O Emmanuel, the Nations are Waiting

O Emmanuel, the Nations are Waiting

Advent Antiphon
O Emmanuel,
the nations are waiting …
O come and save us.

Martin Heidegger
If I may answer quickly and perhaps somewhat vehemently, but from long reflection: Philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all merely human meditations and endeavors.
Only a god can still save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god. We cannot get him to come by thinking. At best we can prepare the readiness of expectation.…
The experience of this absence is not nothing, but rather a liberation of human beings from what I called the “fallenness into beings”….
The greatness of what is to be thought is too great for us today. Perhaps we can struggle with building narrow and not very far-reaching footbridges for a crossing….

From Der Spiegel (1976)

Karl Rahner SJ
Jesus Christ … is the initial beginning and the definitive triumph of the movement of the world’s self-transcendence into absolute closeness to the mystery of God…. The Incarnation of God is the unique and highest instance of the actualization of the essence of human reality.

From Theological Investigations Volume 7 (1971),

and Foundations of Christian Faith (1976)