Karl Rahner was once asked in an interview whether he had any special system for producing such a steady stream of writing (his bibliography compiled by Albert Raffelt runs 281 pp.). In response, Rahner humbly downplayed his output, saying that he has “not written so much when you consider the works of Saint Thomas, Suarez, and others. . . . Some days,” Rahner pointed out, “I write nothing.”

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Of the many things that Peter Fritz has learned from Rahner, extraordinary productivity is clearly one. In the decade since he finished his PhD, Fritz has written around twenty articles and book chapters and authored or coauthored four books. His two most recent coauthored books, Send Lazarus (Fordham University Press) and The Politics of Mercy (Herder & Herder) have been published within the last few months. I have to wonder whether there are days in which Fritz writes nothing!

His second and most recent book on Rahner, Freedom Made Manifest (2019), takes up the theme of human freedom. Rahner famously described human freedom in terms of the option fondamentale, a person’s ultimate response of “yes” or “no” to God’s self-communication in grace. Rahner’s theology of human freedom, and of the fundamental option in particular, has generated controversy. In Freedom Made Manifest, Fritz unfolds Rahner’s work in light of his critics, deftly acknowledging Rahner’s limitations, dispelling key misunderstandings, and demonstrating the promise that Rahner’s work continues to hold for Christianity today. In doing so, he invites us to consider a Rahnerian portrait of human freedom, which, in a passage that beautifully sums up much of the book, Fritz describes as

the God-given capacity for a creature—individual or corporate, even sinners—to participate in the divine action, decided from eternity, of drawing all creation into the divine life through the acts of this creation. Any other freedom is derivative from this freedom, and much of what we tend to call “freedom,” especially consumer and financial choices, is not freedom at all. The only freedom worth calling by that name is the cooperative manifestation in time and history of the divine decision to redeem, save, and reconcile. (127)

Here, I’ll first offer an exposition of Freedom Made Manifest, highlighting what I take to be some of Fritz’s most important insights. Second, I’ll offer my own response to the book, an evaluation which (1) underscores key features of Fritz’s work that I hope to see more frequently in Rahner scholarship (and in theology more generally) and which (2) poses a few questions for Fritz and other participants in this symposium to consider as we unpack this rich project.

Key Content: Freedom Made Manifest

As Fritz offers his account of Rahner’s theology of freedom, drawing on a dizzyingly expansive range of Rahner’s essays, homilies, and other writings, he structures the first three chapters according to Rahner’s sources, broadly organized by three themes: philosophy, penance, and Ignatian spirituality. These considerations set up one of the book’s most central questions, where Rahner’s theology of freedom faces a challenge in its application: What are its implications for people whose freedom has been “undone”? Does Rahner’s concept of the fundamental option in particular remain safely at the level of abstraction, the story of an ideal rational agent smoothly opting for (or against) God, thus failing to attend to the disasters of history (as Rahner’s student J. B. Metz charged decades ago) and failing to acknowledge victims of trauma whose self-realization has been deeply wounded (as Jennifer Beste has argued more recently)?

In the fourth and final chapter, Fritz addresses Metz’s and Beste’s criticisms head on. Although acting in somewhat of an apologetic role on Rahner’s behalf, Fritz acknowledges (as Rahner did in the case of Metz) that these criticisms have merit (167). Fritz’s aim here isn’t to say that Rahner’s work is without fault on these counts—indeed, Fritz agrees with Metz that Rahner’s failure to address Auschwitz directly in his work is problematic (203) and Fritz even frames his fourth chapter as a way to “recalibrate” Beste’s critique so that it more precisely hits home (181). Instead, Fritz’s aim seems to be uncovering overlooked resources in Rahner’s theology as we grapple with these problems, finding ways to exercise Rahner’s theological “legs” in ways which he himself did not. The upshot is that Rahner’s theological concepts like the fundamental option shouldn’t be dismissed in light of these criticisms, but they should be reexamined—his body of work contains notes that haven’t been sounded with sufficient volume (even by Rahner himself) and which can contribute to the conversation today.

Throughout the book, Fritz crafts a portrait of what human freedom is and what it is not. Put positively, he contends that theological ideas like the fundamental option are best understood aesthetically. For Fritz, “theological aesthetics” is not limited to discourse on something like divine “beauty” but pertains to how God’s free self-revelation arrives to us: not just in a narrowly epistemic or noetic manner, but more broadly through our senses (13). Rahner’s own aesthetic account of God’s revelation in turn “discloses the human person’s free, expressive stretching forth toward God’s ever greater glory” (14).

Thus, Fritz sets the stage for recasting the fundamental option as an idea about God’s own freedom being manifest in created, free human lives. Moreover, Fritz maintains, common portraits Rahner’s spiritual agent as an autonomous, rational individual transcendentally electing for or against God in a tidy, smooth way fail to capture Rahner’s proposal. Rahner is famous (or infamous) for his “turn to the subject,” but Rahner’s subject, as Fritz points out repeatedly, is widely misconstrued. For as much as each self-transcending Geist (spirit) is capax infiniti, it is also always embodied, exposed, and woven into the fabric of a community: it’s Geist in Welt, with all of the complications and messiness that the in Welt might involve. Accordingly, God’s freedom is manifest in finite human lives, however wounded and limited they might be.

As he considers each of Rahner’s sources in the first three chapters, Fritz gradually composes his positive account of Rahnerian freedom while countering accounts which exaggerate individual autonomy and rationality. In the first chapter, Fritz situates Rahner within the world of German philosophy, noting how Rahner was shaped by its leading lights but also how Rahner distinguished his own work from them (especially Hegelian Idealism). In his exposition of Hearer of the Word, Fritz clarifies that when Rahner uses the term “transcendental” to describe human activity, he does not have in mind “freedom divorced from materiality, but freedom expressed through materiality. . . . For Rahner, ‘transcendental’ freedom is never transhistorical, ahistorical, ideal, or invulnerable” (52–53). The spatiotemporal world is not a “stage” on which we act but is constitutive of who we are.

In addition to treating Schelling and introducing the theme of Jesus’ Sacred Heart within Rahner’s theology of the symbol, this chapter also explores Rahner’s underappreciated theology of concupiscence, which Fritz demonstrates is a crucial counterpart to the fundamental option. Briefly, Rahnerian human freedom isn’t a simple, smooth process of self-determination—on account of concupiscence, freedom occurs only with significant “friction.” Against the theological manuals of his day, which styled concupiscence as a “bodily” tendency toward evil, Rahner reimagines concupiscence as a phenomenon which applies to both body and spirit (inextricably united to one another as they are), creating “drag” upon one’s “yes” or “no” to God (66).

