The history of the world and the history of salvation in the fundamental theology of Karl Rahner

The article is dedicated to Karl Rahner’s theology of history, in which a central role is played by his novel concept of divine revelation. Distancing himself from extrinsicism, which is peculiar to scholasticism, and immanentism, which is characteristic of modernism, Rahner proposes a new concept of divine revelation, in which material and temporal world is regarded as an environment, as a space, where interaction takes place between God, Who self-communicates himself to a human being in history, and a human being, whose existence is fundamentally an existence in the world. Being called to fulfil his transcendental subjectivity, a human being cannot do it in any other way, but in history. Rahner’s key innovation for Catholic theology is a development of the concept of the universal history of revelation, in the framework of which, on the one hand, it is the event of Jesus Christ which represents the climax of the revelation of God to human being in the form of the Divine-human hypostatic union. On the other hand, the salvific will of God is seen as universal and addressed to all people, and therefore, presupposes a possibility of revelation beyond institutional Christianity.