Karl Rahner Quotes

When man is with God in awe and love, then he is praying.

~ Karl Rahner

Meditating on the nature and dignity of prayer can cause saying at least one thing to God: Lord, teach us to pray!

~ Karl Rahner

In the days ahead, you will either be a mystic (one who has experienced God for real) or nothing at all.

~ Karl Rahner

The dead are silent because they live, just as we chatter so loudly to try to make ourselves forget that we are dying. Their silence is really their call to me, the assurance of their immortal love for me.

~ Karl Rahner

The task of the theologian is to explain everything through God, and to explain God as unexplainable.

~ Karl Rahner

For a Catholic understanding of the faith there is no reason why the basic concern of Evangelical Christianity as it comes to expression in the three “only's” should have no place in the Catholic Church. Accepted as basic and ultimate formulas of Christianity, they do not have to lead a person out of the Catholic Church. . . . They can call the attention of the Catholic church again and again to the fact that grace alone and faith alone really are what saves, and that with all our maneuvering through the history of dogma and the teaching office, we Catholic Christians must find our way back to the sources again and again, back to the primary origins of Holy Scripture and all the more so of the Holy Spirit.

~ Karl Rahner

Every year we celebrate the holy season of Advent, O God. Every year we pray those beautiful prayers of longing and waiting, and sing those lovely songs of hope and promise.

~ Karl Rahner

How often I have found that we grow to maturity not by doing what we like, but by doing what we should. How true it is that not every 'should' is a compulsion, and not every 'like' is a high morality and true freedom.

~ Karl Rahner

The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.

~ Karl Rahner