When a Western European landed his plane among African natives who gazed unbelievingly at this enormous bird, he proudly remarked, “In one day I have covered a distance which used to take me thirty”. Thereupon the wise black chieftain came forward and aSked, “Sir, what do you do with the other twenty-nine?”

Here we have the twofold possibility of man’s fundamental decision: on the one hand technological rationality, and on the other the question of the meaning of human action.

The question also of the relationship between human hopes and expectations by self-liberation, and the God-given salvation: the question of God as connected with the context of mankind’s striving for liberation. The question of God-talk is intrinsically connected with the question of human integrity and wholeness in such a way that this question of identity cannot be solved in purely theoretical terms: it includes the question of a particular life-style — contemplative and political as well. Talk about God stands under the quest of our way of life; it is governed by the question of our real concerns in life.

Karl Rahner’s Foundations of Christian Faith, published in 1978, which is no doubt a masterpiece, nevertheless relies fundamentally on a very controversial picture of man as the being who transcends his finitude just by recognizing it — and this transcendence is something pretty substantial even if difficult to put a finger on. It enables Rahner to make the idea of God intelligible and even quite obvious and natural. The speed with which Rahner draws the reader into .his “system”, and the immense rewards in theological assurance and in spiritual stimulus if one goes with the tide, dissipate the difficulties about the initial move. The text is in any case very hard to understand in detail, or else the Anglo-Saxon reader, putting it all down to the foreign idiom, gives it the benefit of the doubt. This paper is a preliminary exploration of the basic epistemological problems in Rahner’s philosophy of man, with the tentative proposal that a quite different starting-point needs to be accepted.

In this paper we should like to examine some rhetorical aspects of theological language. Before doing so, it is necessary to argue for the view that there is a special mode of discourse appropriate to theology, as opposed to the view that theological language is composed of statements which differ from others only in terms of their subject-matter. There is a distinguished history of opposition to the view we propose; in a very ancient debate it has repeatedly been maintained that theology should be concerned only with discovering and promulgating true statements about God and our knowledge of God, and that any concern with developing sorts and styles of language can only distract and distort. This position is connected with another, which has received support from natural-scientific quarters since the mid-19th century especially: it presents a contrast between academic and non-academic language, founded on the contention that academic discourse occurs in the course of researches where the truth of a statement matters, but virtually nothing else about it does. According to this position, as long as a statement is true it should not matter to the researcher whether anyone finds it important or believable, or whether it impinges on anyone’s interests or needs. (Hence the expressions, presumably used chiefly in non-academic circles, ‘an academic point’, or ‘of merely academic interest’.) The concept of rhetoric can be used to point to misguided features in this type of position, whether it is taken up in relation to theology or in relation to research in general. But theology, more obviously than most subjects, highlights the dubiousness of trying to erect a linguistic ideal without attending to the effects on language of its most communicative aspects.

In much contemporary discussion of ethics, the Roman Catholic tradition — particularly in questions of sexual morality — has been characterized as the last refuge of the absolute. On questions such as the morality of contraception, the Church has been remarkably out of phase with other churches and other ethical traditions, insisting on a particular approach to natural law theory which has, by now, become identified with the Roman Catholic tradition.

It is interesting then, to find the following footnote in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, as edited from Bonhoeffer’s papers by Eberhard Bethge:

Writing at a time when the Roman Catholic tradition maintained a strong consensus on the question, Bonhoeffer notes that this tradition “does not indeed, as is often asserted, maintain that reproduction is the only purpose of marriage. No one did that before Kant”.