Hirtory of European Ideas, Vol. 4. No. 1. pp. 97-116. 1963 Printed in Great Britain.

BOOK REVIEWS

The Church - Maintained in Truth. A Theological Meditation, Hans Kiing, trans. Edward Quinn (London: SCM, 1980), 87 pp,, f2.95. Does God Exist? An Answer for Today, Hans Kiing, trans. Edward Quinn (London: Collins, 1980), xxiv + 839 pp., f12.00.

An interesting history might be written of the long conflict between German Catholics and the papacy, beginning with the Investiture controversy and passing from Conciliarists, Reformers and Febronians to the German Church historians of the nineteenth century. At the heart of the controversy in modern times has been the claim of papal infallibility as defined in the teeth of Ignaz von Diillinger’s objections at the First Vatican Council in 1870. The Council was the subject of a recent hostile work by a Swiss Catholic priest, August B. Hasler, and the eminent Swiss-German Catholic theologian Hans Kiing wrote a sympathetic introduction to the popular version of Hasler’s work in 1979. Kiing was already the author of a major book attacking infallibility, and again assailed the doctrine in a popular ‘meditation’, The Church - Maintained in Truth, also originally published in 1979. The introduction to Halser and The Church - Maintained in Truth were both subsequently cited in evidence by the Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the German bishops in withdrawing Kiing’s ecclesiastical Zicentiu legendi and thus securing his removal from the Catholic Faculty of Theology at Tiibingen. (By the provisions of the Concordat with Rome, Kiing retained his chair, but it was taken outside the Faculty.) The Church - Maintained in Truth, has therefore considerable importance, as a manifestation of the theological divisions within German Catholicism, and as a statement of a theolog- ical position obnoxious to Rome.

There are two aspects of Kiing’s attack, his repudiation of certain specifically ‘Roman’ claims in the name of a wider Catholicism, and his endeavour to define this Catholicism to meet the objections of modern critical thought. The Christian claim to truth, says Kiing, derives from a trust in God and the revelation of His love in Christ, and all other beliefs are secondary and dependent on that one. The scriptures, the creeds, doctrine, the teaching authority of pope and bishop, are but humble man- made proclamations of God’s love in Christ in the light of present practical pastoral or intellectual need, and are fallible and corrigible. Thus the Bible is a collection of fallible books, church authority can err, and while dogmatic definitions are useful signposts and monuments to past endeavours to state the truth, no formula can claim to be absolutely true and binding in its original sense. But while Kiing denies that either the Bible or the Church or the Pope is infallible, and indeed speaks of a ‘fallible magisterium’, he sees them all as possessing a general ‘indefectibility’ which can preserve the spirit of truth in the midst of propositional error, in trueness to the spirit of Christ. What is true is the God in Christ who speaks through Bible and Church, in which whatever proclaims Christ is true, and that always survives in the Church in any age, in spite of mistakes and betrayals.

Yet the spirit of truth must be open to confess past error, and Kiing sees the claim to infallibility by church or pope as an obstacle to renewing Catholicism in the spirit of Christ, because to admit a mistake about what had been infallibly proclaimed is precisely what an infallible institution cannot do. Kiing’s bite noire is Pope Pius XII, and he attacks the ‘dubiousness’ of the papal definition of the dogma of the Assump- tion in 1950 as an aggressive manifestation of ecclesiastical and clerical triumphalism which crushed creative theologians under its heel. In a postscript to the English edition

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of the book on Why I remain a Catholic’, he acknowledges the need for a papal or ‘Petrine’ office ‘purged however of absolutist features - on biblical foundations’, in the spirit of Kiing’s papal hero John XXIII. Indeed Kiing sees in Catholicism a universality lacking in Protestantism, though he also discerns this Catholicism more clearly among Protestants in Tubingen than among his enemies in Rome.

This liberalism may look desirable to non-Christians and Liberal Protestants, and perhaps even to some Roman Catholics, especially in its repudiation of past excesses by authority, but an Anglican reviewer who knows its consequences in his own communion may be permitted to ask certain questions. Are Professor Kting’s safe- guards (a respect for tradition, a reformed papacy, etc.) a sufficient protection against the doctrinal and moral anarchy which now prevails in some Protestant churches? There could hardly be an easier road to intellectual chaos than to relativise credal formulae, and it must be difficult for an agnostic to understand why Christianity can only express its astounding claims in variable and highly provisional forms. So too, Rung’s enthusiasm for women priests and his dislike of so much of his Church’s Marian, sexual, ascetical and wider moral teaching have a distinctly Liberal Protestant anti-Roman Catholic appearance, as does his selective scriptural version of the Christ- ian essentials, which overlooks the doctrinal riches of two thousand years of Catholic tradition. And why should his very simple naked propositional statement of his undoubted Christian faith (p. 12) be considered more spiritually or pastorally effective than the old palatial Catholicism (which he himself once defended in The Council and Reunion), with its many mansions and its extraordinary treasures in thought, devotion and liturgy?

