Christianity: Essence, History, Future

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: A review of Christianity: Essence, History, Future, in America, Vol. 173, No. 12, October 21, 1995, pp. 23-4.

[In the following review, Imbelli calls Küng's Christianity “a monumental, if flawed, achievement,” and goes on to delineate the book's problems.]

In the course of a theological career of almost 40 years, Hans Küng has performed singular service to Christian theology and ecumenical understanding. His early works of the 1960‘s on the church helped prepare and promote the reform movement of Vatican II. His major works of the 1970’s, On Being a Christian and Does God Exist?, attempted to set forth the meaning of Christian faith in God and his Christ and to engage in sympathetic but critical dialogue with believers and non-believers alike.

Most recently Küng and his Institute for Ecumenical Research in Tübingen have embarked upon an extraordinary undertaking. Under the rubric of “No World Peace Without Religious Peace,” Küng is seeking to further religious dialogue through a writing project that will comprise a trilogy of volumes on each of the “Abrahamic faiths”: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This is not a “least common denominator” ecumenism. Küng wants to identify the distinctive parts of the different faiths, precisely in order to further understanding and draw upon deep commonalities of these religions, even in the midst of difference.

The first volume of this project, Judaism, appeared in 1992, and now the volume on Christianity has just been translated into English. With its 800 pages of text, 115 of endnotes and 20 of indices, Christianity bears all the marks of Küng's virtues: stunning erudition, moral passion, provocative honesty and sometimes unrelenting polemics. In sum, the work is a monumental, if flawed, achievement.

As its title indicates and its insertion into the wider project dictates, we have here no detached academic study of Christian origins and history. This review of 2,000 years of Christian history, whose pace is frenetic even for its length, serves a further purpose: “To understand the present more deeply,” indeed, to show “how and why Christianity became what it is today—with a view to how it could be.” A reformist and ecumenical agenda, animated by the dichotomy between Christianity and the modern world, underlies the analysis and structures the “Questions for the Future” with which Küng peppers his text. These “Questions,” variously framed and often posed to challenge each of the three Abrahamic religions, propel the exposition forward and recapitulate its almost prophetic passion.

Küng has two strategies. He first seeks to identify the distinctive “essence” of Christianity. As he had done at greater length in On Being a Christian, Küng holds that this essence lies in the commitment to Jesus Christ as Messiah and Son of God and the confession that in his life, death and resurrection we have the abiding center and norm of Christian faith. He then traces the manifestations of this essence in history by employing the concepts of “paradigm analysis” and “paradigm shift,” which he borrows from Thomas Kuhn, the American philosopher of science. Küng postulates that five paradigms of beliefs, values and techniques have structured Christian consciousness to the present. He designates them as Early Christian Apocalyptic, Early Church Hellenistic, Medieval Roman Catholic, Reformation Protestant and Enlightenment Modern.

Each of these paradigms, which continue to be influential, has succeeded in conserving the abiding substance of faith and transmitting it to new ages and cultures. On the other hand, each has also hardened and hindered the expression of that faith. On the threshold of the third millennium, now a new ecumenical, postmodern paradigm is called for. And Küng, with the considerable resources of the Tübingen Institute at his command, is its prophet!

The entire enterprise appears at once daring, perceptive and problematic. As Küng's book on Judaism has been severely critiqued by Jewish scholars, so his book on Christianity will be by Catholic theologians. For example, the transference of the tool of “paradigm analysis” from the scientific to the religious sphere runs the risk of superficiality. Küng is not content to speak merely of theological paradigms, but rather of paradigms of Christianity that embrace dauntingly disparate cultural, political and economic factors. Küng's extension is so wide that the schema becomes progressively less illuminating, until “paradigm” finally loses any explanatory suggestiveness and becomes merely an umbrella term for designating a particular era, like modernity.

Regarding theology, Küng is excessively wary of ecclesiastical institutionalization, even as he concedes its inevitability, and is too distrustful of dogma. He is very uneasy, for instance, about the doctrine of the Trinity, which he finds unintelligible to Christians and an ecumenical obstacle to the other Abrahamic religions. Like the great 19th-century Protestant theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, to whom he devotes a masterful essay, Küng seems to see the doctrine of the Trinity as no more than an appendix to the substance of the Christian faith.

It is not surprising, then, that Bernard Lonergan, S. J., the foremost analyst of doctrinal development in Catholic theology, merits no mention in the more than 900 pages of the book. Also not mentioned is the work of Küng's former Tübingen colleague, the Catholic theologian and bishop, Walter Kasper, who has written significant studies of the doctrine of the Trinity as the distinctively Christian understanding of God. Moreover, Küng's presentation is so thoroughly laced with anti-Roman polemic, maximizing the failures and infidelities of the hierarchy and downplaying anti-Catholic prejudice and persecution, that even the historical exposition becomes skewed. One sad consequence of this, and indeed of the vitriolic dismissals of the present pope as simply a “restorationist,” is that the postmodern elements of John Paul II's program are not even acknowledged. Küng fails to draw upon them to support his own criticisms of modernity and his hopes for an emerging global ethic of responsibility.

The English translation of the book, though generally fluent, is marred by too many typographical errors, including even mistakes in referring to the paradigm designations themselves. In addition, the word “future” has been added to the English title. This latter term is not just publisher's exaggeration, since Küng does discuss questions and orientations for the future, but it does camouflage Küng's announced intention to devote a second volume to the issue of Christianity's present and future. In the meantime, no matter the astringency of the current volume, Christianity remains vintage Küng and will enliven the theological debate as we approach the coming millennium in the never dull company of Tübingen's Professor Maximus.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

A Jesus for Everyone, A Christ for None

Next

Küng's Synthesis

Loading...