Today's world has become secular, and it would appear that the process is by no means over yet.1 This universal secularity challenges faith to say what its attitude to it is. Faith can try, of course, to ignore the acuteness of the situation and simply hammer away behind locked doors at its customary practices in theology and piety, as though there had been no day of Pentecost and therefore no need to understand and answer for the ever changing times. A faith that is so unhistorical is not likely to feel itself threatened—that salutary state which enlivens and widens the experience of faith. This kind of faith is never stuck for words. It can go on talking with extraordinary superiority about

1. This work marks a first attempt to give a positive interpretation of this permanent and growing secularity of the world in the light of Catholic theology. For an analysis of the situation from which it starts, see especially K. Mannheim, Die Diagnose unserer Zeit, Zurich, 1951; H. Freyer, Theorif des gegenwartigen Zeitalters, Stuttgart, 1955; D. Goldschmidt, F. Greiner, H. Schelsky (eds.), Soziologie der Kirchengemeinde, Mainz, I960; T. Luckmann, Das Problem der Religion in der modemen Gesellschaft, Freiburg, 1963; J. Matthew, Die Emigration der Kirche am der Gesellschaft, Hamburg, 1964, Religion und Gesellschaft, Hamburg, 1967; Internationales Jahrbuch fur Religionssoziologie, Vol. 1: Religioser Pluralismus und gesellschaftliche Struktur, Cologne, 1965; К. Rahner, N. Greinacher, "Die Gcgenwart der Kirche: Theologische Analyse der Gegenwart als Situation des Selbstvollzugs der Kirche," in Handbuch fur Pastoraltheologie, Vol. 2, 1, Freiburg, 1966, pp.178-276.

God and the world. But it lacks urgency and the taste of reality and it can suddenly, in the midst of Christianity, descend to mythology. If, however, it faces the situation that confronts it (in the magnitude of which God's inescapable claim will ultimately reveal itself), it may, perhaps, at first lapse into a poverty of words and inspiration. The long-familiar horizons fade away, and the familiar ground opens at one's feet. We have to find our feet in an historical form of life in faith that is largely uncharted.2

A. A CRITIQUE OF THE VARIOUS STARTING POINTS

It is true, however, that a number of important attempts are being made to respond out of the spirit of revelation and its theology, to the situation of the world that confronts us. We cannot here give an account and evaluation of them all. Besides those attempts, via a "theology of earthly realities," to build contemporary secularism back into that immediacy to God which was current in the medieval view of the world,3 the endeavor is also being made to engender in Christians a less inhibited "opennfs to the world" with the clear aim of catching up with it and establishing it anew in the mystery of Christ.4 The former at-

2. See, for example, Karl Rahner, "Christianity and the New Man," in Theological Investigations, Vol. 5, Baltimore and Dublin, 1966, pp. 135-153.

3. See G. Thils, Theologie de realite terresire, n.d.

4. See especially A. Auer, Weltoffener Christ: Grundsatzliches und Geschichsliches zur Laienfrommigkeit, Ddsseldorf, 1963; "Gestaltwandel des christlichen Weltverstandnisses," in Gott in Welt, Vol. 1, Freiburg, 1964, pp. 333-365. See also R. Scherer, Christlichen Weltverantwortung, Freiburg, 1949; F. Wulf, "Der Christ und die Gestalt der heutigen Welt," in Geist und Leben 28 (1955), pp. 117-133; Y. Congar, Lay People in the Church, Westminster, 1957; J. Leclerq, Christian and World Integration, New York, 1961; G. Tavard, The Church, the Layman, and the Modern World, New York, 1959. Of those contributions to the subject which have appeared since this essay was written we may mention the following selection: H. Schmidt, Verheissung und Schrecken der Freiheit: Von der Krise des antik-abendlandischen Welfverstandnisses, dargestellt im Blick auf Hegels Erfahrung der Gesch-tempts appear to me to be too unhistoricallv restorative in purpose; but it is also to be asked whether the legitimate emphasis on the Christian's "openness to the world," in which the world appears as the immediate material of the Christian mission, always takes sufficiently seriously the universal, highly differentiated and complicated secularity of the world and its pluralism, so vast that it can hardly be grasped as a whole.

There is also the question of whether this understanding of the world does not come dangerously close to a secular optimism which arouses a Christian unrest precisely in the man who takes this secularity of the world completely seriously. Whatever truth there is in this conjecture, I should like to point out just one thing that is, as far as I can see, common to these and similar attempts. They all proceed on the (to them) obvious assumption that the secularity of the world as such is something that is actually contrary to the Christian understanding of the world and must therefore be totally overcome by Christian meansWhat is common to them all is their fundamental rejection of the secularization of the world, which began in modern times is expressed in acute form in our present world situation.6

ichte, Stuttgart, 1964; К. Rahner, "Der Mensch von heute und die Religion," in Schriften zur Theologie. Vol. VI, Einsiedein, 1965, pp. 15-33; J. Rattingcr, "Angesichts der Welt von heutc," in Wort und Wehrh'it 20 (1965), pp. 493-504; E. Schillebeeckx, "Kirchc und Menschheit," in Concilium I (1965);

