A Passion for Truth
Sloyan, Gerard S.
A PASSION FOR TRUTH HANS KONG AND HIS THEOLOGY Robert Nowell Crossroad, $14.95, 377 pp. Gerard S. Sloyan THIS is an altogether helpful book. It reports on the teaching and pastoral career, but...
...The prophet, oblivious of all this, wants action now...
...The Nowell book reveals that whether the dispute be over the church, infallibility, birth control, marriage legislation, or Christian existence itself, Kiing stands for that small core which was delivered by revelation, chiefly the person and teaching of Jesus as testified to in the Bible, while others are equally at ease with its considerable enlargement (sacraments, offices, organizations...
...The Holy Office opened a file on the man whose dissertation viewed the theology of a heretic so favorably...
...An Inquiry (1970) and On Being a Christian (1974), Kiing asked the Doctrinal Congregation if he could see his dossier, have the names of those who would be taking part in the talks, and be allowed theological counsel of his own choosing...
...The older man wrote Kiing a letter which became the book's introduction, saying that Kiing had fully and accurately reproduced his views and that he, Barth, may have been long guilty of a persistent injustice to the Roman Catholic Church and especially the Fathers of Trent...
...The book on the Council was written during a year as research assistant in Miinster shortly after John XXIII announced its convening in January 1959...
...It concluded that Catholics tend to mean by redemption what Protestants mean by justification and that the areas of convergence between Barth and the teaching of the Catholic church were greater than anyone realized...
...Substantively, he was thought to have dealt with numerous questions in ways inconsonant with the teaching of the church (the prohibition of artificial contraception, church and papal infallibility, the sole valid minister of the Eucharist) which popes and councils had settled long ago...
...The year was 1957...
...Kiing's contention that God maintains an erring church in truth versus the claim that in certain cases it or its teachers cannot err is dealt with in a way that can only illumine...
...Starting with The Church and continuing through Infallible...
...Only the basic irreformable pattern given by God through Jesus Christ may not be set aside...
...Every institution, even the holiest (the celebration of the Eucharist, the preaching of the Gospel, the papacy) can decline...
...It reports on the teaching and pastoral career, but more the theological writing, of the Basel diocesan priest on the University of Tubingen faculty whose output has been so influential since 1960...
...Nowell is an English journalist with a sense of history...
...Nowell is favorably disposed to his subject but this is not a work of hom-mage...
...The non-negotiable difference between him and his Catholic opponents would prove to be what, exactly, was of God, hence could not be set aside...
...He looks like a committed Catholic who knows what he knows and literally has a passion for the truth...
...The Gospel is proposed throughout as the standard by which ultimately all Christian behavior and doctrine must be guided...
...The Council suggested that there was no irreformable essence of the church's institutions as established by God which served as a ground floor on which a second storey of reformable elements was built...
...The book traces the man's thought through the development of his theology...
...The differences between the disputants are reported with care, if not in the detail found in Leonard Swidler's book of documents Kiing in Conflict (Doubleday, $8.95, 627 pp...
...Kiing does not emerge as a man of pique, arrogance, or any of the other brushes with which he has been tarred so as to be dismissed...
...Because it is temperate, informative, and judicious it is to be recommended highly...
...It and not the Petrine ministry, rock for the church though it be, is the criterion for deciding what is church and what is not church...
...His editorial service on The Tablet and the highly regarded Herder Correspondence (produced independently of the German original) certifies his competence...
...Justification, his doctoral dissertation at the Catholic Institute of Paris under Louis Bouyer, examined the theology of Karl Barth from a Catholic viewpoint...
...Kiing was invited to accept a professorship at Tubingen in 1960 without having earned his Habilitation, the teaching degree...
...The procedural differences between the two sets of litigants and Kiing emerge early...
...It is impossible for anyone today, including Kiing himself, to read The Council, Reform, and Reunion (1961) with the same glasses as in the pre-Council period...
...History has more than one way of cheating the prophets, including making them redundant by fulfillment...
...A rebuke from the Doctrinal Congregation (the former Holy Office) was delivered to the diocese of Rottenburg where Tubingen is located because The Church bore no imprimatur...
...Kiing's chief shortcoming seems to be an impatience that others cannot see what he sees, in his case the opaqueness of church authorities to the increasingly clear view ordinary Catholics have of what and how they believe...
...Nowell's book is useful both for those unfamiliar with the man and his work and those long familiar with his case...
...It sheds light on matters like Karl Rahner's statement that in the infallibility question he had to argue with Kiing as with a "liberal Protestant" and his subsequent qualified regret...
...His book The Church (1967) examined critically the church's origins in Jesus's life and teaching, its dimensions of unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity, the Petrine office and various other ministries...
...There is a general felicity of expression and an incidental intelligence in all sorts of matters that adds sauce to the stew...
...The difference proved time and again irreducible...
...Thus did his thirteen years of attention by Roman authority and the German bishops begin...
...Barth had been appointed to a special professorship at Gottingen without even a doctorate on the basis of his commentary on Romans...
...Anyone who remarks, "his truth" (and they have been not a few) should be reminded that no one has ever held with passion any other...
...Cardinal Hoffner of Cologne in particular, head of the conference of German bishops, wanted Kiing to profess his faith in the divinity of Christ in traditional creedal language and would not accept his protestations of such faith in any other terms...
...The book's lively style, occasionally repetitive of detail, establishes that complex theological issues need not be written about obscurely...
...This is not primarily a book about controversy but about Catholic faith and theology...
...He was consistently told that no trial was envisioned, only conversations in which he would be asked to clarify his views, and in the end was charged by the curial officials and the German bishops with having refused a legitimate summons...
...Kiing's willingness to set everything, church and all, before the judgment of a holy God would be the distinguishing feature of his subsequent work...
...also, the failure of the majority of Kiing's departmental colleagues to back him because of their fear that the government would bring confessional theological faculties to an end...
Vol. 109 • October 1982 • No. 18
