Christocentrism of Charism – Buggert - CarmelStream

Without this history of freedom, culminating in Jesus' own death and resurrection, there would be no
incarnation. Hence Rahner can state: "the incarnation is a divine movement which is fully deployed
only in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ." cxxxviii And again, "Consequently the life, death
and resurrection of Jesus are the history of the hypostatic union...." cxxxix
The following and somewhat lengthy statement of Rahner clearly expresses his dynamic and
historical interpretation of the incarnation. In this statement one can see how important for the
incarnation event is the role of Jesus' freedom, obedience, death and resurrection.
How can we understand the incarnation of the Logos, i.e. the assumption of the
human reality and the essence of this (human) reality itself, in such a way that the
event of the incarnation from the start is no longer understandable merely as the
assumption of a thing-like, static reality but rather is seen as the assumption by the
Logos of a time, a history, a life-giving death? Can the incarnation of the Logos be
so understood so that from the innermost essence of the incarnation . . . that one
event of death and resurrection is (also) meant and accepted? When, on the one
hand, the history of 'man,' the act of his freedom and the absolute culmination of this
freedom (i.e. his death) are not considered accidents, which belong to an in-itselfunaffected-substance
of a human nature conceived in a static and thing-like way, but
rather are seen as the self-fulfillment of an essence, which achieves its own reality in
this process of self-fulfillment, and when on the other hand therefore freedom is not
seen so much as a 'faculty' which a human has but as the (self)-disposing freedom
which a human person is (precisely in order to bring one's own pre-given essence ...
to its fulfillment), then the event of the incarnation is seen as more closely and
essentially related to the fulfillment of a human life ... than as the constitution of a
human subject, within whose life this or that event only subsequently and
accidentally happens. cxl
Here of course, through his emphasis upon the importance of human freedom for the history
of one's own self-actualization, one can see that Rahner has again broken from Hellenistic
metaphysics in its position that human nature exists in its entirety in the first moment of its existence,
so that all that freedom achieves throughout the history of a person is only "a mere epiphenomenon
of an essence which abides statically and unaffected." cxli
There remains only one point left to consider in the Christology of Karl Rahner. We saw
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