Living Wittily

George Mackay Brown - and the music of poetry

Reading an essay on the poetry of George Mackay Brown, the Orkney poet, I came across examples of why his poetry can best be described as musical. 

Whether the words are shaped to symphonic sounds, or set in the informal discipline of a sonata, or showing off like the soloist in a concerto, there are sounds and rhythms in his poetry, and a capacity to evoke both image and emotion, that I've always found haunting, in a comforting kind of way.

"I have a deep-rooted belief that what has once existed can never die:  not even the frailest things, spindrift or clover-scent or glitter of star on a wet stone.  All is gathered into the web of creation, that is apparently established and yet perhaps only a dream in the eternal mind."
from Finished Fragrance, 


We are folded all
In a green fable
And we fare
From early
Plough-and-daffodil sun
Through revel
Of wind-tossed oats and barley
Past sickle and flail
To harvest home,
The circles of bread and ale
At the long table-
It is told, the story -
We and earth and sun and corn are one.
from Christmas Poem, 

See what I mean? I once knew a brave woman whose life had more than its fair share of pain, of hurt, struggle and wrestling with circumstance. She had lived in Orkney and knew George Mackay Brown. She loved his poems, corresponded with him till his death in 1996, and took comfort from his poetry (of which she had several written for herself). I can understand why. Her resilience and lack of bitterness was at least partially due, I reckon, to an instinct for the beauty and healing of words. Does remembering people  before God, with gratitude, constitute praying for the dead? I hope so.

I just want to say I'm a proud Welsh and Punjabi Sikh girl

Sarika Watkins-Singh, excluded from school for wearing the kara, a wrist bangle which is an important expression of her Sikh faith, has just won her case at the High Court. I find it interesting that political correctness, originally an approach to language and behaviour intended to avoid exclusive or discriminatory attitudes and actions, becomes in some contexts, precisely that - exclusive and discriminatory.

Now I understand the school policy of prohibiting the wearing of jewellery -which suggests decorative and ornamental objects worn for cosmetic purposes. But I would have thought such a policy would accommodate the wearing of jewellery recognised as an expression of a person's religious identity - Sikh, Christian, Muslim, Jewish and other acknowledged faith traditions. As a Baptist Christian I have heightened sensitivity to infringements of religious liberty, and belong to a historic tradition that upholds the right of people to express their faith without fear of persecution. I don't think for a minute the school intended to be discriminatory, though it has been found that Sarika was a victim of religious discrimination. And I don't think the school intended to curtail Sarika's religious liberty, though the consequence of a strictly applied blanket policy had that perhaps unintended consequence.

But when the policy was formulated why didn't religious jewellery feature as an issue; in a pluralist multi-cultural ethos that question should now be standard. And if it had unintended consequences, why fight it in court - admit the flaw in the policy and sort it. Whether the veil, the cross, the kara, the yarmulche - the symbols of a faith tradition are not to be assessed on the same level of social significance as cosmetic jewellery. A school, of all places should be a place where that distinction is recognised and respected - how else teach young people tolerance, respect, and acceptance of the other person whose way of life is different. What is the message to a young Sikh woman if the only options are change your religious practice or be banned from school?  

Following the court judgement Sarika said: "I am overwhelmed by the outcome and it's marvellous to know that the long journey I've been on has finally come to an end. "I'm so happy to know that no-one else will go through what me and my family have gone through."

She added: "I just want to say that I am a proud Welsh and Punjabi Sikh girl."

Hope the school learns its lesson.

Refined embarrassment

Miss Cranston's Tearoom is one of the more select places of refreshment and consistently  reliable civility as a given of customer service. Located in Gordon Street (a name almost synonymous with civility as those who know me had better testify), in the centre of Glasgow, it's within a minute's slow walk from Border's Bookshop. If you are there at the right time you are shown to a window seat from whence to watch all kinds of people anticipating, transacting or reflecting on their various retail experiences; conversing, arguing or walking along in silence - companionably warm or post-stooshie chill. Sit long enough you see both.

