that death "is the only passage to the life which really does not die" (404). Our pessimistic realism consists in accepting death and renouncing everything that would distract us from reality, or substitute for it.

C. The Hope of Christians (p. 404).

Christian hope consists in the realistic belief that God's future--"the absolute and infinite future"--belongs to every Christian. It belongs to him or her in the sense that God offers that future as a grace and a gift. The Christian, Rahner says, "hopes for the infinite and therefore confronts the finite calmly" (405). He or she is free of the illusion that the present is the whole of reality. The present is "encompassed by the holy mystery of eternal love."

D. Christianity and the Pluralism of Human Existence (p. 405).

The Christian is open to the pluralism of reality for two reasons. First, the Christian knows that pluralism is itself the creation of God. Second, the Christian knows that God is different from pluralism. Because reality belongs to God, one can open oneself to it "in real trust and without reservation." But because the pluralism of reality is not God, not the divine itself, the Christian knows that its unity and purpose lie "beyond the realm of his [God's] tangible reality." The pluralism of reality is not a system that humanity can control. Why should one give oneself up to such a pluralism, surrendering in trust and without reservation? Because in this pluralism, God communicates the divine self. To be sure, this communication is mediated. But it is nonetheless a true communication.

E. The Responsibility of Christians (p. 407).

One might protest against this line of thought. One might say that, if the basic thrust of Christian life is to accept human life as it is, then one denies the need for moral striving. Acceptance, one might say, is passivity. If this world is the best of all possible words, and if "whatever is, is right," then why try to improve oneself? Rahner answers that self-acceptance means accepting oneself as a moral being. To be human is to recognize the difference between what we are and what we ought to be. Only by accepting this aspect of being human does one become a Christian.

Accepting our humanity always means accepting it in what Rahner calls an "upward direction." We see the difference between what we are and what we should be, and we attempt to overcome the difference. Overcoming the difference means rising in response to God's Word. The decision for or against God is primary.

We must distinguish, as does Catholic moral theology, between objective moral norms and our subjective obligation to heed the word of God. The objective norm is binding, but it is historically conditioned. More important is the recognition of the difference between what one is and what one should be. Obedience to God in faithfulness is our primary obligation. Catholic theology recognizes that some individual moral norms "belong to a concrete reality which is different from God" (408). These moral norms have only a relative value.

To be sure, one cannot disdain moral norms. To do so would be to make one's own judgment absolute. Such a judgment would then become a godless ideology. The Christian rejects such solipsism. But we must recall that God's word speaks to the human subject immediately. Hearing that word is essential to being human. Hence our subjective obligation of faithfulness to God is primary. Adherence to moral norms is secondary.

Ultimately, however, there is an "intrinsic unity between morality and religion" (410). Although love for one's neighbor always transcends an ethic of laws, nevertheless those laws express that love. Rahner says that love is "the absolute sum of all moral obligations" (410). To be sure, love for one's neighbor may be expressed today in different ways from those of the past. Those new expressions represent an authentically prophetic impulse, critical of the past and constructive of the future. But if love is the genuine love of true religion, then its expression is genuinely moral, and cannot be opposed to moral norms.

Our Christian responsibility is to see reality for what it is. We are to acknowledge ourselves as God's creatures. We are sinful and weak, yes, but capable of confessing that sinfulness and of making the choices offered by God. That is what it means to say that we are simultaneously justified and sinners.

Part 2: The Sacramental Life

In this section, Rahner presents a basic catechesis on the seven sacraments in the context of the basic sacrament, the Church. He begins with what is basic about the Church: it is the salvation history of human life made finally manifest, explicit, and irreversible. Within the Church, the sign of God's efficacious word, God's gracious self-communication becomes tangible (A). Jesus instituted them in a way analogous to his founding of the Church: he intended a Church in which God's grace is tangibly sacramental (B). The public and ecclesial dimension of the sacraments--the opus operatus--are efficacious when they become the opus operantis, encountering humanity's openness and freedom (C). Baptism incorporates the believer into the Church, initiating him or her into the death of Christ. Confirmation is the sign of the full maturation of Christian gifts for the Church's mission (D). Holy Orders and Matrimony are signs of faithful people realizing their identity in the Church, in one case by means of the love of the married couple and, in another case, by the service of the ordained minister (E). Penance is God's offer of forgiveness by means of the explicit reconciliation of the Church. Anointing of the Sick is the Church's holy word to the person in danger of death (F). Eucharist is a meal of thanksgiving and a continuation of the one sacrifice of Christ: we give thanks for what God has done by incorporating us into the life of the Son (G). Although each sacrament is different, together they offer God's word to humanity, relate the believer to the Church, help to realize the believer's role in the Church, and unite us to God (H). The sacraments are God's offer of salvation in the Church, and the reception of the sacraments is the response to the offer empowered by God (I). The Christian life is not a special kind of life but rather life as it really is, the life God has given, and the Christian reflects on it in an explicit way (J).

