"A Crossroad book."

Translation of Grundkurs des Glaubens.

General Preliminary Reflection -- Preliminary Remarks on Methodology -- Some Basic Epistemological Problems -- The Hearer of the Message -- The Interlocking of Philosophy and Theology -- Man as Person and Subject -- Man as Transcendent Being -- Man as Responsible and Free -- The Question of Personal Existence as a Question of Salvation -- Man as Dependent -- Man in the Presence of Absolute Mystery -- Meditation on the Word "God" -- The Knowledge of God -- God as Person -- Man's Relation to His Transcendent Ground: Creatureliness -- Finding God in the World -- Man as a Being Threatened Radically by Guilt -- The Topic and Its Difficulties -- Man's Freedom and Responsibility -- The Possibility of a Decision against God -- "Original Sin" -- Man as the Event of God's Free and Forgiving Self-Communication -- Preliminary Remarks -- What Does the "Self-Communication of God" Mean? -- The Offer of Self-Communication as "Supernatural Existential" -- Towards an Understanding of the Doctrine of the Trinity -- The History of Salvation and Revelation -- Preliminary Reflections on the Problem -- The Historical Mediation of Transcendentality and Transcendence -- The History of Salvation and Revelation as Coextensive with the Whole of World History -- On the Relation and SPecial, Categorical Revelation -- On the Structure of the Actual History of Revelation -- A Summary of the Notion of Revelation -- Jesus Christ -- Christology within an Evolutionary View of the World -- On the Phenomenology of Our Relationship to Jesus Christ -- Transcendental Christology -- What Does It Mean to Say: "God Became Man"? -- On the Theological Understanding of the History of the Life and Death of Jesus of Nazareth -- The Content, Permanent Validity and Limits of Classical Christology and Soteriology -- On the Question of New Approaches to Orthodox Christology -- The Personal Relationship of a Christian to Jesus Christ -- Jesus Christ in Non-Christian Religions -- Christianity as Church -- Introduction -- The Church as Founded by Jesus Christ -- The Church in the New Testament -- Fundamentals of the Ecclesial Nature of Christianity -- An Indirect Method for SHowing the Legitimacy of the Catholic Church as the Church of Christ -- Scripture as the Church's Book -- On the Church's Teaching Office -- The Christian in the Life -- The Sacramental Life -- Eschatology -- Presuppositions for Understanding Eschatology -- The One Eschatology as Individual Eschatology -- The One Eschatology as Collective Eschatology -- Epilogue: Brief Creedal Statements

MOre than any other of Karl Rahner's works, his Foundations of Christian Faith has the character of a theological testament: a a tightly unified summary of Christianity as he has come to understand it over the past forty years. It is a systematic and comprehensive answer to the questions: "What is a Christian, and why can one live a Christian existence today with intellectual honesty?" Conceived as a "Foundational course of faith," this book seeks to demonstrate the instrict homogeneity of all dogma. Starting from the premise that a Christian already lives and knows what Christianity is before he or she reflects upon it, Rahner tries to conceptualize what we are prior to this act of reflection, that is, the already lived and known experience of Christian faith. Because of his throughgoing insistence that theology must always and only talk about the depths of human existence, Rahner strives for and achieves the anthropocentric anchoring of all theological statements. Theology's subject matter is the totality of the human being: the full human person as the living question which only God can answer. In this brilliant one-volume compendium Karl Rahner, the encyclopedic theologian, has created a holistic presentation of the faith which serves to show how theology, anthropology, christology and ecclesiology are fundamentally one. Through his use of transcendental method he has credibly grounded the essentials of Christianity within grounded the essentials of Christianity within the horizons of contemporary human selfin the horizons of contemporary human self understanding. For generations to come this work will serve not only as an epitome of Christian faith, but as the definitive statement and standard exposition of Rahner's own thought as well.