On my recent visit I ordered the individual rhubarb tart and a cafetiere of Blue Mountain coffee. In the discreetly sedate surroundings, sitting at the table with the crisp white cover, and enjoying the joys of refined and leisurely self-indulgence, I discovered the embarrassing problem of the cafetiere with the stuck plunger. I began with a slow even pressure downwards, intending to watch the coarse ground coffee being gently pushed down as the dark brown liquid gathered above. Feeling some resistance I pushed harder, then a little harder, and on the assumption this was an easily overcome technical challenge, a little harder still. The result was an impressive impromptu coffee fountain accompanied by a loud attention drawing clatter of metal on glass. The consequences were neither discreet nor pretty. And within seconds the manager was over, took away the tray, cleaned the table, apologised for the mess (which I'd made), and brought me a fresh and bigger cafetiere of that kind of coffee that makes you aware that not all blessings were lost in the aftermath of the Fall.

As mentioned, Borders is only a minute's walk away and I was on the hunt for a book for Sheila. Milan Kundera's elegiac novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is a profound narrative reflection of the nature of human choices, which tend to be risks we cannot assess beforehand, guesses at happiness, decisions which all but determine the future. Ah but I wasn't after Kundera's considered probing of the human capacity to build, break or endure relationships. I was after a novel with only one word of difference in the title, The Unbearable Lightness of Scones, by Alexander McCall Smith. Holiday reading as a gift. To give a story as a gift is to encourage those we care about to take an inner holiday, the rest and recreation that comes from going someplace else through imaginative literature. In that sense a gift wrapped book is a package holiday.

Not a bad Saturday morning.

Two Cafetiere Disaster Haiku

One

Showing off brute strength,

malfunctioning cafetiere,

coffee eruption.

Two

Coarse ground coffee grain

spews and spreads like speckled mud,

'I'm that embarrassed!'

Poetry and the wisdom of this world.

.A couple of weeks ago we took the Park and Ride bus at the Pear Tree, Oxford. Like the child I've never quite not been, I wanted top deck, front seat. And as so often in life, I was disappointed because some other height addicts with a love for seeing ahead before anyone else, had already usurped my rightful seat. So, content with 'near the front', I sat on the right side, and amongst the great sights of Oxford, saw again that red brick street of quite modern houses which I always take time to look for on the passing bus, 'Elizabeth Jennings Way'.

It's a kind of Baptist pilgrimage thing, allowing a place of significance to remind me of why it's important not to forget the person whose life made the place significant in the first place! Indeed I'm hoping to visit a number of such significant places later in the year as part of my Sabbatical, of which more in due course.

I'm currently working on a paper for the Baptists Doing Theology in Context Conference, which in the plenary sessions, will be on the general theme 'The Wisdom of This World?'. (August 26-29 at Luther King House, Manchester). My own effort is on the role of the poet in contemporary culture, and on the importance for christian witness of paying attention to 'the wisdom of this world' as expressed in the voices of those who are dissident, or dissonant, or interrogative, or disinterested - but never indifferent to life questions and cultural experience. It's a short paper, 30-35 minutes maximum speaky time with time for conversation and reflection. The poet whose voice I am listening to is Carol Ann Duffy. Don't know if there will ever be a Carol Ann Duffy Way in Manchester (where she now lives). Whether or no, her poems express Carol Ann Duffy's way of looking at the world, and seeing the comic and tragic, the trivial and crucial, ranging through wistfulness, realism, cynicism, to their deeper perhaps truer emotions of longing, acceptance and scepticism.

In her collection The World's Wife she distills much of what makes her an essential voice for those who want help in understanding the strange perspectives, unfamiliar emotions, named and nameless anxieties, and much else that makes up the tangled, fankled mess of human relationships in a post-modern culture. Stuart Blythe uses the word flux as a verb which describes what our culture is doing - it is fluxing. Duffy is an honest commentator and mostly compassionate observer of that fluxing which takes place in the emotional sub-structure of human relationships, and which is externalised in a culture that doesn't quite know what to want.