A. The Church as Basic Sacrament and the Seven Sacraments (p. 411).

The transcendental relation between humanity and divinity is the right context for understanding the sacraments. It is not right to say that the seven sacraments are the only gifts of God, outside of which there is no grace. On the contrary, says Rahner, "The history of salvation and grace has its roots in the essence of man which has been divinized by God's self-communication" (411). This is the proper context for understanding the sacraments. They are part of what Rahner calls "the process in which there becomes explicit and historically tangible the history of salvation" (411). The history of salvation, we will recall, is coextensive with history as a whole (see p. 142). In the Judaeo-Christian history of revelation, the salvation that began with human history has become manifest. Sacraments and the entirety of the Church "are only especially prominent, historically manifest and clearly tangible events in a history of salvation which is identical with the life of man as a whole" (412). In the Church, the process of salvation has become manfest.

Salvation history entered into "its final, eschatological and irreversible phase" (412) with Christ, the Church, and its sacraments. In this history, God's triumph is implicit, and the triumph cannot be undone by human beings. The sacraments signify the triumph of God. A Christian sacrament takes place "wherever the finality and invincibility of God's offer of himself becomes manifest in the concrete life of an individual through the church which is the basic sacrament" (412). The church is a sign of salvation, but is not salvation itself.

If the Church and the sacraments signify (but may not be simply identified with) salvation, then are they "efficacious"? Rahner says that they are. They are efficacious because God is efficacious. "God's act of grace . . . continues to be definitively bound up with the acceptance of this offer" of grace (412). The sacraments are efficacious because they manifest what God has done and continues to do--namely, to offer to human beings God's own life. In the seven sacraments, the Church involves human beings with the seven and with itself as the basic sacrament.

B. Institution by Jesus Christ (p. 413).

Although it is problematic to trace the institution of the sacraments to their verbal institution by Jesus, nevertheless the sacraments can be understood in that way. The institution of the seven sacraments, says Rahner, is analogous to the institution by Christ of the Church. We can show that Jesus envisioned the continuation of his teaching and ministry. We can show that the sacramentality of the Church is implicit in the Church's very essence. We can show that the seven sacraments are an interpretation of the Church's sacramentality.

C. "Opus Operatum" &endash; "Opus Operantis" (p. 413).

Christians as a whole grasp a basic eschatological situation: the world is being redeemed and the drama of salvation history has a happy ending. But one cannot know, as an individual, how God will judge "the secret depths of his own freedom" (413). No one knows his or her destiny in advance. The individual cannot say "that he accepts with some absolute certainty the word and the offer which comes to him from God with absolute certainty" (414). We are not in a position to judge our acceptance of God's word.

To be sure, the Catholic admits that the sacrament is an opus operatum, a work of God that "causes of itself." God's offer has "an absolute unconditionality and certainty" (414). But this opus operatum "encounters the still open word of an individual who responds with a 'yes' or a 'no,' and this is the opus operantis" (414). The sacraments are not magic rites. They (1) do not coerce God and they (2) "are efficacious only to the extent that they encounter man's openness and freedom" (414).

We falsely understand the sacraments as quasi-magic acts when we think that the sacraments exist in order to relieve us of an "ultimate and personal decision in faith, hope, and love" (414-415).

D. The Sacraments of Initiation (p. 415).

Baptism has an individual salvific effect. It means that one's sins are forgiven, the glory of God's grace is communicated, and the capacity for faith, hope and love are given. But Baptism is not given primarily for individual salvation. Individual salvation can be achieved without the sacrament. Baptism is primarily an incorporation into the Church. There, in the Church, God's forgiveness has a human, tangible quality. There God's glory is recognized in communal worship. There one shares with others one's faith, hope, and love.

Along with the grace of the Church, Baptism gives "a share in, and the mandate and capacity for participating in" the Church. The Church is the historical tangibility of God's grace in the world" (416). Baptism requires that a person play his or her ecclesial role. In other words, one is obliged by Baptism to participate in the Church.

Baptism is the more negative aspect, and Confirmation the more positive, in a single process of initiation. In Baptism, we die into the death of Christ. In Confirmation, we are empowered to give witness, to attain the fullness of Christian charisms, and to undertake a mission. Confirmation is "the grace of the church for its mission to the world" (417).

