RAHNER AND HARTSHORNE ON DEATH AND ETERNAL LIFE

J. Norman King and Barry L. Whitney

ABSTRACT

While the writings of Rahner and Hartshorne are based upon very different metaphysical foundations, the purpose of this article is to bring to light some of the important similarities (and to clarify some of the significant differences) with respect to their understandings of death and eternal life. We seek to contribute some new insights to the important ongoing dialogue between process theists and theologians rooted in the Thomistic tradition.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the respective understand­ings of death and eternal life in the thought of Karl Rahner and Charles Hartshorne. At first sight, Hartshorne seems to reject totally the tradi­tional Christian view of life beyond death, while Rahner appears simply to reaffirm this belief. On closer examination, however, we wish to show that Hartshorne's thought can be understood as an attempt to reinterpret what he sees as the essential issue in the tradition, and that Rahner's approach is itself a transformation ofthat tradition. In effect, both writers are concerned to move beyond what they regard as lacking or inadequate in the common or conventional religious views.

We wish to show that Rahner and Hartshorne hold strikingly similar views on this question (as indeed they do on others1), a fact which

*For an analysis of the similarities and differences between Rahner and Hartshorne on the question of divine immutability, see J. Norman King and Barry L. Whitney, "Rahner and Hartshorne on Divine Immutability," international Philosophical Quarterly 22 (1982), 195-209. Please note that since writing that article, we have become sensitive to the issue of inclusive language. In the present article, references to God avoid exclusively male language. Since, however, most of the writings of Rahner and Hartshorne were published prior to the general awareness of this issue, we simply have retained their exact wording in quoted material. For his part, Hartshorne's current writings have responded to this issue; Rahner's death in 1984 precluded any similar response.

/. Norman King received his Ph.D. from the University of St. Michaels College, Toronto. He is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Windsor (Windsor, Ontario, Canada N9B 3P4). He has published two books on Rahner's theology: The God of Forgive­ness and Healing in the Theology of Karl Rahner (1982) and Experiencing God All Ways and Every Day (1982), and articles on Rahner in Thought (1979), International Philosoph­ical Quarterly (1982), and Science and Esprit (1983J.

Barry L. Whitney earned his Ph.D. at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. He is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Windsor. His writings on process thought include a book, Evil and the Process God (1985J, and articles in The Southern Journal of Philosophy (1979}, Studies in Religion (1979}, Horizons, Journal of the College Theology Society (1980}, Philosophy Research Archives (1981), and Interna­tional Philosophical Quarterly (1982}.

HORIZONS 15/2 (1988), 239-261

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apparently has not been appreciated and certainly has not been exploited. By bringing to light some of the important similarities as well as clarifying significant differences, we hope to contribute some new insights to the important ongoing dialogue between process theists and authors rooted in the Thomistic tradition.2 Both Rahner and Hartshorne view life within an evolutionary context. Created reality is to them an ongoing, dynamic process which attains the level of self-awareness and freedom in the human person. They acknowledge God as the ultimate source and goal of all created reality, at once immanent within and transcendent to the entire process. Human beings who emerge to a conscious and free level of existence are called or "lured" to fulfill their lives in response to God.

With respect to the question of death and eternal life, the views of Rahner and Hartshorne converge most clearly when they face the basic challenge of establishing the enduring meaning of every human life, despite the stark reality of death. There are differences, of course, in their interpretations of what this death-transcending meaning demands and entails. These may be stated quite directly: for Hartshorne, enduring meaning lies in the unique potentialities realized by persons during their lifetimes, and in their being perfectly and eternally remembered (i.e., immanent) in the mind of God. For Rahner, the individual's unique identity continues as conscious and is fulfilled beyond physical death. Yet behind both views lies the carefully weighted conviction of the lasting meaning of a life that ends in death.

Í. Hartshorne on Death and Eternai Life

Hartshorne's metaphysical vision gives no support to what he understands as the conventional Christian conception of personal immortality, the view that human beings live everlastingly as conscious, active subjects in some post mortem realm. Hartshorne finds more viable the notion of "objective immortality": all creatures are immor­talized in God as data (or objects) of the divine awareness.

He realizes, of course, that there is a strong egotistical and sentimen­tal appeal in the idea that we shall live on forever with our friends and loved ones in an afterlife,3 but Hartshorne rejects personal immortality as an inessential aspect of Christian faith and doctrine. What is essential is the assurance that our existence on earth has ultimate value and meaning. The chief need for immortality, he insists, is not an escape from bodily dissolution, but rather a need for permanence: the "basic question of permanence concerns not so much the perished men as the

2See Barry L. Whitney, "Divine Immutability in Process Philosophy and Contempo­rary Thomism," Horizons 7/1 (Spring 1980), 49-68.

3Charles Hartshorne, "Philosophy After Fifty Years" in Peter A. Bertocci, ed., Mid-Twentieth Century American Philosophy: Personal Statements (New York: Humanities Press, 1974), p. 147.

King and Whitney: Rahner and Hartshorne 241

perished states or experiences of men."4 "The basic question of 'tran­sience,' " as he writes elsewhere, "is not what happens to our identity at death but what happens at every moment to what we were the previous moment."5

According to Hartshorne's process view of reality, human life is composed of a myriad of experiences, each of which is part of a proces­sive sequence that continually synthesizes the data that confronts it into ever new experiences. What we seek is aesthetic value, that is, experi­ences that are intense and harmonious and that avoid the two extremes of both a numbing monotony and a destructive chaos and disorder. Yet death threatens to end our conscious existence and, indeed, prior to death our experiences are "perpetually perishing."6 By the time we die, far more than ninety-nine percent of our personal actuality has already "perished."7 From this perspective, death merely removes the little which remains.8

Death, however, does not constitute our sheer destruction. It does end our conscious sequences of acts and experiences, yet all we have been, experienced and accomplished can never die, since it is retained perfectly and eternally in God. God's love for us, in Hartshorne's judg­ment, is not measured by the granting of a personal (and conscious) immortality, but by the fact that God's eternal experience of our earthly careers grants us everlasting value and meaning: "The true immortality is everlasting fame before God."9

Hartshorne is aware, nonetheless, that premature death is tragic. Among other things, it denies to the creature experiences tht are poten­tially significant and valuable. But death itself is not tragic: death "is only a boundary, establishing the definiteness, the distinctiveness of each non-divine theme."10 Human life is a series of stages: infancy, childhood, adolescence, the prime of life, and old age. Each stage pro­vides a myriad of novel possibilities, and each stage ideally "lasts long enough so that the variations of the theme of the stage in question are not tediously numerous, yet numerous enough to bring out the value of the

4Charles Hartshorne, Reality as Social Process: Studies in Metaphysics and Religion (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press; Boston: Beacon, 1953), p. 211..

5Hartshorne, "Beyond Enlightened Self-interest: A Metaphysics of Becoming," Ethics 84 (1974), 206.

6Hartshorne, Reality as Social Process, p. 211. 7Ibid., pp. 211,41. 8Hartshorne, Whitehead's Philosophy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972),

p. 123. 9Charles Hartshorne, The Logic of Perfection and Other Essays in Neoclassical

Metaphysics (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1962), p. 259. Hartshorne's essay, "Time, Death, and Eternal Life" (Logic of Perfection, Chapter 10), is probably his most systematic and detailed statement on the issue of death and immortality, although references to this issue are scattered widely throughout his many publications. See also Barry L. Whitney, EviJ and the Process God (New York and Toronto: Edwin Mellen, 1985), pp. 157-67, where the issue is discussed in direct relationship to the question of theodicy.

