{"id":55,"date":"2010-07-15T10:34:46","date_gmt":"2010-07-15T10:34:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ipsinaction.com\/ips\/?p=55"},"modified":"2024-06-20T15:43:46","modified_gmt":"2024-06-20T15:43:46","slug":"rahner-human-divine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/?p=55","title":{"rendered":"Rahner: Fully Human and Fully Divine"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Allison R.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jesus once asked his disciples who they said that he was, which I believe was also a question about who they, the disciples, were.\u00a0 They could not know who he was until they had some idea who they were.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 What they usually describe, she says, is a sort of divine laminating process.\u00a0 Jesus\u2019 divinity is snugly encased under a layer of human flesh and blood.\u00a0 It almost never occurs to people, Taylor says, that to be fully one is to be fully the other.<\/p>\n

This is very much in line with Karl Rahner\u2019s theology of who Christ is.\u00a0 In general, we speak of either Christology \u201cfrom below\u201d or \u201cfrom above.\u201d\u00a0 Ascending Christology is one that starts with the historical Jesus, and descending Christology starts with the church\u2019s dogma.\u00a0 It is easy enough to choose one or the other, depending on, among other things, our political feelings and opinions about the church.\u00a0 In fact, Rahner would probably say that it is too easy.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

It seems counterintuitive to say that the more human Christ was, the more divine he was, but that is indeed what Rahner says.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 What is it?\u00a0 They key seems to lie in Rahner\u2019s ideas about freedom, and about authenticity.<\/p>\n

Rahner\u2019s thoughts on the theology of freedom can be summarized on the most basic level with these words: direct, not inverse.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Perhaps this idea, which makes perfect sense in nature, is part of the reason we struggle so much with visualizing the hypostatic union.\u00a0 It only makes sense that if a certain portion of Jesus was human, then the rest of him must have been divine.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But again, Rahner claims that God does not work that way.<\/p>\n

Instead, we must learn to embrace another paradoxical thought: the more dependent on God we are, the more free we are.\u00a0 We can phrase it another way: the more we become like God, the more human we become.\u00a0 This is, at least for me, a shocking thought, and certainly a radical one.\u00a0 In one translation of the Bible, when Jesus tells us that we should eat his flesh and drink his flood, the Pharisees respond, \u201cThat is offensive, disgusting, and a saying that we can\u2019t stomach.\u201d\u00a0 They might as well have might that response to the idea that Jesus\u2019 divinity is inseparable from his humanity, and that, at the deepest level, ours is too.\u00a0 We know what it is to be human, and sometimes, frankly, it is a fate that we wouldn\u2019t wish on our worst enemy.\u00a0 In other words, we know what a mess we are most of the time.\u00a0 What could the Divine Being possibly have to do with that<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Quite a lot, really, if Jesus is any indication.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 What did being human mean for Jesus?\u00a0 Rahner might say that it meant complete and total dependence on God.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He lived in a radical trust that everything about who he was was accepted by God.\u00a0 Nothing was hidden, and nothing was left out.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

But what makes Jesus different from us?\u00a0 What separates us from living as he did, with such radical trust?\u00a0 Rahner says that the difference is one of degree, not of kind.\u00a0 Here is another notion that is difficult for us to stomach.\u00a0 Sometimes I am not sure I want a Savior who differs from me only by degree.\u00a0 And yet I sense that Rahner is right, and also that this is good news.\u00a0 No, I am not Jesus, but neither does God expect me to be.\u00a0 When I meet God face to face, to paraphrase a rabbinic story, God will not ask me \u201cWhy were you not Moses?\u201d but \u201cWhy were you not Allison?\u201d\u00a0 I am not thrilled about being Allison much of the time, but I do not have anyone else to offer to the world.\u00a0 Rahner might say that God does not want perfect replicas of some ideal person, but rather fully actualized human beings, St. Irenaeus\u2019 \u201cthe glory of God is the human person fully alive.\u201d\u00a0 If Jesus\u2019 divinity and his humanity were inseparable, then we can at least hope that something of the same is true for us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 They could not know who he was until they had some idea who they were.\u00a0 The Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor says that she often asks catechumens and read more <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4672,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions\/4672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/ips\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}