On Being a Christian
Küng, Hans
one of the intangibles of soldiering--is to me the high point of his work. Would that the automatic data processing experts understood it! One subject which the author might have touched on...
...Television has influenced and will continue to influence the public's support of armed conflict...
...How easy it is to succumb to the apocalyptic vision that has played havoc with human minds, and destinies, throughout centuries and still bears sway over our unteachable world...
...Using the tools of biblical criticism, he enunciates a demythologized Christianity...
...Manor Every decade or so a book appears to rouse the sluggish world of intellect...
...He relies upon the concrete probing of religious response rooted in individual experience...
...Lasky wears his learning lightly...
...Kking replies that belief in Christianity rests on an act of faith and is a commitment of value...
...For that, he has incurred the displeasure of the Pope, and he has been warned by the Vatican of the dangers of heresy and error...
...maintains that theistic religion can never be replaced and that, like art and poetry, it is an enduring feature of the human condition...
...Toward the close of this book Mr...
...Thus, it is my view that more than ever before, public opinion will alter the complexion of battle...
...To understand the true meaning of Christianity, he argues, we must go back to Jesus' teaching unencumbered by Church doctrine...
...So deep is the hunger after immortality that many will grasp at the mere promise, hoping thereby to give their frail human existence a deeper cosmic purpose...
...but our images of the future, to be effective, should not be out of cognitive touch with the world, nor immune to the scrutiny of critical intelligence...
...Lasky adds, "will be as mixed as these metaphors...
...Instead, irrational salvational doctrines contend for men's allegiance...
...One subject which the author might have touched on more heavily is the influence of public opinion on the future of battle...
...The truth of the matter is that from Agincourt and before, up to the present, battles have been pretty brutal events...
...We embark here on what Prof...
...In spite of devastating critiques by logicians, philosophers, and scientists, the most vulgar and anti-intellectual forms of superstitious religion seem as strong as ever...
...Whether reason, without illusion, is ever enough is a troublesome question...
...Its effect was profound since those who were perhaps unacquainted with some of the more brutal aspects of armed combat suddenly became personally and directly involved...
...Lasky's book contemporary examples--from Malcolm X to Sukarno and Qaddafi--to illustrate the permanence of primitive word-magic in the world of politics and apocalyptic hope, his work is firmly anchored in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries...
...He is such an influential theologian, however, that there seems to be little else that the Church can do at present...
...Lasky / University ofChicagoPress / $35.00 F.S...
...In this book Kiing expresses what seems to be an essentially Protestant viewpoint...
...Cohn sought to find in the chiliastic movements of medieval Europe antecedents to the twin phenomena of Hitler and Stalin: Between the revolutionary eschatology of the later Middle Ages and modern totalitarian "ideologies" there is of course one obvious difference...
...20th-century totalitarianism within the historical-sociological framework of mankind's millennial aspirations...
...de Stall to Albert Camus, has to confront: the struggle "to hold out against the boisterous sea, to resist the waves of faction, to escape the howling wolves, to rise above the controlling powers of zeal, resentment, and prejudice ~ droit et a gauche...
...This has its counterpart for the Jews with the growth of orthodox Chasidism and for the Arabs of fanatic Mohammedanism...
...We cannot escape from that...
...Norman Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millennium analyzed the apocalyptic movements that convulsed Europe from the 11th to the 16th century...
...This Czech refugee from Counter-Reformation 34 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1977...
...Paradoxically, at a time when liberalism in Protestantism has been weakened by evangelical fundamentalism, it is still blowing strong in Catholicism...
...He criticizes the legalism of the authoritarian and hierarchical Church, the subordinate role of women, the Church's historic anti-Semitism, its absolutistic moral doctrine, and its position on birth control and other issues...
...Post-modern technological society needs a set of viable moral ideals to sustain men, to give their lives direction and meaning...
...Though this be vain prattle, unconfirmed by the evidences of experience, it may be too hard for many human beings to accept the world for what it really is or is not...