10Hartshorne, "Philosophy After Fifty Years," p. 151.

242 HORIZONS

themes A theme is worth a finite not an infinite number of vari­ations."11

Life is cumulative, then, as Hartshorne points out, but it is just as surely "self-exhaustive."12 No life other than God's can accommodate an infinite variety of experiences that maintain the intensity and novelty required to make them aesthetically significant.13 It is not possible for us to live on subjectively (consciously) as God does, eternally experiencing ever new values. Yet "we may earn everlasting places as lives well lived within the one life that not only evermore will have been lived, but evermore and inexhaustively will be lived in ever new ways."14

Hartshorne concurs with Whitehead's observation that "unless our joys and sorrows in some way enrich the universe throughout all future time," they are merely "passing whiffs of insignificance."15 Without some guarantor of the permanence of our experiences, in other words, life would be the absurd production of values "only to cast them on the rubbish heap as fast as they are there.16 It is here that Hartshorne utilizes the Whiteheadian theory of objective immortality and contends that it is far more viable than the more traditional solutions to the problem of permanence: the humanist concept of social immortality and the con­ventional Christian concept of personal immortality.

Social immortality, of course, is the view that the ultimate meaning and value of our lives is guaranteed by living on in the memories of our descendants or in the memories of society at large. Yet from Hartshorne's point of view this is a radically inadequate solution to the need for permanency, since the human race may eventually become extinct and all our acts and experiences would then be lost forever. Indeed, even if our race were to survive, no lives would be remembered for long or well, save perhaps those of a few famous people.17 Human memory is, to say the least, very deficient and as such is hardly sufficient to grant past experiences any lasting meaning.18 The only adequate solution to the need for permanence, then, is that our experiences are remembered fully and everlastingly by an infinite and eternally omniscient mind, the mind of God, a God "who is not subject to the incurable ignorance of

11 ibid., p. 150. 12Hartshorne, Logic of Perfection, p. 261. 13Ibid., It is a fundamental tenet of process thought that aesthetic value is primary.

This is a particularly complex issue; yet, for an overview see Whitney, Evil and the Process God, pp. 215-18; see also Hartshorne, Whitehead's Philosophy, pp. 107-08, and Charles Hartshorne, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (London: SCM and LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1970), pp. 303-21.

14Hartshorne, Logic of Perfection, p. 261. 15Hartshorne, Whitehead's Philosophy, p. 134. 16Charles Hartshorne, "The Significance of Man in the Life of God" in Theology in

Crisis: A Colloquium on the "Credibility of God" (New Concord, OH: Muskingum College, 1967), p. 49.

17Hartshorne, Logic of Perfection, pp. 251-52. 18Hartshorne, "Significance of Man," p. 49.

King and Whitney: Rahner and Hartshorne 243

human perception, understanding and memory."19 Only a deity can "furnish the abiding reality of events."20

But what of the time-honored concept of personal immortality? Would not the continued and eternal existence of human beings in some post mortem realm render everlastingly meaningful the entire sequence of experiences and acts that make up our individyal lives? Hartshorne contends that it would not do so. The basic question of the ultimate meaning of our experiences in this life is to be found not in a conscious afterlife for human beings but rather in the immortality of our acts and experiences on earth, exactly and fully as they occurred.21 Eternal life in heaven would involve the accumulation of an infinity of new experi­ences, and this in itself would not guarantee the permanence and mean-ingfulness of our past experiences. Unless we are to become beings significantly other than we are now, it is difficult to imagine that we would be any more capable than we now are of remembering fully our past lives.22 "In unlimited future time," Hartshorne writes, "unlimited novelty must accrue (unless there is to be ever increasing monotony and boredom) and yet one is [on the traditional view of personal immortality] to be oneself, just that individual and no other, and not identical with God."23

Hartshorne's position, in short, is that God alone is capable of eternally assimilating novelty and yet remaining self-identical.24 We human beings lack that capacity and therefore must admit that we are "limited, a fragment of reality, not the whole."25 "The finitude of our type of being," he writes, "seems appropriate to the finitude of our lives:"26 we are spatially and temporally limited, parts of the whole.27 It is not our deaths, then, that would make life absurd and meaningless, but God's—though the latter is not a possibility (for the theist).28

Hartshorne is aware that in denying conscious personal immortality his alternative will seem unacceptable to many people within a religious tradition (specifically Christianity) that has posited subjective immor­tality as an essential and central aspect of its faith. Would not our immortality, conceived as merely objective, destroy any chance to make

19Hartshorne, Logic of Perfection, p. 252. 20Ibid., p. 253. 21 "Without the immortality of experiences," Hartshorne points out, "any heaven

would present the same problem of the transience of experience" (Reality as Social Process, p. 211).

22Charles Hartshorne, "A Philosopher's Assessment of Christianity" in Walter Lei-brecht, ed., Religion and Culture: Essays in Honor of Paul Tillich (New York: Harper, 1959), pp. 177-78; Hartshorne, Whitehead's Philosophy, pp. 108-09.

23Hartshorne, Logic of Perfection, p. 254. 24Ibid., p. 253. 25Ibid., see also Hartshorne, "Significance of Man," p. 40. 26Hartshorne, Whitehead's Philosophy, pp. 108-09. 27Hartshorne, Logic of Perfection, p. 40. 28Hartshorne, "Philosophy After Fifty Years," p. 149.

244 HORIZONS

amends for the errors we have committed in this life, remove the oppor­tunity to grow deeper in insight and devotion beyond the grave, and deny üs compensation for the earthly suffering and injustices we have endured?

Hartshorne's response is that such concerns are based on a funda­mental confusion: the erroneous substitution of individual self-interest for the self-interest and good of the whole, the whole which is God.29 Is it not enough, he asks, that our lives contribute to God's experience and to the lives of other human beings? Must we ourselves live on consciously forever to render our present lives meaningful? Hartshorne cautions against such an egocentric self-interest, a view that he sees as explicitly denying that we can genuinely love either God or one another.30 All goods, in short, cannot be attained by each and every individual; "only God is heir to all good."31 Hartshorne insists that "we have regarded God, not as the end of ends, but as means to our own end, the achieve­ment of permanence."32

Arguments, furthermore, that personal immortality is essential to compensate (reward or punish) earthly life seem especially irrational to Hartshorne. Human beings are constituted by some necessary degree of autonomy in respect to our acts and decisions. There is always an element of chance in the goods we experience, and thus in the suffering and conflicts we must endure.33 God determines only the general limits to our freedom, not the details of our acts and decisions, although God continually lures and persuades us to actualize those values which will contribute both to ourselves and others the most intensity and harmoni­ously significant experiences which are possible.34 Hartshorne con­tends, accordingly, that any heaven populated by human beings would be subject to the same risks of freedom that operates in this life. But if this were the case, it is difficult to see how heaven could be a place of compensatory rewards and punishments imposed by God. Goods and evils surely would continue not to be in exact proportion to our past deeds, for "where there is chance there will be injustice."35

This, of course, is not to say that God is unjust, but rather that "He is not engaged in rewarding or punishing in this bookkeeping sense at

29Hartshorne, Whitehead's Philosophy, p. 106. 30"He who says that belief in the divine enjoyment of a richer life than ours, to which

our own can contribute, and which in turn will contribute to the lives of fellow creatures yet to come, can be no consolation to us for the trials of existence, is simply denying that we can genuinely love either God or man" (Whitehead's Philosophy, p. 105).

