The Küng-Rahner Debate

The debate between Hans Küng and Karl Rahner is surely one of the most remarkable events within today’s remarkable period of Roman Catholic history. The debate was struck off by the appearance of Küng’s book, Infallible? An Inquiry. Rahner responded vigorously to the book by saying that if Küng continued to theologize along these lines, he would have to be dealt with theologically as a “liberal Protestant.” To Rahner, Küng’s views were rationalistic, a clear transgression of the limits for any Catholic critique of the church’s infallible teaching authority.

Understandably, Rahner’s sharp attack was hard for Küng to digest. He responded, in two lengthy articles, by saying that he owed his understanding of the time-conditioned and limited character of dogma to Rahner himself.

In the March edition of “Stimmen der Zeit,” Karl Rahner offered his reply to Küng’s response to him. It is clear that Rahner is not about to take back anything from what he has often said about the history of dogma. Dogma is historically conditioned and time-bound, and therefore always remains an inadequate, human formulation of God’s absolute truth. This is exactly what Küng, too, has insisted, what he has developed, and what, he says, he has learned from Rahner himself.

But now a crucial disagreement rises between Rahner and Küng. Rahner distinguishes between the relativity, inadequacy, and limitation of dogma on one hand and any element of error on the other. Say what one must of the relativity of dogma, it is, in its infallibility, kept free from all error, according to Rahner. He characterizes his way of doing theology as “system-immanent.” What he means is that he works within the Catholic system of infallible teaching. Any element of error would be an attack on the system.

The fact that dogma is affected by its time and circumstances implies that we may and must interpret it. But we must also respect the truth, which has always been embodied in dogma. We must bow before the unchanging truth guaranteed by the Holy Spirit, who was given to the church to lead it into truth. To interpret dogma is another matter than to give dogma a new meaning. From this it is clear that the nature of interpretation plays a crucial role in Rahner’s thinking. If one works within the system, he is bound to see to it that all the new interpretations of dogma (e.g. Mariology, transubstantiation, the sacrifice of the mass) come out in agreement with what the church intended to express in them. The motto of Paul VI applies to dogma: “What was, is.”

Küng has been working for over a decade with all sorts of historical and exegetical questions that surround the notion of infallibility. Obvious errors have been made, Küng has argued, that demonstrate the relativity of the church’s teaching authority. And, he has said, exegesis has compelled the church to rethink its convictions about the primate and offices of the church.

Küng has looked at the church’s history a good deal more critically than has Rahner. It is not as though Küng does not believe that the Holy Spirit has guided the church through its history. He does contend that the Spirit’s guidance—as promised by the Lord—means that the church will not swerve from the truth in a fundamental sense. But he does not think that the Spirit guarantees immunity from all danger or error.

In taking account of what Rahner has said about dogma, we cannot avoid the impression that there remains severe tension. For example: Rahner criticized the traditional interpretation of the saying, “no salvation outside the church,” as being “rigoristic”—harsh. But this expression is not just another theologian’s word. It comes from church doctrine; it was used in the Council of Florence (1439) to exclude Jews, heathen, schismatics, and heretics from the possibility of salvation. Later the expression was softened, as, for example, by Pius IX in the nineteenth century. A distinction was drawn between what was done in ignorance and what was done in willed persistence; only in the latter instance was one excluded from salvation. When, in 1949, the American theologian Feeney wanted to use the ancient expression against American secularization, the Holy Office instructed Cardinal Cushing that Feeney’s interpretation was intolerably rigoristic. Subsequently, Feeney was excommunicated in the famous Boston heresy case.

Thus we note a significant shift in one of the important utterances of the church about the exclusiveness of salvation. A transition was made from a rigorous to a flexible or mild interpretation. Rahner opts for the milder. His feelings were expressed in his view of “anonymous Christianity.” Here he took a broad and tolerant view of those who were otherwise thought of as “outside” the walls. Now, my point is that it seems impossible to contend that what is now interpreted as the real meaning of “no salvation outside the church” is what was intended in earlier days.

Hans Küng has insisted that Catholics should openly admit that profound changes have taken place in the understanding of church dogma. He wants Catholics to stop insisting that the church has always and really taught one and the same truth.

But Rahner has chosen not to accept Küng’s way. He opts for the other solution: there has been no change; there has only been interpretation. The task is to keep interpretation within the unchangeable and infallible dogma of the church. Everything that can be said about the time-conditioned character of dogma must be said without threatening the absolute teaching authority of the church.

Rahner, in short, has elected to follow the path of the traditional construction of the infallible church—all his well-known progressive tendencies notwithstanding. As a result, a kind of necessity, even coercion, hangs over all interpretation of dogma. Any critical testing of dogma by the Word of God has a hard time finding a place within Rahner’s “system-immanent.”

Rahner says that in his last semester of lectures on dogmatics he has had a biblical exegete present. But this is hardly convincing. The real question is whether we can tolerate a disturbance in the development of dogma when the Word of God tests it. At bottom, Rahner’s notion of the untouchability of the infallible dogma sets us before the same problem as that faced by Luther and Calvin. I do not mean to say that Kung is really a crypto-Protestant and that Rahner is at heart a conservative Roman Catholic dogmatician. The business is too complicated for that.

But Küng does put his finger on very weighty problems of tradition (historical development and historical changes), and calls the church to reconsider its understanding of the infallibility of the church and the pope. At this critical period in the church, Rahner has taken up the case for the traditional doctrine. The conservatives in the church will surely be obliged to him. But the problem that Küng puts on the agenda cannot be resolved by summoning up the traditional stand. The problem will stay there, and will finally be decisive for the future of Roman Catholicism.

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