In his next chapter on penance, Fritz again recasts depictions of Rahner that center on his “turn to the subject” by examining those believing subjects in more detail—they are not an autonomous, self-determining monads, but sinners whose “loss of grace” requires constant conversion to God within the community. In a lovely and memorable turn of phrase, Fritz encourages us to look at Rahner’s “anthropological turn” by attending to the “anthropological turning” occasioned by (and manifesting) God’s grace and mercy (83).

Countering claims that Rahner’s option fondamentale is baptized German Idealism, Fritz argues that this theory of an ultimate “yes” or “no” has roots in Rahner’s 1936 study, “Sin as the Loss of Grace,” where Rahner examines the “early Christian conviction that freedom properly used safeguards God’s free gift of mercy, while freedom ill-used threatens to lose this grace” (89). Fritz also treats Rahner’s lectures on penance at Innsbruck during the same period, in which Rahner insisted that the sacrament isn’t about simply reconciling the sinner with God, but also—since sin has an inescapable communal dimension—with the church. With this idea, which became popular in the postconciliar period, Rahner underscores that human freedom is never a purely private reality.

The third chapter on Ignatian spirituality returns to Rahner’s reputation for overinflated and overconfident anthropology, this time shifting focus from the link in his theology between the individual and the church to the link between the believer and Christ. Responding to critics who claim that, despite Rahner’s insistence to the contrary, Christ in Rahner’s theology amounts to a superadded “illustration” of a previously worked out speculative account of human fullness (136), Fritz responds that we “must take Rahner at his word rather than explain his words away” (186, 139). The chapter, which draws from a wide range of Rahner’s writings on Ignatian spirituality, demonstrates why we should do so.

Fritz highlights a striking passage from the third of Rahner’s 1955 Canisianum conferences (“Ignatian Spirituality and Devotion to the Sacred Heart”), where Rahner explains that

our special, unique existence is a participation in the life of Christ, an imitation of our Lord and of his destiny renewed in such fashion that we are really continuing his life, not copying it for the nth time. And hence this Christian mission of ours, this special character, can only be discovered in love of the God-man, a love in which we accept his love, in which he confers existence upon us. (141)

As Fritz showed that individuals cannot be extricated from the material world (as a stage) nor from the church (as an object to which they relate, 163), this person-centered passage shows that they cannot be artificially separated from Christ (as an exemplar). The person’s freedom involves more than simply repeating Jesus’ life in an imitative reiteration—it’s a decision which continues this life, manifesting God’s incarnate self-revelation. Accordingly, human freedom is deeply Christological. As Fritz puts it, “Individual decision occurs in an economy. Individual decision happens in a matrix given prior to explicit reflection, prior to thought, prior to system. Individual decision transpires within a life: the Way, the Truth, and the Life (Jn 14:6)” (154).

This Christological focus extends into Fritz’s work in the fourth chapter, where he returns to Rahner’s beloved theme of the Sacred Heart. Far from a triumphant tale of a powerful, full-throated “yes” to God, the Christic life in which we participate in our freedom culminates in agony, woundedness, and defeat (222–23). The image of Christ’s pierced heart (John 19:34) as an expression of God’s freedom made manifest advances Fritz’s contention that our embodied, communal freedom is also exposed to the ambiguities, pitfalls, and calamities of our world. Despite failing to explicitly attend to history’s specific catastrophes and abuses, as Metz and Beste rightly point out, Rahner’s account of freedom has space for these stories, for the cries of the “undone” to participate in the prayer, even lament, of the weakened and dying Christ (223).

Reflections and Questions

My overview traces only a few threads in what amounts to a rich tapestry of primary sources, secondary interlocutors, and Fritz’s compelling arguments about both. Before raising a few questions for conversation, I want to highlight why Freedom Made Manifest stands as such an important contribution to both scholarship on Rahner and Christian theology more generally.

First, Fritz provides his readers with an invaluable, deft treatment of material which otherwise remains largely inaccessible for most of Rahner’s English-speaking readers, either on account of its notorious complexity (e.g., Hearer of the Word) or because it’s tucked away in Rahner’s Sämtliche Werke, untranslated from the original German (e.g., Rahner’s penance lectures at Innsbruck). Even for readers who have spent quite a bit of time with Rahner, like myself, Freedom Made Manifest contains original insights into dense texts and shines a spotlight on parts of Rahner’s body of work that have languished in the dark. I’ve learned a lot from the book and I’m deeply grateful for it.

Another impressive aspect of Freedom Made Manifest is the number of conversations and arguments about Rahner through which Fritz is able to navigate in a single text. Granted, Metz and Beste stand as landmarks more prominent than other interlocutors, but Fritz encompasses a host of important conversations. One which overlaps with my own work concerns Rahner’s status as (contra Balthasar, Marshall, and plenty of others) a genuinely christocentric theologian. I’ve argued in favor of such a status by interpreting Rahner’s soteriology as “person-centered,” that is, structured in such a way that Christ’s actions are geared toward facilitating union with his saving person (rather than vice versa, the constitution his person setting up a singular saving act, e.g., in Anselm’s satisfaction theory). Perhaps not surprisingly, I find Fritz’s emphasis on the Sacred Heart and especially his theme of the believer participating in and continuing Christ’s life (rather than repeating it for the nth time) to be particularly compelling parts of his portrait of Rahner.

Freedom Made Manifest also does a marvelous job with its treatment of Rahner’s sources, which thematically structure its first three chapters. According to some of his critics, Rahner is guilty of dressing up Kant, Heidegger, Hegel, or some combination of German philosophers in Catholic theological clothing, and while Rahner is sufficiently clever to couch his ideas in traditional doctrinal terms, the suspicion is that “German Idealism” or some other philosophical interloper sits in the driver’s seat while Denzinger’s Sources of Catholic Dogma is just along for the ride (27). Allegedly, then, Rahner’s theology is most honestly and directly reflected in his proposal about anonymous Christianity—he’s motivated more by an abstract “yes” or “no” to God than anything specifically Christian (28). This criticism is only reinforced by some of Rahner’s advocates who, excited by his creativity and jaded by the limitations of manualist theology, gloss over Rahner’s concern about and work on past authoritative teachings and classical theological sources.