31Hartshorne, Logic of Perfection, pp. 259-60. 32Hartshorne, "Religion in Process Philosophy" in J. Clayton Feaver and William

Horosz, eds., Religion in Philosophical Perspective (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1967), p. 265.

^Hartshorne, "Philosophy After Fifty Years," p. 145. 34Ibid.; and Hartshorne, "Religion in Process Philosophy," pp. 266-67. 35Hartshorne, "A Philosopher's Assessment of Christianity," p. 176.

King and Whitney: Rahner and Hartshorne 245

all."36 Such an understanding of divine justice and of heaven and hell, Hartshorne argues, "is in good part a colossal error and one of the most dangerous that ever occurred to the human mind."37 He rejects this "transcendental hedonism" (Paley) implicit in the traditional view, and cites approvingly Berdyaev's designation of it as "the most pernicious morality ever invented."38 "God does not stamp on the bodies of the souls who have lived ill; nor does he insult those who have found love its own reward with post mortem rewards out of all proportion to the goods of this life that a reasonable man could think of nothing else if he really took them seriously."39 God is neither sadistic nor vengeful, and the "attempt to combine such things with divine mercy should be given up."40

Our reward and punishment for our acts and decisions is now, in the value (the intensity and harmony of experience) we achieve. Our only future compensation is that we contribute to other beings and to God. Our choice or refusal to do so contains its own reward or punish­ment in the immediate experience.41 Acting in a loving, harmonious way is, in Hartshorne's judgment, the true "significance of man" and the "purpose of the universe."42

The meaningfulness of human life, accordingly, is guaranteed by a God who eternally experiences all that we have done and experienced during our earthly lives. God experiences all things "without loss of immediacy"43 and with a perfect vision that sees all things from an ultimate perspective. In experiencing each new moment of creaturely life, furthermore, God "must reform his awareness of us forever," according to Hartshorne, "so that we function as a theme for eternally endless variations in the use God makes of us as objects of his awareness to be synthesized with ever additional agents."44 "God will recombine his memory of me," he writes, "with an infinity of other objects of his experience. But this amounts to saying that the only theme worthy of infinite variations is deity."45

36 Ibid. 37Hartshorne, Logic of Perfection., p. 254. 38Hartshorne, "Religion in Process Philosophy," p. 264. In a recent book, Hartshorne

refers to the reward-punishment scheme as "the moral argument against heaven and hell" (see his Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes [Albany: State University of New York, 1985], pp. 97-98).

39Hartshorne, Logic of Perfection, p. 255. 40Ibid. 41 Ibid., p. 257. 42Hartshorne, "Significance of Man," p. 43. 43Hartshorne, Whitehead's Philosophy, p. 107. ^Hartshorne, Logic of Perfection, p. 262. 45Hartshorne, "Philosophy After Fifty Years," pp. 150-51. Hartshorne's point here is

that while we do not live on consciously in an afterlife, God will make use of our lives in ever new ways, endlessly. Whatever good we accomplished in our earthly lives will be used by God in an endless variety of new perspectives. As such, our lives, while con­sciously completed, contribute everlastingly to God. The endless variations God makes of

246 HORIZONS

This objective immortality is, as Hartshorne paradoxically puts it, far more a personal immortality than is the traditional view of subjective immortality: "If one's actual concrete experiences are not personal," he argues, "I do not know what would be. They represent all the actuality that one actually is."46 Those, on the other hand, who define personal immortality as the opportunity for endless future experiences, miss this point. The "preservation of what we create in ourselves and others suffices to give life meaning;" to seek "endless further self-creation," on the other hand, "is not easily distinguishable from asking that we should be God, who indeed [and who alone] is endlessly self-creative."47

II. Rahner on Death and Eternal Life

Karl Rahner develops his thought on death and eternal life within the context of traditional Christianity, but challenges conventional interpretations in the light of his transcendental theological anthropol­ogy. Rahner rejects several common views both as unnecessary to a Christian perspective and as intellectually untenable.48 Still, Rahner maintains steadfastly that the enduring meaning of each human life calls for the enduring reality of each unique self-consciousness and fully achieved freedom. "The reality of man . . . is not abolished in death, but rather is transposed into another mode of existence."49

In the light of his transcendental analysis of the underlying struc­tures of human existence, Rahner maintains that a transcendental orien­tation to the mystery we call God constitutes the very essence of the human being. The deepest yearning of the human mind and will is for the infinite, beyond all the finite realities we immediately encounter. Christianity interprets this basic outreach as attaining, not nothingness, but reality, best portrayed as a forgiving, healing, and fulfilling love.50

This human orientation is itself initiated, sustained and destined for fulfillment by the divine mystery toward which it is drawn. "Man is the

our lives will not be experiences by us, of course, "save in principle and in advance through our devoted imagination, our love of God" (Hartshorne, Logic of Perfection, p. 262).

46Hartshorne, "Philosophy After Fifty Years," p. 149. 47 ibid. 48Death, for example, is not merely a phenomenon of the body as opposed to the soul,

but affects the total person; eschatological statements are not a report from the future, but an expression of present hope rooted in the present experience of grace; eternity is not an infinitely long mode of time, but the achieved final validity of human existence grown to maturity in freedom.

49Rahner, Foundations of Christian Thought (New York: Seabury, 1978), p. 436. 50Foundations, pp. 85-86. For more detail, see "Theology and Anthropology," Theo­

logical investigations 9 (New York: Crossroad, 1973): 28-45; "Reflections on Methodology in Theology," TheoJogicaJ Investigations 11 (New York: Crossroad, 1974): 68-114; and Foundations, pp. 24-71,116-37. To date twenty volumes of Rahner's TheoJogicaJ investi­gations have appeared in English. They are currently being issued by Crossroad, New York. Henceforth we shall refer to any of these volumes as investigations, followed by the volume number.

King and Whitney: Rahner and Hartshorne 247

event of a free, unmerited and forgiving, and absolute self-communication of God."51

Since this orientation constitutes the concrete structure of the human being, Rahner insists that it must not be in vain if life is to have any meaning at all. Yet the stark reality of inevitable death, "this absolute null point,"52 "the absurd arch-contradiction of existence,"53

makes painfully apparent both the utter finiteness of our lives and the very infiniteness of our longing which death seems to negate. The essential issue, for Rahner, is to hold fast to the unconditional and permanent meaning of human life despite its apparent collapse into nothingness. In his eyes, to do so demands the consciously enduring reality of the individual person.

Because physical death calls into question the meaning of life as a whole, it forces us to decide at least implicitly about the final mean-ingfulness or absurdity of our existence. We must decide whether our outreach terminates in "the void of absolute futility or the infinitude of the mystery of love."54 The fundamental option in the face of death is finally either a trusting hope in the unconditional meaning of life despite death, or a crushing despair at the final emptying out of life into absurdity and nothingness.55 It is in human hope in the face of death that one encounters and responds to God, precisely as its original source and ultimate goal: "I call this ultimate ground of my hope, in the act of unconditional acceptance of my existence as meaningful, 'God'."56 This response may remain implicit and without verbal objectification, yet it will be embedded in the actual living out of one's existence.57

In order to justify this trusting hope and to maintain that it neces­sitates a conscious individual immortality, Rahner appeals to the experi­ence of lasting meaning here and now in our earthly existence. This we find in the experience of our own underlying reality beneath the chang-

51 Rahner, Foundations, p. 116. 52Karl Rahner, "Ideas for a Theology of Death," Investigations, 13:181. 53Rahner, "Ideas for a Theology of Death," Investigations, 13:180, 182. 54Karl Rahner, "The Experiment with Man," investigations, 9:223. 55Rahner, On the Theology of Death (Freiberg: Herder; Montreal: Palm, 1961), pp.

