Finding God in a World Come of Age: Karl Rahner and Johann Baptist Metz

During his days in prison in Berlin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer had time to read and reflect on the Enlight-enment and to ask the question of how Christians might live in a world come of age. One can interpret Karl Rahner’s theological and pastoral writing as addressing that question. Born in 1904, he lived through both World Wars to a ripe age of 80 and wrote 1651 published works. Although his writing had a unique historical genesis and intellectual setting, along with a technical vocabulary, he consistently wrote out of pastoral concern in an effort to make Christian faith and belief credible in his Western European culture and the new post-WWII context. Probably his most important student was Johann Baptist Metz who was born in Germany 1928, conscripted into the army as a teenager, and after it, turned to the seminary and to theology. He studied with Rahner in Innsbruck and received his doctorate in theology in 1961 and taught at the University of Münster for thirty years. As Dorothee Soelle converted Bultmann’s existential analysis into social commitments, so did Metz give new social meaning to Rahner’s ＂transcendental＂ theology in a time of social cataclysm. Thus, together, Rahner and Metz, not in competition but as complementary, offer a distinctive response to the spiritual question of finding God in the present-day secular world.

Roger Haight (Edited By)
Roger Haight, a Visiting Professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, has written several books in the area of fundamental theology. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he is a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America.

Alfred Pach (Edited By)
Alfred Pach III is an Associate Professor of Medical Sciences and Global Health at the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and an MDiv in Psychology and Religion from Union Theological Seminary.

Amanda Avila Kaminski (Edited By)
Amanda Avila Kaminski is an Assistant Professor of Theology at Texas Lutheran University, where she also serves as Director of the program in Social Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship. She has written extensively in the area of Christian spirituality.