Against these tendencies, Freedom Made Manifest provides an impressively balanced portrait of Rahner, which isn’t an easy feat since it requires an enviable command over the work of a wide array of very different thinkers. Fritz demonstrates the ways in which Rahner indeed engages with, takes cues from, but also criticizes and revises various German philosophical figures and schools. At the same time, Fritz expands upon the common, one-dimensional portrait of Rahner as engaged in aggiornamento (updating) to demonstrate that Rahner likewise cares deeply about situating his own work in a tradition, drawing not only upon Thomas but upon the Church Fathers as a ressourcement theologian (80).

Finally, Fritz’s work contains some wise advice about how to read Rahner, recommending an approach that could be extended to any classic theologian: “We must revise Rahner but also be willing to be revised by him” (25). Freedom Made Manifest offers several illustrations of this advice in action. The first is a prominent and recurring theme of the book, that “choice” has come to dominate the idea of freedom in the contemporary imagination. “Under neoliberalism,” Fritz explains, “people may, arguably, be ‘free to choose,’ but decreasingly are they free to decide” (25). In this case, revising Rahner’s account of freedom in an act of “updating” would prove dangerous. Rahner’s own emphasis on “decision” can stand as an important corrective to a reductive, consumerist mindset. A second example has to do with “individualism,” a phenomenon which Rahner himself identified as problematic but the critique of which is, nonetheless, sometimes extended to include Rahner’s own anthropological focus on the believer. Fritz warns that we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss Rahner’s attention to the individual, since it may be needed more than ever precisely as a counter: “True individuality is the best antidote to modern individualism” (165, see also 142–43).

In the remaining space and with the goal of learning even more from this text in the conversations arising out of it, I’d like to pose three questions. The first concerns the compelling case for freedom as “decision,” which is something deeper than “choice”; Fritz illustrates the latter as economic realities, e.g., which breakfast cereal, latte, or stock to purchase (3, 30). While it’s clear that freedom can hardly be reduced to “choice” in this sense, I’m curious about whether the latter idea could play some positive, if derivative, role in a robust account of freedom (at least when it pertains to economic realities more serious than coffee flavors!). Having economic choices available can, it seems, be important in many situations as a matter of justice. Lack of options when it comes to food, housing, or other economic realities can function in ways which constrict freedom, serving as a painful source of “friction.” Admittedly, I have not yet read Fritz’s newly published books on politics and economic justice, so this question stands as a kind of invitation to describe how his recent publications fit together. Is “choice” (Wahl) even an appropriate term for describing these sorts of more serious economic options? How might the availability of such options relate to the deeper idea of “eternal decision” and the human opportunity to make it freely?

Second, I’m curious about whether Rahner’s writing on purgatory (together with his theology of death) helps to reinforce points made in this project. I suspect that it does. In his essays on purgatory, Rahner acknowledges the messiness of a person’s freedom, their fragmented status, and the painful “integration” of the person to their fundamental option (a process that seems to parallel the notion of “collection” that Rahner discusses in connection with German mysticism, 71–72).

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Finally, in his treatment of “The Theology of the Symbol,” Fritz includes a wonderful section on Rahner’s anthropology, which draws on Thomas’s (and ultimately Aristotle’s) hylomorphic account of the soul and body as form and matter. According to this account, there is no preexistent body or preexistent soul, since neither of the two are “foreign” to one another. Spiritual life for Rahner is embodied life (60). Explaining that disembodied souls and unsouled bodies are just “theoretical possibilities,” Fritz goes on to argue that the same goes for human freedom—that is, it must be lived out and embodied if it is to be authentic freedom at all (62). As Fritz says later, free decision is a spiritual act, but it’s not “purely ‘spiritual,’” since for human beings, there is no such thing—freedom is embodied (66). My question arises out of Fritz’s next move, where he extends this analysis to God, saying,

And based on Rahner’s teaching that reality and its appearance in the flesh are inseparable, we can push even further and say that divine freedom, as attested by Christian faith, is a mere theoretical possibility unless it is embodied. Thus we return to the Schellingian statement that God is revealed in the human only. This is not a prodigal overstatement or callous anthropocentrism, but a call to human readers, who can respond in nothing other than a human way. If we take Schelling seriously, and if we take Rahner seriously, we must actualize freedom—our own and God’s—lest we conceal it and inhibit its manifestation. (62)

I’m curious whether Fritz might expand a bit on his description of divine freedom without embodiment as a “mere theoretical possibility,” particularly with an eye toward Rahner’s critics who understand him to be excessively Hegelian. Is the claim here that God, in theory, could have acted freely without ever self-communicating to a creation (but didn’t)? Or is it something seemingly stronger and more parallel to the case of the hylomorphic human, for whom disembodied divine freedom is a mere “theoretical possibility” because there’s really no such thing—“If it is not embodied . . . it is not freedom at all” (62)?

To be sure, Rahner himself drew parallels between the hylomorphic anthropology (form and matter) and God’s self-communication, particularly in Christ (Word, humanity), situating them both as instances of the Realsymbol. At the same time, Rahner also seemed to also express some caution about the comparison. Specifically, to describe God’s free self-communication, Rahner tended to qualify “form” language with the prefix “quasi.” As I understand it, Rahner intended this somewhat awkward “quasi-formal” phrasing to safeguard God’s freedom in self-communicating, that is, to differentiate the event of God’s free self-communication from the soul’s more automatic expression in the body.

3 How might this “quasi” qualifier fit (or not fit) into Fritz’s insight about divine freedom being “a mere theoretical possibility unless it is embodied”? To put my question another way, what might Fritz say to critics who would point to this statement about embodiment and divine freedom as confirming their suspicion that Rahner’s vision of God’s freedom is closer to a Hegelian one of necessary divine “emanation” than Rahner would like to admit (cf. 46)? That unless such divine freedom is “embodied” in the “flesh,” it is not freedom at all?

Karl Rahner’s theology is a favorite of theologians to riff on. This is even more so true for ecclesiologists, for nearly half of Rahner’s extensive writings are on the topic of the church.