84-88; "The Scandal of Death," Investigations, 7:140-44; "On Christian Dying," Investiga­tions, 7:285-93.

56Karl Rahner, Christian at the Crossroads (New York: Seabury, 1975), p. 23. See also "Ideas for a Theology of Death," Investigations, 13:184, where Rahner states: "Man finds his strength neither in despair nor in the illusion of self-sufficiency, but rather when, believing and loving in hope, he commits himself to the incomprehensible Mystery which comes to him and takes effect upon him in death. We call this mystery the God of hope."

57Rahner, "The Foundation of Belief," Investigations, 16:13-14. For a fuller discus­sion of the experience of God, see "The Experience of God Today," Investigations, 11:149-65; "Experience of Self and Experience of God," Investigations, 13:112-32; "The Human Question of Meaning in Face of the Absolute Mystery of God," Investigations, 18:89-104; Foundations, pp. 51-71. See also James J. Bacik, Apologetics and Eclipse of Mystery (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980), and J. Norman King, Experiencing God All Ways and Every Day (Minneapolis: Winston, 1982).

248 HORIZONS

ing qualities and events of our life; in the experience of thought which brings together in a unity past, present and future; and especially in the experience of freedom and its exercise in moral decision-making.58 In Rahner's view, freedom is the capacity to fashion definitively our very selves and the total direction of our lives. "Freedom precisely does not consist in a quest to achieve ever fresh changes at will. Rather it is of its very nature the event of a real and definitive finality which cannot be conceived of otherwise than as something that is freely achieved once and for all."59

Certainly, each life is made up of a series of unique situations that include biological stages as well as external circumstances. Every situa­tion has its own particular place in the course of life as a whole, and each stage has its own "unique and unrepeatable value."60 In addition, inte­rior freedom is itself intrinsically oriented to outward expression, where it is embodied and tested "in the material of tangible and hard reality. "61

But at each stage and in each situation, what is attempted and only gradually achieved over the course of one's lifetime is the total and irrevocable self-disposition before and in response to the self-bestowing God.

In this light, the desire for meaning despite the seeming absurdity of death is not merely a wish to prolong endlessly our present life. If time were extended interminably, every action could be postponed indef­initely and every decision could be undone or reversed over and over again. None would be important; all would be indifferent, empty, and without significance.62

Our deepest longing, in Rahner's view,lies in another direction, manifested in our very experience of freedom, the basic thrust of which is to fashion our very self definitively, to complete our being—not just to prolong the process of its becoming. Our shrinking from physical death and our hope despite death do not, in essence, embody a desire for unending temporal sequence, for more and more of the same. Our true longing is that the self we have fashioned in its irreducible uniqueness (in dialogue with our personal, social, historical, and physical environ­ment), not fall back into nothingness, but have a meaning and validity which endure, and even achieve a completeness beyond our present grasp. Our basic yearning is for a definitive and lasting validity for the self that we have fashioned through a fundamental option embodied in

58Rahner, "Eternity From Time," Investigations, 17:172-75. 59Rahner, "Ideas for a Theology of Death," investigations, 13:185-86. See also "Theol­

ogy of Freedom," Investigations, 6:178-96; Foundations, pp. 53-39, 65-66, 94-108; Grace in Freedom (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), pp. 203-64.

^Karl Rahner, "Ideas for a Theology of Childhood," Investigations, 8:33. 61 Karl Rahner, "Reflections on the Gradual Ascent to Christian Perfection," Investiga­

tions, 3:110. 62Karl Rahner, "The Life of the Dead," Investigations, 4:347-48; "Christianity and the

'New Man,'" Investigations, 5:140-43; "On Christian Dying," Investigations, 7:286-89.

King and Whitney: Rahner and Hartshorne 249

and shaped by concrete particular acts.63 At its deepest transcendental level, this longing is not, for Rahner, a matter of egotism, since it is built into the very grace-enhanced structure of the human person. Moreover, this thrust also includes in its transcendental scope the whole of human history.64

In exercising our freedom, we have experiences of lasting personal meaning and validity which transcend the ravages of time as a mere sequence of moments.65 Rahner cites such examples as fidelity to the deepest truth of our conscience, unreserved love for another human being, commitment to social reform, and loyalty which does not capitulate before death.66 We experience these core decisions as matters of crucial, unconditional, and inescapable responsibility. They have, therefore, a validity, significance, and meaning that transcend the moment of time in which they are made.67

Since the decisions of freedom concern our very self, Rahner sees these experiences as pointing to the transcending of time by the personal self, and so as supporting "the survival of personal existence despite biological death."68 Just as we transcend the mere sequence of indiffer­ent moments in our moral decisions, so too we may hope that out of our temporal lifespan as a whole which ends at death, may emerge the enduringly valid self we have fashioned. "It is becoming," he writes, "and not what has become which passes away. What perishes is not the secret extract of life, but the process of its preparation. When this pro­cess, which we call life, has come to an end, then the perfect has arrived, and this is ourselves as we have become in freedom."69

For Rahner, there is no question of a linear continuity of human temporality beyond death, as if one just changed horses and rode on. The temporal dimension of human existence with its open-ended indeter-minateness comes to an end with biological death. Then the person is what he or she has irrevocably and finally become.70 As a human experi-

63Rahner, "The Life of the Dead," Investigations, 4:348-49; "Theological Consider­ations Concerning the Moment of Death," Investigations, 11:314-15.

64Rahner, Foundations, pp. 268-69. See also "On the Theology of Hope," investiga­tions, 10:242-59.

65 "Wherever a free and lonely act of decision has taken place in absolute obedience to a higher law or in radical affirmation of love for another person, something eternal has taken place and man is experienced immediately as transcending the indifference of time in its mere temporal duration" (Rahner, Foundations, p. 439).

66Rahner, "The Life of the Dead," investigations, 4:348-51; "Experiencing Easter," Investigations, 7:162-64; "Eternity From Time," investigations, 19:172-75; Foundations, p. 438.

67Rahner, "Ideas for a Theology of Death," investigations, 13:182. ^Rahner, Foundations, p. 438. 69Karl Rahner, "The Comfort of Time," Investigations, 3:145. In "Experiencing Eas­

ter," investigations, 7:163, Rahner writes: "The process of becoming ceases when the state of being begins."

70Rahner, "The Life of the Dead," investigations, 4:347-48; "Ideas for a Theology of Death," investigations, 13:173-76; "Eternity From Time," investigations, 19:170-72; Foundations, pp. 436-41.

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enee rather than an external mechanical measurement, time is the pro­cess of becoming, while eternity is that of being. Eternity comes to be out of time as the mature fruit of time which overcomes time itself.71 "Eternal life is the fully liberated, self-realization of the radical inferiority of our personal history of freedom, the final and definitive state of one's per­sonal history as brought to its fullness in freedom."72 However, this is not a purely passive state, but one of dynamically and actively being who we have irrevocably and finally become. It is a total presence to and sharing in God's fullness of being in harmony with all of creation.

