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.