Kung’s detailed and documented story of how his removal was engineered, even allowing for any partisan, partial, personal perspective as the one telling the story, is profoundly moving, and very hard to read without enormous anger, regret, sympathy- and a surprising second thought.
Regret because Kung, whose ego bestrides both volumes in ways that indicate how hard he would have been to overcome in a fair intellectual fight, is a theologian who could be an important bridge between church and world; a church which desperately needs to modernise and a world moving further away from modernity and now from post-modernity. On Being a Christian remains one of the great statements of how the Christian view of God is earthed in the person of Jesus Christ, and how the Gospel can be thought, believed and lived in the flux of contemporary culture. No such book can escape some criticism, and much disagreement. Kung himself acknowledges that what he has written remains open to debate, revision and adjustment to the changing landscape of human knowledge and understanding. At the same time I can think of no other book on this scale of intellectual and theological exposition, that in the last 50 years had such popular impact and was taken so seriously by many outside Christian faith who wanted to know what On Being a Christian would involve in a world like today.
Sympathy because Kung’s fate exposes a fundamental opposition between two ways of thinking about what it means to be Catholic. Kung’s own use of the paradigm model in this book makes this clear; his opponents worked predominantly within the Hellenistic and then the Medieval paradigm of Greek philosophy and scholastic dogmatic theology. Kung works within the Reformation and Enlightenment paradigms of reforming internal critique, historical criticism and systematic rational analysis. Both would claim to go back to the New Testament and early church paradigms as their norm, but do so using their own and different intellectual structures derived from their favoured paradigms. The result is that Kung claims the portrayal of the historical Jesus in the NT as recovered by historical criticism and textual exegesis is normative; his opponents claim that the dogmatic formulations on Christ at Nicaea and Chalcedon, and in high medieval scholasticism, enables a normative Christian interpretation of the NT. As Bultmann said, exegesis without presuppositions is impossible. So is a dialogue between fundamentally different forms of theological discourse.
And a surprising second thought. Kung himself acknowledges that his removal from his teaching post, actually removed him from Vatican control of his published and public statements. He remains a priest and catholic in good standing. But in the last 28 years he ahs become a figure of global stature. His search for a Global ethic, his studies of the religious situation of our time, his involvement at high political and academic levels of reflection on cultural and religious dialogue have made him what he could never have been within the reasonable constraints of traditional Catholic dogma as imposed by a conservative curia and papacy. Long before 9/11 Kung was on to the serious global implications of conflicting fundamentalisms, religious and political. His voice is now respected and heard (and listened to) across a wide range of human religious and political diversity.
So I finish this second volume with mixed feelings. A final post will be a series of quotations from this volume. They come from a passionately critical intellect determined towards truth. They demonstrate restless impatience with unexamined tradition privileged over honest critical enquiry. As such, his words reveal the integrity and yet the enigma of a man whose devotion to Jesus and the Church, whose passion for God and for the world, whose inability to flinch in the face of truth as he perceives it, whose own formidable intelligence and intellectual self-confidence may unintentionally create communication problems with anyone who has authority over him.
And who yet, for me, is one to and from whom I have learned so very much – in agreement and disagreement, through big books and thin books, as positive example of scholarship in the service of the church and as a reminder that truth and freedom, which lie at the heart of all genuine scholarship, also lie at the heart of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, who is the way, the truth and the life. What I take these words of Jesus to mean, I have no doubt, differs markedly from Hans Kung, but I wouldn’t like to try and argue it out with him in a classroom! Though in any such argument, it would never occur to me to think of him as anything other than a faithful follower of Jesus, seeking the truth of the One we are called to follow, asking awkward questions with the confidence of one whose self description includes phrases like ‘evangelical disposition’, ‘catholic Christian’ and ‘ecumenical theologian’.
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