Rahner maintains, furthermore, that because the transcendental orientation toward God constitutes our very essence, our definitive free self-disposition is at least implicitly a "yes" or "no" response to the infinite self-bestowing Mystery. Human fulfillment through death con­sists correspondingly in a complete knowing and loving oneness with God, a "loving immediacy to the ultimate Mystery of existence called God."73 It will be "an existence and life that has God himself as its content, a life that implies love, limitless knowledge, supreme happi­ness, and so on."74

For Rahner, the teaching of Christianity and our own experience of enduring validity ground our hope in life beyond death and indicate its content as oneness with God and one another. We may speak of "the perfection of the personal creature as a whole," or "the single complete fulfillment of a human being,"75 including a somehow transfigured physical makeup and world. While our language will depend upon our epistemology,76 Rahner cautions that we can only state the matter abstractly, not imagine it concretely.77

Rahner regards the completion of the unique person as a relational and social reality, bound up with human history, its physical milieu, and the whole created evolutionary reality.78 In the first place, the most complete self-realization of the individual before God occurs in the love of neighbor, both in its more intimately interpersonal and in its more

71 Rahner, Foundations, p. 437. See also "Theological Observations on the Concept of Time," investigations, 11:288-308.

72Rahner, "Ideas for a Theology of Death," investigations, 13:175. 73Rahner, "Ideas for a Theology of Death," investigations, 13:175. 74Rahner, "Eternity From Time," investigations, 19:176. See also "Beatific Vision," in

Karl Rahner, ed., Encyclopedia of Theology (New York: Seabury, 1975), pp. 78-80. 75Karl Rahner, "Beatific Vision" in Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler, eds., Diction­

ary of Theology, new rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1981), p. 42. 76 ibid. 77 "How all this can be experienced in the concreteness of a state beyond time, what is

the meaning of transfigured corporality, eternal fellowship with the redeemed, and so on: this is something we cannot concretely imagine or picture to ourselves here and now" (Rahner, "Eternity From Time," investigations, 19:176).

78Rahner, "Christianity and the 'New Man,'" Investigations, 5:135-53; "Immanent and Transcendent Consummation of the World," investigations, 10:273-89; Foundations, pp. 444-48.

King and Whitney: Rahner and Hartshorne 251

widely social sense. Such love also affirms and implies the uncondi­tional and enduring validity of those who are loved, extending to embrace all of human history and its context.79 One's transcendental hope for enduring meaning, moreover, finds concrete expression both in striving to build a more authentically human future on earth while at the same time accepting one's death as making room for the freedom of others.80

Enduring meaning, however, cannot simply be a matter of living on in the effects of one's decisions on others and upon history. It cannot be realized in social immortality alone. For in that instance each individual and each generation simply become sacrificed to the next, and the unconditional value and definitive significance of the person is under­mined.81 In addition, any future society we help to fashion will be built by finite human beings out of finite resources and materials. It will be the replacement of one finite reality with another, and will reflect back to us the image of our own finiteness and mortality. The deepest human longing, however, is for the infinite. Hence, the hope for lasting meaning is really the hope for the lasting meaning of all of human history and of the cosmos and its environment.82 Rahner sees all of human history as moving towards its final and definitive validity, towards a divinely bestowed consummation of "a living humanity which has gone to its very limits in developing its own powers."83

In this regard, Rahner refers to the Christian doctrine of the resurrec­tion of the body as an image of the definitive completion of the whole person,84 "in the one world in which all spiritual persons exist,"85 and "which makes intercommunication possible."86 Rahner points out as well that we might think of heaven and hell as being distinguished in a striking way by the manner in which a particular person accepts this

79 Karl Rahner, "Reflections on the Unity of the Love of Neighbor and the Love of God," investigations, 6:231-49; "Christian Humanism," investigations, 9:187-204.

80Karl Rahner, "The Experiment with Man," investigations, 9:205-24; "The Peace of God and the Peace of the World," investigations, 10:371-88; "The Question of the Future," Investigations, 12:201; "On the Theology of Revolution," investigations, 14:314-30.

81Rahner, "Christianity and the 'New Man,'" Investigations, 5:144-45; "Marxist Utopia and the Christian Future of Man," investigations, 6:59-68.

82Rahner, "Christianity and the 'New Man,' " investigations, 5:140-43. See also "The Theological Problems Entailed in the Idea of the 'New Earth,' " Investigations, 10:260-72; "The Inexhaustible Transcendence of God and Our Concern for the Future," investiga­tions, 20:173-86.

83Rahner, "Christianity and the 'New Man,' " Investigations, 5:149. See also "Imma­nent and Transcendent Consummation of the World," investigations, 10:273-89.

84 "The resurrection . . . means the final and definitive salvation of a concrete human existence by God and in the presence of God, the abiding and real validity of human history" (Foundations, p. 266). See also "The Resurrection of the Body," Investigations, 2:203-16; "Jesus' Resurrection," Investigations, 17:16-23; "The Body in the Order of Salvation," Investigations, 17:71-89; Foundations, pp. 266-69, 435-36; and Karl Rahner and Karl-Heinz Weger, Our Christian Faith (New York: Crossroad, 1981), pp. 105-23.

85Rahner, "The Body in the Order of Salvation," Investigations, 17:89. 86Ibid., 88.

252 HORIZONS

common sphere, whether with love or with hate, "as the transfigured world or as what the Bible calls hell fire."87 In no sense, however, should we think of heaven and hell in terms of externally conferred or imposed rewards or punishments. It is a question of the intrinsic consequences of one's fundamental grace-enabled option.

Rahner stresses as well that there is no human life that is "superflu­ous," no life that is "so commonplace that it is not valuable enough to become eternal."88 Since every person is known by God by name and exists in time in the presence of God, "every person is a person of eternity."89 While the divine self-bestowal orients all persons to a posi­tive eternity, the Christian doctrine of hell is an image which highlights the utter and crucial responsibility of each human person, and the possibility of a negative fundamental option.90 At the same time, Rahner adds, "there is nothing to prevent a Christian hoping that in practice the final fate of every human being, as a result of the exercise of his or her freedom by the power of God's grace, which dwarfs and also redeems all evil, will be such that hell will not in the end exist."91 Space, of course, does not permit the examination of many explicitly Christian themes treated by Rahner which inform his thought and enter his discussion of the issue of eternal life.92

III. Similarities, Differences, and the Basis for Dialogue

We have attempted to demonstrate that both Rahner and Hartshorne insist upon the lasting meaning of human life, despite the inevitability of death. For Hartshorne, the meaning lies in the fact that every act and decision is retained fully and eternally in God. For Rahner, the meaning lies in the fact that human beings reach a state of fullness and complete­ness beyond death. The fundamental difference between them is that Hartshorne denies while Rahner affirms the conscious continuance of the human being beyond physical death. Rahner regards this conscious completeness of each human being as an integral and reasonable, indeed, an essential complement of enduring human meaning, while Hartshorne finds it unnecessary and somewhat problematic.

Despite this difference, we maintain that Rahner and Hartshorne share a significant degree of common ground with respect to the ques-

S7Ibid. 88Rahner, "The Life of the Dead," investigations, 4:351. 89Rahner, Foundations, p. 441. ^Karl Rahner, "Hell," Encyclopedia, pp. 602-04; "Christian Dying," investigations,

18:238-41. 91Rahner and Weger, Our Christian Faith, pp. 120-21. ^Rahner maintains, for example, that the apostolic witness to the resurrection of Jesus

articulates and confirms our own transcendental hope. Foundations, pp. 264-69; Chris­tian at the Crossroads (New York: Seabury, 1975), pp. 87-93. See also "The One Christ and the Universality of Salvation," investigations, 16:199-224.

King and Whitney: Rahner and Hartshorne 253

tion of death and eternal life and that this common ground may well provide a fruitful basis for furthering the important contemporary dialogue between process theists and Thomistically rooted thinkers. To a fuller examination of these similarities (and also the fundamental differences) we now turn.