J. B. Metz (ed.), B?' eitverstandnis. im Glauben, Mainz, 1965; 2nd ed., 1966, with contributions by H. U. von Balthasar, E. Biser, J. B. Metz, H. de Lubac, H. R. Schlette, Y. Congar, E. Schillebeeckx, J. Retzinger, L. Schcffczyk, R. Schnackenburg, A. Deissler, A. Vogtie, W. Dirks, J. Pieper, J. Splctt, K. Rahner, E.-W. B6ckenf6rde;-W. D. Marsch, "Protestantisches Weltverstandnis," in Protestantische Text« aus dem Jahre 1965, Stuttgart, 1966, pp. 100-112;

H. R. Schlette, "Wie bewerten wir die Sakularisierung? Theologische Ubcrlegungen zur Welt von heute," in Zeitschrift fur Missionsivissenschaft und Retigionswissenschaft 50 (1966), pp. 72-88; Christen ills Humanists», Munich, 1967.

5. And thus, in spite of any emphasis on "openness." Sec A. Aucr, op. cit.

B. CHRISTIAN FAITH AND CONCRETE WORLD HISTORY

It is precisely this "obvious" assumption, however, that now seems highly suspect when we consider the theology of history. For a theologian who thinks historically will not so readily accept the imputation that the modern process of secularization is, in essence, unchristian and that the concrete history of the world has therefore once again severed its connections with the history of salvation. This kind of view conceals a dangerous tendency to make the history of salvation an extrinsic thing and invokes a theological positivism that does not take with sufficient seriousness the truth that the "spirit" of Christianity is permanently embedded in the "flesh" of world history and must maintain and prove itself in the irreversible course of the latter. Theology must not make things easy for itself by neglecting the process of the concrete history of the world—having, as it were, a monophysite understanding of salvation history. Rather, the process of history is "accepted" in the Christian logos and remains so. It cannot disentangle itself from it, and theology must seek out and testify to this constant if always hidden and crucified "marriage" between salvation and world history. In regard to our question: the task of theology is to show that the historically irreversible process of secularization does not mean that Christianity is disappearing, but that it has become truly historically effective. It is not the case that what pertains to the "essence of Christianity" must therefore always have been existent in full historical tangibility and maturity. Something historically "new" cannot, therefore, be presented as being either a contradiction, an aberration, or a decline from Christianity (in its social, cultural, and other manifestations), or else, at any rate, a mere profane historical development, unimportant for Christianity and the Church and, at most, to be taken account of as the external situation within which the Church carries on its activity and the Christian preserves his way of life. Something historically new may at least be the new appearance in time of something that did not actually previously exist as an historical force, but was somehow adumbrated in the'nature of Christianity, had to be realized because of it, and now is something the age urgently confronts us with.

So we may at least permit the question: In what way does this irreversible secularization of the world (which we cannot take seriously enough) still stand beneath the "law of Christ" (1 Cor. 9, 21)? In what way is what happens within history still an advent, a future in terms of a Christian past, a coming upon us of what took place in Jesus Christ? How is he himself still active, as the Lord who reigns within and throughout history, not merely as its transcendent guarantee? Has not the secularization of the world forced him into a sulking corner, from which only the metaphysical acrobatics of theology can rescue him? How is his spirit still poured out over the face of our secular world? How does that which forces itself upon us ever more urgently still come historically from the "hour of Christ"? Why is all present-day theology of history not simply a mystic veiling of our situation without God?

C. THE CONSTANT AMBIGUITY OF SECULARIZATION

The first reply we could make—and what it states is something important—is that the Christian understanding of history stands beneath the sign of the cross, which means also under the sign of the constant protest within the world against God. In the secularization of the world the cross reveals itself as the constant existential of the Christian economy of history. The secular world in which we live today is nothing other than the heightened universal expression of that secular rejection of the holy, of God and his Christ, which is always provided for in the Christian plan of history.6 Though this answer is not complete, it remains valid even throughout our subsequent points. If history is not just what takes place within the "world" (as a fixed framework) but is the world itself (as event),7 then that contradictory unity of history and hence of the "world" is possible. In this unity the same objectifications of the "world" can be both sin and at the same time the process of handing sin over to God, a process in which it is overcome. What they are originally and ultimately, in the last decision, constitutes the mystery of history which is in God's hand. This ambivalence of history, which is the basis of the ambivalence of the world, is seen most clearly in the phenomenon of death, but it is a quality that permeates the whole of history and the world.

If, then, in what follows, the positive character of the permanent secularity of the world is to be made intelligible from a Christological point of view, this means a negation of neither a hamartological nor a soteriological interpretation of the world, but provides the basis for the ambivalence of the existential hamartological or soteriological nature of the- world, because this ambivalence is possible only because history is and always will be secular, because it is distinguished in secular fashion from the process of salvation and damnation that takes place in relation to it—for in this way, without postulating a paradoxical identity of salvation and damnation, is history able to have both possibilities open to it.

6. For an attempt, in terms of the history of theology, to interpret our world situation from this point of view, see J. B. Metz, "Die 'Stunde' Christi," in Wort und Wahreit (1957), pp. 5-18.

7. See idem, the article on "Welt" in Lexikon fur Theologie und Kirche, Vol. X, pp. 1021-1026, as well as Appendix I in this volume. Here "world" is interpreted as history.