1 There is a seemingly endless supply of topics, and takes on these topics, within Rahner’s writings, making it a treasure trove for researchers. Peter Joseph Fritz, helpfully, dives into a nuanced, extensive examination of freedom in this second book of his trilogy on Rahner’s theology. Fritz articulates his central question: “‘How does the eternal announce itself in the seemingly insignificant?’ Or, ‘What is the means, the ‘how,’ of God’s revelation?’” (244). In examining freedom made manifest, Fritz addresses critiques of Rahner’s engagement of freedom, namely Johann Baptist Metz and contemporary trauma theory, most clearly addressed by Jennifer Beste. As an ecclesiologist who engages trauma theory, I want to expand Fritz’s central question to consider how our understanding of freedom, particularly ecclesial freedom, is stretched when considering the presence of collective wounds and trauma in the contemporary church. The question for me becomes “What is the means, the ‘how’ of God’s revelation, in the midst of a church marked by wounds?” To answer this, I look to how our understanding of the church is stretched when we consider the church as a source of trauma, such as the sexual abuse of minors in the church. In this section, I outline major points of trauma theory in conversation with the sex abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. Next, I consider what Rahner’s articulation of “loyalty to the church” looks like in the contemporary ecclesial context. Fritz’s engagement of Rahner’s view of freedom does not crumble under the pressure of these critiques. Rather, by rooting Rahner’s analysis of ecclesial freedom in the contemporary context, marked as it is by scandal and harm, we are able to see Rahner’s nuanced, layered understanding of the church and freedom.

Fritz explains the connection of freedom and the church for Rahner: “Church counteracts the potential for loss of grace (dis-grace) by mediating God’s grace to sinners. I have insisted throughout this book that for Rahner, human freedom, ecclesial freedom, and divine freedom always go together. Because of this he offers, especially in his theology of penitential freedom, a way of speaking theologically about the communal bearing of suffering” (220). It is important to call attention to this communal dimension of suffering as well as grace and freedom. At the same time, it leaves me wanting for more. What about the situations in which the church is the one wounding others? Is the bearing of suffering truly communal, or is that just a euphemism for the hierarchy to evade responsibility?

Perhaps the clearest example of wounds within the church is the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The sex abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church is not a chapter that we can put behind us. There is no door to close this section of history. The sex abuse crisis has fundamentally altered what it means to be church. The question becomes how, not if, our understanding of church is informed by wounds. To address this, I follow in Fritz’s footsteps and engage with trauma theory.

Trauma is not just a bad thing that happened, but something that is so monumental that it overwhelms the mind and body’s standard response system. It becomes unbearable. Further, the ramifications of an originating traumatic event extend much beyond the initial occurrence and initial physical healing. Responses recur through the body, mind, spirit, soul, and even genetics throughout the remainder of one’s life, extending into future generations with epigenetics. The body is intimately involved in traumatic responses, as evidenced by many trauma survivors preferring massage therapy and yoga to traditional talk therapy. Expanding Bessel Van Der Kolk’s well-known phrase, “the body keeps the score,” Erin Kidd asserts, “The body of God keeps the score.”

2 Kidd’s analysis of Rahner and the body also invokes the communal dimension of trauma, a dimension that is well-suited to Rahner’s analysis of freedom. The church, the body of God, keeps score of the grace and wounds of the world, of the members, of one another.

Fritz’s deep reading of Rahner’s work, especially his often neglected works, brings to light aspects of wounds in the body of Christ. For example, Rahner argues that the church is wounded by the sins of individual members. At the same time, Rahner refuses to separate “the church” from “members of the church,” as though the church is somehow removed from its members. Instead, Rahner advocates for penitential practices to reintegrate the member into the church. Fritz explains, “To Rahner’s mind, this sense of communal wounding and the need for communal healing has been lost in modern theology and practice” (197). I argue that the Roman Catholic Church today is quicker to look to the need for communal healing, and the work that is required by all members of the church, than we are to look at how the actions of the church hierarchy harm all members of the church. It is much more common to see parishes host events examining how to move forward in the aftermath of the sex abuse crisis, than it is to see bishops repent of their role in the cover-up of sex abuse. Rahner’s call for penitential practices and reintegration is ignored by lofty seminars at best and the active and deliberate process of silencing and cover-up at worst. Rather than grapple with our wounds, we host speakers, develop university committees, and publish theological essays (like this!). Rahner’s call invites us to confront our collective complicity and harm, rather than sidestep the central wounds.

In order to understand the dynamics of trauma, freedom, and the church, it is helpful to look to a foundational parable in trauma theory. Trauma centers upon a “double wound,” a term employed by Cathy Caruth that illustrates how trauma impacts both the body and the mind beyond the originating event. She describes wounds of the body as a “simple and healable event” whereas wounds of the mind are “an event that . . . is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor.”

3 Contained in this understanding of a double wound are several tenets of trauma theory, including the unable to be assimilated nature of the originating wound, the intrusion of the wound into the present and future, the repetition associated with intrusion, and the haunting nature of wounds. To illustrate this sense of double wounding, Caruth draws upon the parable of Tancred and Clorinda from Tasso’s romantic epic Gerusalemme Liberata, a foundational story in the psychoanalytic work of Freud.4 The story tells of Tancred, the hero, who unknowingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel where she is dressed in the armor of an enemy knight. This originating wound continues to be repeated unwittingly. When Tancred goes into a magic forest, in the midst of his devastation, he slashes a tree with his sword, causing the tree to cry out with the voice of Clorinda, whose soul was contained in the tree. Caruth draws upon this story to explain belatedness in trauma theory: “Just as Tancred does not hear the voice of Clorinda until the second wounding, so trauma is not locatable in the simple violence or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on.”5 Further, this story illustrates that trauma is rooted in an experience of death, even if the person survives. Trauma conveys the interconnection between death and life.

The parable of Tancred and Clorinda illustrates that we are bound to repeat wounds if we do not acknowledge their presence and ongoing impact. In considering how this informs our response to the sex abuse crisis in the church, let us look to Boston as an example. The impact of the sex abuse crisis in Boston has many levels and reverberations. First, there was the initial wounding of victims, their families, and communities. The release of the Boston Globe reporting in 2002 inflicted unique wounds. Some of these wounds were belated, with victims reexperiencing trauma that originated years before. Yet there was another type of wounding experienced collectively by the church in Boston and throughout the world. The harm caused by the hierarchy’s efforts to protect abusers at the expense of victims extends to this day. The closing of parishes as a result of financial distress repeated this act of wounding. Another wave of wounds reemerged with the movie Spotlight, bringing visuals to places and people that before were relegated to pages of newspapers. Personally, I had to grapple with how to walk through the halls of the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry that formerly belonged to Cardinal Law,

6 and reckon with my own complicity in benefitting from the privileges of studying at a university that financially rescued the archdiocese. The Pennsylvania Grand Jury report created another round of wounds with similar ripple effects. The hierarchy’s efforts to fight the repeal of statutes of limitations laws continue to wound the church.7 Is the church bound to be like Tancred, continuing to harm Clorinda? Or is there a certain moment where we can stop this cycle of repetition? It is to this question that I propose that our ecclesiology needs to be informed by trauma and needs to take the topic of wounds seriously.

