Rahner versus Balthasar? Legitimizing ecclesiastical strategies

Abstract

Rahner and Balthasar are, without doubt, the two most significant Catholic theologians of the last 20th century. Both have helped us to think about the integrality of Christianity at the level of our time. However, one can perceive in the current ecclesial situation a self-interested tendency to contrast their theologies and to derive from them divergent and even contradictory pastoral strategies. The present article aims to analyse the legitimacy of these ecclesial strategies and the possibility that they can be simply deduced from the core theologies of Rahner and Balthasar. The conclusion will be to show how the high flight of these two titans of theology cannot easily be reduced to schemes that crudely falsify the purity of their intuitions.