To anticipate a paragraph of my paper. Her poem on the myth of Icarus, who manufactured wax wings and was so pleased with his techonological brillince that he flew too high, the sun melted the wax and he fell to his doom, is a scathing comment on the myth of male mastery through technology.
Mrs Icarus witnessed the fall:

Mrs Icarus
I'm not the first or the last
to stand on a hillock,
watching the man she married
prove to the world
he's a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock

Hans Kung: On Still being a Christian 5 The church must change to remain itself

This final post is a collection of quotations from Disputed Truth. One of Kung's gifts is a way of writing that has style, lucidity, and a restrained but persistent passion for his subject.

One of Kung's most important books is Justification. The Doctrine of Karl Barth and a Catholic Reflection, English edition 1964, which along with Von Balthasar's volume on Karl Barth, represents some of the best appreciative Barthian criticism, both still having to be reckoned with as interpretations of Barth -(though Bruce McCormack's work has since 'reckoned with' Von Balthasar's thesis). Kung  spoke with affectionate admiration at Barth's memorial serrvice, and comments in his latest Memoir volume:

Now the theologian who could point to an incomparable theological oeuvre has returned to his God. And I remember the moving moment when he told me that if ever he had to go before his God he would not refer to his many 'works' not even to his 'good faith', but simply say, 'God be merciful to me, a poor sinner'. I do not doubt for a moment that he has been received graciously. (page 98)

The relationship between Kung and Ratzinger, now Benedict xvi, is woven throughout this volume. Is there any love lost between them? Or found? It's harder to read Kung's inner feelings than to read the well written narrative, anecdotes, and comments; a mixture of fair-minded recall, reflection after the fact and not infrequent acid aside, which could be humorous, ironic or sarcastic, depending on the tone of voice - not discernible in print! Here are a couple of his comments:

From the beginning to the present day Joseph Ratzinger has seen himself 'really at home' in traditional Bavarian Catholicism...He saw and sees himself as a theologian of tradition, who persists essentially in the theological framework marked out by Augustuine and Bonaventure. For him the 'early church', or the 'church of the Fathers' is the measure of all things...
This is the early church as he understands it. He doesn't see Jesus of Nazareth as his disciples and the first Christian community saw him but as he was defined dogmatically by the hellenistic councils of the fourth/fifth centuries, which in fact split Christianity more than they united it. The Jesus of history and the undogmatic Jewish Christianity of the beginning hardly interests him, so he also has no deeper understanding of Islam, which is stamped by their environment. Nor does he show much understanding for the diverse charismatic structure of the Pauline communities and the different possibilities  of a 'succession of apostles', and also of'prohpets' and 'teachers'. he isn't interested in the church of the New Testament but in the church of the fathers (of course without the mothers). (page 131)

In his critique of Rahner, Ratzinger and other dogmaticians, Kung can sound more Protestant than Catholic. But that would be to misunderstand him. Rather than a church where one branch claims monopoly of catholicity, Kung  insists that all Christian traditions submit to the singular authoritative criterion. However to make the Gospel of Jesus Christ as attested in the New Testament that primary criterion, as Kung does, is an obvious challenge to a too narrowly conceived Roman Catholicism:

...this criterion cannot be other than the original Christian message, the gospel of Jesus Christ. That means that the theologian who is catholic in the authentic sense must have an evangelical disposition, just as conversely the theologian who is evangelical  in the authentic sense must be open in a catholic direction. In this sense we can be ecumenical theologians, whether catholic or evangelical. In other words, authentic ecumenicity means an 'evangelical catholicism', centred on and ordered by the gospel of Jesus Christ. (page 167)

Jesus isn't a phantom, but a historical person with human features. And if one can learn about him only from the foundation documents of the faith, and in the end it is often impossible to decide what is historical and what isn't, the great contours of the message, the conduct and the fate of Jesus of Nazareth and his relationship with God, come out so clearly and so unmistakably, that it is evident that the christian faith has a support in history and that therefore discipleship of Jesus is possible and meaningful.  (page 225)