...but, in the last analysis, it offers unpalatable soup, too thin for the creative human imagination...
...Hans Kiing, in a powerfully argued and lengthy book (720 pages...
...It will be the second volume, now in preparation, that promises to illuminate the world of Marxism and the post-Marxist utopias and revolutions of our own times...
...I agree with him that the current world crisis The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1977 33 in part is deeply religious...
...Where the former borrowed the language of Judeo-Christian prophecy, the latter have drawn upon nineteenth-century speculations in the fields of history, biology and sociology...In reality, however, the racial theory adopted by National Socialism was wholly unscientific and the simplified version of Marx's teaching known as Marxism-Leninism (formerly Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism) is hardly less so...
...Keegan draws certain conclusions for the reader's benefit...
...Faith in.Jesus the Christ gives peace with God and with oneself...
...And finally, there is the "psychic" revolution, with its uncritical devotion to astral projection, telekinesis, ectoplasmic poltergeists, astrology, and other forms of para-normal nonsense...
...A liberal Catholic theologian from Tiibingen, Kiing has taken on the Vatican and the Papacy...
...Viewed at a distance of two generations, over a period in which more people have been murdered in the name of this false tomorrow than had once inhabited the known world, the verse sounds trite and the thought puerile...
...It is a real adventure in learning more about a subject which, when it comes, has lasting effect on us all...
...In an earlier work he sharply criticized the doctrine of infallibility...
...Traditional religious forms and symbols no longer seem adequate for contemporary man (outside of Plains, Georgia, and the Bible Belt...
...Kiing is skeptical about much of the fictional legend of the historical .jesus, the reality of miracles, the Resurrection, the authenticity of the scriptures, revelation, the cult of Mary, the doctrine of the Trinity...
...I would be less than candid if I were not to mention it vis-/t-vis Vietnam...
...It is a form of humanism, indeed a truly "radical humanism," for it relates itself directly to the problems of man in the world...
...Kiing's erudition and scholarship is impressive...
...Yet perhaps men would rather be deceived than accept the finitude of human existence, or the need to develop confidence in their own powers of courage and intelligence...
...Dwelling at some length on events in Miinster under the Anabaptist leader John of Leyden---a prime example this of a utopia that quickly degenerated into vulgar tyranny--Prof...
...We must be leery of hasty generalizations, of course: For all we know, the current flight from reason may simply be a media event to be replaced by still other fads and fashions, and like the New Left and the counterculture, will dissipate as quickly as it appeared...
...Confidence in science and technology Paul Kurtz is editor of The Humanist and professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo...
...It is a valuable antidote to the knownothing literal evangelicalism of American Babbittry...
...Now Melvin Lasky, editor of the Encounter magazine of London, in his equally monumental survey asks us to rethink the relationship between ideas, ideals, and ideologies...
...The blue eyes of the Revolution shine with a necessary cruelty Aragon rejoiced, while Auden promised: We shall build tomorrow A new clean town With no more sorrow Where lovely, people walk up and down We shall all be strong We shall all be young...
...One cannot prove by reason the existence of God, yet belief in Christ and his teachings can have a profound influence in one's life...
...Now we have a medium which depicts this brutality...
...Lasky casts his net much wider...
...Today this revivalism assumes various forms: There has been a resurgence of primitive evangelical, Bible-thumping, faith-healing fundamentalism...
...It is a rare intellectual pleasure to accompany this erudite cicerone as he shows us the influence of words upon ideas and ideas upon mankind which, despite all historical precedents, appears unable to free itself from the magic chain of metaphors, forever returning to the ancient dreams which can be implemented solely by violence--and the violence destroying not only the existing social system but freedom itself...
...Kiing declined to go to Rome to answer an inquisition by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith...
...Quoting from English, German, French, Italian, and Latin sources, he sets out to analyze the ideological extension of human personality over some five centuries of history...
...Max Beloff describes as "a voyage of discovery across the three centuries that elapsed between the writing of More's Utopia and the new era that began with the ending of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars...
...and he replies: "In order to be truly human...
