[In the following review, Breslin praises Kung's On Being a Christian, stating that “Kung provides a skillfully argued, theologically nuanced and personally appropriated set of arguments for the liberating power of Christianity.”]

Religious bestsellers in this country usually mean inspirational books by Billy Graham or slightly kooky tracts like Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth. And even when they sell zillions of copies, they don't make the standard bestseller lists because they're sold in bookstores that are not surveyed. They do things differently in Germany, to judge by the startling success of the original edition of this theological work by Hans Kung. For months, it hovered near the top of Der Spiegel's chart, just behind Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag.

That's not likely to happen here, unfortunately, but it's just possible that the combination of Kung's reputation (both as premier theologian and as ecclesiastical maverick) and the current interest in religious questions may save this book from the fate of most theology: professional wrangling followed by popular oblivion.

On Being a Christian is most certainly theology, aimed at the head, not just at the heart, and Kung offers no excuses for raising difficult questions or for providing 80 pages of footnotes, heavily Teutonic in flavor. But it is theology of a special kind, what used to be called apologetics—a defense of, or argument for Christian belief. If that smells a bit musty to you, reminiscent of ugly black textbooks, don't be put off. Kung knows that the most serious challenge Christianity faces today, at least in the Western hemisphere, is indifference: why bother to be a Christian? And he knows, too, that other challenges, from secular humanism and the world religions, have to be faced squarely and argued with in earnest. In short, he knows his audience—university educated, religiously interested but often ecclesiastically disenchanted—what he calls, in the generalizing way of theologians, “modern man.”

For those who fit the description—and they include a large number of nominal and once-upon-a-time Christians across this country—Kung provides a skillfully argued, theologically nuanced and personally appropriated set of arguments for the liberating power of Christianity. His twin lodestars are human experience and human reason and he insists that separating them leads inevitably to a mindless subjectivism or a desiccated reactionalism. His discussion of theism turns, then, not on series of “proofs” but on a reflection about human trust. To move from such trust to Christian faith still requires a leap, but Kung's approach—in opposition, say, to Barth's—emphasizes a fundamental continuity between the two experiences.

After a brief, and necessarily superficial, excursus on the genius and flaws of the great world religions, Kung turns to the book's principal question—what is it that makes Christianity different? The answer he gives is surprising only in its simplicity: Jesus the Christ, experienced as the central figure in human history and as the decisive religious event in a person's life, alone guarantees the uniqueness of the Christian gospel. Without “an explicit, positive reference to Jesus Christ,” Kung refuses to baptize good will or good deeds as Christian, and he scorns any facile use of the term “anonymous Christian” to solve the problem of salvation outside the church. Almost two-thirds of his 600 pages of text is devoted to explicating the meaning of this central affirmation about Jesus Christ, and this core forms the most successful part of Kung's book.

As in the introductory section, objectivity remains a prime apologetic tool. Without discounting the importance of myth and legend, symbol and metaphor, Kung insists on the history that undergirds a faith commitment to Jesus Christ. To get at that historical foundation he employs all the implements of New Testament criticism, most neatly summed up in the phrase, “historical-critical method.” What that means is a systematic attempt to identify the various layers that make up the New Testament, from the particular theological visions that shaped the final written texts, back through the interpretations that were given to the oral tradition by the various early Christian communities, to the most primitive strata of all where we can perceive the outlines of Jesus's own preaching. It is not a process to cheer the hearts of fundamentalists, but it represents the majority view of contemporary Scripture scholarship. Many experts will disagree (some already have disagreed) with specific uses to which Kung puts this method, but few would quarrel with his basic approach.

What the process yields, while hardly a “Life of Christ” in the old-fashioned sense, is a fascinating portrait of Jesus of Nazareth, an itinerant preacher who appeared only briefly on the Palestinian scene but who managed to throw into question most of the accepted religious, social and even political beliefs of his day. He joined no party, whether of the Establishment or of the revolutionaries, and he embraced neither the legal compromises of the Pharisees nor the world-shunning asceticism of the Essenes. He had only one overriding interest, the coming reign of God, and he believed passionately that every other human concern must be interpreted in light of that impending reality—whether it was the Mosaic Law or the structure of the family or the way individuals dealt with one another. God's kingdom, God's cause came first, but on closer analysis, Kung argues, we find that God's cause, as understood by Jesus, meant man's cause as well. “God wills nothing but man's advantage, man's true greatness and his ultimate dignity. This then is God's will: man's well-being.”