Another of Kung's enduring contributions is his work on ecclesiology. His book The Church, became a source of considerable anxiety to those with centralist Vatican prejudices, and is still a standard account of the church as primarily a charismatic community expressing the Body of Christ in a life which is incarnational, redemptive and sacramental, all three teleologically present both in the Church's origins and in the defining expressions of its mission. It is a singluar irony of Kung's life that he is one of the best apologists for ecumenical rapprochement and inter-faith conversation, yet has been a focus of divisive controversy within his own communion for half a century. So these words bear the weight of considerable experience and persistent hopefulness.

The church must change even more to remain itself. And it will remain what it should be if it remains with the one who is its origin; if in all its progress and change it remains faithful to this Jesus Christ. It will then be a church which is closer to God and at the same time closer to men and women. Then the catholics with their emphasis on tradition will become more evangelical and at the same time the Protestants with their epnasis on the gospel will become more catholic, and in this way - and this is decisive - both will become more Christian. (page 230)

The reading of Kung's Memoirs has been an emotionally demanding and theologically enjoyable encounter with one of the few theologians whose theological and moral programme seek to span cultures within and beyond Christianity, and on a global scale. His 'Global Ethic' is not without its serious critics, and his theological reconstructions do read at times like an older form of demythologising and disowning of mystery, removing the sharp edges of a Gospel which both wounds and heals. Like many others, there are times when I think Kung is simply wrong, and in seeking to explain, explains away, and in seeking to communicate with the modern world is perhaps too accommodating to the modern, and now post-modern mindset. But in a world that manages to be both polarised and fragmented at the same time, a message of global responsibility and a way of moving towards a more responsible and hopeful way of human existence, Kung believes, arises out of the nature of the Church and its rootedeness in the life, death and present reality of Jesus Christ.

Kung is right about the Gospel of Jesus Christ as first criterion, judging both church and world. You don't need to go to Nicea and Chalcedon to root such a message of global conciliation and human healing in the reality of Jesus Christ - 'through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things...making peace by the blood of the cross'. Kung's latest theological reflection published before this volume was on the Beginning of All Things. I hope he has time and inclination to write one on the End of all things, with Christ as the telos in whom meaning and purpose, in creation and in human life, finally and fully cohere.

Hans Kung: On Still being a Christian 4. From confrontation within to dialogue beyond the Catholic church

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. Anger because, regardless of the rights and wrongs of his Church’s case, the long inquisitorial process, the final steps taken by an international class diplomatic service with endless resources to break Kung’s by political force and personal attack, the isolation of Kung by the withdrawal of support from a number of colleagues – (under pressure from higher up is Kung’s generous explanation) and all this against a priest professor whose right to fulfil his vocation is withdrawn in all but final terms on Christmas Eve, these tactics simply outrage one like myself who stands in a so different ecclesial position.

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’.

The casual consumer graffitti we call litter!

last week, on a sunny afternoon, around 3p.m. in Central Croydon which I've actually walked through, two policemen asked a young woman who has dropped litter to pick it up and dispose of it properly. She picks it up and then drops it again. The police insist, onlookers become involved, and in the time it takes to spit out chewing gum around 30 "teenagers" are laying into the two police officers. Some papers call it yob mob rule.

How does a dropped piece of litter escalate into a mob attack on two police officers which leaves them injured, off work, and has a bystander comment the violence and aggression were so extreme they thought the officers might have been killed. The disproportion between dropped litter and life threatening violence, makes this incident a parable of a culture that is losing it. Losing its temper, losing its way, losing respect and its self-respect, losing its sense of laughter, losing its conscience, losing its capacity for community - losing it.