To the historian there is a disturbing historical contrast here, between the religion of Pius XII (and of the really very conservative John XXIII), and the latter-day western European Catholicism which acknowledges Professor Kiing as its prophet. As contem- porary Poland shows, it is the old-fashioned proposition-~dden faith which calls men into the priesthood and women into convents and both into the self-denying labours in missions and charity which have been the glory of the modern Roman Church. It is precisely because Professor Kiing insists that faith be tested by its pastoral and practical consequences that we can ask to be shown its fruits. A traditionalist Catholic might well say, to Kting, give us your Father Damiens and Lech Walesas and Mother Theresas, and we will follow you. It is obviously difficult for an Iron Curtain pope or priest to feel that Kiing knows what persecution is. It is also difficult for a mere historian to recognise the parallel now being freely drawn between the lonely torment of the forgotten victims of the old Roman Inquisition, and Kiing’s not uncomfortable professorial ma~yrdom, as it is Rome which maintains the unpopular position before a mocking world which applauds Kting.

In Kiing’s more recent book, Does God Exist?, Rome is again discussed as if it had played no other historic role than that of persecuting Christian theologians. This second work is a massive tome, more than eight hundred pages long, on the idea of God in modern western culture, with a subordinate attack on the Roman Catholic theological tradition for the inadequacy of its response to contemporary atheism, indeed for being in part responsible for that challenge. Kiing traces the problem posed for theism back to the division of western thought by the dualism posited by Descartes between mind and matter, which gave rise to the conflict between philosophical idealism and materialism and to the emergence of a purely naturalistic scientific view of the world. Yet Ki_ing claims, while admitting that the point is difficult to prove, that the Cartesian separation of faith and reason also sharpened and strengthened the two-tier system of natural and revealed religion deriving from Aquinas, and so the Roman Catholic schools developed a positivist Cartesian theological science of meta-

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physical certainties, and at the First Vatican Council declared that God can be known by the unaided human reason, a statement tightened in St. Pius X’s anti-modernist oath into the affirmation that God’s existence can be proven with certainty.

Kiing dislikes modem neo-scholasticism as the intell~tual instNment of papal authority, and as making religious claims for the teaching of reason which the mass of modern men cannot see. Thus in his sympathetic exposition of the traditional proofs of God’s existence, he argues in a fairly well-worn manner that these proofs are not logically binding: rather, they provide a useful framework for reflection on God and an assurance that though theism is not provable by reason, nor is it purely irrational. Kiing, however, sees recent Roman Catholic theology (in the writings of De Lubac and Rahner) as now increasingly dispensing with an outdated distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ truths, by placing ‘natural truths’ in the understanding of faith, and by bringing nature into the realm of grace, in order to recover a monist biblical view which this dualism has tended to obscure.

Kiing argues that this biblical view is better represented in a different, less single- mindedly intellectualist, more voluntarist tradition, stemming from Augustine, and encompassing Pascal, Kierkegaard and Karl Barth. He thinks, however, that this tradition errs in depressing the proper claims of nature and reason, which the tradition of Aquinas preserves. Both traditions, however, in their modem form, offer encouragement to atheism, the tradition of Aquinas (and Descartes) by affording an improper autonomy to reason and nature, the tradition of Augustine (and Pascal) by denying reason and nature their due. Neither the Cartesian cog&o nor the Pascalian credo is an adequate foundation for modem theism, and both traditions need radical reappraisal from a reconsideration of biblical teaching and more recent atheist ideas.

