It was a lucky coincidence that I got to know Johanna Rahner personally in the summer of 2017.
I.
It was the anniversary year of Martin Luther's 95 theses, commonly known as the "Reformation anniversary". The Protestant Church Congress was to take place in Berlin; the closing service was planned for Wittenberg. As has long been the custom at church congresses and Catholic conventions, the organisers wanted to set a clear ecumenical tone. These included a dialogue event on the ecumenical situation, which brought together a Catholic speaker and a Protestant speaker. Johanna Rahner and I were asked to take on this task. We were not satisfied with the telephone conversation we had as a result. We made an appointment in Stuttgart, met for a delicious breakfast, discovered the first areas of overlap in our idea of ecumenism, asked ourselves how denominational differences would find their place in it, and parted in anticipation of the reunion in Berlin.
At the event itself, Johanna Rahner had a papal word at the ready to encourage Christians of all denominations to take clear ecumenical steps. She quoted Pope Francis: "We churches are called to form consciences, but not to replace consciences." And she clarified what for her was the most important sign of ecumenical conscience formation: she saw the Eucharistic community as an example of freedom of conscience; she saw interdenominational marriages and families as pioneers of such conscience-driven ecumenism. "We Catholics," she shouted into the hall of the Französische Friedrichstadtkirche in Berlin, "should finally invite the Protestants to communion." In my opinion, the warm welcome she extended should of course also apply in the other direction. I still believe that freedom of conscience also means that Catholics are welcome to take Protestant communion and can make use of this invitation in freedom.
Naturally, Johanna Rahner was asked at this event - as on many occasions before and after - about the admission of women to the ministry. Presumably not all those who asked the question were aware that this admission is not much more than half a century old in the Protestant world. Some participants may have thought that there have always been pastors in the Protestant church. Johanna Rahner was of course aware that the ordination of women in the Protestant church has a relatively short history. She left no doubt as to how urgently she hopes and pushes for a comparable change in the Catholic Church. However, she explicitly drew attention to the major step that Catholic ministers must be prepared to take in view of the long roots of the male priesthood in church tradition. In the debates and controversies since then, it has become clear not only within the Church, but also in the public sphere, that this reference cannot mean indifference to the task at hand. Johanna Rahner's courageous presence can always be counted on in such debates. Freedom of conscience and courage characterise her ecumenical stance.
Johanna Rahner, as the example of our first personal encounters shows, is a theologian who brings her great theological qualities to bear in a practical way. The list of her ecumenically relevant memberships is remarkable. Personally, I was particularly grateful that she was willing to be appointed by the Evangelical Church in Germany as a Catholic theologian to the Academic Advisory Council in preparation for the anniversary of the Reformation in 2017. The ecumenical composition of this committee was in itself an important signal. Her ecumenical commitments also include her long-term membership of the Ecumenical Working Group of Protestant and Catholic theologians. The editorial board of the Ökumenische Rundschau, the scientific advisory board of the European Melanchthon Academy and the Societas Oecumenica are further examples of intensive ecumenical commitment. I would also like to make special mention of her membership of the Central Committee of German Catholics, which, as we all know, is of particular importance for the presence of Christian commitment in our society. Beyond such committee work, her ecumenical passion is evident in her willingness to support inquiring Christians in their desire for ecumenical fellowship, to equip them with good theological arguments and to encourage them on their way.
II.
I have deliberately placed Johanna Rahner's great practical commitment at the beginning of my laudatory speech. However, her multifaceted ecumenical commitment is impressively underpinned by academic research. Johanna Rahner is one of those academic theologians who do not initially focus their academic work on the systematic disciplines of theology, but rather build their theological work on a foundation of an exegetical or historical nature. Johanna Rahner's academic work began with a dissertation dedicated to a key topic of New Testament theology, namely the revelation of God in Jesus of Nazareth. She examines this question not, as is often the case, in the so-called synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, but in the Gospel of John, which, in comparison to the so-called synoptic Gospels, chooses a very independent way to illustrate the salvific significance of Jesus Christ, as every reader can sense from the first words, the prologue to this Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word."
