Rahner's Score

Extract

With the appearance of its eighteenth and nineteenth volumes, the English translation of Karl Rahner’s Schriften zur Theologie now stands complete in a score of volumes (I reviewed the twentieth, which appeared in 1981, in February last year). Completion was timed for Rahner’s eightieth birthday, which was on 5 March.

Some of the essays refer in footnotes to subsequent papers, so a supplementary collection will eventually (even soon) be necessary. The publishers are to be congratulated on staying the course. The translators have sometimes nodded, and some have occasionally been defeated by Rahner’s tortuous sentences and idiosyncratic jargon (it has never been kept uniform). It is pleasant to record that the last three in the series (two volumes of the German edition) have been undertaken by Edward Quinn: needless to say, they reach the standard set by Cornelius Ernst in his pioneering version of the first volume (1961).