Karl Rahner > Quotes

“In the days ahead, you will either be a mystic (one who has experienced God for real) or nothing at all.”
― Karl Rahner

“When man is with God in awe and love, then he is praying.”
― Karl Rahner, The Need and the Blessing of Prayer

“The number one cause of atheism is Christians. Those who proclaim Him with their mouths and deny Him with their actions is what an unbelieving world finds unbelievable.”
― Karl Rahner

“Only in love can I find you, my God. In love the gates of my soul spring open, allowing me to breathe a new air of freedom and forget my own petty self. In love my whole being streams forth out of the rigid confines of narrowness and anxious self-assertion, which make me a prisoner of my own poverty emptiness. In love all the powers of my soul flow out toward you, wanting never more to return, but to lose themselves completely in you, since by your love you are the inmost center of my heart, closer to me than I am to myself.”
― Karl Rahner, Encounters With Silence

“For it is the bitter grief of theology and its blessed task, too, always to have to seek (because it does not clearly have present to it at the time)...always providing that one has the courage to ask questions, to be dissatisfied, to think with the mind and heart one ACTUALLY has, and not with the mind and heart one is SUPPOSED TO have.”
― Karl Rahner

“Childhood is not a state which only applies to the first phase of our lives in the biological sense. Rather it is a basic condition which is always appropriate to a life that is lived aright.”
― Karl Rahner

“Meditating on the nature and dignity of prayer can cause saying at least one thing to God: Lord, teach us to pray!”
― Karl Rahner, The Need and the Blessing of Prayer

“In the midst of our lives, of our freedom and our struggles, we have to make a radical, absolute decision. And we never know when lightening will strike us out of the blue. It may be when we least expect to be asked whether we have the absolute faith and trust to say yes”
― Karl Rahner

“The dead are silent because they live, just as we chatter so loudly to try to make ourselves forget that we are dying. Their silence is really their call to me, the assurance of their immortal love for me.”
― Karl Rahner, Encounters With Silence

“The task of the theologian is to explain everything through God, and to explain God as unexplainable.”
― Karl Rahner

“In the ultimate depths of his being man knows nothing more surely than that his knowledge, that is, what is called knowledge in everyday parlance, is only a small island in a vast sea that has not been travelled. It is a floating island, and it might be more familiar to us than the sea, but ultimately it is borne by the sea and only because it is can we be borne by it. Hence the existentiell question for the knower is this: Which does he love more, the small island of his so-called knowledge or the sea of infinite mystery?”
― Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity

“For a Catholic understanding of the faith there is no reason why the basic concern of Evangelical Christianity as it comes to expression in the three “only's” should have no place in the Catholic Church. Accepted as basic and ultimate formulas of Christianity, they do not have to lead a person out of the Catholic Church. . . . They can call the attention of the Catholic church again and again to the fact that grace alone and faith alone really are what saves, and that with all our maneuvering through the history of dogma and the teaching office, we Catholic Christians must find our way back to the sources again and again, back to the primary origins of Holy Scripture and all the more so of the Holy Spirit.”
― Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity

“If we have been given the vocation and grace to die with Christ then the everyday and banal occurrence which we call human death has been elevated to a place among God's mysteries.”
― Karl Rahner

“It would be all right if I could pray in this way, or in that other way, if I were just able to give You the only thing You want: not my thoughts and feelings and resolutions, but myself. But that is just what I am unable to do, because in the superficiality of the ordinary routine into which my life is cast, I am a stranger to myself. And how can I seek You, being so distant, how can I give myself up to You, when I haven't been able as yet to find myself?”
― Karl Rahner, Encounters With Silence

“The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.”
― Karl Rahner

“The Word is, by definition, immanent in the divinity and active in the world, and as such the Father's revelation. A revelation of the Father without the Logos and his incarnation would be like speaking without words.”
― Karl Rahner, The Trinity

“The Christian of the future will be a mystic”
― Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations

“Chinch.”
― Karl Rahner, Prayers for a Lifetime

“que con vuestra oración hayáis traído realmente ante mi presencia vuestras verdaderas o presuntas necesidades y males, que realmente hayáis acudido a mí, al Santo y Eterno, y que en vuestra oración no mantenéis un mero monólogo de egoísmo ciego con vosotros mismos lo reconoceréis si vuestra petición se transforma en una pregunta dirigida a mí, en esta pregunta a mi inescrutable sabiduría y eterna bondad: ¿qué es mejor para mí, la necesidad o la felicidad, el éxito o el fracaso, la vida o la muerte? Si vuestra petición no se transforma en esa pregunta en el momento en que penetra en la silenciosa incomprensibilidad de mis planes eternos, es un signo de que no habéis orado, sino que os habéis rebelado contra la majestad de vuestro Dios, a quien le corresponde adoración especialmente cuando le pedís ayuda en la necesidad de vuestra existencia terrena».”
― Karl Rahner, Acudir a Dios en la angustia: El sentido de la oración de petición

“How often I have found out that we grow to maturity not by doing what we like, but by doing what we should. How true it is that not every should is a compulsion, and not every like is a high morality and true freedom.”
― Karl Rahner, Prayers for a Lifetime