Rahner: Fully Human and Fully Divine

by Allison R.

Jesus once asked his disciples who they said that he was, which I believe was also a question about who they, the disciples, were.  They could not know who he was until they had some idea who they were.  The Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor says that she often asks catechumens and students to describe how they think Jesus could be both fully human and fully divine at the same time.  What they usually describe, she says, is a sort of divine laminating process.  Jesus’ divinity is snugly encased under a layer of human flesh and blood.  It almost never occurs to people, Taylor says, that to be fully one is to be fully the other.

This is very much in line with Karl Rahner’s theology of who Christ is.  In general, we speak of either Christology “from below” or “from above.”  Ascending Christology is one that starts with the historical Jesus, and descending Christology starts with the church’s dogma.  It is easy enough to choose one or the other, depending on, among other things, our political feelings and opinions about the church.  In fact, Rahner would probably say that it is too easy.  Without an understanding of Christ as both fully human and fully divine, and not in the sense of that laminating process that Taylor describes, Christology would be almost meaningless.

It seems counterintuitive to say that the more human Christ was, the more divine he was, but that is indeed what Rahner says.  Rahner was so deeply a theologian of the everyday world that this idea, Christ as fully divine and fully human, must have some important bearing on how we live out our lives.  What is it?  They key seems to lie in Rahner’s ideas about freedom, and about authenticity.

Rahner’s thoughts on the theology of freedom can be summarized on the most basic level with these words: direct, not inverse.  We might remember these concepts from our early days of math classes: in an inverse equation, the more there is of something, the less room there is for something else.  Perhaps this idea, which makes perfect sense in nature, is part of the reason we struggle so much with visualizing the hypostatic union.  It only makes sense that if a certain portion of Jesus was human, then the rest of him must have been divine.  Likewise, it seems to be the case that if we dedicate some amount of our time, energy, and money to God, then we can use whatever is left over to develop ourselves as human beings.  But again, Rahner claims that God does not work that way.

Instead, we must learn to embrace another paradoxical thought: the more dependent on God we are, the more free we are.  We can phrase it another way: the more we become like God, the more human we become.  This is, at least for me, a shocking thought, and certainly a radical one.  In one translation of the Bible, when Jesus tells us that we should eat his flesh and drink his flood, the Pharisees respond, “That is offensive, disgusting, and a saying that we can’t stomach.”  They might as well have might that response to the idea that Jesus’ divinity is inseparable from his humanity, and that, at the deepest level, ours is too.  We know what it is to be human, and sometimes, frankly, it is a fate that we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemy.  In other words, we know what a mess we are most of the time.  What could the Divine Being possibly have to do with that?

Quite a lot, really, if Jesus is any indication.  Rahner says that human beings are the grammar of God, a fascinating metaphor for us English majors, and that Jesus was the ultimate expression of this.  What did being human mean for Jesus?  Rahner might say that it meant complete and total dependence on God.  There seemed to be no struggle within Jesus to reserve or section off parts of himself, to define what belonged to God and what did not.  He lived in a radical trust that everything about who he was was accepted by God.  Nothing was hidden, and nothing was left out.  If our humanity is in direct, not inverse, proportion to our dependence on God, then Jesus was the most fully human person the world has ever seen.

But what makes Jesus different from us?  What separates us from living as he did, with such radical trust?  Rahner says that the difference is one of degree, not of kind.  Here is another notion that is difficult for us to stomach.  Sometimes I am not sure I want a Savior who differs from me only by degree.  And yet I sense that Rahner is right, and also that this is good news.  No, I am not Jesus, but neither does God expect me to be.  When I meet God face to face, to paraphrase a rabbinic story, God will not ask me “Why were you not Moses?” but “Why were you not Allison?”  I am not thrilled about being Allison much of the time, but I do not have anyone else to offer to the world.  Rahner might say that God does not want perfect replicas of some ideal person, but rather fully actualized human beings, St. Irenaeus’ “the glory of God is the human person fully alive.”  If Jesus’ divinity and his humanity were inseparable, then we can at least hope that something of the same is true for us.