SOURCE: “Religions of the One God,” in Commonweal, Vol. CXIV, No. 5, March 13, 1987, pp. 143, 146-47.

[In the following interview, Küng discusses the similarities and differences between the major world religions and his attempt to create an understanding among different religions with his book Christianity and the World Religions.]

World religions was the major topic of conversation last fall when Commonweal's David Toolan spoke with Hans Küng in New York City. Küng's comments on authority and dissent within the Catholic church [appear above].

[Toolan:] How did you come to write your current book, Christianity and the World Religions: Paths of Dialogue with Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism? It represents a new direction for you, does it not?

[Küng:] My interest in world religions goes back to my student days in Rome when I first visited North African Muslim countries. I realized that relating Christianity to world religions is an extremely difficult job to do theologically. You may recall that Chapter Three of On Being a Christian contained a big section on world religions as a horizon of Christianity. I indicated there that this relation had to be studied, well aware that I needed many years for that.

Now, after the Roman intervention—which I still find unjust, theologically unfounded, and politically counterproductive—I find myself relieved of a lot of administrative work, faculty meetings, examinations of students, and the responsibility for teaching dogmatics. It has freed me to travel, and given me the opportunity to concentrate on the subject of non-Christian religions and to write this book.

So there have been positive results from Rome's action?

(Laughter) Yes.

This may be one of the ironies of church repression. I seem to recall that Henri de Lubac wrote some of his best books—about Buddhism and atheism—when he was silenced.

Of course I'm still very much involved in the critique of the present reactionary course of Rome. But I did not want to get fixed on those problems. The issues raised by my new book are the problems of the future, the ones Christianity will have to face in its third millennium. To quarrel about birth control, admitting divorced people to the sacraments—these are really problems of the pre-conciliar church.

What do you think the central issues for the post-conciliar third millennium are?

Seen from the outside, it is obvious that many of the world's current conflicts—in Northern Ireland, in the Near East, between Iran and Iraq, between Pakistan and India, in India between Hindus and Sikhs, and previously in Vietnam between Buddhists and a Catholic regime—are heavily influenced by religious motives. I do not want to reduce the military, economic, and political conflicts to religious ones. But my thesis is that these conflicts become bloody and without pity if they are done in the name of God. And so my conclusion is that without peace among the religions there will be no peace among the nations.

If we had been able to initiate dialogues between Christians and Moslems twenty years ago when I was in Lebanon with Cardinal Willebrands and Dr. Visser T'Hooft, talking one week with Muslims and the next week with Christians, we could have avoided a great deal of bloodshed. But at that time we were not allowed to meet.

I think we see President Carter more positively today because in the Camp David Accord he really achieved something in this domain, which was possible because both he and Anwar Sadat were religiously motivated to a high degree. To a certain extent Begin was, too. This was a sign that you could have religious peace on religious grounds.

Some time ago, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt told me that when he and Sadat were alone one evening going down the Nile, Sadat said he wanted to have a sanctuary in the Sinai for the three Abrahamic religions. Because, Sadat said, we will never have peace in the Near East without mutual understanding between the three religions. This is not only what is called political theology but a world political theology. It will involve all the other questions which are treated in my current book: the problems of whether Islam is a way of salvation, whether Mohammed is an authentic prophet, whether the Koran can be considered the Word of God, and so on. From these high theological positions stem more ordinary problems: the secularization of Islam and Christianity, what the law means in Islam and Judaism and Christianity. In fact, one of the difficulties with the original lectures, from which my current book is drawn, was how to bring all these complex questions into the space of an hour.

Were there any surprises in this interreligious dialogue? Agreements or understandings that hadn't been there for you before?