Let us now return to Fritz’s work on Rahner’s understanding of freedom. In what I consider to be the high point of the book, Fritz examines Ignatian Spirituality in connection to freedom. In doing this, he draws out three of the most important features of Ignatian spirituality in connection to freedom: indifference, the “existential,” and loyalty to the church (132). For readers of Rahner, the first two are commonly discussed topics. The last topic, however, has the potential to rub against contemporary sensibilities and theological analysis. What is loyalty to the church today?

The key to understanding loyalty to the church is the connection to Jesus’ Sacred Heart. Fritz explains, “Loyalty to the church must be a love that imitates this merciful love of Christ. . . . The church in its current, pilgrim condition is ‘precisely not simply the holy, flawless Bride of Christ without wrinkle or defect.’ This means that the one who would be loyal to the church must love it (through its members, of course) with ‘long-suffering, compassionate, enduring love.’ Loyalty to the church is fidelity to an as yet incomplete church. Loyalty to the church is, in short, an imitation of Christ’s mercy” (156). This understanding of “fidelity to an incomplete” church is prophetic for the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. It would be easy to romanticize this notion, but to do so would go against Rahner’s thought. Rahner consistently emphasized the importance of the church in the concrete. We can affirm that the church is a unique mediation of Christ, while also not equating the church with Christ. The church can always become more authentically the church. It is this principle to which we are called to be loyal.

While I firmly believe this, I am also left wanting more. How can I be loyal to a church that values secrecy and power over the protection of children? The relative silence of the church on issues of racism furthers this. What does loyalty look like to a church where bishops are largely silent on racism in this country? How do I live out this loyalty, even when repositioned as loyalty to an incomplete church, when it feels more like complicity in white supremacy than it does like working for racial justice? To this, Fritz would probably redirect me to freedom, once again. He explains, “Like Ignatius, Rahner sees an intimate connection, even a transparency, between ecclesial freedom and God’s freedom. This transparency is not complete, the movement from ecclesial to divine freedom not friction-free. But it exists, and it is essential for the full flowering, rather than pathological self-restriction, of individual freedom” (162).

Freedom is not “friction-free.” Ecclesial freedom is not “friction-free.” Loyalty to the church, most certainly, is not “friction-free.” This is a gift of Rahner’s ecclesiology to the contemporary church. It also is not a clear-cut solution, nor would Rahner want it to be. To be loyal to a church that is marked by white supremacy, that engaged in the extensive and coordinated cover-up of the abuse of minors, that continues to exclude the marginalized, that is quick to align itself with privilege, is at best a messy existence. Yet perhaps this messiness is where we are best suited to further explore freedom made manifest.

First, I am honored to have been asked to be a part of the panel considering the substantial and excellent work of Peter Joseph Fritz on Karl Rahner. I am grateful that Peter Fritz is one of the young scholars who keep Rahner’s work alive and fresh in the remarkably different world of today from the post-Vatican II climate of Rahner’s world.

Like Fritz, I have been enamored of Karl Rahner from the beginning of academic study of theology. First introduced to Rahner at the University of Notre Dame, I was never what one might call a “conservative” Catholic, but I was a devoutly Catholic eighteen-year-old, passionately in love with the Catholic Church, save my desire to see women ordained. I had the rather naïve idea that women would be eligible for ordination in the church at some point in my lifetime; now, more than thirty years later, I realize that that is not possible. Any will within the institutional church to wrest itself from the clericalism that is the legacy of imperialism and develop further the trajectory indicated by Vatican II, is simply nonexistent. I grieve the loss of my eighteen-year-old optimism; I grieve that decades of involvement in the pastoral interests of the church, having worked in multiple ministries, result in what for me today is a “wintry season”—to borrow Rahner’s own somewhat bleak phrase—such that at present, my spiritual commitment is no longer to this church.

My idea of Christianity, however, is still profoundly Catholic in the Rahnerian sense: that God occupies the core being of every living thing, the core of the deepest experience of being human, the mediation between our optimism and pessimism, the twin and accompanying experiences of the absence and presence of the divine. The divine mystery in Christianity has been to my mind best articulated by Rahner, even if Rahner himself was too humble to realize this, because his genius was to realize that all human categories and language are infinitely inadequate. Rahner’s articulation of divine mystery has ironically led me to Mahayana Buddhism’s teaching of the interconnectedness of all things, that all things are devoid of substantial being or individualistic identity, and that liberation means non-attachment to ego for the sake of compassion. Mahayana Buddhism allowed me to see the valuable iconoclastic tendencies in the Christian tradition and the possibilities for aesthetics as a matrix for purifying the tradition of rigidity and authoritarianism dominant in the institutional church today.

Rahner was one of the rare Catholic theologians of his generation who actually contradicts the critique Paul Tillich gives of Roman Catholic theology in his Systematic Theology of 1951, that Roman Catholic theology identifies ultimate concern with the activity of the authority of the Catholic Church. I agree with Tillich that a theology that locates the “real source of systematic theology” in the propositions and authority of the Catholic Church cannot be “ultimate,” or creative, or indicative of the incomprehensible God. I think Rahner would have agreed also, but there is not much in his corpus that references Tillich; this may be due to Rahner in the 1950s has bigger fish to fry through active resistance to the neo-scholasticism that had mesmerized the church.

1 Rahner’s love of the Catholic Church is indisputable, but this love is neither for the clerical structure nor for the papacy but is located in his identity as a pastor and his love of God’s people. I often wonder what Rahner would think of a church that set backward the vision of Vatican II in the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI and the explicit support of the Trump administration by Archbishop Dolan of New York et al. “Odious” is too mild a word to describe the American Catholic support of Trump and its continued blindness to systemic racism. Many of my Catholic relatives are one-issue voters, claiming to be “pro-life.” But their definition of “life,” and that of the bishops who support this administration, does not include the thousands of migrant children separated from their families at the Mexican border or the thousands left to die of the Covid-19 pandemic without adequate protection or those condemned to execution on death row. “Pro-life” certainly does not include Black lives when the famously pious Catholic attorney general William Barr claims that the pandemic lockdowns are analogous to slavery as “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history,” and that the Black Lives Matter movement uses the “less than a dozen a year” victims of police brutality as “props to achieve a much broader political agenda.”2 Roman Catholics in general, and American Catholics in particular, have much for which to atone in their complicity with systemic racism. In an interest to recognize my complicity, I confess that my decades-long exhaustion with the hypocrisy of the institutional church has progressed to a separation, finally even eclipsing my concern to attend Mass. “For the many” of the Eucharistic Prayer was, perhaps, the beginning of this end.

