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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higher up is Kung’s generous explanation) and all this against a priest professor whose right to fulfil his vocation is withdrawn in all but final terms on Christmas Eve, these tactics simply outrage one like myself who stands in a so different ecclesial position.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’.

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.

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.

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:

It is, as far as I can judge, a deeply Christian, humane and prophetic goal worthy of his best thought and truest devotion – to Christ and church.