E. The Sacraments of the States of Life (p. 417).

Orders and Matrimony do not found two different states of life. It is not true to say that, because the married state and the celibate state are different, that the two sacraments could not be administered to the same person. The two sacraments are rather two ways by which the Church actualizes itself as the basic sacrament. The Church is actualizing itself in relation to a person who is making a decision constitutive for his or her salvation. The Church does not decide the person's vocation by administering the sacrament. No, it is the person who makes the decision.

Orders. Rahner then asks whether the sacrament of Orders, by which the Church hands on its offices, is also a means of sanctification for the one who receives it. He answers as follows. God wants the Church to be holy. If God wants the Church to be holy, then God wants the Church's officials to be holy. If they were unholy, then the Church could not depend on them to help bring about the mission of the Church.

But the Church does depend on them. "The existence and continuation of sacraments" in general (although not the efficacy of any one celebration of the sacraments) depends on the holiness of ministers. Since God wills the holiness of the sacraments, then God must will a holy hierarchy. The sacrament of Orders is also directed at the sanctification of the person who receives the sacrament.

Matrimony. Marriage is also a sacrament of a state of life. Since marriage is "an event of the grace and love which unites God and man" (419), it is "a moment in the self-actualization of the church" (419). The bride and groom "manifest that love which unites God and man" (419).

Then Rahner asks whether the manifestation of love in marriage is essential to the Church. Rahner says that it is. The heart of the parallel between the Church and marriage is this: the unity of the love itself in one flesh. Creation is incorporated into the order of grace. Creation has significance for grace. All human moral activity has "a hidden relation to Christ" (420), in which this activity has its fulfilment."

In summary, then, Rahner that marriage is a sign of God's love. "Whenever there is a unity in love between two persons . . . in their final and definitive validity, this is the effect and the manifestation of the grace which . . . becomes manifest in the unity between Christ and the Church" (420). There the Church is present as "the smallest community of the redeemed and sanctified" (421).

F. Penance and the Anointing of the Sick (p. 421).

These two sacraments reflect the reality that our new life in Christ is always the threatened life of a sinner. "If we have experienced how hopeless real guilt before God is just from our human perspective, then we long to hear the word of forgiveness from God" (421). In forgiveness, God communicates the divine self. In Penance, a person who has said "no" to God receives that forgiveness.

"God's word of forgiveness is not only the consequence, but is also and ultimately the presupposition of the conversion in which a guilty person turns to God and surrenders himself" (421). The word has been extended throughout history. It found its irrevocable expression in Jesus Christ. "He entered into solidarity with sinners in love, and he accepted God's word of forgiveness for us in the final act of his faith, hope, and love in the midst of the darkness of his death, the death in which he experienced the darkness of our guilt" (422). His death was as dark as our guilt.

The Church offers forgiveness in many ways. The Church promises it as the forgiveness of sins, in Baptism, in prayer, and in confession (whether privately or when the individual confesses "before God and his Christ in the common confession of a community" 422). By sin, we place ourselves "in contradiction to the essence of the holy community" (422-423). So when, in God's word of forgiveness, the Church extends forgiveness, it extends it by forgiving the injustice which the sinner has done to the Church.

The anointing of the sick must be seen in its fundamental context, the situation of final illness. Alone the faithful individual must decide how he or she will understand the meaning of life. In this loneliness, the individual is never wholly alone. With God "there also surrounds him the holy community of believers, of those who love and pray, of those who in life try to exercise the obedience of death, and who in life try to gaze upon the dying one in faith" (423). We live, says Rahner, "from out of the death" of the Lord. Jesus accepted God's word of forgiveness for us in his own death, accepted in complete obedience. So we want the Church, Christ's body, present at the sickbed.

The Church, through its minister, speaks a holy word to the person who is ill. He allows not only the interior acceptance of grace for the sick person, but he allows the grace of the Spirit-filled Church to be present as an event. Grace takes place by becoming corporeal. The very sickness becomes a situation of grace and salvation. The person receives grace because he or she believes and is longing for forgiveness.

G. The Eucharist (p. 424).

The Eucharist is the sacrament of the Church in a very radical sense. The Lord's Supper was essential to the founding of the Church. It is essential to Jesus' own understanding of himself as a mediator of salvation. Although we speak of the sacrament of the Eucharist as one of the seven sacraments, nevertheless it stands alone.

The helps us understand the institution of the sacrament. On the night before he died, Jesus ate a meal, within which he gave to his followers his own body and blood under the appearance of receiving bread and wine. Jesus had accepted his death and connected it with the content of his preaching. He regarded the celebration as an anticipation of the final banquet. It was the foundation of the community of his friends and followers.

The Eucharistic food is the body of the one who gave his life in free obedience. The Eucharist is a real meal. By eating it, one is incorporated into the body of Jesus' spiritual community. It assures us of Christ's presence wherever the Lord's Supper is celebrated.

