Abstract
How does Jesus bring about human salvation? Throughout his career, Karl Rahner expressed deep suspicion of answers that portray Christ as “stepping in” for us (Stellvertretung) and performing a great redemptive act in our stead: grace ought to capacitate rather than displace, he argued. Rahner’s assessment provoked great protest from Hans Urs von Balthasar, for whom Stellvertretung was indispensable. This article considers their exchange by examining (1) Rahner’s distinction between mere “signs” (Vertretungssymbole) and real symbols as well as (2) his favored alternative for Stellvertretung, the notion of Repräsentation, an underappreciated dimension of his soteriology adopted from his early patristic studies.
How does the Logos, God’s eternal Word, relate to the created humanity of Jesus? How do Christ’s life, death, and resurrection “save” the one who stands in need of redemption? How are God’s grace and human freedom aligned? As he wrestles with these perennial and central theological questions, Karl Rahner does so with a fundamental conviction that shapes his work: For all of these pairs—Word and humanity, Christ and believer, grace and freedom—the two sides cannot be extrinsically linked with one another.
But as Rahner laments, extrinsicist explanations abound. Too frequently the Word is styled as “donning” Jesus’s humanity as a sort of “costume,” Jesus is hailed as a proxy who displaces us as he performs his saving work in our stead, and grace is understood as overwriting our fallen freedom. Rahner describes each of these popular theological proposals as cases of Vertretung, a German term that literally means “stepping in for,” and which can be translated as vicarious representation, substitution, or standing-in. 1
Rahner’s wariness about this “extrinsicist” term appears in his work on symbols and sacraments, where he proposes his own “intrinsic” alternative in his theory of das Realsymbol. And in his soteriological writings, he goes so far as to say that a Vertreter-Jesus who steps into the believer’s place is “inconceivable.” This remark provoked a sharp reaction from Hans Urs von Balthasar, who responded that in jettisoning this role for Christ, Rahner hamstrings his Christology, leaving us with a Jesus who does not represent us and, in the end, is not even necessary for our salvation.
Here, I will argue that resources for answering Balthasar’s charge exist in overlooked parts of Rahner’s theology. In addition to providing das Realsymbol as an intrinsic alternative to the extrinsic Vertretung, Rahner also offers an intrinsic, soteriological counterpart with his idea of Repräsentation, a concept with roots in his early patristic work and which is operative throughout his career. Repräsentation focuses not so much upon a discrete, redemptive act performed by a Redeemer who has taken our place, but upon who Jesus is: the fully divine One who, as fully human, has taken on our place in order to establish an intrinsic, saving union with us. Attending to this soteriological category provides a new avenue for addressing Balthasar’s influential criticism. It also demonstrates how Rahner’s theology of the symbol and soteriology hang together in his effort to combat theological extrinsicism, which he associates closely with Vertretung.
Vertretung and Symbol
Although Rahner wrote just one article dedicated to his concept of “symbol,” 2 the idea is present in a host of his writings; his brother Hugo even referred to it as the “embodiment” (Inbegriff) of his entire “theological direction.” 3 Since it is a well-studied and widely familiar topic among Rahner’s readers, I will offer only a brief overview of das Realsymbol here, with the goal of illustrating the nature of Rahner’s dissatisfaction with Vertretung.
In “The Theology of the Symbol,” Rahner initially sets out a general treatment of “symbol” before launching into an exploration of particular applications. In this first part, he notes that the term “symbol” is used frequently as a popular synonym for “sign.” In his own usage, however, Rahner insists that symbol has a highly specific, thick meaning, and so he distinguishes it from the more popular thin usage. He gives the latter relationship the name Vertretungssymbol and defines it as a case of two independent and self-constituted realities artificially “agreeing” with one another. For example, we might consider how redness and octagons have nothing to do with stopping, intrinsically—stop signs are artificial, rather arbitrary conventions.