The Gratuitous Nature of Immortality

In the first place, both thinkers believe that human life would be meaningful even without its conscious continuation beyond death. Any such continuation would have a wholly gratuitous character.

Hartshorne's position, as noted above, is that human life need not reach such a conscious completion in order to escape ultimate absurdity. He did, however, leave open the possibility of a personally conscious afterlife, as did Whitehead.93 Yet Hartshorne insists that such a con­scious personal immortality is unnecessary in establishing what it sup­posedly seeks to establish: the lasting and ultimate meaning of every creature's earthly acts and decisions. Objective immortality in the eter­nal mind of God guarantees the ultimate meaningfulness of finite lives.

Hartshorne goes so far as to suggest that a conscious, subjective immortality would in fact be a "problematic luxury, possibly undesira­ble."94 There are problems, he believes, in conceiving human beings as living eternally in a heaven of some sort. Would not, for example, any heaven be subjected to the same risks of freedom and chance that operate in this life? And could human beings continue to be defined as human beings if we supposedly could accumulate an endless succession of new experiences?95

^See Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: Macmillan, 1926), p. 107. Whitehead writes: "It is generally held that a purely spiritual being is necessarily immortal. The doctrine here developed gives no warrant for such a belief. It is entirely neutral on the question of immortality or on the existence of purely spiritual beings other than God. There is no reason why such a question should not be decided on more special evidence." Whitehead, however, made an even stronger allusion to the possibility of subjective immortality in Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1938): "The ever­lasting nature of God, which in a sense is nontemporal and in another sense is temporal, may establish with the soul a peculiarly intense relationship of mutual immanence. Thus in some important sense the existence of the soul may be freed from its complete depen­dence upon the bodily organization" (p. 208).

An article by David Griffin makes this case most convincingly and in the most detail. See his "The Possibility of Subjective Immortality in Whitehead's Philosophy," Modern Schoolman 51 (1975), 39-57. Other relevant writings on this issue include Lewis S. Ford and Marjorie Suchocki, "A Whiteheadian Reflection on Subjective Immortality," Process Studies 7 (1977), 1-13; Marjorie Suchocki, "The Question of Immortality," Journal of Religion 57/3 (1977), 288-306; and Suchocki's later book, God, Christ, Church (New York: Crossroad, 1982). Robert Meliert also has an interesting discussion of the issue in his What Is Process Theology? (New York: Paulist Press, 1975), 125-29. See also Robert Kinast's When a Person Dies (New York: Crossroad, 1984); and Joseph Bracken's The Triune Symbol {Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1985).

94Hartshorne, Reality as Social Process, p. 211. 95Ibid., p. 253.

254 HORIZONS

For his part, Rahner strongly affirms a personally conscious fulfill­ment beyond physical death, while insisting on the gift character of grace and its culmination in the beatific vision. He is equally convinced, nevertheless, that the free self-bestowal of God is not something extrin­sic or peripheral to human existence, but responds to the deepest orien­tation of the human mind and will.96

Human existence, according to Rahner, would be meaningful with­out a grace that culminates in an eternal fulfillment. Yet, since the very essence of a human being is openness to God, the divine self-bestowal in grace and vision does provide the fullest possible completion to which the human heart aspire.97 This divine gift also effects in human beings an indelible orientation (a supernatural existential) towards beatifying one­ness with God, towards salvation, understood as the "subjective existen­tial healing and fulfillment of life."98

At this point, we wish to suggest that while Rahner and Hartshorne differ in a way that seems irrevocable with respect to the issue of conscious immortality, there is, nevertheless, a meaningful basis for dialogue here. Contemporary Thomists, for example, have been chal­lenged by Hartshorne to reexamine their position, while Hartshorne and his followers ought to examine with care Rahner's arguments for a conscious immortality. The fact that Hartshorne writes from a strictly philosophical basis while Rahner writes from a deliberately Christian perspective is relevant here. The contemporary generation of process theists consists of many who write from this same Christian perspective and who are not so strongly convinced as is Hartshorne that we can do without a conscious immortality (John Cobb is one important exam­ple99). On the other hand, Rahner regards the type of consciousness to be found beyond death to be different and greater than the kind we enjoy in this earthly life. A more thorough comparison of this view with Hart­shorne's understanding of immortality as something other than a con­scious state, therefore, might prove to be a very valuable area of future investigation.100

96 "It is precisely the essence of the personal being that he is ordained to personal communion with God in love (by nature) and must receive just this love as free gift." Karl Rahner, "Concerning the Relationship Between Nature and Grace," investigations, 1:305. See also "Ideas for a Theology of Grace," Investigations, 13:176-78; Foundations, pp. 122-24 and "Beatific Vision," Encyciopedia, p. 79.

97Karl Rahner, "Theos in the New Testament," investigations, 1:82-86. The funda­mental notion of human openness to a possible divine self-communication forms the central theme of Rahner's early work, Hearers of the Word (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969).

98Karl Rahner, "Beatific Vision," Dictionary, p. 458. "See, for example, Cobb's God and the World (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969), pp.

100-02. See also Cobb's "Whitehead's Philosophy and a Christian Doctrine of Man," Journai of Bible and Religion 32 (1964), 209-20.

100Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, pp. 435-37; "Beatific Vision," Dictionary, pp. 42-43.

King and Whitney: Rahner and Hartshorne 255

Enduring Meaning inheres in God

Rahner and Hartshorne share the strong conviction that the endur­ing meaning of human beings inheres in God. Without the infinite reality of God as foundation, goal and context of meaning, there could be no lasting significance to human life. The final purpose of human lives is found in oneness with God, a oneness in which unique individuality as well as relationship with others, with human history, and with the rest of the cosmos is preserved. For Rahner, of course, the oneness remains conscious on the part of the enduring person as well as in the God with whom one is united. For Hartshorne, this consciousness which pre­serves the individual in his or her uniqueness and place in history remains in God alone.

Hartshorne is emphatic in pointing out that each individual being is preserved fully and completely in God, and the fact that the individual does not live on consciously in no way "deindividualizes" the creature. The creature, in other words, is not simply absorbed into God in such a way that he or she would cease to be that unique, distinct creature.101

Those who would object, nevertheless, that "God could not merge me and my values into an indefinitely immense system and still claim that I have maintained my individuality and my values"102 miss the funda­mental insight of process metaphysics, that actualities can be experi­enced by other actualities and yet retain their individuality.103 We who are not God, however, must "abstract" somewhat in prehending other finite realities; God experiences all things "without loss of immediacy" and hence excludes nothing.104 The pertinent point here is that God's love for us need not be expressed in the granting of an eternal preserva­tion of our earthly experiences, not in the granting of endlessly new experiences.

For Rahner, both the uniqueness of the individual and the divine source and goal of that uniqueness are underscored. Rahner sees the reality, meaning and purpose of all that is, and more specifically of human existence, as flowing from the divine self-giving, the divine love.105 It is in our individual uniqueness, as well as a member of the

101 Such metaphors as "being absorbed into deity," according to Hartshorne, "merely evade alternatives that can be stated more directly. Such crude physical images are surely not the best our spiritual insight can suggest" {Logic of Perfection, p. 254).

102Hartshorne, Whitehead's Philosophy, p. 107. 103See, for example, Hartshorne, Whitehead's Philosophy, p. 107. The entire White-

headian system, he insists, "is built on the theory that individuality can include other individuality as such, literally have or prehend it. Individuality thus is opposed not to inner complexity but to lack of integration of this complexity. This is the doctrine which I have called the idea of the 'compound individual,' and there seems no doubt it is White­head's."

