Philip Arthur Bence PhD Thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

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Rahner himself would support these statements. The
preaching of the church must be faithful to God and his
truth.
"God, his honor, the responsibility of living before
the judgment of God, the hope of eternal life, Jesus
Christ, the crucified and resurrected one, remain the
eternally central themes of the life and preaching of the
Church." Likewise, "The priest therefore should not
bother people today with any sort of irrelevancy; he
should really preach what is essential and decisive.
. We have to speak of Jesus Christ, of the eucharist,
of God, of his mystery, of the Trinity."'" Rahner
elevated preaching to a point of honor near the Eucharist
itself; both (along with other aspects of the liturgy)
serve to contemporize God's historic salvific acts.'5.5
To this emphasis on preaching the message in a
manner faithful to God, Rahner would add balancing
counterstatements. Rahner warned against preaching
that . .
has often become a kind of dogmatizing, from
the outside, boasting formal and doctrinaire
authority, a moralizing that was not
infrequently arrogant or appeared pharisaical,
a shunning of daily political or cultural
political problems over against which the
Church puts her claims.7
He felt that preaching loses its value when it
degenerates into this dictatorial mode. True preaching
always seeks, Rahner wrote, not to legislate, but to
"edify." Edifying preaching does not, however, lose its
note of authority. In order truly to edify, people in a