...Manor is the senior editorial writer of the Winnipeg Free Press...
...If ideology appears to have become in our time an anthology culled from a vestpocket dictionary of iddes re;ues, and if in every ideological phrase there lies buried the etymological lore of centuries, there was a time when the words were new, the sentiments fresh, the ideas original and unprecedented...
...Yet intellect provides no immunity against this infection, as Lasky shows by the case of Comenius...
...Although we find in Mr...
...Whether we agree with them or not, and I do not personally agree with certain ones, they are well developed and thought-provoking...
...Lasky as he confronts the struggle that every intellectual historian, from Bayle to Mme...
...Ten years ago Raymond Aron published his survey of relations between states, his monumental Peace and War...
...He also maintains that scientific humanism has failed to satisfy the deeper hunger within the human soul for meaning and purpose...
...and Mrs...
...Lasky's skillful guidance to follow words as they developed into ideas, and ideas into violent acts...
...As a nullifidian humanist, I find much in this book that I admire and can agree with...
...When skeptics ask, "why ought one to be committed to Christianity, rather than the other world religions or humanisms...
...and in the ability of human beings to solve the problems of the contemporary age has been undermined by the new religiosity: Whether this will mean a permanent shift in outlook and values is difficult to say...
...John Keegan's book is a "must" for the professional military and a "should" for any student of history...
...It is fascinating to watch Mr...
...He is sensitive to the critics of Christianity and indeed concedes many of the objections that skeptics have offered of it...
...To read into reality more than it is, is simply a form of selfdeception...
...Marxism as an ideological religion has moved into the vacuum seeking to provide symbols of salvation and hope...
...For all his erudition, Mr...
...For those who reject traditional religious sects, bizarre cults of psychotherapy have sprouted--with esoteric Asian gurus, swamis, or satanists promising salvation through transcendental meditation, yoga, exorcism, or other rites of initiation...
...This medium brought the war instantaneously from that tortured land into the living rooms of Mr...
...To be a Christian, he believes, sustains a person...
...BOOK REVIEW On Being A Chmstian Hans Kiing / Doubleday / 112.95 Paul Kurtz Ever since the days of Jonathan Edwards, America has undergone a "religious revival" every twenty years or so...
...Yet I think that Kiing fails to make his case, even for his modified Christianity...
...Perhaps men need gospels of Divinity or Utopia, and anything less is uninspiring...
...One might almost think that the modern world is at an end, that the scientific revolution which began in the 16th century has been overwhelmed, and that we are back to the Middle Ages...
...For if utopia and revolution are too much with us today, it was not always so...
...The Face of Battle fills this description...
...America...
...The book is eminently readable, a compelling book, and although I am a busy newspaperman fully occupied with what the Greeks so aptly call ephemeridae, the fleeting record of minute slices of contemporary history, I found it difficult to tear myself from the swiftly flowing, albeit demanding, overview of mankind's progression, the patient but incontrovertible demonstration that history is not fashioned by economic development but by the force of ideas...
...BOOK REVIEW Utopia & Revolution MelvinJ...
...He believes that Christianity provides the most potent hope for humankind, and this he spells out with considerable skill and audacity...
...Kiing seeks to reinterpret Christianity and to reinvest it with new meaning and value for the contemporary context...
...Still, many have been badly shaken by the resurgence of this "new religiosity," for it was widely believed that with the growth of universal education and affluence, gullibility and nincompoopery would eventually disappear...
...This was the first major essay to place F.S...
...It is to these pristine origins of ideology that we are led under Mr...
...Its splendors and miseries," Mr...
...He asks the question: "Why should one be a Christian...
...Twenty years ago, Prof...
...Secular humanism thus far may have failed many people in providing that: It has not offered alternative religious symbols of sufficient power and intensity...
...Christianity is not outside the world or separate from it, but within it...
...To me, any work which produces thought through sincere and wholesome argument or debate is a good effort and well worth the time required to be spent upon it...
Vol. 10 • June 1977 • No. 9