When the Catholic Church adopted this more exclusivist approach in translating liturgical language, it obstructed the access to freedom that Rahner taught is central to the potential for human fulfillment present in all human persons, regardless of religion or belief. This is an aesthetic problem.

Fritz explains that his understanding of “aesthetic” in Freedom Made Manifest is not primarily about art theory or theories of beauty, nor is it about “aesthetic theology” as Hans Urs von Balthasar defines it, in terms of philosophical accounts of taste and the fine arts (15). Rather, Fritz demonstrates that Rahner’s “theological aesthetic” pertains more to “the human apprehension of God’s elevating sublimity” (15). I agree with Fritz here; because Rahner was actively appreciative of the historical and embodied existentials that shape one’s particular existence—à la Heidegger—the way we apprehend divine self-communication is within the housing of these particulars, and so the sensibility of reception. Words—especially the poetic words of sacred speech—are ways we manifest to ourselves the shape of our existence. Fritz writes, “Rahner contends that the word of poetry and the word of scripture mutually enhance the human person’s capacity for receiving them. These two types of words share the chief similarity of bringing the human person radically face to face with who he is, and thus to the brink of eternity—that is, to the point of the fundamental option (73)”

3 Fritz’s point is that for Rahner, the criteria of what makes poetry “art,” as in a philosophical aesthetics, is not the issue; rather, Rahner is interested in the sort of transcendental conditioning—shaping conditions of possible experience and the synthetic movement of the intellect—that poetry generates for the receptivity to symbols and to what those symbols express (see 74).

The “symbol” points to the depth of divine mystery that flows through all living things. Our senses exercise the human imagination for the divine, toward the totality of possible reality. “We not only have sense organs, but we are our sensuality,”

4 Rahner writes; more than tools of perception, our senses are the means by which we more deeply enter the world and its divine interconnectedness. Fritz recognizes that for Rahner, aesthetics refers to “an account of the manifestation of being. . . . If ontology asks what being is, aesthetics asks how being manifests itself.”5 All being originates in God; all that lives shares in the divine being. Divine being is then the condition by which we can know anything about the world and anything about God.

Salvation—communion with God—the objective and purpose of freedom, is for Rahner ascribed to the meaning of being human, not to the meaning of being Christian. Christianity simply reveals this ascription as a “supernatural existential.” Human fulfillment is a matter of ontological import: “The very acceptance of a divine self-communication through the power and act of freedom is one more moment of the self-communication of God, who gives himself in such a way that his self-donation is accepted in freedom.”

6 Divine being is exponential: it grows whenever there is free response. For Rahner, the freedom of God to create that which is other or finite is also the basis for God’s free self-communication. Rahner places in direct proportion the freedom of God to create an other and the decision to communicate God’s very self in love to this other: the more we can understand that grace is God’s communication of God’s own being, articulated in the Grundaxiom, the more we can understand that this is, according to Rahner, “an act of God’s highest personal freedom.”7

The manifestation of divine being can only occur in freedom, because freedom itself grows the existential response. Divine self-communication, or grace, is then not a quantitative reality or an external force, nor is it restricted to efficient causality as in neo-scholasticism, but is originally part of what it means to be a human person, as God’s offer of Godself as the fulfillment of human being.

8 God “does not merely indirectly give his creature some share of himself by creating and giving us created and finite realities through his omnipotent efficient causality. In a quasi-formal causality, he really and in the strictest sense bestows himself.”9 Through the supernatural existential, grace is more than merely “given” by God, as though grace is something that happens to the human person at a certain point or because of good works. Grace is rather the abiding presence of God to the human person in virtue of his or her humanity, informing every movement of the human person in knowledge and love. Grace existentially affects the human person’s openness toward the world, which, in a sacramental sense, is also toward the self-communication of God. In other words, grace conditions the human person’s ability to receive and respond to God’s self-communication prior to the person’s historical or religious experience of God. Because the offer of the self-communication of God is an existential condition of the human person, grace, while transcendent, necessarily occurs within the arena of history, and conforms itself to the particularities of a historical person in a particular time. The self-communication of God is always mediated through the existentials of human personhood.

I would like to return, however, to what I had indicated is an intrusion of clerical authority on the translation of the words said during the consecration of the Eucharist. From the pews, the first time I heard “for the many” or “for many” as translation of pro multis instead of “for all” in the consecration of the wine was very difficult for me. In a reverential moment, I heard the difference between the “blood poured out for you and for all” and “blood poured out for you and for the many” as a profound disruption and nearly cried. Technically, there had been a debate over the Latin translation for several years prior, of which I was unaware. But my sensitivity to the words, and the way I felt the liturgical rug being pulled from under me, revealed that the clerical authority which set to standardize a translation with an exclusivist intention could intrude upon the sacred and inclusive language of the Eucharist. Pope Benedict XVI stressed the importance of the “literal translation” of pro multis in a letter to the president of the Episcopal Conference of Germany in 2012. He carefully details the biblical origins of the phrase, but packs the theological wallop when he writes, “‘All’ concerns the ontological plane—the life and ministry of Jesus embraces the whole of humanity: past, present and future. But specifically, historically, in the concrete community of those who celebrate the Eucharist, he comes only to ‘many.’”

10 “Only to many.” The “ontological plane,” mediated in history, received through the senses, an aesthetic experience of divine self-communication, now represented in language that is technical, rational, literal, exclusive. And this is only a relatively small issue in the grand stew of what I consider acute problems with liturgical language during Benedict XVI’s tenure.

