One of the topics to which Karl Rahner devoted a good deal of thought is what he called ‘searching Christology’. He did not think that Jesus Christ comes to human beings as a ‘bolt out of the blue’, so to speak, as an event for which they are totally unprepared; rather, Jesus the Christ comes to a human being who is open, even disposed, to recognize his significance, who is already—indeed always—a being who is searching for the Christ. In this article I am outlining Rahner’s searching christology, for I do not think it has received the attention it deserves, and then I am offering some of my own comments and critical reflections on the topic.

For Rahner, one of the things which precedes the human acceptance of Jesus Christ as God’s revelation is a human search in which, as we shall see, human beings are enough aware of what they are looking for to be able to recognize it when they find it. It is the detailing of what human beings are searching for that interests him.

He attempts to verbalize (albeit in the Christian terms with which he is most familiar) what he takes to be universal human experience. As humans, according to Rahner, we are beings of transcendence who reach out beyond ourselves toward others and ultimately toward the one beyond all limits, the one whom Christians call God (even if we do not always articulate that explicitly).