Like anyone else who cares about the environment we all have to live in, and I mean the urban environment as well as the natural environment, litter isn't only an eyesore. It's a statement about how little we value the place we live and the others who share it with us. Chewing gum spat out on our streets by the gobful, fast food packaging with some of the dredges left in it, drink cans and bottles kicking around your feet, plastic bags blowing around or stuck on fences and plants, the crisp bag that flies out of the car in front; the scattering of fag-ends outside buildings where smoking is banned but litter isn't, and woe betide any policeman who tries to say different, - when it comes to mess we can be very creative in our destructiveness.

So what should a follower of Jesus do? What does a dissident disciple do in a country where litter is so bad Bill Bryson once described one of our towns as hosting an all year litter-fest? When did you hear a sermon on the theological arguments for not throwing litter? I know about the radical and risky call to forgive, be a peacemaker, to love as generously as we are loved by God - the heroic stuff is hard to do but at least we know that the demand is serious. But in a world as messy as ours has become, and I mean messy economics, messy war, messy violent crime, messy media mind-shaping, - how far up the priority scale should litter throwing be?
Well, the same Jesus spoke of the lilies of the field, the birds of the air, the importance of seed and bread and good soil and cared for vineyards. But no, he didn't prohibit the dropping of litter - mind you, after the biggest mass takeaway ever, they took up 12 baskets full of the leftovers. I suppose the reasons why I shouldn't throw away litter are a mixture of good citizenship, long instilled habits of caring about our world and other people, a desire to live in a society that at least cares for the basics of urban housekeeping. But I think there is something deeper, more symbolic, more transformative about walking to the litter bin with my can, chewing gum, banana skin, coffee takeaway cup or whatever. And it's this.

What we do to our streets images what we are doing to our world. If I don't care about mess, the accumulated detritus of not giving a toss where I dump my garbage, it raises the question of how I'll ever learn to care about global pollution. It takes the same human action to throw away a carrier bag in Glasgow as on the Moray Firth, or on the Pacific coast. In Glasgow each plastic bag becomes a personal statement that lingers when the culprit has gone, mobile consumer graffitti, a durable advert for our carelessness - that is we don't care enough and couldn't care less. On the Moray and Pacific coasts, carelessly thrown away carrier bags choke dolphins. Actions have global consequences. 

Which is why I admire the initiative of the members of Mosaic Glasgow, 'a wayfaring group of Christ followers'. They've joined FORK, Friends of the River Kelvin, and as followers of Jesus take responsibility for cleaning up the river and protecting the environment around it. They do this as Christians loving the world God loves; and every act of litter retrieval is an act of witness to a Gospel that is about human mess, and what God in Christ calls us to do about it.

Friendships, Frustrations, Fulfilment and Filled-fullness!

Been to Aberdeen today where I was preaching at the church where I was previously pastor. As always, welcome, laughter, sharing of much experience, a good number of new faces though some of those I know best were on holiday. Caught up in the afternoon with others for lunch, then afternoon tea with two of our closest friends in Aberdeen, laced with conversation about mysticism, inter-faith dialogue, what Jesus meant by life abundant, Hans Kung, and much catching up on each of our families.

Left to come home around 6.00p.m. when the day started taking unexpected turns. First, 10 miles south of Aberdeen a sudden noise as if a jet was overtaking us - but it was a puncture and the road noise on the non slip surface made it sound as if the rear axle was about to come off. A dangerous part of fast road so we nursed the car into a narrow road entrance. Dressed in the Sunday clothes unpacked spare wheel, jack and wheel brace. Except said blessed wheel brace was a useless piece of cheap soft metal that slipped off the wheel nuts as soon as pressure was applied. So phoned the AA. The cavalry came - and with a two foot lever and a wheel brace the nuts came off - no idea how this could have been done with the equipment supplied by the car manufacturer.

By this time it's 8 o'clock we are 140 miles from home, hungry but once again mobile. We stopped 15 miles further on at The Gang Faur and Fair Waur, an old fashioned, nae nonsense transport cafe which serves food as if calories were their speciality - which they are. Just after I ordered the filled roll I saw it. The baked rice pudding - with the dark nutmeg skin. Decided I'd see how I felt after my fried egg roll. Surprisingly I was still interested so I went back - filled roll and pudding, a balanced meal. The plateful was, how can I explain?  You know how nouvelle cuisine is little portions arranged on a large plate; this was nae messin cuisine, large plate and large helping. I staggered to the table with the prize, and spent ten minutes proving that even if faith can't move mountains - if it's made of rice pudding, I can.