The central biblical theme of her dissertation is accompanied by a historical and systematic work of similarly fundamental importance, with which Johanna Rahner created an impressive foundation for the systematic and at the same time ecumenical orientation of her thinking and teaching. This was supervised by Jürgen Werbick in Münster as a habilitation project. The topic could hardly be more central: a justification-theological examination of the Catholic understanding of the Church. This task contains an ecumenical impulse that makes the heart of the Protestant theologian beat faster. Documents from the theological dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran Churches are taken as the starting point for examining the relationship between justification by grace alone and the theological understanding of the Church: Creatura Evangelii - Creature of the Gospel, is the title of this fundamental monograph. Ecclesiological impulses of the Reformation are confronted with a search for traces in the Roman Catholic tradition. Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchthon and Johannes Calvin represent the Reformation understanding of the church in this book, while the search for traces in the Roman Catholic tradition ranges from the Counter-Reformation to Bellarmin and Johann Adam Möhler to the Second Vatican Council.
When dealing with Vatican II's understanding of the Church, the question of how the confession of the holiness of the Church relates to the fact that the Church is not only a Church of sinners, but also a sinful Church itself, gains crucial importance. The ground-breaking reflections on this topic by Karl Rahner - to whom Johanna Rahner is distantly related, i.e. through seven corners - at the time of the Second Vatican Council are very much present in this book. Right down to the footnotes, Johanna Rahner visualises Karl Rahner's fundamental insight and at the same time points out the "inner closeness to a Reformation view of the Church that stems from the belief in justification". She summarises this in a footnote with the following words: "This church, which is both saint and sinner, is the concrete church, the maturity of which one can rub against, lament and suffer from. In her (Karl Rahner is quoted) 'to want to make a permanently pure distinction between the divine and the human-all-too-human' is 'delusion and rapture'" (Johanna Rahner, Creatura Evangelii, 327, note 270).
In my eyes, these reflections by Karl and Johanna Rahner are of outstanding importance for the self-understanding of every church, but also for the ecumenical co-operation of the churches. Rahner's thesis of the concrete church, which is both saint and sinner, coincides surprisingly closely with the theological attitude that found expression in a confession of guilt of the church formulated by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1940. But this is not the only reason why the self-critical insight into the dual character of the Church as both saint and sinner seems to me to be of central ecumenical importance today. Only on the path of self-criticism and repentance can our churches find their way out of the church twilight, which affects them all in our country - despite all the individual differences.
III.
The contribution of good theology is indispensable for such a path of self-criticism and conversion. As much as this is dependent on proven academic achievements, it must point beyond them. At a time when the public resonance of the churches has become fragile, it is all the more important that good theology becomes resonant and reaches the public. Johanna Rahner deliberately includes topics in her research that are designed for such public dialogues. This includes the relationship between religion, culture and educational processes, but also their relationship to politics and society, as well as the theoretical foundation and practical significance of dialogue between the world's religions in the context of a globalised world. Patchwork religiosity and subjective pluralism of faith are just as much a focus as the religiosity of children and young people, with special consideration of youth and cult literature as well as pop music. This bold exploration of new questions for theology is combined with publications on classical fundamental questions of theology that are accessible to students and can promote their theological knowledge and their ability to make independent judgements. Johanna Rahner has an unmistakable pedagogical impetus.
When she decided to study theology, she combined this with a degree in biology. The intention to prepare for the teaching profession with this dual qualification was obvious. Her theological expertise led her to work as a lecturer in theology from the outset, starting in 1990 at the Freiburg Specialist Academy for Pastoral and Religious Education, which was soon followed by university assignments in Cologne, Freiburg, Münster, Karlsruhe, Bamberg and Kassel. In 2013, she was appointed to the Chair of Dogmatics, History of Dogma and Ecumenical Theology at the University of Tübingen. Her intensive academic teaching activities have been particularly reflected in her publications in that she has published a series of theological textbooks that differ from other examples of this genre in that they are methodologically genuinely focussed on the process of teaching and learning. This pleasantly distinguishes these works from textbooks that are more orientated towards the reading habits of the authors than the recipients. The introduction to Catholic dogmatics and the introduction to Christian eschatology as well as a book on the doctrine of the sacraments are exemplary in this respect. Johanna Rahner succinctly explained the ecumenical intention of this work on the fundamental questions of dogmatics in an interview with Evelyn Finger for DIE ZEIT: "I want to open up classical dogmatics to the outside world; interdenominationally and interreligiously, but also in the face of non-believers and doubters."