The whole process was a great adventure. My Tubingen colleagues (van Ess, Stietencron, and Bechert) are highly competent in the fields of Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, and I thought my own background in Christian theology would enable me to respond each week to their presentations. The greatest discovery in the process was that you can see Christianity in the mirror of the other religions. This became fascinating. Despite all the divergences, I saw that there were many parallels and convergences—some not at all positive. For instance, it is obvious that Roman Catholicism at present has the same problems as Islam does with religious reformation and with the Enlightenment of modern times. The current Roman regime can be compared to that of the ayatollahs of Iran who are trying to go back to medieval Islam. For both Teheran and Rome, the paradigm of authentic faith is drawn from the Middle Ages, in opposition to nearly everything that came afterward. Both try to go back to a medieval paradigm with various modern adaptations—television, helicopters, jets, and so on.

The use of modern communications means that authorities can make the organization even more centralized than things ever were in the Middle Ages.

Certainly. I found that conservative Judaism, conservative Islam, and conservative Roman Catholicism have very similar attitudes and patterns of behavior. I had a long discussion in Teheran about the case of Galileo. The Muslims defended the pope, and I defended Galileo.

In earlier periods we had Christian specialists in Islam, but Muslims never carefully studied Christianity. The Muslims I have been speaking with on my travels knew next to nothing about the application of historico-critical exegesis to Christianity. Their understanding of Christianity predates the critical approach. But when I was confronted with questions regarding the Incarnation, I was able—because of the basis I had developed in books like On Being a Christian—to explain how you can understand the title, Son of God, from a monotheistic Hebrew perspective. If the title is so understood, as it was applied to the kings of Israel and then transferred to Jesus, it does not contradict monotheism. Muslims, I found, were very interested to learn of this common Semitic background to divine sonship. It made for mutual understanding, whereas the Hellenistic background (to the definitions of the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon) made for misunderstanding.

The same was true in explicating the doctrine of the Trinity. If taken within a Hebrew context, this too could be affirmed without contradicting monotheism. In this way, two hundred years of historical-critical research affords us the possibility of giving very different answers to the old, divisive questions.

I assume that Iranian Muslims would be very reluctant to adopt a historical-critical approach to their own traditions, would they not?

Well, every religion has its neuralgic, non-negotiable points. For Judaism, it's the Land of God; for Christianity, it's the Son of God; and for Islam, it's the Word of God, the Koran. In Teheran, Pakistan, and elsewhere, I would always ask how we can understand the Koran without having to follow it literally—say by cutting off hands and so forth. How were we to understand the revelation of the Koran? Was it possible to understand the Koran as the Word of God and at the same time the word of the prophet? And what does that distinction mean? Is it possible to adapt the great message of the one God, all merciful and compassionate, to the modern situation without taking everything literally?

What was the response to that?

I think it was new for them, and presupposed that you were very positive about Islam as a way to eternal salvation, about Mohammed as an authentic prophet of God, and the Koran as a Word of God. When you had said this quite clearly, they were ready to discuss some other things.

I would say that in the world religions discussion, we are where we were fifty years ago between Protestants and Catholics: I remember that in 1957 when I wrote my dissertation on the doctrine of justification, it was commonly said that justification is the main difference between Protestants and Catholics and there's no common ground there. It was a great surprise, then, when Karl Barth wrote his famous preface to my book on justification, saying that he agreed with my interpretation. After having had so many positive experiences over the last twenty-five years, I am very hopeful that even on these difficult topics—the Son of God, the Land of God, and the Word of God in the three Abrahamic religions—we may yet arrive at mutual understanding.

I do not believe in the unity of all the religions—that is an eschatological problem—as I believe in the unity of Christianity, the unity of Judaism, or the unity of Islam. But I do believe in what I call not the unity but the peace among different religions—that we could understand each other as brothers and sisters and not as opponents and enemies. It happened before. Pope John XXIII took up what had been a matter of small, elite groups working in dialogue over several decades. The pope said let us have peace, and somehow it happened: Were the current pope to take up the interreligious dialogue, something momentous might happen again, as rapidly as it did in John XXIII's time.