Karl Rahner, Thomas Aquinas: Monk, Theologian, and Mystic
One becoming a priest must be a theologian. Not a schoolboy who snakes his way through examinations because otherwise one won’t get ordained. We don’t need to be theological geniuses. But we have to be human beings and Christians who love theological knowledge, who are there for it with mind and heart. For us there can in the long run be no really spiritual life without an intellectual life. In theology we have to allow ourselves to be challenged as whole persons with all we are, with mind and heart, with the whole weight and seriousness of existence in our times, with all the experience of our lives. Not only what is written in schoolbooks belongs to theology.
But theology can only be pursued as preparation of the whole priestly person preaching later on, if there flows into it and there is elaborated in it whatever moves or what ought to have moved a cultivated person in the age in which God has placed us without our asking. Just as Thomas did, so must we. If the living God has spoken to us, and if theology is nothing but the exact listening to God’s revelation with every means of grace and nature available to a person, then we have to be theologians, or we are not in general what we should be. For us, theology is simply a part, an inner moment of the work of salvation on our own existence and that of others. Not just an academic affair.
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