Karl Rahner Quotes

#1. Emptiness is only a disguise for an intimacy of God's, that God's 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.

Karl Rahner

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

Karl Rahner

#3. Grace can and does have a history.

Karl Rahner

#4. Knowing God is more important than knowing about God.

Karl Rahner

#5. 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

#6. 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.

Karl Rahner

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

Karl Rahner

#8. 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

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

Karl Rahner

#10. In the post-Christian world, all Christians will be mystics.

Karl Rahner

#11. Grace is everywhere as an active orientation of all created reality toward God.

Karl Rahner

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

Karl Rahner

#13. 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

#14. But there is yet another form of this hidden heresy, and, paradoxically, it can affect those who are proudest of their long-standing and unimpeachable orthodoxy; heresy in the form of indifference.

Karl Rahner

#15. Learning always involves self-transcendence. Learning calls forth what is in us, helping us to move toward authenticity and wholeness.

Karl Rahner

#16. The struggle against atheism is foremost and of necessity a struggle against the inadequacy of our own theism.

Karl Rahner

#17. 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

#18. 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

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

Karl Rahner

#20. 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.

Karl Rahner

#21. 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.

Karl Rahner

#22. Love alone allows man to forget himself ... it alone can still redeem even the darkest hours of the past since it alone finds the courage to believe in the mercy of the holy God.

Karl Rahner