D. THE SECULARITY OF THE WORLD AS A THEOLOGICALLY POSITIVE STATEMENT

When we look at the reality of the contemporary world, let us not see simply or chieHy the "necessary" negative element of the movement of history, as understood by a Christian, but ultimately also something that is positive for a Christian. To put it in another way: the worldliness of the world is not to be the undialectic expression of the fact that the divine acceptance of the world is protested against and rejected by the world, but should itself emerge as the occasion of the manifestation in history of the fact that God has "accepted" it.8 The secularity of the world should not reveal itself to us primarily as a dethroning of Christ within the world, in an historically intensified protest against him, but as the decisive point of his dominion in history.

Let us, accordingly, consider the theological basis of secularization, so that we can use it to orientate our understanding of the world in faith. We can formulate this intention in a preliminary way through a proposition that shows the limits within which we express our attitude to the more universal theme of "how faith sees the world," and the manner in which we do this —that is, essentially in terms of the theology of history. This formulation might be as follows: The secularity of the world, as it has emerged in the modem process of secularization and as we see it today in a globally heightened, form,9 has funda-

8. "Acceptance" can, of course, mean several things: (1) that the world as creation is called by the will of God, in his self-communication to the world; (2) that this call is achieved victoriously in the world because of God's plan of predestination in the world as a whole; (3) that the free acceptance by man of this acceptance really takes place; (4) that being accepted and freely accepting historically manifest the nature of acceptance. We do not need to differentiate further between these levels and shades of meaning in the world.

9. See K. Lowith, Weltgeschichte und Heilsgescheben, Stuttgart, 1953;

Der Weltbegriff der neuzeitlichen Philosophic, Heidelberg, I960; T. Parsons, Structure and Process in Modern Societies, Glencoc, Illinois, I960; H.

mentally, though not in its individual historical forms, arisen not against Christianity but through it. It is originally a Christian event and hence testifies in our world situation to the power of the "hour of Christ" at work within history.16

2. The С'hristo logical Foundations of a Theological Interpretation of the Secularity of the World

At first glance this proposition may surprise us. Is not precisely the opposite to be expected? Is not the power of the Christian spirit in history seen precisely in the progressive drawing of the world into the saving reality that has been founded in Christ, in the final overcoming of the difference between the sacral and the profane? Does not the world appear to a Christian precisely as the material of salvation, as the beginning of a universal cosmic liturgy, and therefore is not Christianity essentially a constant struggle against the secularization of the world?

Lubbe, Sakularisierung: Geschichte tines ideenpolltischen Begrifff, Freiburg, 1965; H. Blumenberg, Die Legitimitat der Neuzeit, Frankfurt-Main, 1966;

J. Matthes, Religion und Gesellschaft (see note 1).

10. See F. Goganen, Der Mensch zwischen Gott und Welt, Heidelberg, 1952; Verhangnis und Hoffnung d»r Neuzeit: Die Sakularisation als theologisches Problem, Stuttgart, 1953; F. Delekat, Oher den Begriff der Sakularisation, Heidelberg, 1958; W. Hahn, "Secularisation und Religionszcrrall," in Kerygma und Dogma 5 (1959), pp. 84-98; D, von Oppen, Das personale Zeitalter. Stuttgart, I960; T. Rendtorff, "Sakularisierung als theologisches Problem," in Neue Zeitschrift fur systematische Theologie 4 (1962), pp. 318-339; D. Bonhoeffer, Ethics, New York and London, 1965;

A. E. Loen, Sakularisation: Von der wahren Voraussetzung und angehlichen Gottlosigkeit der Wissenschaft, Munich, 1965; J. В. Metz (ed.), Weltverstandnis im Glauben (see note 4); H. Cox, The Secular City, New York, 1963.

A. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JESUS CHRIST IN OUR VIEW OF THE WORLD

I shall return to the above questions later, though I hope they will be answered indirectly by my attempt at a positive justification of the above proposition. Let us consider quite simply what took place historically in Jesus Christ as far as our view of the world is concerned. Naturally, the whole breadth and depth of this event cannot even be outlined, let alone comprehensively described. My primary intention is to offer a theological interpretation of the secular world today, and this must determine the scope of my analysis of the Christ event.

Allowing for this narrowing of perspective, let us formulate the Christ event in the following basic statement: In his son, Jesus Christ, God accepted the world with eschatological definitiveness. "For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, . . . was not Yes and No; but in him it is always Yes. For all the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why we utter the Amen through him, to the glory of God" (2 Cor. 1, 19f.). The Church which he founded is the historically tangible and effective sign, the sacrament of the eschatologically final acceptance of the world of God.

The duality of the Church and the world is still the historically visible form of the guilty rejection by the world of the accepting logos. If the world had not been accepted in protest and refusal, then there would be no Church—not even in constant antagonistic distinction to the world: ecclesia ex corde scisso. Rather, the world would be undialectically the actuality of this acceptance, and its history itself would be the unveiled representation of the nearness of God, given once and for all.

But this does not falsify the proposition. The possibility that the world can be—and actually is—both accepted and yet protesting, is given precisely in its secularity, which remains and grows.

