Even though Christ was not in a state of belief, he nevertheless experienced in himself the darkness which is the specific character of human death and the deprivation of the personal consummation in the void of the bodily end. He not only offered a satisfaction of some kind for sin, but he enacted and suffered precisely the death which is the expression, manifestation and revelation of sin in the world. He did all this in absolute liberty, as the act and the revelation of that divine grace which divinized the life of his humanity and which, by reason of his own divine person, belong to him of natural necessity. In that way however, death became, at least for himself, something absolutely different from what it would be in a man who did not possess, in his own right, either the life of grace, or that absolute freedom, secure from all the weakness of concupiscence, which was properly Christ’s. It is precisely in its darkness that the death of Christ becomes the expression and embodiment of his loving obedience, the free transference of his entire created existence to God. What was the manifestation of sin, thus becomes, without its darkness being lifted, the contradiction of sin, the manifestation of a “yes” to the will of the Father. (Karl Rahner, On the Theology of Death [2d ed.; trans. WH. Henkey: New York: Herder and Herder, 1965], 61-62, emphasis added—note, as a Trinitarian, Rahner does not believe that Jesus had faith in God)