The greater part of Kiing’s work is a massive sympathetic elucidation and criticism of the objections to theism from modern philosophy, the bulk of this space being devoted to the tradition of left-wing German Hegelianism stemming from Feuerbach, who, Kiing argues, supplied the philosophical presuppositions of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche. This makes the foundation of modern atheism the Feuerbachian philosoph- ical reduction of religion to a form of human consciousness, and on this presumption Marx built his economics, Freud his psychology and Nietzsche his nihilism. Yet apart from the presumption, there was much in nineteenth-century Christianity to justify the Marxist, Freudian and nihilist analyses and rejection of religion, even though not all Christianity can be explained away after this manner. Kiing writes:

Religion, as Marx shows, can certainly be opium, a means of social assuagement and consolation (repression). But it need not be. Religion, as Freud shows, can certainly be an illusion, the expression of a neurosis and psychological immaturity (regression). But it need not be.

Neither Marxism nor Freudianism nor nihilism provides an exhaustive reductionist explanation of religion. Nor does comparative religion, which is agnostic about the origins of religion, and nor do the physical sciences, which can neither prove religious claims nor disprove them. Modern scientific enquiry has no need of the hypothesis of God as deist mechanic or as the God of the gaps in our knowledge or as the divine ground of an evolutionary ascent. But a scientific believer can confess a God who exists in a fashion congruent with science if not provable by it, as the ‘Creator of world and man, tra~ce~dentaZiy and im~nent~y determining eve~t~i~g’.

Atheism, in short, is as undemonstrable as theism, yet theism has a property which atheism lacks, a ‘fundamental trust’ which is of the reason as it is of the total person, and which is rational in making concrete and practical sense of reality as atheism does

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not. Kiing finds the God who gives meaning and purpose to existence in the God of religion, a God who, Kiing declares by the Hegelian logic understood only by Hege- lians, affirms, negates and transcends the God of the philosophers. More comprehens- ibly, Kting defines the God of faith as the dynamic God of a living biblical and Christian experience, a God partially proclaimed in various non-Christian theologies, but concretely if unevenly revealed in the particulars of Old Testament history, and supremely revealed as personal - ‘with a human face’ - in the suffering and loving Christ. Kiing presents a Triune God, Father, Son and Spirit, who is not primarily the God of traditional Christian metaphysics, for the old body of metaphysical doctrines was a set of abstractions perfectly good for its time and place but not for ours. Kiing does not consider it literally true, for it was enmeshed in a scientifically obsolete world view, and it is religiously unfitted to an age which does not understand it anyway. Rather, the character of Professor Kiing’s God is disclosed in the human activity which He inspires, in the needs, fears and longings of man. Kting therefore argues that modern theology should not begin from above, in metaphysical theorising about God, but from below, in a God who is active in man’s reason, will and feelings, in the thought and work and love which men put into their everyday lives.

This is a very bald summary of a book which contains a number of smaller books on such disparate themes as comparative religion and the relations between science and theology. The principal recurring irritation is Kiing’s King Charles’s head, the persecuting papacy, which turns up in the most various subject matter, (Copernicus and Galileo, the Chinese rites, Teilhard de Chardin, even Leninism, which Kiing makes the occasion for an elaborate comparison of modern Rome and Moscow). Professor Kiing is famous for the lucidity and force of his prose, and much of his writing about his understanding of God is extremely moving. This is not, however, a book for the traditionalist believer, who, on Kiing’s own criteria, finds in the old metaphysics and spi~tuality an infinitely richer and more moving explication of his own experience than Kiing’s, one more satisfying to his reason and his desire to make some sense of Scripture, tradition and himself. Perhaps Kiing will speak with authority to those who find in Marx or Freud or Nietzsche or modern science or comparative religion substantial objections to Christian belief, or who, suspecting or not knowing the traditional Churches, are looking for a new statement of the Gospel. Certainly Kiing has an enviable gift in bringing to life the thinkers he admires, and representing their thought as alive.

But is this work an adequate defence of Christian theism, when it sloughs off so much past Christian reflection on God as of no more than historical interest? Have not the Fathers, the Schoolmen, even modern neo-scholasticism, more to offer than Kiing’s dismissive summaries of them suggest? And is the true test of the Christian thought of the present its relevance to an atheism largely developed in nineteenth- century Germany? And what of the theologians in traditions which Kiing barely mentions, the Eastern Orthodox, and even the Anglican? These questions do not admit of easy answers, but there is a subsidiary question being asked throughout this book, which is much easier to answer. This reviewer cannot see the Roman Catholic Church adopting or even tolerating Kung’s theology, without becoming an institution radically different from what is now, and always has been. Liberal Protestants will consider Kting an orthodox believer. He is not, however, an orthodox Roman Catho- lic, if this term retains a definite meaning from its history.

Sheridan Gilley