104Hartshorne, Whitehead's Philosophy, p. 107. 105 "God goes out of himself, he himself, he as the self-giving fullness For this

reason he is defined in Scripture as love" (Rahner, Foundations, p. 232).

256 HORIZONS

human community, that the person is called to oneness with God. "Each is an Individuum ineffabile, whom God has called by name, a name which is and can only be unique, so that it is really worthwhile for this unique being as such to exist for all eternity."106 While the graced human being, once posited, remains eternally distinct from God, its total reali­zation is found in oneness with God in mind and will. Its deepest existential is de facto a graced orientation to a total union with the self-bestowing Infinite, to "the full and definitive experience of the direct self-communication of God himself to the individual human being . . . precisely as a member of redeemed humanity in Christ."107

This is a knowing and loving union with God that enfolds all of creation.

Being and Becoming

The preceding section illustrates once more that, despite significant similarities, it is the question of conscious immortality that separates Rahner and Hartshorne: Hartshorne offers what many would regard as some of the strongest arguments against subjective immortality, while Rahner argues strongly for its necessity. If dialogue is to proceed, it might be useful to point out here how the basis for their contrasting interpretations (in our opinion) lies in their differing philosophical emphases. On the one hand, Hartshorne stresses that reality, experience, knowledge, and freedom are immanent in the process of becoming, while for Rahner the emphasis is upon the actuality of being that he views as underlying the ongoing process of becoming itself.108 These differing emphases lead to a difference in perspective on the nature and enduring reality of the person, self or soul. Briefly stated, for both Rahner and Hartshorne, when the becoming ends with the creature's physical death, the creature's being or actuality is completed. This much is held in agreement. For Hartshorne, moreover, no further experiences can be added to the sum total of the experiences, acts and decisions which occurred during the creature's earthly life span. In this sense the crea­ture's being is complete, but the full reality that the creature attained in this life is eternally present in God. Rahner concurs that the process of becoming is brought to a close by physical death and that what the person has become endures eternally in God. Yet the fundamental differ­ence remains: for Rahner, the being that has been fashioned through this process continues consciously and attains a beatified, perfected state.

106Karl Rahner, "On the Question of Formal Existential Ethics," Investigations, 2:226-27. Elsewhere, he states emphatically: "This [beatific] union of man with God and with his fellows means no loss or absorption of individuality; rather the closer man approaches to God the more his individuality is liberated and fortified" ("Heaven," Dictionary, p. 201).

107Rahner, "Beatific Vision," Encyclopedia, pp. 78-80. l08The differing emphases of Rahner and Hartshorne on being and becoming also

affect their understanding of God, as the divine immutability issue illustrates (see note 1).

King and Whitney: Rahner and Hartshorne 257

There may well be grounds here, nevertheless, for serious dialogue between the two approaches. Hartshorne's position, for example, has been misunderstood by many commentators. It is not the case that he focuses solely upon the process of becoming to the exclusion of being. Like other process metaphysicians, Hartshorne understands being as the abstract or common features within a creature's lifetime sequences of experiences. One's being or "personal identity" (as Hartshorne often refers to it) is constituted by those experiences like honesty and courage which "characterize" a creature's continuing sequence of experiences. The creature forges its unique character by acting in a more or less consistent manner, yet at the same time the character so formed affects the creature's future actions and experiences.109 Being, in sum, is an abstract aspect of our becoming, not a thing in and of itself. Our being or character is continually modified, however slightly, during our earthly sequences of experiences. Once we die, Hartshorne suggests, our charac­ter is completed, though this is not a completion in Rahner's sense of a perfected state, nor a conscious one at that.

We wish to emphasize at this point that Rahner certainly acknowl­edges the process of becoming and, indeed, the dynamic character of all reality. In this regard, the definitive beatifying union with God and creation is not for Rahner a purely passive state, but a dynamic, active experience. It is as well an ongoing presence to God precisely as incom­prehensible and inexhaustible mystery.110 Rahner accentuates being, moreover, in two ways that may not be adverse to process thought. First, he underscores the permanent, transcendental structure of human exis­tence, which he sees as the essential inner lining, so to speak, of every human experience and its condition of possibility. This "necessary permanency of any reality" persists and sustains the changing "qual­ities, phenomena, and occurrences."111 This is not contradictory to Hart­shorne's view. Nor indeed is Rahner's second point. Rahner affirms that the final purpose of all human becoming is being. While the particular­ity and diverse variety of individual experiences are essential, and give shape and color, depth and interest to the life of a person, they are nevertheless the expression and means of the definitive shaping of the enduring self in response to the self-bestowing God. Each decision is a

109On the question of personal identity, see, for example, Charles Hartshorne, "Per­sonal Identity From A to Z," Process Studies 2 (1972), 209-15; and Hartshorne, "Strict and Genetic Identity: An Illustration of the Relation of Logic to Metaphysics," Horace M. Kallen, et al., Structure, Method, and Meaning: Essays in Honor of Henry M. She//er (New York: Liberal Arts, 1951), pp. 242-54.

110For a detailed discussion of this issue, see "An Investigation of the Incomprehensi­bility of God in St. Thomas Aquinas," investigations, 16:244-54; "The Human Question of Meaning in the Face of the Absolute Mystery of God," Investigations, 18:89-104.

mRahner, "Eternity From Time," investigations, 19:172. On the mutual necessity and complementarity of the historical and transcendent dimensions of existence and experi­ence, see Foundations, pp. 138-52, and "Formal and Fundamental Theology," Encyclo­pedia, pp. 524-25.

258 HORIZONS

summation of his or her past and a reaching into future finality (within an interpersonal, social, and physical context). This is true even of decisions whose explicit content is far removed from basic issues of human life.112

Even here, a rapprochement can be drawn with process thought which does hold, in a certain sense, that every creature attains a final state. Once the process of becoming is completed in death, all that we have achieved and experienced becomes a unified experience, our com­pleted being. We exist in God eternally as this distinct being.

Egotism

The different emphases which Rahner and Hartshorne place upon being and becoming have led to what appears to be a sharp difference in their views with respect to the question of egotism. Is it egotistical to hope for and be granted a personal immortality where human beings would live on both consciously and in a completed, perfected state (Hartshorne), or is such a belief in fact a structural and transcendental necessity, the gift of divine grace (Rahner)?

Hartshorne insists that the nature of human beings is one of finitude. We may live on infinitely within God's eternal essence, but our conscious existence is limited to our earthly lives. The denial of this fundamental fact, Hartshorne believes, is based upon an invalid egotism and self-interest as ultimate priorities. He indicts the traditional sub­stance philosophy (the philosophy of being) for leading Christianity to adopt this self-interest attitude, and to make eternal reward or punish­ment the major motivating factor behind our actions.113 In Hartshorne's judgment, such illusory egotism misses a fundamental truth of White-headian process metaphysics,114 that there is no self-identical being existing through time as such or apart from the process of becoming. When the earthly sequence of experiences of each creature end in death, what lives on, according to Hartshorne, is not a conscious being but the past experiences that constituted every creature's reality. A creature's being is "a partial, not complete identity; it is an abstract aspect of life, not life in its concreteness."115

The concept of personal substance, moreover, seems to present us with sharply contrasting alternatives: either sheer destruction or a glorified state. In Hartshorne's view, this is a false and misleading

112Karl Rahner, On Prayer (New York: Paulist, 1968), pp. 71-75; Hominisation (Freiburg: Herder; Montreal: Palm, 1965), p. 109; "The Comfort of Time," Investigations, 3:145.