What does this basic proposition tell us, as far as our purpose is concerned? We distinguish in it two statements about God and the world, one formal, the other factual. The formal statement is: God himself does something for the world in an historical action; and the factual: God acts in such a way in relation to the world that he accepts it irrevocably in his Son.

B. THE NECESSARY CONDITIONS FOR THE PROPER UNDERSTANDING OF THE INCARNATION OF GOD

Let us consider first the formal statement. What does it say formally about God?

God, this statement maintains, is a God of history—the God of history, not just by setting it in motion and keeping away from it, but by appearing in it himself in all truth and by its becoming in his Son the actual destiny of the unchanging God.11

Our faith, then, in God is not the objectification of the timeless metaphysical self-awareness of man, clothed simply in a dramatic form: it is the response to a unique event in history. God for us is not merely a •God who is always the same, colorlessly and faceless ly present as the numinously shimmering hori2on of our being, withdrawn into the infinite distance and involvement of his transcendency. He is not the symbol for the apex of our existence which is lost asymptotically in the infinite. He is Emmanuel, the God of an historical hour. Transcendence itself has become an event. It does not just simply stand above and beyond history, but is what is still to come in history; it is the future of man. God is no longer merely "above" history, he is

11. Why the triune God acts for us precisely in his eternal Word is a question that is also important for the theology of history, but which we cannot discuss here. See K. Rahner, Schriften zur Theologie, Vol. Ill, Einsiedein, 1964, pp. 40-46; Vol. IV, pp. 96ff., 118-120, 137ff.

himself "in" it, in that he is also constantly "in front of it" as its free, uncontrolled future.12

But we must not forget that the Son of God is never just any fact within history. It is not just that from the ethical and religious point of view he is rated higher than any other historical figure and has therefore become a model for the rest of mankind. He is of decisive importance for the reality of history itself. He does not merely reign over history, by appearing in it (beside other historical phenomena) and setting up a universal kingdom in it {beside other "kingdoms"), but he reigns within it by historically giying it its basis. He does not simply claim it retrospectively, for it belongs to him from the beginning, inasmuch as he founded it as genuine history, and the presence of his kingdom in history, the Church, is the symbolical re-presentation of this eschatological founding of history.13

What does our basic proposition tell us formally about the world? First: this world in which God acts is not merely a world of things, but always the world of man, the world into which man has already entered in understanding and action, for this action of God on the world is always concerned with man and hence with the world as man's.14 This "anthropocentric" view of the world is based on the fact that the world becomes

12. See J. B. Met?, "Gott vor uns," in Emit Blocb xu Ehrm, Frankfurt, 1965, pp.227-241.

13. In order to understand the power of Jesus Christ in history it is of the greatest importance to note this inner (transcendental) difference »nd the phenomenon of history itself. Thus the Incarnation is not a "principle" that is applied subsequently within history (to particular phenomena), but the inner principle of history itself: its coordinating point (Col. 1, 17), its final ground (Rev. 3, 14), the dynamic reason for everything, its "Alpha and Omega" (Rev. 1, 8), its "fulfillment" (Gal. 4, 4; Mk. 1, 15), its absolute concretion, in which alone what is earlier and what is later in time become genuine history. Only if the constant ground of history is itself conceived historically does the nature of history fully appear.

14. Therefore, the word "world" should never be taken simply in a cosmocentric, objectivistic sense; it must be conceived "anthropocentrically":

as a relationship to the world, as a view of the world. For more detail on this point see "Welt" in LThK, Vol. X, pp. 1021-1026.

visible as an historical entity because of God's free, original action on it.15 It would be Greek rather than Christian thinking to conceive of the reality of the world primarily as the fixed framework within which history takes place, in an indifferent and ultimately fatal return of the same things.16 Rather, the world comes into being through the historical actions that affect it. "Historical growth" or "having come about historically" is part of the description of its reality.17 In its being it is already the existential expression of the most various free historical origins, and precisely this fact accounts for the irreducible manysidedness of its reality.18 However, the definitive historical action of God

15. See also F. Goganen, Was 1st Chrlstentum?, Gottingen 1956, pp. 78ff.

16. See R. Bultmann, "Das Verstandnis von Welt und Mensch im Neuen Testament und im Griechentum," in Glauhen unit Verstehen, Vol. II, Tubingen, 1952, pp. 59-78; "Der Mensch und seine Welt nach dem Urteil der Bibel," in Glauben und Verstehen, Vol. Ill, Tubingen, 1962, pp. 151165. For exegetical literature on the subject, see, inter alia, the article on "Kosmos" in ThWhNT, Vol. Ill (2nd ed., 1950), pp. 867-896; R. Volkl, Christ und Welt nach dem Neuen Testament, Wiirzburg, 1961; H. Braun, "Die Indifferenz gegeniiber der Welt bei' Paulus und bei Epiktet," in Gesammelte Studien zun Neuen Testament und seiner Umwelt, Tubingen, 1962, pp. 159-167; H. Schlier, "The World and Man According to St. John's Gospel," in The Relevance of the New Testament, New York, 1968, pp. 156-171; W. Schrage, "Die Stellung zur Welt bei Paulus, Epiktet und in der Apokalyptik," in Zeitschrift fur Theologie und. Kirche 61 (1964), pp. 125-154; G. von Rad, "Aspekte alttestamentlichen Weltverstandnisses," in Evangelische Theologie 24 (1964), pp. 57-73; R. Schnackenburg, "Der Neue Mensch—Mitte chrisdichen Weltverstandnisses," in J. B. Metz (ed.), Weltverstandnis im Glauben, pp. 184-202; A. Deisslcr, "Die Bundespartncrschaft des Menschen mit Gon als Hinwendung zur Welt und zum Mitmenschen," in ibid., pp. 203-223; A. Vogtie, "Zeit und Zeituberlegenheit in biblischer Sicht," in ibid., pp. 224—253.