Unfortunately, the men of Jesus's time were no better than ourselves in recognizing what constituted their “true greatness and … ultimate dignity.” And when Jesus made it clear that forgiveness, service of others and renunciation of self-interest were integral parts of that well-being and that, moreover, God's special concern was for the despised and the outcasts rather than for the conventionally law-abiding, then God's reign became a threat to man's self-sufficiency and His messenger an expendable rabble-rouser.

Kung insists that Jesus went to his death precisely because of his religious messages; because the freedom and the intimacy with God that he claimed both for himself and for all who accepted his preaching were rightly perceived as undermining the elaborate religious structure of the Jewish leaders. He died like those whose cause he championed—the disinherited—and if we are to believe the most primitive Passion accounts, with a fear of being abandoned by his Father as well.

And then something extraordinary happened, so extraordinary in fact that suddenly the frightened and scattered disciples became bold heralds, the preacher now the subject of their preaching. Kung's handling of the Resurrection accounts and of their subsequent interpretations reveals in brief compass his method of dealing with complex questions. First of all, he argues convincingly from the New Testament evidence that something more than a psychic quirk or an historical ruse is at issue. Jesus died and then was experienced by his followers as being alive, but not in the manner of a resuscitated corpse. God, the Creator and Conserver of life, had bestowed on him a wholly new existence, which was quickly associated, especially in light of Jesus's own preaching, with the Jewish expectation of the resurrection of the dead at the end of time. But it was emphatically the same Jesus, and so as long as we don't become too materialistic about it, we can speak of his “bodily resurrection.” In classical homiletic style (a recurrent feature of the book), Kung returns to this basic point several times, attempting to separate the essential message from legendary and other accretions. He perhaps overplays his dismissal of the importance of the “empty tomb” or the “appearances” as evidence of the Resurrection, but he seizes the main point and presents it clearly: “The living Christ and through him the living God, who called him from death to life, are the object of the Easter faith.”

This passion for getting at essentials is, not surprisingly, the strength and weakness of this book as an introduction to Christianity. Better than any other theologian I can readily think of, Kung can read the “signs of the times,” especially when it comes to gauging the skeptical temper of his contemporaries; he also combines a wide knowledge of Scripture scholarship with a sure grasp of more philosophical theology. But in his eagerness to get back to the basic New Testament message, he often gives the impression that theological and doctrinal development over the past two millenia has largely meant distortion. One example: He is right, I think, in insisting that many of the Hellenistic distinctions (for example, person and nature, consubstantiality) used in Trinitarian and Christological formulas no longer speak to the modern mind, indeed, often confuse it. But the question remains whether a theology that remains satisfied with describing what Jesus does without asking what and who he is does sufficient justice to the mystery of Jesus and his Father as revealed in the whole New Testament. Similar questions could be raised about his dismissive treatment of the Marian doctrines and of the priestly significance of Christian ministry.

It is in specifically ecclesiastical matters, however, that Kung's cherished objectivity fails him most, to be replaced by an unpleasant haranguing tone. In an example of rhetorical overkill, he attributes the lack of a section on “prayer, meditation and Christian worship,” no doubt accurately but not very gracefully, to his time-consuming battles with “the Roman Inquisition.” Did the already enormous size of the book have something to do with that decision as well? One wonders at the buck-passing.

But Kung's achievement rises above such quibbles, if not above serious theological disagreement. He recently described himself as a “centrist,” and though more conservative Christians may scoff at such a designation, it rings true for most of this book. He reminds proponents of “political theology” that others traveled that same road, from the right, in pre-Nazi Germany, and he warns church leaders that a primacy built on privilege is neither consistent with the New Testament nor convincing to 20th-century believers.

Beyond this balancing act, however, Kung has done something much more significant. He has captured some of the liberating power of the earliest Christian preaching and translated it into contemporary terms. Belief in the Crucifixion is not very hard to come by these days (or any days): one only has to look around. But to believe that it was precisely the Crucified One whom God raised from the dead as a sign of His free and complete commitment to human kind is a staggering thought—almost too good to be true. Such faith, Hans Kung reassures us once again, is what being a Christian is all about.