113Hartshorne insists that the idea of heaven as a place of conscious existence in a perfected state is "largely the result of the concept of personal 'substance' " ("Religion in Process Philosophy," p. 264).

114Hartshorne, "Beyond Enlightened Self-Interest," p. 209. 115Ibid., p. 201.

King and Whitney: Rahner and Hartshorne 259

dilemma. Death no more destroys our experiences than the finis at the close of a book destroys the book.116 God alone, however, is the sole eternal reader of the books which represent the lives of every creature. "Death is not sheer destruction, the turning of being into nonbeing,' ,m

because there exists a God in whom our earthly experiences in total live eternally.

Is there room for dialogue here? For Rahner, the longing for per­sonal fulfillment beyond the confines of this life, the longing in effect for oneness with Mystery, is not egotistical but inevitable, insofar as it is built into the very structure of the human being. In his view, this thirst for enduring meaning contains a hope for conscious personal immortal­ity. This position is not necessarily antithetical to process thought, although Hartshorne is the strongest of its advocates who holds for a purely objective immortality. Some process theists who, like Rahner, accept the authority of Christian grace, revelation, the Christian tradi­tion and its symbols, may be closer to Rahner than is appreciated gener­ally, agreeing there may be in every human being, "by transcendental necessity," a tendency to hope in one's ''resurrection,'' in "the abiding validity of one's single and entire existence."118 "Every person wants to survive in some final and definitive sense."119 Freedom of choice, Rah­ner contends, enters only in one's response to this orientation, ultimately in the form of a freely opted for hope or despair. Thus, while underscoring its gratuitous character, Rahner speaks of this eternal completion as an intrinsic requirement or consequence of the present graced human existence.

Neither the category of reward-punishment nor selfishness, how­ever, is suitable to describe such salvation, which is indeed a manifesta­tion of the very opposite of egotism, according to Rahner. The infinite preciousness of life and its eternal claim shine forth, rather, in such experiences as ultimate selfless love and fidelity and ultimate selfless obedience to truth.120

Heaven and Hell

Finally, in discussing images of heaven and hell, Rahner and Hart­shorne firmly concur insofar as they both exclude perspectives of eternal reward and punishment and opt instead for the concept of intrinsic consequences.

116Hartshorne, "Religion in Process Philosophy," p. 264. 117Hartshorne, Logic of Perfection, p. 247. 118Rahner, Foundations, p. 268. See also the references to subjective immortality in

note 93. To these we could add a recent contribution by Jan van der Veken, "Talking Meaningfully About Im-mortality," in Word and Spirit 8 (Petersham, MA: St. Bede's, 1986), pp. 95-108.

119Rahner, Foundations, p. 258. 120Rahner, "Eternity From Time," investigations, 19:177.

260 HORIZONS

Hartshorne regards the traditional images of heaven and hell sym­bolically, not as literal realities.121 They express, for example, the funda­mental religious truth that death is not ultimate destruction, and the intuitive truth that what we do, how we act, and so on, is important and has irrevocable consequences.122 Death, in this sense, is the "divine judgment on our lives [the "last judgment,,123l for, once completed, we are what we have decided and done/'124 "Nothing can be added or taken away."125

It is in the present world that we find our heaven or hell, the result of our own acts and decisions, and those of others which affect our lives for good or ill. What ought to motivate our actions, moreover, is simply love of others, "helping one another to live nobly on earth,"126, not egotistical concern to earn an afterlife reward or avoid an eternal torment.

That countless people suffer impoverished lives while others thrive in overabundance is obviously a serious problem. Yet its solution is to be found not in an afterlife compensation, according to Hartshorne, but by dedicated and sincere human effort here and now. The justice we need to work for is clearly justice on earth, not in some heavenly domain.127

For Rahner, likewise, heaven and hell are images, symbols which underline the absolute seriousness and inescapable responsibility of our basic decisions, and the two starkly opposed directions in which we can ultimately shape ourselves and our lives. We may respond positively to the graced orientation of our being to God or we may violate this basic thrust.

In this regard, heaven denotes not an arbitrary, external reward, but the unfolding into completeness of a positive fundamental option.128

Hell stands for "the radical contradiction between... the permanent offer of God's self-communication in love, and the definitive, obdurate refusal opposed to it by the free act."129 "Punishment for sins" is not analogous to vindictive penalties imposed in political society, but the inherently painful contradiction between who one truly is and who one wrongly opts to be. "It is the painful protest of the reality which God has fashioned against the false decision of the human being."130

121Hartshorne, Logic of Perfection, p. 256. 122ibid., p. 251. 123Ibid., p. 255. 124Hartshorne, "A Philosopher's Assessment of Christianity," p. 177. 125Hartshorne, Logic of Perfection, p. 255. 126Hartshorne, "Philosophy After Fifty Years," p. 151. 127Ibid., p. 148. 128Rahner, "Heaven," Dictionary, pp. 204-05; "Beatific Vision," Encyclopedia, p. 78. 129Rahner, "Hell," Encyclopedia, pp. 602-04. 130Karl Rahner, "A Brief Theological Study of Indulgence," investigations, 10:153.

For Rahner's discussion of sin and its intrinsic consequences, see J. Norman King, The God of Forgiveness and Healing in the Theology of Karl Rahner (Washington, DC: Univer­sity Press of America, 1982).

King and Whitney: Rahner and Hartshorne 261

Rahner insists, moreover, that one's basic self-defining response to the self-bestowing God is concretely realized in and through love of neighbor.131 He strongly emphasizes both interpersonal concern and the struggle for social justice as integral to this response and as expressive of one's transcendental hope.132 Finally, "the salvation of the indi­vidual . . . is not achieved fully except within the absolute future of the whole of humankind, as the ultimate result of the love of all the others in the absoluteness of God."133 There seems to be nothing in this which process thinkers would find problematic.

W. Conclusion

In this article, we have suggested that Rahner and Hartshorne share several significant convictions, despite their differences in approach and areas of disagreement. Two of the fundamental issues that need to be resolved are the question of being and becoming and the question of conscious immortality. With respect to the former, we have suggested that both Rahner and Hartshorne, with differing accents, present subtly nuanced views that warrant a more careful comparison. A constructive analysis might demonstrate how a convergence of these views may be possible. On the issue of conscious immortality, we have recognized that Hartshorne is the strongest process opponent of this belief, but that there are arguments in the process literature which support belief in a con­scious, personal immortality, an analysis based upon Whiteheadian metaphysics. On the other hand, a Rahnerian perspective might seri­ously consider Hartshorne's objection to conscious immortality in rela­tion to its own assumption that in any afterlife consciousness would be transformed beyond what we now experience in this earthly life.

In sum, the thought of Rahner and of Hartshorne is a challenge to rethink fundamental issues in the light of the fresh perspectives and insights they bring and perhaps to discover or forge new or different tools which might permit a comprehensive synthesis which incor­porates and goes beyond their work. Their thought is also a challenge to live one's earthly life with personal depth, interpersonal compassion and social responsibility in response to the transcendent Presence at the heart of this process, with trust in its enduring personal and historical meaning.

131 Karl Rahner, "Reflections on the Unity of the Love of Neighbor and the Love of God," Investigations, 6:247.

132See, for example, Karl Rahner, "Christianity and the 'New Man,' " investigations, 5:135-53; "Christian Humanism," investigations, 9:187-204; and "On the Theology of Revolution," investigations, 14:314-30.

133Karl Rahner, "Christian Humanism," investigations, 9:189.

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