It is not just the presence of Christ in general, but the presence of the suffering and dying servant of God. In that sense, the Eucharist is a sacrifice as well as a meal. It is a sacrifice in that within the Eucharist, the one sacrifice of Jesus continues to be effective, to live on in the liturgical act of representation.

Fundamentally, the Eucharist is connected to thanksgiving. It is the Church's way of making real God's offer of the divine self and of giving thanks for it. It is God's "most intense" self-communication, says Rahner, because Jesus gave it the form of his own life, the life that God loved and definitively accepted.

Finally, Rahner describes the individual and the ecclesial effects of the Eucharist. It is individual in that it gives one a participation in the life of Jesus, the life of love, obedience to the Father, gratitude, forgiveness and patience. It is ecclesial as well. In the Eucharist, God's saving will--God's will to give the divine self to humanity--becomes visible and tangible. The Eucharist is the very tangibility and permanence of God's gift of self. The Eucharist is "the fullest actualization of the essence of the Church," he concludes, because it is "the presence of Christ in time and space" (427).

H. Common Aspects of the Sacraments (p. 427).

What are the common aspects? Every sacrament is the presence of God's efficacious word. When any of the sacraments are received fruitfully (as well as validly), human beings respond. They respond not just in inner freedom but also in a public, historical, and social way. That is why the sacraments involve words and things: water, bread, oil, touch. But of words and things, words are primary. In some sacraments (i.e. matrimony and penance), God's word is present in human words alone. That is why Rahner defines every sacrament as an "efficacious word of God."

All sacraments, moreover, relate a person to the Church. They are not just administered by the Church, but they are the self-actualization of the Church. In the sacraments, the Church is actual (and not just potential) for both the minister and the receiver. That is why Rahner calls the sacraments a dialogue. In the dialogue, God addresses humanity and "establishes creatures in their own reality and freedom" (428). God speaks to humanity from creation onward. In every moment God addresses us. And God has created us to be able to hear God and respond in a way that is worthy.

Sacraments address the individual more specifically than the kind of general address to be found in a sermon. In the sacraments, the Church makes a specific demand upon the human being. Every sacrament is not only the self-actualization of the Church, but "an event in the relationship between the individual and the church" (428). In the sacraments the faithful person recognizes his or her place and function: as a member, as a Eucharist concelebrant, as a reconciled sinner, etc.

Finally, the sacraments are mysteries that unite the past, present and future in a way that corresponds to the essence of humanity and of God. Rahner speaks of this in the language of Thomas Aquinas. Sacraments are a memory of God's offer in Christ (signa rememorativa), they effect what they express (signa demonstrativa), and they anticipate the fulfillment of eternal life (signa prognostica).

I. Official-Ecclesial Salvific Act and Existentiell Salvific Act (p. 429).

In this brief section, Rahner shows the unity of the sacraments as both official acts of the Church and as moments in the salvation of an individual. The sacraments, as an "operative work" of the Church (an opus operatum), are not to be distinguished from the sacraments as the "operating work" of Christ on an individual's life (the opus operantis). It is wrong to say that the sacraments as the work of the Church are alone the act of God upon the person in grace--and that the individual's acceptance of the grace of the sacraments is merely a free human act. Both are aspects of a single dialogical relationship with God in grace. The opus operatus manifests human salvation in an ecclesial way, and the opus operantis manifests salvation in a merely existentiell (but nonetheless grace-filled) act.

Rahner draws a parallel between the sacraments and the official and explicit history of human salvation. There is a history of salvation that (while coexisting with the history of the human spirit) finds an unsurpassable expression in the Bible and the tradition of the Church, Rahner says. In the same way, there is a gift of God's grace that (while being given in myriad ways to humanity) finds official, explicit, and juridical presence in the sacraments. "Everything in human life is indeed the history of salvation," says Rahner, "but not everything is for this reason sacramental in this narrower and stricter sense" (p. 430).

J. Reductio in Mysterium (p. 430).

In this final section, Rahner returns to the opening remarks of Chapter VIII. Christians accept life as it really is. "The ultimately Christian thing about this life is identical with the mystery of human existence" (430). The Christian is the one who "allows himself to fall into the mystery which we call God." The Christian believes that, by falling into God, he or she is "really falling into a blessed and forgiving mystery which divinizes us." The Christian knows that he or she is committed to God in an explicit and conscious way, and not just living unreflectively. To be sure, other human beings may be living an anonymously Christian existence, to the degree that they strive to hear God's invitation and respond to it, and they may find salvation as well. But the Christian seeks life as it is--the life to which God's explicit, tangible, and historical revelation belongs.