The thicker symbolic category described by Rahner is das Realsymbol. Here, Rahner opts for language of Repräsentanz rather than Vertretung, for we are not dealing with an artificial association of two self-constituted realities, one of which “steps in” for the other. 4 On the contrary, a Realsymbol consists of an “original unity” exteriorizing in some “other,” and it is only through this self-expression in the other—with which it forms a perfect unity—that the represented original is able fully to be itself. Rahner’s appeal to a classical, Catholic account of the body–soul relationship might help to illustrate what he means. Despite what some dualists might hold, the soul is not simply “extrinsically” or arbitrarily paired with an associated body. Trained Thomist as he was, Rahner drew on a hylomorphic anthropology, according to which the soul is the form of the body. Indeed, the enformed matter of the body is the soul’s own self-expression, and it is only in this expression—the body–soul unity—that the soul is fully itself. To drive the point of intrinsicism home here, one might summarize Rahner’s hylomorphism by saying when this soul exteriorizes, this body is “what you get.”
In the subsequent section, Rahner offers a chain of additional examples of das Realsymbol, the first being the eternal generation of the Logos. When God the Father “goes out” of himself, self-communicating to some “Other” eternally, “what you get” is the Father’s Word—that is, God the Son. It is only in relation to the Son—this Son—that the Father can be the Father. They are not independent, self-constituted realities that artificially join forces, nor does the one “step in” as a proxy for the other—the two complete each other in the highest unity. 5
Moreover, the eternal Word in turn self-exteriorizes in history, expressing itself in its own symbolic “other,” namely, the humanity of Jesus. Against Thomas Aquinas and others who speculated about alternative possible configurations of the Incarnation (e.g., the Third Person of the Trinity taking on a human nature, or even multiple divine Persons assuming one or even multiple created natures), Rahner insists on a strict intrinsic relationship. 6 When the Son exteriorizes, the human Jesus of Nazareth—and nothing else—is simply the result. Such a model safeguards the genuinely revelatory nature of Jesus’s humanity from artificial extrinsicism. Jesus is not an arbitrary flesh-suit in which the Word masquerades, at best a “sign” or Vertretungssymbol which steps in on behalf of the eternal Son. On the contrary, Jesus’s humanity is the genuine self-revelation of the Son in history.
Thus far, Rahner has described the Father eternally exteriorizing as the Son and the eternal Son exteriorizing as the humanity of Jesus. It is no surprise, then, that Rahner’s next step is to consider das Realsymbol of Christ’s own presence, which he identifies as the church. And the church itself only self-realizes through its expression in the sacraments, which bring us to the end of Rahner’s chain of Realsymbole. Each of these symbols is intrinsically connected to the other, establishing a nesting series of salvation—the “Russian dolls” of grace, in which the sacraments link us to God the Father through Jesus Christ and the church.
