[In the following review, Race asserts, “Hans Küng's Global Responsibility aims to provide a rationale for overcoming the tragic fissure between peace and truth, both within and between the world religions.”]

While the moral summons to peace ought to instil friendship between the religions, their neurotic desire for the absolute truth, as the respective traditions have symbolized and defended it, has driven them to war. If religions have historically placed a premium on truth over peace, then the declining state of the globe now cries out for a reversal of priorities. Hans Küng's Global Responsibility aims to provide a rationale for overcoming the tragic fissure between peace and truth, both within and between the world religions. It is an extension of his earlier Christianity and the World Religions (1984), where the author was in dialogue with Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. Since then, Küng has engaged more seriously with Judaism and the Chinese religions. His resulting aspiration has become a threefold slogan: “No survival without a world ethic. No world peace without peace between the religions. No peace between the religions without dialogue between the religions.” Given the world's radical plurality, the conceptual difficulties of a “world ethic” seem virtually insurmountable. But Küng's boldness lies in the belief that, among all human systems, the world religions still represent the best loci for discovering the foundational values needed for our survival. As the abysmal record of the religions and the modern critique of religious belief tell against such boldness, each strand of this triple chord begs further examination.

First, Küng repudiates the Nietzschean prediction that humankind is moving “beyond good and evil.” We are now post-moderns, he believes, in the sense that global survival demands a “new, differentiated, pluralistic and holistic synthesis,” beyond the confrontational ethics and politics endemic within modernity. If the limitations of the modern technological experiment have become abundantly self-evident in the degradation of human and ecological life, Küng believes that only through the religions' grounding the finite human conscience in the sense of the divine unconditional can the impasse be transcended. While this move is not a return to religious orthodoxy (for it is religion purged of exclusive prejudice in truth, and of inhumaneness in morality, that Küng is advocating), it nevertheless allows religious ethics a serious place in the painful transition from autonomous ethics to shared ethics. The point is not unreasonable, in spite of the secular philosopher's claim that religion has only ever sanctified existing ethics post hoc. But Küng overstates his case by claiming that the religions provide an unambiguous ground for morality. Most characterizations of postmodernity assume that there is no unambiguous anything; and this is surely right. Even the religious belief in the world's essential contingency points in the same direction.

The second strand of Küng's chord is an expansion of a lecture he gave at Unesco in Paris in 1989. He specified the shared ethical goal between the religions as the humanum, an ecumenical criterion of basic human dignity shared by all the religions. Yet as the religions define what is truly human differently within their respective traditions, the question of their relationship at the theological level cannot be lightly abandoned. Küng knows this and therefore embarks on the difficult road of combining what he calls “steadfastness” to one's own tradition with “maximal openness” to others. So he eschews exclusivism, because it indicates a fortress mentality; inclusivism, because it spells death by another's embrace; and the pluralist view that all religions are the same underneath, because it leads to indifference. His view that the religions might correct and complement each other nevertheless jars with his Christian retention of Christ's finality. It is not wholly clear whether Küng's theological desire to uphold even a mild form of the finality of Christ is methodologically compatible with the “rough parity” between the religions that genuine dialogue demands. There is no reason for thinking that the assumption of parity leads inexorably to the forgetting of truth.

The first two strands of the chord present a flow of argument as punchy as any that this troubling Swiss Catholic has ever produced. By comparison, the third strand is rather disappointing. It amounts to a research plan for writing world history from a new religious perspective. In the circumstances of post-modernity, where the religions are assuming a continuing importance, the necessity for a new historical perspective cannot be gainsaid. The religions are going to need information of the patterns of continuity and discontinuity that historical study yields. Former examples, which Küng discusses, are too aprioristic (Hegel), or pessimistic (Spengler), or fail in the face of the evidence (Toynbee). Distinguishing the Near Eastern Semitic religions and the Far Eastern Chinese and Indian religions, Küng believes the future lies in understanding their differences and commonalities. If the purpose of religion is salvation/liberation, rather than simply arriving at the correct mental picture of the Godhead, then the analysis would unearth the achievements that could be harnessed as experiential data for a world ethic. It may be that, as John Hick believes, the religions have probably produced good and bad in about equal measure. Even so, such a new historical analysis would provide a semi-empirical backing for any proposed world ethic.

Global Responsibility, as the title implies, is Utopian. HRH the Duke of Edinburgh, who has written the preface, hopes that it will “stimulate a more determined search for a shared belief in the beauty and value of this planet Earth as our common and unique home in the vastness of the universe”. Küng's vision is not yet so green as that. But endeavouring to unite peace and truth in the service of the humanum prises open a new way of being religious fully compatible with that greater green awareness. It would add to history's tragedy not to take up the invitation.