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Karl Rahner's transcendental Christology examined the conditions for the possibility of faith in Christ and presented human nature as developing in response to God's grace. This article affirms Rahner despite the critiques of Michel Henry, Roger Haight, John McDermott, Patrick Burke, and Donald Gelpi. Rahner's Christology is not a phenomenology (Henry) but a theology that affirms God's presence in history. To be sure, some critics have attacked Rahner for emphasizing God's initiative and diminishing human responsibility (Haight) and for uncritically accepting Greek metaphysics (Gelpi). Yet Rahner rightly depicted Christ as a sacrament of the Father's will, an event in history with consequences for all time. Other critics have accused him of obscuring the distinction between God and humanity (McDermott) and suggesting that there are two conscious subjects in Christ (Burke). This article accepts Rahner's view of Jesus as both the presence of God's Word and the human response to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christologie: Systematisch und exegetisch was published in 1972 by Karl Rahner and Wilhelm Thüsing. When in 1980 the translation appeared as A New Christology, it did not include Rahner's five chapters from the 1972 volume, but inserted three essays by Rahner whose German originals were unidentified. The present essay identifies the source of the three chapters. It also reveals that Rahner's original five chapters were published a second time in the 1976 Grur:dkursdes Glaubens, although in a different form, and in 1978 were accurately translated in the sixth chapter of Foundations ofChristian Faith. The present essay concludes by tracing the genesis of Rahner's transcendental Christology from its 1969 origins to its 1972 publication to its 1978 translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do the assertions of Karl Rahner (1) that the soul does not exist for its own sake but is a "principle" of being, and (2) that one must reject anthropological dualism in order to consider the body and soul a unity, endanger the traditional doctrines of the soul's independence and immortality? Rahner's Christology says no. As a principle of being, the soul "causes" the body to realize its potential for immortality. United with the body, the soul is the seat of human (distinct from animal) nature, capable of spiritual growth. Immortality and independence reflect the divine Word's entrance into human nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]