Introducing Karl Rahner

Karl Rahner, a German Jesuit, was probably the most prominent and influential Catholic theologian of the twentieth century. In the 1950s, he was on the margins, his orthodoxy questioned and his work censored. Yet a decade later he was a key theological adviser at the Second Vatican Council and, in almost all accounts but his own, one of the shaping influences upon it. Heavily influenced by Aquinas, his work sought to reconcile Christian faith with contemporary thought and the revelation of God in human experience. Here, Karen Kilby makes Rahner’s often dense and difficult thinking accessible to a wide audience. She sketches a few of the central themes of Rahner’s thought and gives the reader both a feeling for the way he approaches problems and some sense of the breadth of his work.