140 Theology 118(2)

Peter Joseph Fritz, Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics, The Catholic University
of America Press: Washington, D.C., 2014; 312 pp.: 9780813225937, £40.95/$49.95
(hbk)
Peter Joseph Fritz offers a challenging interpretation and robust defence of the
theology of Karl Rahner, by demonstrating the multiple ways in which Rahner’s
aesthetics both converges with and diverges from that of Martin Heidegger.
Confidently opposing Rahner’s critics on a wide variety of issues, Fritz sets out
to overturn a great many aspects of the conventional reading of Rahner, defending
him, for example, against the charge of modern subjectivism and, more unusually,
asserting the apocalyptic nature of his theology.
Fritz argues that Rahner uses insights taken from Heidegger, specifically
Heidegger’s lectures on the poetry of Friedrich Hölderein, to develop his own
theological aesthetics. Aesthetics, ‘the human subject’s apprehension and judge-
ment of beauty’ (p. 14), is further defined, by Fritz, as ‘an account of the mani-
festation of being . . . If ontology asks what being is, aesthetics asks how being
manifests itself’ (p. 11). For Rahner, being is revealed first and foremost through
Jesus Christ.
What is distinctive about Rahner’s theological aesthetic is the heightened index
of the sublime within it, beginning with Spirit in the World (1968). For Fritz, the
ethos of Catholicism is the Catholic sublime as it comes to light in Rahner’s works.
The sublime uncovers the inadequacy of human subjectivity for representing
nature; it brings to the fore the fact that being’s manifestation is broader than
the human capacity to receive and to contain it. Rahner converges with
Heidegger, says Fritz, in recalling thinking and language to the mystery that sus-
tains them. He diverges from Heidegger, who acknowledges only a finite mystery.
For Rahner the mystery is infinite and actively self-giving.
Heidegger, says Fritz, predicts devastation with the end of the domination of
metaphysics: ‘sublimity [for Heidegger] lies in the thrill of standing by while being
abandons beings’ (p. 203). Rahner resists Heidegger with the Vorgriff, the antici-
patory sense of being as such, and with Jesus, whose life was raised, not annihi-
lated, by the incomprehensible mystery. The formlessness of being proves
destructive in Heidegger; in Rahner it proves redemptive.
Interestingly Fritz characterizes Rahner’s theology of history as apocalyptic.
He attributes Rahner’s apparent reticence with regard to apocalyptic theologies
to his rejection of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s apocalypticism, described by Fritz as
‘pleromatic’, a classification borrowed from Cyril O’Regan. According to Fritz,
while Rahner exercises much more eidetic reserve, and calls into question
Balthasar’s metanarrative, this is not to say that Rahner empties his theology
of apocalyptic content. Rahner does not provide a detailed vision of the ‘new
earth’, indeed Fritz is scathing about Rahner’s detractors, who seek a lost clarity.
Yet when Rahner’s statements about God as absolute future are viewed in the light
of the book of Revelation the apocalyptic character of this theology becomes
evident.

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Book Reviews 141

Fritz abhors Heidegger’s invented apocalypse, at its most unsightly when

Heidegger writes of evil. Unwilling to recognize evil as evil, Heidegger determines
that apocalyptic catastrophes derive from the callousness of being, a callousness
which must be affirmed. Rahner’s Catholic sublime envisions the cross as the axis
of history, and the absolute future as God.

Anne Inman
St Mary’s University, London

Margaret Barker, King of the Jews: Temple Theology in John’s Gospel, SPCK:
London, 2014; 648 pp.: 9780281069675, £50.00 (pbk)
Some four decades or so ago Thomas Kuhn, in his book The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (1962), offered an account of the nature of disciplinary development.
There is ‘ordinary science’, he argued: the state of a discipline in relative consensus.
Every now and then a moment of ‘revolutionary science’ occurs, in which a novel
proposal for organizing the field emerges. The litmus test of such a proposal lies in
its capacity to account for the available data with completeness and elegance. These
qualities must, of course, be tested, contested and demonstrated.
Such is the task attempted by Margaret Barker in relation to John’s Gospel. She
first proposed Temple Theology as an organizing principle for the history of the
religion of Ancient Israel and Early Christianity in her 1987 work, The Older
Testament. Her earlier work was ambitious and consensus-challenging, subsequent
publications having attended to demonstrating the explanatory power of her thesis
across the field – essentially, to precipitating a revolution. Her principal claims are
that (1) the religion of the First Temple is discontinuous from that of the Moses/
Torah theology that came to dominate the Second Temple period, but that
(2) these earlier traditions were preserved in various forms, including that of
secret traditions in Early Christianity. She brings these ideas to bear upon concepts
such as Messiahship, incarnation and salvation in novel and provocative ways.
The volume commences with a brief account of some of the evidence of hermetic
and esoteric ideas in the Early Christian tradition, in sectarian Judaisms, and in
elements of early Gnostic thought (pp. 1–19). This forms the basis of the author’s
reconstruction of the theological situation ‘of which’ (p. 1) the evangelist wrote: a
social world in which First-Temple ideas jostled for space alongside newer forms of
‘Hebrew’ thought (pp. 2–3). Barker’s argument in Part 1 of the work serves as an
introduction and overview of what follows. She relates Temple Theology to nodal
Johannine ideas such as Ioudaios (‘Jew/Judaean’, pp. 23–33), the identity and place
of Moses (pp. 34–61), and the significance of the monarch (pp. 62–144), before
moving on to a chapter-by-chapter detailed account of their significance in John in
Part 2 of the work (pp. 147–606).
By way of a brief evaluation, it is clear that if Barker is correct in her overall
religious-historical reconstruction, then her argument has paradigm-shifting

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