On the road home, listening to Classic FM, Elgar's Love's Greeting, written for his wife. Hearing this beautiful piano and violin, looking over the mearns to the hills, and then the background outline of the Perth hills, with a setting sun, pink coral laced clouds, against a sky as clear as blue crystal, I felt one of those surges of peace and spiritual at homeness - such as happens only after the renewal of rich friendships, the frustration of a puncture, the inner glow of rice pudding, and against the background of a sky that is an artist or photographer's dream, - and all shared with Sheila ( who by the way had an equally challenging pudding - rhubarb crumble and custard - but I finished mine!)

Hans Kung - On Still Being a Christian 3. The truthfulness of truth

Having read through this second volume, I am at a loss to explain the enigma of  Kung’s self-portrait as revealed in his attitude to his Vatican opponents, whose actions are essential parts of his life story. Intransigent and seeking consensus, razor sharp frankness balanced by a conciliating respect, aware he is accused of arrogance but insisting on his willingness to be convinced of his "errors", a hermeneutic of supsicion about the motives of his opponents and a naive hope that they will see things his way- except that naivete and Kung seem oxymoronic.  Throughout he takes great care to insist that his overriding concern as a theologian is with the truthfulness of truth, and the right to speak truth in freedom. In his account of his controversies with the Curia, the German Bishops and fellow theologians, he tells truth even when it damages reputations and feelings, though not I think gratuitously. But he is a profound theologian who can write with the wit and literary savvy of a seasoned journalist who knows how to press the right buttons – on people and typepad keys! But he almost always finishes by insisting he harbours no ill will towards those who clearly intended him, and caused him, professional and vocational harm – whether or not for the good of the church. And it’s hard not to believe him – and even harder not to admire his restraint towards those who engineered his vocational derailment.

This sharply intelligent, intellectually combative and unrelentingly argumentative scholar succeeds in bringing incredible clarity and lucidity to complex theological discussions. It’s this quality that makes his big books like On Being a Christian and Does God Exist? seem far removed from other theological breeze blocks of compressed dogma. As a young newly ordained Evangelical Baptist pastor I got stuck into On Being a Christian and was given a guided tour of the intellectual passions; admiration, fascination, annoyance, concentration, discovery, resistance, wonder, contemplation, the joy of learning, the labour of argument, and on many an occasion a devotion rooted in an experience that could only be called further spiritual education in the meaning of Jesus for today.

In this second volume of memoirs, there is a long description of how On Being a Christian was written. Starting off as a modest introduction to Christianity over several years it became a thoroughly researched, carefully structured, crisply written apologia to the modern world on behalf of a faith that can be lived because centred on Jesus of Nazareth, crucified, risen and the foundation of the Church’s Gospel. Kung’s approach to a Christology from below was diametrically opposed to a dogmatic, Conciliar Christology from above as defined by the Ecumenical Councils and enshrined in the traditions of Roman Catholic Dogma. Throughout his account of the writing of the book, and its reception by millions of readers, Kung insists that though he started from below, the telos point of his understanding of Jesus Christ arrives, he believes by a much more intellectually secure route, at a view of Christ not incongruent with dogmatic orthodoxy, but with necessary restatement in the light of historical criticism and modern forms of thought. The Curia clearly did not hold so sanguine a view.

This volume covers 15 years of Kung’s life, told as two strands of a plot that at times reads like the Morris West novel that was never written. The tension created by an outspoken, provocative scholar who wishes to speak truth in freedom, but as a member of an increasingly authoritarian and hierarchical church, and the self-interests of power games and at times legitimate theological criticism of an institution which must pay some attention to public opinion, - is tightened as the book reaches its climax in the final removal of Kung’s permission to teach as a Catholic theologian. What I found depressing was the utter inability of either side to communicate; the negotiating, political and diplomatic engine of the Roman church has Rolls Royce quality, but in all the negotiations and meetings, letters and interviews, there is little sense of a meeting of minds and hearts such as would result in mutual understanding.

