I get my copies of New Blackfriars in a rather unusual manner, once a year and all at once, a whole years’s worth at a time. So it was only in May 1982 that I came across Fergus Kerr’s article Rahner Retrospective III: Transcendence or Finitude in the September 1981 issue. It gives such a seriously misleading view of Karl Rahner’s understanding of human nature and offers such an inadequate substitute as the proper philosophical foundation for Christian theology that it requires to be countered without delay.

As the title of his article suggests, what Kerr objects to in Rahner’s view of human nature is his notion that we are transcendent beings. What he wants to put in its place is a certain understanding of our finitude.

Kerr describes his paper as “a preliminary exploration of the basic epistemological problems in Rahner’s philosophy of man, with the tentative proposal that a quite different starting-point needs to be accepted” (p 370).