The Anthropological Turn: The Human Orientation of the Theology of Karl Rahner

Anton Losinger

Jan 2000 · Fordham Univ Press

About this ebook

With the re-structuring of the entire edifice of Western thinking along anthropocentric lines in the wake of Descartes' "Cogito, ergo sum" and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, the names of Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche mark the foundations of a widespread conviction that any inquiry setting out from an anthropological point of view arrives at atheistic conclusions, namely, the overthrow of the divinity that, from the standpoint of the human being, is "alienating." Hence, one might ask, is theology that sets out from an anthropological point of view not from the very beginning an "absurdity," a "contradictio in se"? On the contrary! "Precisely today," as Karl Rahner puts it, theology "must make contact with the human being whose own existence is of the utmost importance to him or her." Thus, for Rahner, that epochal and anthropocentric basic cast of mind in human beings' understanding of themselves today -- and, no less, in anthropology as it is scientifically pursued -- signifies one of the most stubborn challenges and tasks for the contemporary orientation of theology itself. For the necessary anthropological dimension of the human being's question of God corresponds inversely to the "theological dimension of the question of the human being," postulated by Rahner. If theology understands itself as the question of God, a question or inquiry that in itself makes a demand of the human being in his or her entirety, then theology inevitably places the inquiring human beings themselves in the middle of the inquiry. In other words, precisely because the question or inquiry is theological, it points directly and self-evidently to anthropology as the horizon and presupposition of theology. Book jacket.

About the author

Anton Losinger currently resides in Germany. He was recently Visiting Professorial Lecturer at the School of Philosophy of the Catholic University of America.