Though much more could be said about Rahner’s proposal, my purpose here is to point out one of Rahner’s key motivations. Theological extrinsicism ends up weakening central Christian unities: matter and form (hylomorphic); Father, Son, and Spirit (trinitarian); the Son’s two natures (christological); and the res and sign (sacramental). Connections which consist of mere Vertretung are not sufficient. Our very salvation depends on the integrity of this chain of unities which extends from the Trinity through the human Jesus down to the church and its sacraments: for the content of our salvation is none other than God. 7
Vertretung and Soteriology: Rahner’s Concerns
Vertretung frequently shows up in christological and soteriological conversations under a variation which adds the word Stelle, or “place,” as a prefix—hence, Stellvertretung, or “stepping into the place of.” Stellvertretung is abundant in the work of Germanophone theologians writing on these topics, both Catholic and Protestant alike. Barth, Bonhoeffer, Sölle, Ratzinger, Kasper, and Balthasar all make extensive and positive usage of the term in their Christologies. 8
Rahner, on the other hand, maintains a distance between this term and his own theologies of Jesus and salvation, and for several reasons. One concern is that styling Jesus as our Stellvertreter can end up reversing the proper order of God’s salvific activity—that is, God can be misconstrued as the appeased object rather than the saving origin of atonement or reconciliation. For instance, on what Rahner terms an “Anselmian” model of atonement, 9 Christ the Stellvertreter “steps into” our place and acts to make a satisfying gift to God. 10 Or on a penal substitutionary model, the saving Stellvertreter displaces sinners in order to undergo God’s great penal wrath in our stead. In either configuration, God is the object of an appeasing act which transforms God’s wrath to mercy. And so, warns Rahner, soteriologies like these featuring Stellvertretung can end up obscuring the theological truth that reconciliation begins with God’s love and salvific will. As Rahner succinctly puts it, riffing on John 3:16, “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, and it was not because the Son gave himself that an angry God with great effort changed his mind about the world.” 11
Rahner’s central concern, however, is that Stellvertretung ends up compromising human freedom in the name of Christ’s work “for us.” Rahner asks, “Can another person really relieve me of a task, or an attitude or a deed before God and oriented to him, of demands which are in fact imposed on me, but which I am not capable of meeting?” 12 Christologies which fashion Jesus as extrinsically stepping into our place certainly give this impression, Rahner observes. But is this the way a gracious God saves? Such a procedure would seem to cut against Rahner’s tirelessly repeated axiom about grace, namely: God’s grace and human freedom grow in direct rather than inverse proportion. 13 After all, Thomas Aquinas insisted that “grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it”; 14 accordingly, the more God’s self-communication is present to us in grace, the more free we are, and vice versa.
The soteriological upshot is this: To attribute our salvation to God’s gracious self-communication in Jesus cannot diminish our own free realization of that same salvation—on the contrary, Christ augments it.
[S]elf-redemption and redemption from outside are not two mutually exclusive concepts. “Redemption from outside” by Jesus Christ does not mean that human beings would be exempted from doing something that they are obliged to do by means of their own freedom or that something would be conceded to them that they cannot do themselves and which would nevertheless be demanded of them. It means that God by his grace, in view of Jesus Christ and his cross, grants and offers people the possibility, in the most radical self-surrender of their existence through faith, hope, and love, of constituting their own ultimate validity in the order of salvation.
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Rahner insists on a strong, direct, and intrinsic connection between God’s gracious self-gift in Christ and the believer’s self-realization, while once again he judges theologies of Vertretung to be troublingly extrinsic. Jesus the Stellvertreter “stepping into the place” of the believer as a proxy, Rahner judges in stark language, is “ultimately inconceivable” and “opposed to the correct understanding of self-redemption.” 16
Vertretung and Soteriology: Balthasar’s Challenge to Rahner
Rahner’s antipathy for Stellvertretung language caught the eye of Hans Urs von Balthasar, who criticized him for it (among other charges) in his Theo-Drama, which includes a section titled, “Excursus: The Soteriology of Karl Rahner.” 17 To be clear, Balthasar himself recognized that Stellvertretung language could be misused and even warned against the sort of “displacement” ideas that likewise troubled Rahner: “Jesus can not push aside the sinner so as to enter into his place. He cannot appropriate his freedom in order to have him do what he would not do himself,” Balthasar writes. The human “in his freedom is not like a piece of luggage which can simply be redeemed from the depository.” 18 Yet despite its potential for misuse, Stellvertretung is for Balthasar an indispensable theological concept and he judges that in Rahner’s reaction against its limitations, Rahner has created an even more problematic Christology with several irredeemable flaws. Balthasar enumerates these flaws in his “Excursus.”
