Quotes by Karl Rahner

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

“In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable we eventually learn that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished”

“Grace is everywhere as an active orientation of all created reality toward God.”

“What Christ gives us is quite explicit if his own words are interpreted according to their Aramaic meaning. The expression This is my Body means this is myself.”

“How often I have found 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.”

“Every year we celebrate the holy season of Advent, O God. Every year we pray those beautiful prayers of longing and waiting, and sing those lovely songs of hope and promise.”

“emptiness is only a disguise for an intimacy of Gods, that Gods silence, the eerie stillness, is filled by the Word without words, by Him who is above all names, by Him who is all in all. And his silence is telling us that He is here.”

“Grace can and does have a history.”

When man is with God in awe and love, then he is praying.

Meditating on the nature and dignity of prayer can cause saying at least one thing to God: Lord, teach us to pray!

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.

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

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.

The task of the theologian is to explain everything through God, and to explain God as unexplainable.

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.

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 “onlys” 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.

Every year we celebrate the holy season of Advent, O God. Every year we pray those beautiful prayers of longing and waiting, and sing those lovely songs of hope and promise.

How often I have found 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.

The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.