17. It is not a static entity, nor is it primarily a "condition," but more fundamentally a "process." History is not something that is subsequently added to an already constituted world-nature; it belongs, rather, to the ontological constitution of the world itself. That is why the world is also more "in itself" than can be stated of it in purely metaphysical reflexion.

18. Theological ly, that means that it is always already existentially preformed by the deed of Adam (in fact, even earlier by the sinful deed of the angels, which can never be regarded as totally unrelated to the world) and by Christ's saving deed for it. There are the various "gods" and "lords" of the history of the world (see 1 Cor. 8, 5).

for it (not in it!) reveals19 the world not only in its general historicity, but above all in its eschatological character. In an historical movement forward that it cannot itself know it has to attain an end that has already been promised to it. It must itself become what it already is through the deed of Jesus Christ:

the new age, "the new heaven and the new earth" (Rev. 21, 1), the one kingdom of God and of men.20

C. THE INNER DIALECTIC OF THE ACCEPTANCE OF THE WORLD THROUGH THE INCARNATION OF GOD

Let us turn now to the factual statement of our theological principle and recall again that we are endeavoring to gain from it a theological understanding of our secular world today. This principle states that in his Son, God acts in such a way in relation to the world that he accepts it in eschatological finality. What does this mean?21

19. "Reveal" has here an ontological significance: to be "revealed" means to emerge and pass into the actuality of a particular historical reality.

20. A formal historical account of the world is suggested here which allows us to evaluate, for example, the monistic account of the world given by dialectical materialism (formally) and overcome it in a Christian way. For the historical world understanding of Christianity, transeendence is not something that is absolutely beyond the world, but something that is still to come in history. Only that this unity of God and the world in the medium of history is not given by us, but by God himself (who alone in the freely communicated unity with us can also keep open the difference with us). See note 11.

21. Let us briefly consider here a point that is not made implicitly in the text: the final acceptance of the world by God in Jesus Christ also means that the "prince of this world" is already "cast out" (see Jn. 12, 31; 16, 11;

Lk. 10, 18; Col. 2, 15, etc.). His "power"—which must not be absolutized, as with the Gnostics, into an apotheosis of evil, nor levelled out into fragmented activity which can be grasped entirely, and hence avoided, in terms of this world, but must be seen more as an over-all existential idea (with historical origins), a universal negative term relating to our concrete historical area of freedom—is, seen in terms of the theology of history, already on the decline. It is by no means on the same level as God's saving action in Jesus Christ, which not merely takes place within history (that

Everything depends on the divine dialectic of this "acceptance" being seen properly and not misunderstood or taken monophysitically—a misunderstanding that has constantly new significance in the history of Christianity. In Jesus Christ, man and his world were accepted by the eternal Word, finally and irrevocably—in hypostatic union, as the Church and theology state. But what is true of this nature that Christ accepted is also fundamentally true of the acceptance of man and his world by God.22

This acceptance in no way makes the world of the human into something temporary, merely illusory and ultimately unreal. The human nature of Christ is not "lessened" by being taken up inro the divine Logos, made simply into a dead tool, a mere accessory, a gesture of God within the world, but given its hitherto unsuspected full human authenticity: Jesus Christ was fully man, indeed more human than any of us.

For God does not do violence to what he accepts. He does not suck it into himself, he does not divinize it theophanistically. God is not like the gods, he is not a usurper, a Moloch. God's divinity consists in the fact that he does not remove the difference between himself and what is other, but rather accepts the other precisely as different from himself. He is able, and wants, to accept it precisely in what distinguishes it from himself, in its non-divinity, in its humanity and worldliness, and only because he is able to do this, has he been happy to "create" a world and

includes it alongside other forces within history), but has eschatologically founded the historicity of history. See H. Schlier, loc. cit.

22. We see here—in an abbreviated form—the human nature that Christ accepted as an expression of the fundamental acceptance of man and his world. If we are theologically correct in our conception of this acceptance of Christ's human nature by the Logos, so that we follow through by holding that the divine Logos remains for all eternity, man, ?. man of this world, we shall be in agreement with our extrapolation of the Christological principle to the basic relationship between God and world. In his "Spirit," in which the incarnate Logos remains with us, this permanent and irrevocable acceptance of the world of man is guaranteed—without this being a formal pre-definition of the particular salvation destiny of the individual.

finally "accept" it wholly in his eternal word. Acceptance by God is therefore more fundamentally being made free to be one's self, to have the authentic, independent being of the non-divine. God's truth "makes free" (see Jn. 8, 32); acceptance of him makes the other free to be uniquely himself. The majesty of the freedom he bestows is that he is the one who truly lets things be what they are. He is not in competition with, but the "guarantor" of the world. The world's specific gravity increases in the advent of God. He does not put out the light of the non-divine, but makes it shine more brightly—ultimately to his greatest honor.23

