Our Reliance Isn’t on a God Who Blesses Weapons: Karl Rahner’s Nuclear Weapons and the Christian
Probably the terms most commonly associated with twentieth-century German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner (1904–1984) are “anonymous Christian,” and then perhaps, “supernatural existential” and “transcendental Thomism.” These jargony terms have come to serve as metonyms for his theology, and proof that Rahner’s writing is abstract and difficult. Similarly, when Rahner is depicted, by supporters and critics alike, as a leader among the “progressive” wing of the church coming out of Vatican II, this too can discourage engagement with his writing. Indeed, we have noticed over the past several years that seminarians and young Catholics with some measure of theological education, especially if they have received this in more traditionalist or conservative environments, have been advised against studying Rahner’s theology, usually because of one or all of the factors that we have just reviewed.
On all these counts, Rahner has been misunderstood, and we lament that young people are being dissuaded from reading him. When they do encounter his texts (as they do in both of our classrooms), they find in him much more, and much else, than mischaracterizations allow. They find in him a priest with a deeply Christic spirituality, which wonders at the greatness of God. They discover in Rahner, if they are permitted, a man devoted to Jesus’s mother, Mary, the God-bearer, the most fully redeemed human person (as he liked to call her). They meet in Rahner a Christian smitten by Jesus’s Sacred Heart—a devotion that suffused Rahner’s life, and which has new currency today, after Pope Francis’s publication of Dilexit Nos, which footnotes Rahner. But what strikes them most—again, if they have the right guides—is how Rahner’s spirituality and devotion lead him to discipleship: they commit him to enduring and active love for the church founded by Jesus Christ.
The vast majority of Rahner’s writings—approaching 5,000 pieces spread over sixty years—and the character of his career as a professor, teacher, and researcher, aim to serve the needs of Christ’s Church, as this Church, in turn, works to bring Christ’s life to the world. In an extensive autobiographical interview late in his life, Rahner expressed succinctly what underpinned his theology:
Ultimately my theological work was really not motivated by scholarship and erudition as such, but by pastoral concerns . . . I have always chosen, and in fact had to choose, tasks and themes that somehow dealt with the actual moment, with the questions of our day . . . A large proportion of my theological output is made up of individual essays on the most diverse subjects, prompted as they certainly were, by the concrete conditions of the time, the Church, and pastoral need.[1]
Rahner’s claim that his essays focused “on the most diverse subjects” is surely no exaggeration. In fact, his reach ranges from considering the theological implications of such “everyday things” as sitting down, laughing, and eating, to tracing the encounter with grace in the manifold stages and vicissitudes of human life—childhood and old age; the possibility of courage in the face of illness, and the call to live with “boldness” (the notion of parresia that was also central to the spirituality of Pope Francis).
While Rahner’s writing is attuned to the pilgrimage of each individual Christian disciple, it is also alert to the communal dimension of Christian faith, to the experience of the Church in the world. Whether addressing the relationship between science and faith, including the emergence of “genetic manipulation,” the contribution of art to human flourishing, or the Church’s responsibility for the “humanization” of the world, Rahner sought to articulate the dynamics of Christian hope amid the ever-present temptation to pessimism in the complexity and darkness of life in the modern world.
Our world today, as with Rahner’s world in the middle of the twentieth century, is marked by widespread violence and, this is crucial, nuclear proliferation. Whereas this phenomenon had its genesis during the years that Rahner hit his intellectual prime, in our day, we are starting to see a reinvigoration of nuclear arms races. The current U.S. administration has pledged to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal, Russia appears primed for nuclear rearmament, China is expanding its program, and several other countries are threatening to increase production or to begin nuclear programs. A recent commentary by a researcher at RAND argues that the Cold War is being revived. Though it may initially seem strange to support our contentions about Rahner’s spirituality and theology by publishing an essay of his on nuclear weapons, we hope that this brief statement of context makes sense of the choice.
