For the Joy of the Journey

The Church written by Hans Kung has been an important influence in my understanding of the nature and character of the church. There is a great deal of irony in that. Kung is a radical Catholic theologian. I was introduced to the book as an assigned reading by Dr. Ferguson in his “Church of Christ” class at Abilene Christian College (1972). Kung’s criticism of the Catholic Church revealed surprising parallels and similarities between the Catholic Church and the Church of Christ. Reading Kung was eye-opening for me, not only in his views of the church but in the very fact that he was Catholic.

Could it be possible that a Catholic had truthful understandings, not only about the nature and character of the church but also God? A radical and challenging idea for a person who was raised to believe that Catholics and the Catholic church were about as far from truth as you could be and not be classified as non-Christian. It began to occur to me that perhaps I should begin to read outside of writings by “the brotherhood”.

The continuing relevancy of Kung’s writing for me is evidence in the following quote from an early chapter:

It seems to be far from straightforward or without dangers for the church to reflect seriously on the Gospel of Christ. Has it the right to appeal to the words of Jesus? Is it really founded on his Gospel? Or is it merely a substitute phenomenon, making do in place of something much greater which, despite Jesus’ proclamation, has yet to come into being? It would do nothing but harm to the Church if questions like these, which are admittedly awkward ones and have never been adequately aired, were to be dismissed as stemming from the ill-will of critical exegetes and historians, who challenge an uncritical and unhistorical ecclesiological dogmatism which naively defends the staus quo. Surely these questions indicate a fundamental longing for the origins of Christianity, for the discovery of what Jesus really intended? What did Jesus really intend? Did he simply intend the Church we have today? Is the Church we have really backed up – in its essentials, not in the inessentials – by the message of Christ? Or is it not proudly basing the justification for its existence on the words of someone who would have opposed it from the start, just as he opposed the Jewish temple clergy and the theology of the scribes? Many people today must have the impression that the Church is a prisoner, so to speak, of its own history and traditions, of its own ideas and laws. All too often it seems to be defending itself against the words of Jesus and the un-compromising challenge of his message. To many people the Church’s frequent talk of “tradition” merely suggests it is afraid to investigate boldly and radically its own origins and the original message which brought it into existence; it seems to be unwilling to take serious steps to clear out of the way all the barriers which separate it from the source of its own existence. Does the Church too ask the same question which the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoievski’s terrifying story puts to the returning Christ and to Christ’s message: “Why do you come to disturb us?” There is no doubt that the message of Jesus has had, if not a destructive, at least a disturbing effect on the Church in any age, challenging it, rousing it, goading it into new life; in short, it has always been a “stumbling-block”.