Karl Rahner

"For God remains God and does not change, and Jesus is a real, genuine, and finite man with his own experiences, in adoration before the incomprehensibility of God, a free and obedient man, like us in all things." – "I Believe in Jesus Christ", Theological Investigations IX.10

"...a body in its constituent parts or something similar, by means of which God himself renders himself visible on the stage of his world's history. But both interpretations of this statement are nonsensical and contrary to what Christian dogma really intends to say."

"If we say 'God is made man' in the ready-made patterns of our everyday speech, we either think automatically of God being changed into a man or else we understand the content of the word 'man' in this context as an outer garment..."

"But if we listen closely to what *real* Christian doctrine says about the God-man, we notice that there is nothing to be 'demythologised' in this fundamental dogma, but that it only needs to be understood correctly to be *completely orthodox and at the same time worthy of belief.*"

"If we are honest, we modern men will admit that the doctrine of God's Incarnation seems at first sight like pure mythology which can no longer be 'realised'."

“The most personal of existential factors, and the most metaphysical at the same time, is that which Thomas has expressed in these words: Adoro te devote latens Deitas, quae sub his figuris vere latitas.” - "Thomas Aquinas on Truth"

"Every sin is at root merely the refusal to entrust himself to this boundlessness; it is a lesser love which, because it refuses to become the greater, is no longer love at all." – "Theology of Freedom", Theological Investigations VI.13, 1964

"The only ultimate structure of the person which manages to express it completely is the basic capacity of love, and this is without measure. Thus man too is boundless."

"The Christian ethos does not basically consist in the respecting of objective norms imposed by God on reality. All structures of things are lower than man. He can alter them, bend them as far as possible; he is their master and not their servant."

– "Behold This Heart!": Preliminaries to a Theology of Devotion to the Sacred Heart, 1953, Theological Investigations III.21

"Only a lover is able to pronounce the word 'heart' with understanding, and only one who is lovingly united to the crucified Lord knows what is meant when the 'Heart of Jesus' is spoken of. But even the word 'heart' itself opens up to the lover new paths for his love which can never love enough."

From "Thomas Aquinas as Monk, Theologian, and Mystic", 1949

"...that in their very essence they do not belong to the past but are past only in that they have sped ahead of us into the future, the future we have yet to meet: dominus cum sanctis suis ("The Lord with his saints") all of this is more true than we ourselves are."

"...that the essence of their life remains by their eternal salvation embedded also in the ground of all reality by which history remains, including the history that has occurred after them and is yet to come..."

"The fact that they are, that they are with God, that they love us, that we love them, that they intercede for us who are their brothers and sisters in the unending liturgy of heaven..."

"They are alive. They live in complete fulfillment, hence in true reality, which is powerful and present. Those who can be called by name are true reality, are what matters more than theoretical principles and abstract theories."

"The celebration of the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, the patron saint of theological studies, is not only a spiritual-historical remembering. What we are doing or should be doing here as Christians is also a matter of engaging with the communion of saints. Those in heaven are not dead."

“But theologians are never spared the task of prompt renewal. Anything which is merely conserved, or which is merely handed down without a fresh, personal exertion beginning at the very sources of Revelation, rots as the manna did.” – "The Prospects for Dogmatic Theology", TI I

“The thought of earlier generations, even if it has had results in the form of conciliar definitions, is not a sort of couch for the thought of later generations. Definitions are much less an end than a beginning. A Hic Rhodus. An opening. No real achievement is ever lost to the Church.”

"...and by attempting to pursue theology without formal and continuing dialogue with the Church, its teaching office, and its theological history." - "A Theology We Can Live With", Theological Investigations XXI

"...or the first half of the twentieth century. But that is a far cry from saying that the only way young theologians can make their theology studies relevant today is by being asinine enough to eschew all contact with the doctrinal decisions of the Church..."

"...then their theology must really be an ecclesial one, and it must have in principle an open and positive relationship to the ecclesial teaching office. Those days are certainly gone when theology could be a Denziger theology in the neoscholastic style of the nineteenth century..."

"Even today one can continue to discuss the morality of the pill and whether women a hundred years from now will still be excluded from the office of the priesthood. But if theologians want to live in the Church with the theology they want to live with..."

"A university science would demean itself it it were to measure its ultimate value by the yardstick of commercial utility. Truth is under no obligation to vindicate itself to purely pragmatic or financial interests." – "Theology Today", Theological Investigations XXI

"...but say something to us which we in our time have not considered at all or not closely enough, about reality itself." - "The Prospects for Dogmatic Theology", Theological Investigations I

"What is it that makes the properly historical in studies like those of de Lubac or de la Taille so stimulating and to the point? Surely it is the art of reading texts in such a way that the ybecome not just votes cast in favor of our against our current positions (positions taken up long ago)..."

"...I do not think that computers could be built for theology to any significant degree, chiefly because no-one would know how to programme them." - "The Historicity of Theology", Theological Investigations IX

"...the infinity of dissatisfied finiteness, but not the blessed infinity of truly limitless fullness" – "The Eternal Significance of the Humanity of Jesus for Our Relationship with God", Theological Investigations III.3

"Without him every absolute of which we speak or which we imagine we attain by mystical flight is in the last analysis merely the never attained, objective correlative of that empty and hollow, dark and despairingly self-consuming infinity which we are ourselves..."

"[Christ’s] created human nature is the indispensable and permanent gateway through which everything created must pass if it is to find the perfection of its eternal validity before God…"