Recalling this reminds me of an argument I had in a graduate seminar with a colleague student who could not appreciate why the filioque (“and the Son”) is a theological problem, why “filioque” cripples the Holy Spirit from sharing in the originating power of divine being. Tiny words, aesthetic placement, theological implications, theological obfuscations. The dictum that only Catholics are welcomed to the Eucharistic table during Mass is another aesthetic problem, a corporeal performance of exclusivism that had always troubled me. Perhaps I became more vexed to hear the words of exclusivism; such demonstrates the aesthetic power of words as symbolic. As Fritz cites the work of Stephen M. Fields, for Rahner, “language is always embodied thought.”

11 Perhaps the words made more concrete my problem with what was a gesture, of those having to remain behind while those Catholics in sacramental good standing were able to participate in the Eucharist.

Fritz argues that language and symbol in general are ontological matters, because they point to the condition of divine being in which our freedom meets divine freedom and so is freedom made manifest.

12 The “embodied thought” of the liturgical language in this case, as I sat blindsided in the pew, showed me something not only of clericalism’s true colors, but of how far is the contemporary church from manifesting the Reign of God. I believe that the years of participation in the Eucharist has shaped conditions for receiving divine self-communication, even when I wasn’t paying attention; though unknown directly to consciousness (nich ge-wusst), these conditions are present in every conscious human act (be-wusst). Perhaps the Eucharistic prayer declaring that the blood of Jesus is “poured out for all” shaped the very condition by which I reacted with aversion when the translation was changed to “for the many.”

Fritz points out Rahner’s notion that sin interrupts symbolic activity, concealing the freedom in which our being originates.

13 The lacuna between the possibility of holiness as manifestation of divine being and the reality that the church is pilgrim and we are a pilgrim people reminds us all of our finitude, of the asymptote that is human freedom grounded in divine freedom. Our existential condition as human beings is symbolized in words that express the inclusion in the divine being, such that there is no “inside” and “outside” this ontological framework. What we are, our fulfillment and our expression of that fulfillment, is an embodied response to divine fulfillment expressed and communicated to incarnate divine fulfillment. The dynamic of this interplay between being and expression to make being manifest or incarnate holds not only for persons but for communities as well. The sin of the sort of clericalism that protects pedophile priests and denies access to ordination for women and married persons is systemic sin that distorts the symbolic power of the church as Reign of God, that distorts recognition of the freedom aesthetically mediated and so obfuscates the manifestation of divine being, the very manifestation that Fritz argues is “the central paradox of Christianity—that freedom is made most luminously manifest in the despair of an abandoned man hanging on a Roman cross, a person who has been completely undone. This paradox, not a transcendental-idealist theory of subjectivity, provides the grammar and the content for Rahner’s theological aesthetic of freedom, which as aesthetic is a theology of freedom attuned to freedom’s exposure.”14

There is a great deal of the poetic in Peter Fritz’s Freedom Made Manifest. By “poetic” I should not be taken to mean that the book is beautifully written or that it has a lyrical quality to it. I certainly think both are true, but neither adequately captures my meaning. By “poetic” I mean that Fritz’s book enacts a poiesis or “making” that can lead one to a deeper understanding of Karl Rahner’s theological project. There is a fitting symmetry in the way the book begins and ends with the same question: “How does the seemingly insignificant announce the eternal” (1 and 236)? For, on Fritz’s telling, the drama of human freedom unfolds as a response to God’s gracious self-communication manifested through the world. Divine disclosure occurs in the warp and woof of daily life, in the muck and mire of history, and is addressed to humans in all their fragility and vulnerability. As Fritz explicates Rahner’s admittedly “unconventional” (11) theological aesthetic, he does so in a way that remains attuned to the poetic “making” or “happening” that accompanies every human response to God’s self-offer. The human “yes” or “no” to God’s grace is an existential decision that forever shapes how one lives. Thus, far from an abstract project unmoored from space and time, Freedom Made Manifest confronts readers with a Rahner who takes seriously the human subject’s concrete situation.

Fritz’s poetic sensitivities endow the text with a performative character. Echoing the intention of Rahner’s Spirit in the World, Fritz invites readers to “relive” this theological itinerary as it unfolds.

1 Unfold it does, often in interesting and exciting ways. Fritz is to be thanked for his fresh retrieval of Rahner’s thought and for “carving an apologetic path through Rahner’s works” (167).

My response raises one point and poses one question. The point intends to show how the intertwining of the aesthetic and the poetic are central to Fritz’s understanding of Rahner’s theological aesthetic. The question is not a challenge but an invitation to Fritz to respond to some concerns one might have about Rahner’s theology. I ask this question to provide Fritz an opportunity, should he like it, to deepen aspects of Rahner’s theology or Fritz’s overall argument that might be missed. There are many turns and bends along Fritz’s “apologetic path,” and it is almost certain that one might have missed a key insight along the way.

Let me start by setting the stage. In his first chapter, “Rahner on Transcendental Freedom,” Fritz executes four maneuvers. First, he offers a case for reading Rahner against the horizon of Friedrich Schelling’s philosophy, a thinker Rahner studied in a seminar taken with Martin Heidegger in 1936 (35). Second, he identifies “Schellingian resonances” (30) within Hearer of the Word

2 and suggests how Schelling might have influenced Rahner’s understanding of freedom. Third, Fritz establishes a direct connection between Rahner’s concern for freedom found in his early philosophy of religion (Hearer) and his later theology as reflected in 1959’s “The Theology of the Symbol.”3 Fourth, he concludes the chapter by revisiting Rahner’s notion of concupiscence. Responding to Dennis Jowers’ critique,4 Fritz demonstrates how Rahner envisions human “transcendental freedom” as having to “contend with the ‘friction’ of historical reality” (31). Despite appearances, Fritz contends, Rahner did not think that human freedom unfolded in an easy and untroubled manner. On the contrary, freedom must always contend with the “historical friction” of concupiscence that makes the full expression of human freedom so difficult. Human freedom finds its expression not in one-off heroic acts but, rather, in the day-to-day choices one makes and lives out. Human freedom is expressed not in what one does on this or that occasion but is, instead, embodied and manifested through who one has become over a lifetime of discernment. Fritz’s retrieval of concupiscence portrays human freedom as bound to one’s historical situatedness and constrained by one’s inescapable aesthetic misapprehensions of the world. Due to concupiscence, we now “see in a mirror, dimly” (1 Cor 13:12) and fail to recognize the ways God is disclosed to us. Our senses, you might say, have been dulled by concupiscence’s cataracts whose film impedes our ability to perceive the God’s self-manifestations. Gerard Manley Hopkins, in “Hurrahing in Harvest,” expresses well this insight: “These things, these things were here and but the beholder wanting.”5

