What kind of theologian was Karl Rahner often misspelled Rayner and what did he teach?

Answer 1

Karl Rahner (the pronunciation of his name rhymes with "garner", not with "trainer") was a German Jesuit priest and one of the most eminent Christian theologians of the 20th century. He lived from 1904 to 1984. Being appointed - against the resistance of conservative Vatican circles - by Pope John XIII as expert adviser, professor Rahner considerably influenced the discussions of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and its agenda of bold church reforms. In his prolific theological and philosophical writings, professor Rahner claimed that every man (not only the Catholic or the Christian), has a latent awareness of God, which is an awareness of a higher reality transcending time and space. Any further knowledge of man about God has its source in God's self-revelation to man, especially through the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ as the human form divine. But in spite of this self-revelation, and in spite of the theologians' sophisticated interpretation of God's acts of self-communication, God will forever remain an insolvable mystery to man. Rahner was a severe critic of the Catholic church of his time. His main criticism was that the Church had lost contact to the very origin and vital source of all religion - the mystical experience or experience of transcendence. A church which preached a religion which consisted merely of dogmatic statements and of empty rituals only would not survive. Karl Rahner expressed this conviction 1966 in a famous thesis: "The christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all." To him (Catholic) Christianity could only have a future, if all its preachings and dogmatic statements as well as all of its rites and ceremonies pointed toward the basic religious experiences of men - the awareness of the existence of a higher, eternal, godly, and forever mysterious reality beyond time and space, which gives an ultimate meaning to man's fleeting life.