The next post I'll try to sum up some reflections on why Kung and the Vatican simply couldn't communicate - and how, perhaps in the providence of God, which lets none of the protagonists off the hook for their misjudgements and wrong turnings, the suffering of Kung the scholar opened the way to more expansive opportunities for his ecumenical theology.

Hans Kung: On Still Being a Christian 2 A Modern Day Luther?

I remember reading Kung’s On Being a Christian, while lying on a beach on Tiree the jewel of the Outer Hebrides, (along with Colonsay) and for years after, if I thumped it on my desk I could still find the odd grain of silver-white sand. My copy is the no nonsense Collins first edition, no pictures or other marketing gimmicks, just the author's name in bold black, the title in near luminous orange, and a sombre grey background which both highlights the text and yet succeeds in being understated.
The book was both a revelation and an intellectually and theologically formative blessing to me; and for several reasons. 

Ever since, I’ve been fascinated by this angular, formidably intelligent, Catholic priest-theologian’s combination of courage for truth and calm confidence in his sense of what lies at the core of the Gospel. Not for nothing did Third Way, in its earliest days, review On Being a Christian, and ask the question whether Kung was a modern day Luther. After all, Kung’s published doctoral thesis was on the theology of justification, a critically appreciative conversation on the subject as massively articulated by Karl Barth. Another book set a tiger loose in the Vatican pigeon lofts. It was entitled Infallible?, the question mark in the title being the most important typing character in the entire book. His book The Church was deeply informed by his previous thought on reforming the church and the ministry, by his experiences at Vatican II, it was rooted in the biblical text, and demonstrated thorough control of historical and critical questions within the tradition. No wonder the Vatican moved from defensive uneasiness to a more assertive and then offensive collision course. (The reasons why that collision was all but inevitable I’ll deal with in a later post.)

But second, On Being a Christian was, and remains, one of the most intellectually forceful yet readable expositions of what it means to be Christian in the modern world. Theological snobs might want to suggest that it was too hard, erudite, long, multi-disciplinary, to be accessible to the theologically untrained. Tell that to the publishers who revelled in a volume of serious and engaged theological scholarship up there on the bestseller lists. I remember remaindered copies of the British Fontana Paperback Edition being sold off some years later at a Baptist Assembly for £1, encouraged by the then General Secretary Rev Dr Andrew MacRae!

And again. Brought up in Lanarkshire and converted into West of Scotland Baptist Evangelicalism of a pronounced 1960’s Protestant flavour, my limited knowledge of Roman Catholic theology, popular piety and official teaching didn’t prepare me for such a book as this, written by a Catholic for whom the word Roman was historically conditioned, while the word Catholic was of the essence of the Church. He seriously qualified papal authority, he held strongly to the doctrine of justification, he took seriously the contemporary search for transcendence and meaning within and beyond the church in the 1970’s (and since), his starting point was the biblical witness to Jesus crucified and risen, he was deeply suspicious of exaggerated claims for Mary, in particular the dogmatic pronouncements about immaculate conception and assumption. In other words this was a different kind of Catholicism.

Oh there was much then, and there remains much in Kung’s faith as a Roman Catholic on which he and I starkly differ; and his conclusions drawn from an uncritical use of historical criticism are at times way to the left of my own positions. But his commitment to the Gospel of Jesus, his search for ways of expressing faith in Jesus in a way that is liveable, accessible and faithful, is everywhere evident. His courage in taking on imposed dogmatic and ecclesial pronouncements, and his sheer intellectual grasp of the contemporary nexus of history, culture, theology and philosophy, make him, for me at least, essential reading if I am to understand better, the globalised world, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Church as witnessing community, and these three in their conversations and collisions.