Hans Kung, Disputed Truth. Memoirs II, (Continuum: New York, 2008)
This is the first of several posts on a volume that reads like a novel. It has characterisation, plot, the tension of narrative development, delayed resolution, and the reader drawn in to care about the outcome, how the story ends. In fact the Australian ex Jesuit novelist Morris West, at the climax of Kung's conflict with the Vatican in 1979-80, visited Kung and offered to write a novel about his story; and as the author of The Shoes of the Fisherman he could have done an intriguingly good job. Indeed at the height of the Cold War Star Wars tensions in the mid 1980's, West did write The Clowns of God, about a charismatic Pope, and a Tubingen theologian whose thought and character do resemble Hans Kung. But this volume latest volume of Memoirs is undiluted Kung - lucidly critical theologian, historical analyst of his own tradition, self-apologist, and on my reading relentlessly loyal Catholic priest, so long as his loyalty is to be given to the Church as the people of God, rather than the Church as the hierarchical power structures of an ecclesial institution which in his view is teflon coated against necessary reform.
One of the Free Church of Scotland's greatest preachers and writers, Alexander Whyte, 100 years and entire Christian traditions removed from Kung, once urged students to get themselves 'into a relation of indebtedness with some of the great thinkers of the past and present', as a way of guarding against spiritual and theological tunnel vision, as a commitment to pastoral and theological breadth of understanding, and as an exercise in intellectual humility which guards against any of us setting ourselves up as our own pope!. He was criticised by some in his own communion who never quite understood the ecumenical and catholic spirit of ‘the hospitable hearted evangelical’. He had a meeting with John Henry Newman, his Appreciation of Santa Teresa was read in monastic communities at lectio divina at lunch, he read speculative mystics, doctrinal puritans, deep-dyed Scottish Calvinists, and tasted from most of the other tributaries that flow from distant Christian foothills into the broad stream of Christian tradition. Years ago I took his advice – and amongst those with whom I have a relation of indebtedness is Hans Kung – along with a bunch of others just about as varied as Whyte.
So having read the first volume of the Kung's memoirs last year, (My Struggle for Freedom) I have been anticipating the next volume, and like many others, wondering what he would write about his relationship to Pope Benedict, formerly Cardinal Ratzinger, along with John Paul II, easily the single most ecclesially powerful theological opponent Kung has encountered. Ratzinger’s role as the Vatican’s doctrinal enforcer was always going to make Kung’s memoir potentially explosive. In fact Kung is so meticulous about context, perspective, exposition of issues and standpoints, that this volume only comes up to 1980, which clearly omits some of the most significant developments in the Catholic Church and in the life and mature thought of Kung himself. So a third volume is to come, God willing; as Kung reminds us he is now in his ninth decade – can he really be? I must be getting on myself!
Having started on this book, I think little else will get in the way till it's finished. As his own Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Kung confesses:
As a Catholic Christian and theologian with an evangelical disposition I wanted to put myself at the service of men and women inside and outside the catholic Church and…by human confusion and divine providence – was liberated and impelled to engage intensively in the increasingly important issues of world society. Without ever giving up my roots in the Christian faith, I embarked on a life of expanding concentric circles; the unity of the churches, peace among the religions, the community of nations. (Disputed Truth, pages 1-2)
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