When thinking all of this through logically, we are always misled by the fact that we take our models for the ontological understanding of the acceptance of the world by God more from the sphere of nature than from that of existence.24 But we must consider what happens in this acceptance in terms of specifically human attitudes. Let us think of the relation between two people in friendship. The more deeply one is "accepted" by the other and is "taken into" his own existence, the more he discovers himself, the more radically he is made free for his own possibilities. "Being accepted" and "independence" are not here opposed but correspond to one another, intensifying each other sympathetically. An accepted world only becomes the world in its truest worldly possibilities, not in spite of, but because of the fact that God had taken it lovingly into his inter-trinitarian sphere of life. Finally, as the model of human friendship shows us again:

through this liberating acceptance of the world the deepest form of its belonging to God is made possible, just as the liberated slave can belong more radically to his former master as a free

23. Just as the true greatness and freedom of a man is ultimately revealed in his capacity to let them be themselves, so that they do not grow pale, diminish and disappear beside him, but emerge with him in their original, hardly suspected radiance, finding their way to their own being.

24. On the task of conceiving the reality of revelation primarily in ("anthropocentric") categories of existence and not in ("cosmocentric") categories of nature, see J. B. Mett, Christliche Anthropozentrik. Zur Dentform des Thomas van Aquin, Munich, 1962, pp. 108-115.

friend and be called upon in far fuller and more fundamental ways.26

God, I have said, calls us to our own being when he calls us to himself. But in the depths of the creature's own being there is the infinite distance from God. But this distance is not preserved by the creature itself, but by God. For God remains himself in the acceptance of the creature and is himself the sole reason for the difference from himself.26 When he approaches, the distance and difference from him are not wiped out (inconfuse: Den2inger 302), but created and made visible. What he accepts comes to itself precisely in its creatureliness and its non-divinity. Ipsa assumptione creatur, St. Augustine says profoundly of the humanity of Christ:27 in and through being accepted by the divine Logos did it become real precisely as a creature, as what is nondivine. Precisely because God accepts the non-divine does he appear above it as the transcendent creature. Through his descent into the world God becomes visible in his inexpressible sublimity over it, in his radical transcendence as the creator. The descent and the transcendence of God grow in their mutual relationship. Christianity, which preaches the acceptance of the world through the incarnation of the eternal Word, proclaims God also with all emphasis and in unique radicality to be the transcendent creator of the world, as the God semper major, who "dwells in unapproachable light" (1 Tim. 6, 16), and at the same time proclaims the world to be the non-divine creation of his hands. For Christianity, the understanding of the creacureliness of the world is already within the context of the understanding of the world in

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present—"merely moral" ones. See J. B. Men, loc. at., p. 87.

26. See К. Rahner, "Current Problems in Christology," in Theological Investigations, Vol. I, pp. 148-200; Vol. IV, pp. 105ff.

27. St. Augustine, Contra sermonem Arianorum 8, 6: PL 42, 688. See for the Chfistological significance of this axiom F. Malmberg, Ober den Gottmenschen, Freiburg, I960, pp. 38ff.

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terms of salvation history. The reality of the world as creation is always mediated through the historical saving reality of the world.28 But in this mediation through salvation history our understanding of the creatureliness (and finitude) of the world is not levelled out, but made more acute and pure. Through the world's being accepted in Jesus Christ it does noc become a "piece" of God, nor God a "sector" of the universe within the world; but through it and in it the world appears for the first time as wholly worldly and God as wholly divine. The world does not become invisible in its divinity, but precisely in its nondivinity or in its worldliness (how else?), in which alone God makes it his (as what is radically different from him), and reigns throughout it in his "Spirit." If we consistently remember this point, if we consistently note the inner dialectic in the event of the acceptance of the world, we shall not regard the world view suggested here as that inadequate Incarnational optimism which maintains that the world has been immediately "divinized" by the Incarnation of God and interprets salvation history itself as the growing divinization of the world.

There is, however, another important characteristic about this worldliness of the world which has come into its own and is held by God in its difference from him, and again we can see it

28. What we encounter primarily and immediately in the New Testament is not God or the transcendent creator of the world, and not the world in its creaturely dependence on him, but God as the father of our Lord Jesus Christ and the world as what he is concerned with in salvation history. The theological understanding of creation, the theological idea of creatureliness (or finitude) is already in a context of (salvation) history. In this connection let us also point to the teaching, which can certainly be argued from « Cttholic point or Tirw, that God did not let the infralapiariin ff»\\f-n) order cf narare be tottl'.r a'^tnKtxi from him became the tin which disturbed this order still remains held by his continuing saving will in Jesus Christ, so that the whole infralapsarian state of nature and of creation appears finally theologically as the expression of the grace of God's will in salvation history. See H. Kiing, "Chrisrozentrik," in LThK, Vol. II, pp. 1169-1174. See esp. idem, Justification, New York, 1964; and also K. Rahner, "Questions of Controversial Theology on Justification," in Theological liivevn^atinns. Vol. IV,. do. Isq-ZlA.. eso. 2.1-QflL

from the example of Christ. By itself—seen as perfected both abstractly and eschatologically—the world which has come into its own is conceivable entirely as a pure, absolutely transparent appearance of the self-communication of God; theologically, as a transfigured world which already hands itself over in its perfection to God, as the perfect "kingdom of God." All of this would mean the perfection of the world's own permanent reality also, not its disappearance into God (as with Christ who was resurrected and glorified in his permanent humanity).