To Rahner’s concerns about an “appeased” God, Balthasar fires back that Rahner’s God has the opposite problem. More than simply the loving origin of atonement, this God is in fact “he-who-is-always-reconciled.” 19 That is, reconciliation is apparently a fait accompli, thanks to this reconciled God’s universally operative salvific will. No reconciling process at all, let alone dramatic Stellvertretung, is needed for Rahner. The heavy lifting of redemption is done by God’s constant but abstract offer of grace, realized in human freedom. 20
This Rahnerian alternative comes at a high christological cost, Balthasar argues, for in dismissing Stellvertretung, Rahner has scuttled any pro nobis action on Jesus’s part. Jesus’s death is not “for us,” despite central New Testament texts which say otherwise, nor does Christ “represent” us in any meaningful way. For Rahner, “it is not Christ who, in virtue of his uniqueness, embraces and contains [hu]mankind in order to reconcile it to God through his suffering—for we have already heard that such ‘representative’ action [Stellvertretung] is inconceivable.” 21
So if Rahner’s Christ neither acts dramatically pro nobis, nor embraces or contains humans as a reconciling Stellvertreter, what does he do? Balthasar suggests that the uniqueness of Rahner’s Christ lies in functioning as a kind of notification to the world of God’s salvific will. Against this reduced role for Jesus, Balthasar retorts, “With regard to Christ’s Passion, it is more than a sign of God’s constant and antecedent desire to be reconciled to the world; it is more than a sacramental sign that God is reconciled to the world.” 22
The christological result of Rahner’s protest against Stellvertretung is that Jesus no longer stands as a sine qua non of our salvation. He is at best a notification in solidarity with us, a role which falls far short of classical constitutive claims like “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life: no one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). In Balthasar’s judgment, Rahner’s story of salvation “does not mean that the perfect Yes to God on the part of the man Jesus is the condition without which neither the world nor salvation would be possible.” 23
Revisiting Rahner’s Christology: Repräsentation as an Alternative to Stellvertretung
These are significant charges! Christ does not reconcile, represent, or embrace humankind, Christ is a mere notification, and Christ loses his status as the sine qua non of salvation. Is Rahner’s theology of grace in the world in fact guilty on these counts? This question is worth asking, since elements of Balthasar’s critique have widely impacted the reception of Rahner’s Christology. 24
Before answering this question, two brief preliminary remarks are in order. First, Balthasar’s critique has not gone unnoticed by Rahnerians, some of whom have mounted explicit defenses. 25 These defenses tend to center on Rahner’s use of symbolic causality and das Realsymbol, arguing that with his Jesus-as-notification charge, Balthasar caricatures Rahner’s theology of the symbol. 26 My purpose here is not to summarize or evaluate these rejoinders, but rather supplement them with what I take to be an overlooked dimension of Rahner’s thought.
Second, Rahner was willing to use Stellvertretung language at different points of his career. For instance, commenting on the Gospel of John in his 1936 theology dissertation, Rahner remarks that the Messiah is the “Stellvertreter of God and the Mediator of God’s gifts.” 27 Here, the young Rahner is clearly using the term to indicate a different and more robust notion of “representation” than “displacement” (lest Jesus displace God rather than make God present).
Rahner also employs Stellvertretung in his final years, though he treats it much more critically. In a 1982 lecture, Rahner repeats his wariness of the term, fraught as it is with potential for misuse, and remarks that “it would do no harm if we avoided it.” 28 Nonetheless, he admits that it contains some “true and valid elements.” Elaborating, he explains that human beings do not exist as entirely independent, isolated monads. 29 We are always related to and mutually conditioned by others, including the fully human Christ. But, Rahner continues, Christ’s salvific role is not exhausted by his existing simply as one member among many in a web of human solidarity; rather, it consists in Christ “constituting” and “consolidating” the entire web of humanity in himself, as he recapitulated his own life on the cross. 30 In this sense, Jesus does indeed represent others in a salvific way. 31
This last idea indicates a strategy for assessing Balthasar’s critique, a task to which we will now turn our attention. I propose that Rahner does not throw out the idea of Christic “representation” with the Stellvertretung bathwater. Rather, he develops an alternative soteriological notion, Repräsentation, with which he is much more comfortable, and which also successfully meets the challenges posed here by Balthasar. So, what is Repräsentation, where is Rahner getting this idea, and how does it appear in his own theology? Let us consider these questions one at a time.
