Church [Paperback]

Hans Kung (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2001

For religion to work today there must be an awareness of the profound mystery and wonder of life, combined with an awareness of the practical and everyday living. This book discusses how the holiness, mystery and fascination with the divine can be encountered through spirituality.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, German (translation) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Hans Kung is Emeritus Professor of Ecumenical Theology at the University of Tubingen and President of the Global Ethic Foundation. He is the author of numerous best selling books including On Being a Christian (Harper Collins).

>

Product Details

• Paperback: 530 pages
• Publisher: Continuum (May 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0860121992
• ISBN-13: 978-0860121992
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #114,639 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Church- A Customer Review, November 23, 2005

By 

Ryan Buesnel "Ryan" (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Church (Hardcover)

It's amazing how a book first released in 1968 can still be relevant to todays Church. This work is a systematic approach to the ecclesiological and eschatological structures of the Catholic and Protestant Church.Hans Kung is an engaging writer who treats each subject with care and meticulous scholarly research. Protestant readers should not be put off by Kungs Catholic background, as Kung is fair and insightful in his critique of both Church traditions.

Although 'The Church' is a scholarly publication written by one of the most innovative and clever theologians in modern history, 'The Church' is remarkable engaging and easy to read, despite its considerable length. This book is suited to both Church leaders and the layperson who are seeking a concise study of the nature and purpose of the Church.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars HOW OUR PILGRIM CHURCH WILL PROGRESS AFTER HER PRESENT PREGNANT PAUSE, August 25, 2007

By 

C. Scanlon "least helpful reviewer" (among us humans) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Church (Hardcover)

The Church is not any building. The Church is not even any particular institutional structure imitating past secular structures such as the monarchical or the imperial.

As this excellent and approved book presents: Our Church is the Pilgrim People of God. Our Church is the unfolding, on-going creation of the Holy Spirit. Our Church is the Mystical Body of Christ.

In this scholarly, well-researched and considered tome (My Image Book reprint of 1976 covers 655 very full pages), Professor, Theologian and Catholic Priest, the Reverend Father Hans Kung explores the Bibilical essence of Church and how our post-conciliar ecclesiology may more honestly and integrally recapture that essence and Holy Spirit of God which entered through the window flung open by good Pope John XXIII at the beginning of his Ecumenical Council.

It goes without saying that this book bears the Nihil Obstat (Nothing Obstructs its publication doctrinally nor morally) of the learned Doctor of Theology and of Legal Studies John Barton, Censor, as well of course as the IMPRIMATUR ordering its publication by the Vicar General of Westminister. It is in fact dedicated in the post-Conciliar ecumenical spirit to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Michael Ramsey. The search for ecumenism and the unity of our Faith was once a goal set by the Second Vatican Council.

The great Catholic Priest and Bibilcal Scholar Fr. Robert McAfee Brown endorses this important work with these words (which I quote in part): "Kung's most significant and enduring work thus far, which is saying a lot ( . . .). 'The Church' seems to me destined to become the work from which both Catholics and Protestants will begin new formulations of a doctrine of the church."

Fr. MacAfee Brown is of course the famous mainstream Catholic scholar whom we must thank for such important works as Speaking of Christianity: Practical Compassion, Social Justice, and Other Wonders.

Further endorsement falls from the learned pen of the famous Father Avery Dulles, brother of John Foster, etc., who writes: "'The Church' is a very important and valuable book. It brings together an almost unbelieveable amount of exegetical and historical information, and effectively shows its bearing on the renewal of the Church today. Kung is profoundly committed to the renewal of the Church according to the Gospel. This authentic evangelical motif should make this book as appealing to Protestants as it is necessary to Catholics."

The orthodoxy of the theologian, professor and Reverend Father Dulles, later Cardinal, falls far beyond question, and his endorsement of this great book must bear much weight. Father Dulles wrote a good number of accepted texts, including the influential Models of the Church as well as several lesser known works including Models of Revelation. Also "necesssary to Catholics" seriously seeking a deeper understanding of our Faith is his The Craft of Theology: From Symbol to System. See also his important work for the Woodstock Theological Institute.

