The Idea of Christianity

This book is a reworking of Karl Rahner’s Foundations of Christian Faith into a succinct and more readable form. Rahner subtitled his work An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity. This book has used an adaptation of Rahner’s subtitle in order to acknowledge both its dependence on Rahner’s work and also the liberties which its author has taken with Rahner’s work. The Foundations has been summarized and greatly condensed. Rahner’s lengthy one-sentence theological tracts have been completely recast and simplified. His arguments have been reduced to their essentials. Many of his abstractions have been made more concrete. Nevertheless, the principal ideas and the main lines of argument in this book are indeed Rahner’s and much of the flavor of his language has been retained. This book will provide many readers with a useful and fairly comfortable access to Rahner’s powerful theological insights.