He was deeply sympathetic to liberation theology and a politically engaged Christianity, critical of the excessive centralization in the church that he saw under Pope John Paul II, and rejected any “backward glancing vision which longs for a pre-Reformation Western Christianity.” At the same time, Metz was not afraid to criticize other theologians who were identified as progressives, whether this was Rahner’s theory of “anonymous Christianity” or the Reformed theologian Jürgen Moltmann’s notion of divine suffering. Metz was one of the founders of the journal Concilium, which is often associated with the liberal or progressive wing of the post-conciliar church, but he was not so easily pigeonholed. After completion of his studies, which included a doctoral dissertation on Thomas Aquinas, and a few years in pastoral ministry, he took up an academic position at the University of Münster in 1963, where he remained for the next thirty years, until his retirement. It was in Innsbruck that he became the student and collaborator of Karl Rahner.
He studied theology in Bamberg, Munich, and Innsbruck, and was ordained a priest in 1954. The German theologian Johann Baptist Metz, who died on December 2 at the age of ninety-one, was born in Bavaria, served briefly as a sixteen-year-old in the Wehrmacht during the closing days of World War II, and spent several months in a POW camp in the eastern United States.
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