Rahner’s essay, “Nuclear Weapons and the Christian” (1982), coauthored with his nephew Thomas Cremer, is a prime example of Rahner’s concern for the Church and the world.[2] Cremer, a medical doctor who became a prominent professor of human genetics, was involved in the peace movement in the then-West Germany and a group called “Christians Against Nuclear Armament.” Through an active correspondence and personal conversations, Cremer persuaded his uncle to closely attend to the issue of nuclear weapons and to weigh in on the issue. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was widespread debate, protest, and occasional social unrest in West Germany, as NATO, to which West Germany belonged, and the Soviet Union escalated their arms race. Since Cremer and Rahner regarded the tensions surrounding the arms race to be of vital concern to the church, they believed that it was imperative for Catholic intellectuals to respond—hence their co-authoring of this essay.
The essay first appeared in an edited volume titled Abrüstung—christlich zu vertreten? (Disarmament: Justified from a Christian Perspective?). Clearly, a reader can tell from this essay, Rahner and Cremer believe that Christian faith not only justifies disarmament, but requires it. “Nuclear Weapons and the Christian” was republished in the final volume of Rahner’s Schriften zur Theologie (Theological Investigations), the year of his death. We have recently reprinted it as part of a collection of Rahner’s spiritual writings, because we deem that it indicates the sort of peaceful discipleship that his spirituality entailed.
We have chosen to republish in Church Life Journal the central portion of the essay, in which Rahner and Cremer defend a “pacifist” position of unilateral disarmament. Two sections precede our selection. The first reexamines just war teaching in conjunction with conscience formation, which has been rendered more complicated than ever with distinctively modern threats of total war. The second considers the epistemic uncertainties involved in staking out a definite position with regard to nuclear armament.
Having acknowledged the controversies and uncertainties, Rahner and Cremer, nevertheless, take a definitive position against nuclear armament, doing so as a matter of Christian conviction. Rahner and Cremer recognize that not all Christians will be called to the “pacifist” position. They think it necessary, however, to articulate such a position, and for at least some Christians to adopt it. The message of God’s Kingdom that Jesus proclaimed in the Sermon on the Mount requires it. So too does Jesus’s saving death on the cross.
The final two sections, after our selection, argue explicitly for unilateral disarmament, even when the prospect is high that “the other side” will not do the same. Rahner and Cremer make their case by focusing on the theme of conversion: attitudes must change, and sins be left behind. They write, “We are for disarmament in explicit conjunction with a change of consciousness among ourselves which will make us attach a higher priority to the misery of several hundred million people living in absolute poverty than to our own need of security.”[3] The burden of proof against a pacifist position lies on the powerful. How, Rahner and Cremer conclude, can powerful people justify putting millions of lives, especially those of the powerless, at risk by proliferating nuclear arms?
The key phrase from the essay is this: “our reliance is not on a God who blesses weapons.” We offer this selection from Rahner in the hope that Christians everywhere, and all people of good will, may recognize the truth of this statement. From Rahner’s Christic, Marian, Mystery-of-God-smitten spirituality, we learn that, properly speaking, we rely on a God who blesses nonviolently-secured peace.
[1] Karl Rahner, I Remember: An Autobiographical Interview with Meinold Krauss (London: SCM, 1984), 22.
[2] In our explanation, we rely on Andreas R. Batlogg, SJ, “Editionsbericht” in Karl Rahner, Christentum in Gesellschaft: Schriften zur Pastoral, zur Jugend, und zur christlichen Weltgestaltung, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 28, ed. Andreas R. Batlogg and Walter Schmolly (Freiburg: Herder, 2010), lvi–lvii. Thank you to Fr. Batlogg for his research on this topic, and to Prof. Albert Raffelt for answering our questions about Rahner and Cremer.
[3] Karl Rahner, Spiritual Theology, ed. Richard Lennan and Peter Joseph Fritz (New York: Paulist Press, 2025), 420.
