Introductory notes for readers of this thesis - Theses - Flinders ...

Your silence in this time of my pilgrimage is nothing but the earthly manifestationof the eternal word of Your love…That is how my dead imitate Your silence: theyremain hidden from me because they have entered into Your life. The words oftheir love no longer reach my ears, because they are conjoined with the jubilantsong of Your endless Love…And that is also the way they live for me. Theirsilence is their loudest call to me, because it is the echo of Your silence 110 .Rahner’s conclusion is that, in Jesus, God has given himself fully to the whole ofhumanity and that, through Jesus, humanity has given itself, vicariously, in the fullestpossible way to God. Because Jesus is connected to the whole human family by virtue ofhis humanity and participation in history, ‘somehow’ the entire human race is included inthe saving work of Christ. Rahner’s Christological vision cannot imagine a world inwhich everyone is not somehow affected in a supernatural way by the fullness of thisdivine/human/divine movement.The Christian knows that the light of the morning [a metaphor of themanifestation of saving grace in Christ] on the mountains is the beginning of theday that lights up the valleys. It is not a day that is confined to the higher levels,and so condemns the darkness below 111 .This sketch of a redemptive view of the Incarnation as whole, in contrast to a more atraditional view of the cross as exclusive salvation event, provides the Christologicalframework for the supernatural existential. Within this Christological framework Rahnerconstructs his idea of the anonymous Christian.The foundational sacrament of the churchIf Christ is the sacrament of God—or at least of the saving grace of God if we acceptKilby’s modification to Rahner’s construct—then, for Rahner, the church is the perpetual,historic sacrament of Christ.Now the Church is the continuance, the contemporary presence, of that real,eschatologically triumphant and irrevocably established presence in the world, inChrist, of God’s salvific will. The Church is the abiding presence of that primalsacramental word of definitive grace…the Church is truly the foundationalsacrament, the well-spring of the sacraments in the strict sense 112 .110 Encounters with silence, 57.111 Rahner, The content of the faith, 394.112 K. Rahner, The Church and the sacraments, 18, in Dych, Karl Rahner, 84.163