GRACE
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and identity is signified and effected. This precisely is the grace of the sacrament. Once again it is Rahner who has most significantly explored the centrality of the doctrine of the Incarnation in the theology of grace in our time. As I mentioned before, it is closely connected with his concept of the supernatural existential and the possibility of having an anonymous Christian. The Incarnation is really the proto-grace, the archetype and basis of all grace. The humanity of the divine Word is the Ur-Sakrament, the prime analogue of all sacraments. But this humanity is not to be viewed, as seemingly it often is, as just a kind of mask or livery for the divinity. Nor is it to be seen as a kind of freak, so unique because of its attribution to the divine Word that it ceases to be in the fullest and truest sense human. The divinity was not forced upon the human nature of Christ; no violence was done to the humanity in the hypostatic union. Rather, because human nature as such is radically and naturally an openness to God and supernatural action, the mystery of the Incarnation can he understood to be at one and the same time God's most perfect and sublime revelation of himself and the validation of man's anthropomorphic projections upon God. For, as Rahner says, it is precisely in the humanity of Christ that God reveals himself truly and most perfectly. And still that revelation of the one who is totally Other required a selfalienation, a kenosis as Paul would have it, that rendered possible a relationship between God and man that never could have existed without it. It is this revelation of God in Christ that reverses the whole flow of theology and substitutes for an anthropomorphic concept of God a theomorphic view of man. For we must believe that Christ is truly human, that in this nature he is like other men. In so making us his brothers in the flesh he showed us what we really are. So Rahner defines man as the self-alienated God. Man is the cipher of God, the abbreviation of God. It was when God decided to be something other than God, when he decided that the totality of love which he is should he reflected in the nothingness outside of him, that man arose.