As he draws the chapter to a close, Fritz offers a summary that braids the aesthetic and poetic dimensions of his argument. “A theological aesthetic of freedom,” he writes,

Gives an account of at least two things. (1) The silent ground (God) who freely decides to speak, and in this decision, exists as the freedom of appearances (words are a mode of appearance), and (2) the human person, who through words (especially powerful ones like poetic words) comes to recognize the groundedness of appearances in an incomprehensible, unnamable, inaudible, invisible freedom, and on the basis of this recognition to decide whether to be gripped by this mysterious freedom or to deny it and to grasp onto (and be enslaved by) the “individual things one hears.” (74)

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Fritz appreciates how concupiscence occludes one’s apprehensions of these divine disclosures. Our senses cannot often or easily glimpse the presence of the transcendent abiding within and manifested through the immanent order. Thus it requires the graced poetics of Christian life—a life of ongoing conversion, penance, and liturgical participation—for one to apprehend, or, better, be apprehended by, God’s address. The graced poetics of discipleship do not demand that one copy Jesus Christ’s life “for the nth time” (141) but, instead, call one to one prolong the Incarnation in and through one’s life. Through the work of the Spirit, our lives become ever more Christoform. Christ, the word made flesh, aesthetically and concretely manifests in human history the shape of authentic human freedom. For both Rahner and Fritz, human freedom cannot be understood apart from the grittiness and messiness of human history but only as a part of it.

The point I want to make is that Fritz grasps how, for Rahner, the life of Christian discipleship is a progressive, and, by God’s grace, a perfective process. Fritz puts his finger on the dialectical heartbeat of Christian life, a Spirit-guided poiesis whereby one comes to recognize and commit oneself in freedom—the fundamental option—to God’s address. More the Spirit’s poiesis attunes one to God’s disclosures, the more attuned one grows to the sheer gratuity of this gift that is offered. Nevertheless, Fritz has no illusion about how fraught and fragile our “exposed” freedom is (180–235). For the aesthetic exemplar of Christian fulfillment, the one who makes “luminously manifest” (235) the form freedom takes in a world riven by sin, is the Crucified Christ. The scandalous message of the cross, “foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor 1:18), can be assented to only through the work of the Holy Spirit. Through the Spirit’s poiesis, we are converted from gawkers at a horrifying spectacle to beholders who discern in the broken body of the crucified “Rahner’s model for human decision, even for the fundamental option—an existence grounded in a pierced heart, overwhelmed by a concupiscent remainder, suffering unto God, uttering a silent cry” (233). The cross, in effect, is the fundamental option made concrete because it is the consequence of embodying authentic freedom in a broken world.

As a Jesuit and a theologian who is sympathetic to Rahner, I thank Peter Fritz for writing a book that is informative and transformative. The interplay of the poetic and the aesthetic enkindles a desire to take up and read Rahner with renewed gusto. Rahner’s theological aesthetics, on Fritz’s account, would appear eminently capable of making a theological “way of life” possible. Such a way of life would reflect the ways the human heart can be touched by the Holy One and drawn deeper into relationship. Human freedom is not a theory but a practice, one informed and formed by the daily routine of Christian life. Read at the right angle, what Fritz describes as an “apologetic path” transmutes into a mystagogical passage that, although opened by Rahner, has been illuminated by Fritz.

Now, before I commend myself anew to the infinite depths of divine Mystery, I want to raise a question. As mentioned above, I do so to give Fritz an opportunity to speak to lingering concerns and criticisms about Rahner’s project in general or, perhaps, his own theological project. My question is not particularly novel, but it is a query that recurs often among Rahner’s critics, so my posing it here might allow for a new approach to answering it.

As I read the chapter entitled “Rahner on Ignatian Freedom,” my Charles Taylor-sense tingled: “Individual decision happens in a matrix given prior to explicit reflection, prior to thought, prior to system” (154). To my ears, this echoes Taylor’s “social imaginary,” the unthematic yet operative background assumptions, practices, mores, and customs that allow us to go about our daily lives. We live out our lives against a historically conditioned and existentially conditioning backdrop. We are, as Rahner knew well, spirits in the world, and our mode of life cannot but reflect the historical milieu in which one lives. I agree, then, with Fritz when he claims that the “fundamental option (as a holistic manifestation or concealing of divine freedom through human freedom) must be understood within its hamartiological and ecclesiological matrix” (241). How we enact and give flesh to our “yes” or “no” to God’s offer of grace will take place within and be contoured by these matrices. Every “yes” or “no” to grace will be informed, or, tragically, deformed, by one’s ethos. In other words, the way one responds to God’s transcendentally offered grace cannot but be mediated through and conditioned by one’s categorical situation.

My question, as one might expect, concerns the relationship between grace and nature in Rahner’s theology. Some might wonder if he makes grace, and the freedom it engenders, too easy? How, for Rahner, does transcendentally offered grace enter and transform history? Rahner’s theological aesthetics may be attuned to the ways that the eternal may “announce itself in the seemingly insignificant” (237), but what is the difference between the God disclosed in a pizza on Friday night and the consecrated bread of the Eucharist? Does the aesthetic matter matter on Rahner’s account, or is grace simply grace no matter where or how it is mediated? Is the Spirit’s poesis delimited to the transcendental realm or does Rahner allow for this poesis to attune those who undergo it to see the form of the Crucified Christ as the primary analogate for the fundamental option? But to see this form, doesn’t Rahner have to account better for the concrete mode of life that makes this beholding possible?

I apologize: I wanted to offer one question and I’ve posed several. Maybe I could get at the core of my query this way: Does Rahner’s theological aesthetic have the resources to animate a radically Christian mode of life, a life that prolongs the incarnation and recognizes itself as authentically expressed in the figure of Christ? Or in universalizing grace has Rahner managed only to offer a transcendental anesthetic that dulls the world to the gospel’s call to follow Christ, an invitation that is nice in theory but has no real way of manifesting itself in praxis? Does Rahner’s grace force us to confront the darkness of history or does it cocoon us from having to enter history’s scrum?

Fritz cannot be expected to answer for Rahner, of course, but it would be helpful to hear why he thinks the Rahnerian path still deserves to be followed. Is there room in Rahner’s account for the Spirit’s poiesis to renew those called by grace not simply to see the form of Christ but, by implicating them in the drama of salvation, to allow themselves to be graciously conformed into the body of Christ?