Repräsentation: Rahner’s Person-Centered Soteriological Concept
Even the etymology of Repräsentation presents an important contrast with Stellvertretung. 32 As we have seen, the latter comes from the German terms Stelle and treten, indicating a “stepping into the place of” (and so can signal a kind of displacement); the former comes from the Latin repraesentare, meaning to “place before” or “to make present again.” Already, Rahner’s theological preference for intrinsic relations favors this configuration of representing and represented. After all, if the Christ representing does not displace the believer represented, but incorporates and makes her present, a direct rather than inverse model of grace and freedom seems to be on the table.
The most distilled portrait of Repräsentation can be found in the corresponding entry in Rahner’s Theological Dictionary, where he articulates it in terms that repeat the ones seen in the 1982 lecture about Stellvertretung’s “true and valid elements.” The entry is sufficiently brief and rich to quote in full: The objective unity of the world, which one God has created for one purpose and destiny and which reveals itself in the comprehensive unity of man’s intellectual horizon, must also obtain in the personal sphere, though in a special manner. Hence there can be no absolute individualism where supernatural salvation is concerned, though this salvation is the fruit of a free decision which is unique and which one must take for oneself. Even here we are in part sustained by the decisions of others and their consequences. Now when such a decision by an individual has special significance for the salvation of others (or everyone), because of the nature of the agent or of his decision, one can speak of representation, in the theological sense: then this one man really stands for all [dieser eine steht dann wirklich für viele oder alle], ‘represents’ [repräsentiert] them, without, of course, depriving them of their own free decision, for they must at least decide whether they will accept for themselves the meaning and effect of the other man’s representative decision [repräsentativen Entscheidung des anderen]. Thus Jesus Christ, the *Mediator, is the supreme representative of mankind in his vicarious redemption [der absolute Repräsentant der Menschheit in seiner stellvertretenden Erlösung].33
In the web of relations in which we exist, Jesus “stands for all,” though in a way that incorporates rather than vitiates freedom. In this way, we can say that Jesus represents us.
This representative relationship of incorporation between Christ and the believer might be best explained by appealing to a distinction between two different kinds of soteriologies: act-centered and person-centered. Classical act-centered soteriologies, like Anselm’s satisfaction theory, propose that Jesus’s personal constitution is geared toward his ability to function as a kind of redemptive super-agent. Why did God become human, as Anselm asks in the title of his famous treatise, Cur Deus Homo? Because you need the right ingredients—full humanity and divinity—in order for Jesus to perform a great act of satisfaction, or else it would fail. 34 Person-centered soteriologies, on the other hand, turn this rationale on its head. Here, Jesus’s acts are geared toward facilitating the union of believers with himself, the One where God and humanity meet. Jesus is not so much the agent who accomplishes salvation as much as he is the locus where it is found. He is not just the author of reconciliation, but is himself its realization. 35 And Rahner’s Repräsentation falls into this person-centered, rather than act-centered, category. It is not the story of Jesus doing what we ought to but cannot do for ourselves. It is the story of Jesus’s own perfect humanity opening up new possibilities for ours, establishing a locus toward whom our free acts are oriented and in whom we find our fulfillment. 36 In this person-centered way, Jesus stands as “the supreme representative of humankind.”
The Roots of Repräsentation: Rahner’s Engagement with Patristic Theology
Where does this person-centered soteriology come from? Although they do not use the same “person-centered” language, Brian Daley and Kathryn Tanner each identify this soteriology as characteristically patristic. 37 Familiar sayings of the fathers ranging from “God became human so that humans might become God” (Athanasius) to “That which was not assumed has not been redeemed” (Gregory Nazianzen) tend to focus on Jesus’s own identity as already carrying salvific weight, not just as a setup for a saving act. Irenaeus’s theory of recapitulation, according to which Jesus is the New Adam, the perfect human who is also God and who sums up the whole of humanity in himself, is a particularly salient case of person-centered atonement. And it is a case with which Rahner, perhaps surprisingly, was intimately familiar.