But God has not accepted the world in this way, as the story of Christ shows. Christ entered into the flesh of sin, he became open to suffering; his "integrity" (as the power to give the whole of his being to the obedient love of God) is simultaneously his openness to suffering: his exposure to the fate which came upon him from outside, which is not simply summoned "from within"; a death to which he is not reconciled from the beginning as his own, but is the chalice that he asks to pass from him;

temptation that must be answered by obedience, that is, by accepting the contradictory. This "passivity" has a development within him. It becomes more and more acute, until the Father, who is God, abandons him, until the powers who are opposed to God plunge the Lord of Glory into the absurdity of death. The "integrity" of Christ does not preserve him from the abyss of human suffering and human paradox, bur is precisely the most acute possibility of undergoing it more radically, fully, and without compromise than we "concupiscent" men, whose concupiscence is always at the same time also the a priori covering over of the radicality of the fact that our existence is open to suffering. Thus in his humanity he accepts the world in that "infralapsarian" distance from God which is what is intended in this acceptance, but is not simply identical with that unique being of the world come into its own that is realized in a supreme degree in the acceptance of the world by God, but which marks the concrete historical starting point and way of this

divine acceptance of the world. It is not the place here to ask more exactly why he accepted the world in the "form of a servant" (see Phil. 2, 6-11). This form is an ultimate that we must accept as the mode of God's loving action that is appropriate to him, because basically it would be truer to say that sin was permitted because God willed the historical course of this love than simply to say that this way was taken because only in this way could the guilt be overcome. The same thing is true of the world altogether. Whether the process is to be conceived in infralapsarian or supralapsarian terms (since the two aspects cannot be properly separated by us), it is given its own unique independent being in such a way that it must start its historical journey towards the perfection of acceptance by God from a point that means openness to suffering and holds the world in that ambivalence of an historical phenomenon that does not yet show the world as a completely integrated and transparent "opus operatum" of this acceptance. It constantly begins again its course in that ambiguity which is peculiar to profane history as such, through and in which it can also be, and always is, the objectivication of the rejection of the acceptance by God on the part of angels and men.

But this happens precisely in order that the boundless absolute love of God for the world can have that unique characteristic that we are able to see originally and unambiguously alone in the crucified Christ.

We could say much more about this unique independent being of the world, which God places in Christ. It is empirically not possible to distinguish clearly between the fundamentally constant and growing unique independent being of the world (in contrast to theopanism) and this quality of the world being placed in this situation of openness to suffering and concupiscence, of historical ambivalence (or the place of the "vain" love of God), because this would remove the place of God's love for the world in the crucified Christ and the place

of decision. The historical path of this world beneath the power of its acceptance by God runs in two apparently opposite directions. One is the overcoming of this distance of the world from God in its openness to suffering and concupiscence (because it really is accepted by God, and this acceptance does not relate only to what is not yet realized, but is already the eschatological event in the sense of a "productive" eschatology that is realizing itself. But the direction of this movement is then absolutely simultaneously (mortem moriendo destruxit) the event, taking place ever more radically, of this distancing of the world from God in openness to suffering and concupiscence. Through both there is realized the history of the process of the world's being given its eternal, valid, unique reality. The crucial thing is that these aspects of the one history of the world can never be properly distinguished from one another by man, who still stands within this history. But he is called to see in the experience of his history and its course through time, all these aspects as an historical event.29

(1) The Truth of the Incarnation as the Framework of a Christian Understanding of the World

This multifarious truth of the event of Christ, according to which the Incarnation of God makes the flesh appear wholly as "flesh," as earth, as secular world, and God appear wholly as God in his transcendent superiority to the world, now becomes operative in the economy of the movement of history which stands beneath the "law of Christ" (I Cor. 9, 21); it becomes the framework of a genuinely Christian view of the world.30 For all the

29. H. U. von Balthasar, Das Game im fragment, Einsiedein, 1963.

30. In the following we are pursuing the basic theme that we are concerned with: that the acceptance of the world by God himself implies a positive and growing secularity of the world »s the condition of its.

future of the world is derived from the hour of Christ (see 1 Cor. 10, 11; Eph. 1, 10; 1 Pet. 4, 7).31 As it moves forward, the world passes ever more deeply into its historical origin and places itself more and more seriously beneath the star and the law of its beginning, which is: acceptance by God in Jesus Christ. It is true that to the degree in which this beginning, this origin, is not available to us and visible within history, so the future of the world that follows historically from this origin also remains genuinely hidden from us. It remains the future of the world that is, in a true sense, still to come and cannot be controlled, the future in which the power of its origin comes upon it as an Advent.