This intention is reflected in a large number of essays and book contributions. The importance she is recognised for in this field is particularly evident in the fact that she has been co-editing the book series Quaestiones disputatae - "questions worthy of discussion" - together with Thomas Söding since 2019 - a unique book series for all areas of theology that has reached the impressive number of 332 volumes since it was founded in 1958. In this context, Johanna Rahner is also "related" to Karl Rahner through seven corners. Together with Heinrich Schlier, he was the first editor, while Johanna Rahner is - as you might have guessed - the seventh editor of this grandiose field of theological experimentation alongside Thomas Söding. The topics with which she has immediately made herself recognisable as editor are striking: synodality in the Catholic Church and the current debate on the admission of women to the priesthood, the latter under the remarkable title: Christusrepräsentanz.
IV.
I have saved Johanna Rahner's most important institutional responsibility for the future of ecumenism for last. Since the summer semester of 2014, she has succeeded Bernd Jochen Hilberath as Professor of Dogmatics, History of Dogma and Ecumenical Theology at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and heads the Institute for Ecumenical and Interreligious Research founded by Hans Küng. It characterises its task under the four guiding concepts: Observe - Consider - Advise - Move.
Johanna Rahner gave her inaugural lecture on 11 July 2014, the same semester in which she took up her professorship in Tübingen. In this way, she was able to integrate her new beginning into a lecture series entitled: So that they may all be one. Programme and Future of Ecumenism and was edited by the three previous directors of the Tübingen Institute, Hans Küng, Bernd Jochen Hilberath and Johanna Rahner herself. She gave her own contribution the title Zum Fortgang der Ökumene. She did not make any particular fuss about this title. However, as she mentioned in the course of her lecture, it came from the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who had given this title to a letter to the moderator of an issue of the Tübingen Theological Quarterly, the fundamental theologian Max Seckler. Ratzinger saw the activist forms of contemporary ecumenism as being in danger of losing their connection to that which was unavailable to them. In contrast, he insisted that "unity itself" could not be brought about through a "negotiated ecumenism". For "even if divisions are first and foremost human work and human guilt, there is also a dimension in them that corresponds to a divine decree." And he added: "But when the time has come that we no longer need this division and that the 'must' no longer applies, that is for the judging and forgiving God alone to decide." However, as Ratzinger himself admits, this means "finding unity through diversity", so that in the end the division is only "polarity" without contradiction. However, it is not enough to assume that division is tolerable when "the poison of hostility" is removed from it. Rather, one cannot talk about the plurality between the denominations without recognising the plurality within the various churches themselves. Johanna Rahner emphatically emphasises the plurality within herself as one of the strengths of Catholicism.
This plurality comes to light all the more clearly if one understands catholicity not only in terms of the magisterium or priestly responsibility, but also focuses on the self-responsible sense of faith of all Christians, i.e. what the Reformation tradition brought to the concept of the priesthood of all the baptised. In my understanding, it should be possible on such a path to move beyond the standstill in the mutual recognition of ministries - and thus also in the mutual recognition of the ecumenical partners' being church. These are issues that are just as urgent as Johanna Rahner's insistent call for women to be admitted to the priesthood.
On the way there, it is necessary not simply to see existing differences as insurmountable opposites, but to understand them as complementary. In this sense, Johanna Rahner, following Wolfgang Klausnitzer, proposes a complementary ecumenical methodology. Admittedly, the concept of complementarity must be understood in a broader sense than that proposed almost one hundred years ago by the physicist Niels Bohr. For him, complementarity referred to different ways of experiencing and describing the same object as different. A characterisation that Klaus-Michael Meyer-Abich formulated as follows goes further: "Complementary cognitions belong together insofar as they are cognitions of the same object; however, they exclude each other insofar as they cannot occur at the same time and for the same point in time." Love and justice, the conceptualisation of a nature conceived as lifeless and the laws of life, the neurological monitoring of brain processes and the awareness of free will are examples of such complementarities.
There seems to me to be no doubt that theology has always had to deal with such complementarities in an intensive way. They include, for example, the revelation and hiddenness of God or the holiness and sinfulness of the church, but the unity of the church in the plurality of churches should also be explicitly mentioned in our context. I see thinking about theological complementarities as a promising approach for an ecumenical theology that sees plurality primarily not as a threat, but as an invitation to recognise the unity of the Christian faith in the diversity of its manifestations. Johanna Rahner has made an important contribution to a complementary form of ecumenical theology and practice. And she will continue to do so, as I am sure many hope. She is an intrepid voice in favour of a contemporary Christianity. The Ecumenical Prize of the Catholic Academy in Bavaria is both a token of gratitude and an incentive.