Although his early philosophical work tends to overshadow it, the theological work in the first decade of Rahner’s career was positively steeped in patristics, which impacted the direction of his own theology. 38 Amidst the many essays he wrote on the fathers, his theology dissertation, E latere Christi (1936), will serve to illustrate this connection. There, as he traces the historical development of an early instance of typological exegesis, he devotes disproportionate space to Irenaeus. As he articulates Irenaeus’s theory of recapitulation, he not only mixes in his own language of Symbol, but defines Irenaeus’s “order of salvation” in the following terms: “Christ is the acceptance of true humanity, the ‘flesh’ which ‘recapitulated’ all flesh.” 39 Strikingly, Rahner’s own later constructive work consistently utilizes the same vocabulary: Christ is “God’s . . . acceptance of the world into God himself in person and as a person . . . the unsurpassable and final event,” 40 “God has accepted [hu]man[ity] in him,” 41 and “in him God has accepted [hu]man[ity].” 42 Rahner not only studied patristic theology with marked intensity during his early years; it seems to have operated as a kind of “substratum” on which he built his own constructive work, as Karl Neufeld has argued. 43
Another telling link between Irenaeus and Rahner’s soteriology can be found in Rahner’s Theological Dictionary, which presents a unique opportunity to compare theological concepts operative in Rahner’s thought. There, he defines “recapitulation” in much the same way as above, which is no surprise. However, Rahner’s entries on “redemption” in general and “recapitulation” contain striking parallels with one another. First, like the “recapitulation” entry, “redemption” prominently features Eph 1. It also positions parallel accounts of Jesus’s being (compare “the Incarnation of God” which is the “ goal of creation and apogee of Adam’s race” to “the union of God’s life and human existence” which is history’s “all-sustaining sense and centre, its definitive culmination”) and activity (compare “having borne our sins and risen as the first-born from the dead, his radical acceptance of every phase of human history has redeemed and ‘re’-constituted that creation which up until his coming had been subjected to vanity” to “the acceptance, in loving obedience, of human existence characterized by sin”) into a person-centered configuration. Moreover, the “redemption” entry even repeats the recapitulation language seen in Rahner’s dissertation, stating that “in Jesus God has definitively accepted the one world and humanity.” 44 These parallels may very well indicate that as Rahner thought broadly about “redemption,” he defaulted to a more specific Irenaean, recapitulation-based conceptual framework.
Irenaeus makes another appearance in Rahner’s entry on “Salvation” in Sacramentum Mundi. 45 On the one hand, this is no surprise, since it occurs as Rahner reviews a string of various historical atonement theories, e.g. Christus victor, Anselmian satisfaction, and Liberal Protestant exemplarism, among others. What is remarkable is that Rahner includes critical remarks for all of these others, but none for Irenaeus and recapitulation; if anything, his tone there is apologetic.