But now the "world"—seen from a Christian point of view— is always related to man, it is always the attitude of man to the world, his understanding of it. Hence a statement by the theology, of history about the world is primarily and concretely a statement about its understanding of this world. That is why we are able to say that whether it can or wants to accept it or not, this understanding of the world lives from the historical power of the framework for the world given in Christ and lives from his Spirit, the "Spirit of Christ" (1 Cor. 2, 16), which no longer reveals anything of a radically new nature, but draws everything from what is of Christ (see Jn. 16, 24), so that in this "Spirit" and its working32 the Christ event objectifies itself and "represents" itself within its original, underivable world framework.33

31. See J. B. Metz, "Die 'Stunde' Chrisri," loc. tit., pp. 9-14.

32. This "Spirit of Christ" is the true "objective spirit" of history, which admittedly cannot be grasped purely intellectually, but can only be received in a genuinely historical decision ("faith").

33. We cannot here go further into the specific relation between cause and effect which is assumed here, according to which the cause (which has been an historical event) is such by "representing" (in both meanings of the word) itself in what is (historically) to be given a cause.

(2) The Historical Understanding of the World in Relation to the Original Christian View

In order to estimate the epoch-making importance of the view of the world that was opened up to us in the Christ event, we have only to remember that conception of the world within which the Christian Gospel had to go out and be articulated:

that of the Greeks. For the Greeks, the world had always had a numinous side; there was always the dark beginning of God himself; all their horizons merged into a twilight of the gods. This view never allowed the world to become wholly secular because it never let God become wholly divine. As we know, the Greek view of the world lacked any sense of God as a transcendent creator. God was conceived of more as a world principle, as a kind of cosmic reason and cosmic law, as the immanent regulating principle of the universe: the divine was itself an element of their picture of the world.34 But precisely this immediate divinity of the world, this religious, mystical veiling, the apotheosis of nature and a direct piety based on it, are not Christian but pagan. Only the heathen, says Paul, have "many 'gods' and many 'lords'—yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and for whom we exist" (1 Cor. 8, 5-6), the transcendent God, who does not appear within the world as God, but lets the world be the world. Hence Christianity, as it understood more and more from its own origins, had to appear not as a growing divinization, but precisely as an increasing de-divinization and, in this sense, profanization of the world, dispelling magic and myth! Thus it is not by chance that with uncanny instinct the Christians were branded by the heathens, dominated by the Greek conception of the world, as

?4. It remains to be noted that the radical devaluing of the world in late Greek Gnosticism is ultimately itself again the documentation of a religious mystification and not of a pure secularization of the world: see H. Jonai, Gnosis und spdfantiker Geist, Vol. I, Gottingen, 1954, p. 150; also F. Gogarten, Verhangnis und Hoffnung der Neuzeit, p. 23.

the real and dangerous d-theoi, "atheists," who abandon the world to godlessness.31' For a long time the classical view of the world persisted within the Western Christian world. Today it must be admitted that even the "classical" Middle Ages had a strong general quality of the pre-Christian world view about them and were dominated by a straightforward "divinism" (Y. Congar). Only because we tacitly made this impure medieval world view the model of the Christian concept of the world does the modern secularization of the world cause us religious difficulty.

In truth, however, a genuinely Christian impulse is working itself out historically in this modern process of an increased secularization of the world. We have only to judge this universal process of secularization and the "cosmic atheism" that this entails within the framework of the Christological principle we have developed above to see that this process is in its essence —though admittedly only here—not directed against a Christian understanding of the world but against a straightforward cosmic divinism, so much so that this process re-enacts within history what has taken place in the Christ event regarding our relation to the world.36

With the Father's acceptance of the world in Jesus Christ we have the radical and original setting-free of the world, its own authentic being, its own clear, non-divine reality. This process operates in history on the basis of the modern secularization of the world. The world is now universally given over to what the Incarnation bestows upon it in a supreme way: secularity. The historical course of this process is many-layered and by no means easy to give an account of. It is not free of wrong turns and the

35. It could be shown that it was an unchristian conception of the world that was chiefly behind the Christological heresies of the early Church.

36. F. Gogarten, in his important book Verhangnis und Hoffnung der Neuzeit, comes to a similar reappraisal of the modern process of secularization—though from a different theological perspective. See H. Liibbe, op. at., pp. 117-126.

perversities of a hybrid secularism.37 As new heights in the understanding of the world are attained, the abysses of possible error and corruption become deeper, and the danger of falling into them becomes greater. The reservations and protests of the Church against this modern passage of the world into its own worldliness must be seen against the background of these concrete dangers and aberrations. But here we are concerned with the course of this development as such. If we see it in the light of our principle, then it cannot be simply dismissed as mere secularization in the sense of an undialectical expression of the protesting emancipation of the world from the ultimate grasp of God and its eschatological manifestation, the Church. Rather, it must be seen precisely as the sign of the world being liberated and receiving its secularity from the hand of God. Of course, we do not and could not mean that modern secularization and the view of the world which operates within it is the pure, innocent expression of that secularization of the world given by the Christ event.

Thus the separating out of the imperium from the sacerdotium, which began in the late Middle Ages, the movement in which the world and its institutions, especially the state, made itself independent and distinct from the Church, must be seen as something fundamentally positive, from a Christian point of view. The state now appears ho longer, as in the ancient world, as a sacred institution, but as a secular creation of God. It is divested of its direct and unquestioned numinousness and sacrality by Christianity, which proclaims itself to be the true coordinating point of all religious concerns of man, and the advocate of the secular world given its own

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