[In the following review, Carr outlines Küng's investigation of Judaism in his book by the same name.]

Hans Küng is Professor of Ecumenical Theology and Director of the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Tübingen. The thesis of his long and learned book (90 pages of dense footnotes) is that religion, rightly conceived, offers humanity its last chance for peace and justice in what he terms the post-modern world. There can be

no peace among the nations without peace among the religions; no peace among the religions without dialogue between the religions; no dialogue without investigation of the foundations of the religions.

The present book[, Judaism,] is the first volume of a trilogy that will investigate the foundations of the three great monotheistic world religions which share a common founding father in Abraham: Islam, Judaism and Christianity. It is their shared belief in one God, the ‘Abrahamic ecumene’ that can be the basis of a new world order.

For his investigation of Judaism Küng takes from the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, the notion of ‘paradigm shifts’. Paradigms are those ‘entire constellations of beliefs, values etc’ which are shared by a ‘given community’. Just as in the exact sciences hypotheses are discredited in the light of new discoveries and replaced by new hypotheses which fit the facts, so religions suffer great sea changes. In Küng's hands the history of Judaism becomes a drama as each paradigm is replaced by a new constellation, a new world outlook.

Thus the paradigm of the kingdom of the priest kings, David and Solomon—that Jewish, golden age which was revived in the state of Israel with the star of David on its flag—collapses to be replaced, after the Babylonian exile (586-538 BC), by a new paradigm: the theocracy of the Jerusalem Temple. The prophets who have thundered against the worship of false gods and called for repentance are domesticated and subordinated to the teachers of the law. The strict observance of the law (circumcision, ritual slaughter, prohibition of mixed marriages, etc) becomes the core of Judaism with cultic life centred on the Temple of Jerusalem. Judaism persists as a religious community within a Roman province. It no longer needs a state. Rebellion against Rome to re-establish the lost independent state brought the destruction of the Temple (70 AD) and the prohibition of entry into Jerusalem for circumcised Jews. With the religious capital gone, cultic life is decentralised. The local synagogue replaces the Temple. The local rabbi the Temple Priest. This is the ‘mediaeval paradigm’ of the diaspora based on Torah piety (the Torah contains the revealed will of God) and the ritualisation of everyday life according to the instructions of the Mishnah and the Talmud. Judaism has become a closed circle, a society cocooned in its ritual practices, alien to the Christian world. And Jews are persecuted by Christians as the murderers of Christ. The collective guilt of the Jewish people was not formally rejected as slander until the Second Vatican Council.

How can Jews, Küng asks, escape from the segregation they sought for themselves, which was then forced on them by the anti-Semitism of the Catholic church in the Middle Ages? Assimilation is the last paradigm. Jews can escape from the ghetto as citizens of the modern state. Moses Mendelsohn's (1729-86) escape, as both a Jew and a card-carrying member of the European Enlightenment, served only to reveal the dangers of assimilation. Jews like the poet Heine converted to Christianity as the ‘entrance ticket to European culture’. The Holocaust was to prove that there was no such entrance ticket.

Professor Küng's chapters on a possible Jewish-Christian dialogue is heavy going, as the excellent translation struggles with the opacity of the German original. All enlightened scholars of both faiths have long acknowledged that Jesus is inconceivable outside the Jewish world of his time. The Jewish theologian, Martin Buber, called Jesus his great brother. But for less enlightened minds difficulties persist. Jewish strict monotheism finds it difficult to accept Christ as consubstantial with God and a member of the Trinity. But for Küng there is no need for the doctrine of the trinity and the incarnation; all that matters is belief in the one and only God and acceptance of the ‘liberal’ message of Jesus Christ.

Fundamentalism, with its refusal to face up to the common problems of the post-modern world, precludes dialogue. Far from facing up to these problems, Orthodox Judaism turned its back on the modern world and remained stuck in the ‘mediaeval paradigm’. A Jew who substitutes for Torah piety and the strict observance of the law a fixation on the Holocaust and commitment to the state of Israel is a lost soul. For the resilient reader there is an informative account of the attempts to reform and modernise Judaism, particularly in the United States where more Jews live than in the state of Israel. The Orthodox negate modernity: Liberal Reform Jews seek ‘assimilation to modernity’. But reformers have a hard time, as the eminent Jewish rabbi, Louis Jacobs, found out to his cost in London when he dared to treat the Torah as an historical document.

If Orthodox Judaism is a stumbling block to dialogue, on the Christian side there is the Catholic church. It is not merely that mediaeval Catholics invented modern anti-Semitism. Popes have, and still do, inhabit a mediaeval world. Pius XII's pontificate, with his concern to preserve his church as an institution by concordats with dictators whose human rights record was deplorable and his silence on the Holocaust, constitutes a ‘Christian tragedy’. The present Pope, from the ‘provincial city of Krakow’ has ‘no understanding of modern life’. He uses ‘the practices of the Inquisitors’ to muzzle liberation theology. His blind opposition to contraception condemns the Third World to starvation, and, according to Küng, endows Catholic Poland with the highest rate of abortion in Europe as the main method of birth control. The process of self-criticism that is the premise of dialogue is ‘hardly to be found at present on the part of official Roman Catholicism’.

No wonder Professor Küng warms to the great Jewish prophets. Much of his own message will be rejected or misunderstood, and not only by Rome. Jews must not harp on the Holocaust but exercise forgiveness; Christians, particularly Germans, must not forget or ‘relativise’ their guilt, but assimilate it. Only then is reconciliation possible. As for the Middle East, only the dovest of doves can accept his message: a ‘sovereign Palestine state’ and the acknowledgement that Israel has no sovereign rights over Jerusalem. There can be no peace in the Middle East ‘unless the Abrahamic ecumene can be made an effective force in world politics’.

This demands the abandonment of the exclusive fundamentalisms that have set—and still set—nations at each others' throats. For Küng there must be an act of repentance for the past record of Christians as crusaders and persecutors. Only by concentrating our minds on the common message of the Hebrew Bible, the Gospels, and the Qu'ran may we discover what Mr Curdle in Nicholas Nickleby called ‘a kind of universal dovetailedness’. As our economies, so our faiths must converge if the ‘Abrahamic ecumene’ is to serve the ethic of the post-modern world.

I sense in my ecumenical friends a certain animus against the Enlightenment. For Küng the ‘substitute Gods’ of the Enlightenment—reason and faith in humanity—have nothing to offer the post-modern world, having made a hash of the modern one. Ecumenicism is not only a message of hope; it can be seen as one of the defensive responses to the post-Enlightenment erosion of the simple certainties of traditional faith: belief in the resurrection of the body which makes the loss of loved ones tolerable; fear of hell fire which encourages right conduct, in this world. Küng would have us believe that on death we will be admitted ‘into God's incomprehensible, all-embracing reality’. The old faiths may have been simple to the point of absurdity. But at least they were comprehensible.