Person-centered, Representative Soteriology in Rahner’s Mature Work
There is plenty of other evidence of this patristic-inspired, person-centered Repräsentation operative in Rahner’s mid- and late career as well, much of which I have detailed in my recent study, Being Salvation. Here, I will highlight two salient examples. First, in a 1953 essay titled “The Eternal Significance of the Humanity of Jesus for Our Relationship with God,” Rahner laments that in the neo-Scholastic manual entries on the “last things,” the humanity of Jesus is utterly neglected, drowned out by the power of the beatific vision. But Rahner insists, “Jesus, the Man, not merely was at one time of decisive importance for our salvation . . . but—as the one who became man and has remained a creature—he is now and for all eternity the permanent openness of our finite being to the living God of infinite, eternal life.” 46 Here, Jesus does not save through a displacing act, but through an inclusive and ongoing mediation as he incorporates believers into his own body, which is personally united with God. Rahner doubles down on his person-centered vision of Christ’s eternal significance in his Sacramentum Mundi entry on “Resurrection.” In contrast to the popular notion that Christ acted to “open the gates” of heaven, Rahner instead proposes that Christ’s own resurrection created heaven in the first place! 47
Second, in his well-known Foundations of Christian Faith, Rahner laments that, afflicted as they are by individualist patterns of thought, Western Christians have trouble countenancing “the whole human race in the individual human reality of Jesus”; they tend to envisage a Savior who “performs redemptive activity” which “is accepted by God as representative [stellvertretend] for the human race.” Against this tendency, Rahner calls for a soteriological Christology, in which Jesus is “in his very being salvation,” one which gives “immediate expression to the salvific event which Jesus Christ himself is.” 48 Here again, Rahner insists on a robust, person-centered Christology of Repräsentation, over and against a mere performance-based logic of Stellvertretung.
At this point, let us revisit Balthasar’s charges. In his wariness toward Stellvertretung, does Rahner undermine a pro nobis role for Jesus? Rahner’s own explicit reply to this charge is that “for us” can mean something like “for our sake,” rather than “stepping into our place.” 49 And Christ’s person-centered role as recapitulating Repräsentant certainly is “for our sake.” Moreover, one could even style Rahner’s Jesus as “in our place,” so long as “our place” precisely is Christ (the locus of salvation, rather than the displacing agent). Such an incorporating Jesus gives the lie to Balthasar’s claim that Rahner’s Jesus does not represent, embrace or contain humanity. 50
Does Rahner maintain Christ’s status as the sine qua non of salvation? Yes, but again, not primarily as an actor. Christ is the sine qua non not because he is the only agent who could “open heaven’s gates,” but because he inaugurates heaven in himself, and his humanity mediates God’s presence to creatures eternally.
Finally, is Rahner’s Jesus a mere notification? On the contrary, such a role would reduce Jesus to having a merely extrinsic connection to the believer, the problem which motivates Rahner’s skepticism of Stellvertretung in the first place. On Rahner’s notion of Repräsentation, Jesus is no mere notification of salvation—he is the One who is in his very “being salvation.”
Conclusion
The idea of Vertretung provides a fruitful avenue for appreciating Rahner’s consistent effort to avoid theological extrinsicism. Both in his treatments of symbol and in his soteriological writings, Rahner insists that the concept of “stepping in” for another fails to do justice to the way that grace operates in the world. God’s presence to creation cannot be one of external or arbitrary pairing, nor can it heal creation by way of displacing creaturely freedom. God’s presence in grace enlivens the human creature, making it more fully itself as it pursues its final fulfillment: participating in the trinitarian life. By sidelining Stellvertretung, Rahner does not compromise his Christology in the ways Balthasar alleges. As the One who eternally mediates this divine self-communication, Jesus is no mere notification of salvation, but is the fully human and divine One who stands as salvation’s locus. This is how Jesus “represents”—not by a stellvertretend act of “taking our place,” but rather by personally taking on our place as his own, uniting our interconnected world to God in grace. As Rahner put it in 1943, [T]he saving reality of Christ is the consecration, in principle, of the whole creation. If anything was not assumed, neither was it redeemed; but whatever has been united with God has also been saved, says Gregory Nazianzen. But everything has been assumed, for Christ is true man, true son of Adam, truly lived a human life in all its breadth and height and depth, has truly become a star of this cosmos in which everything depends on everything else . . . And hence everything, without confusion and without separation, is to enter into eternal life; there is to be not only a new heaven but a new earth. Nothing, unless it be eternally damned, can remain outside the blessing, the protection, the transfiguration of this divinization of the world which, beginning in Christ, aims at drawing everything that exists into the life of God himself, precisely in order that it may thus have eternal validity conferred upon it. This is the reality of Christ, which constitutes Christianity; the incarnate life of God in our place and our time.
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