This profound and lengthy work, therefore, by Professor, theologian, Doctor of Theology, Doctor of Law, Doctor of Humanities, and Reverend Father Kung, bearing these bright shields of Imprimatur, Nihil Obstat and the public endorsements of at least two well-resepcted colleagues, presents his comprehensive examination of the nature and meaning of Church.

He begins in section A by explaining the authentic esence and image of the Church, and the distortions of that Image. Section B explores the most exciting aspect for me: The ministry of Jesus, and his preaching the message of the reign of God. Notice throughout the use of the rather generic term Reign rather than the specific Kingdom of God, as the latter term imposes a secular misconception and distortion which is not found in translations of the Our Father, for instance, in tongues other than English: Adveniat regnum tuum, and might therefore more faithfully transmit the original sense of Jesus's preaching and teaching and mission.

We then consider with Father Kung the foundation of the Church, the nearness of the reign, which remains already yet not yet, reminiscent of Saint Bernard's famous formulation of the soul seeking God in love, whom it already possesses. Then we enter the apostolic era of the earliest Church, which is compared with the reign of God. We see the ekklesia as congregation, community and Church, and how we serve.

Section C explores various aspects of the Church structure, as People of God, as a Creation of the Spirit, and as Body of Christ. Section D presents Dimensions of the Church, its unity in diversity, its catholic (universal) identity, which causes some to declare no salvation outside the Church, a question Father Kung dares explore. He continues his examination of contradictions and paradoxes by showing the Church both sinful yet Holy, and how the dynamics of forgiveness and renewal maintain the vitality of our pilgrim Church. He finishes this rather Credo section with a treatise on apostolic succession. His final section looks at the offices of the Church with Christ as High Priest in whom we all share, the nature of ministerial service in the Church, and the meanings of the Petrine ministry. A summary epilogue concludes this great work, followed by a number of indices by scriptural reference, by name and by subject.

Anyone interested in gaining a greater understanding of the nature and history of our Church must read this book, which strongly deserves an easily accessible spot on your reference shelf, bearing as it does so many endorsements, including by the officials of our Church. This book may be happily supplemented by his later work: The Catholic Church: A Short History (Modern Library Chronicles)

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars When Shame Drove Men To Dream New Dreams, September 26, 2008

By 

Thomas J. Burns (Apopka, Florida USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Church (Hardcover)

There is no denying that "The Church" is a child of its time. Released in 1967 just two years after Vatican II, this signature work of Hans Kung was succeeded by a string of critical and controversial ecclesiastical works by its author. In the years immediately succeeding its publication, "The Church" played its role in the anguished debate over the very nature of Catholicism in the postmodern world.

But this is now over four decades in the past. Those who used this text in ecclesial and university battles are now for the most part long retired or even deceased. Battle lines are still drawn, but the map looks strangely different. The question that remains now is whether removed from its post-conciliar setting, "The Church" has an enduring value, something to say that remains fresh in the contemporary setting.

I finished rereading this book almost a year ago, and I wrestled with that thought myself until I came across the excellent collection of essays entitled "Vatican II: Did Anything Happen?" [2007] This is a wonderful and spirited defense of the necessity of the Council. It was inspired, I believe, by a tendency in the Vatican today to act and speak as if the great Council was a momentary blip that changed little. In point of fact, however, Vatican II was a moral necessity, given that Roman Catholicism and its sister communions had been utterly powerless in the face of the grotesque evils of two world wars and the Holocaust.

Kung's work, like that of other war generation Catholic theologians of Western Europe, is a vision of a Church that indeed would have the moral credibility of character before the powers of this world. There is some striking similarity between Kung's methodology and that of Karl Barth several decades earlier; both define contemporary Christian experience as the outflow of the arrival of the Reign of God. The Church is nothing more and nothing less than the community of those who accept the Reign of God and gather to celebrate this wondrous overturning of history. Membership in the Reign of God is a dramatic, life altering decision. As Kung himself would remark in a later work, Christianity is the only world religion that calls its members to become like unto God.

Kung's sources for the nature, mission, and structure of the Church are primarily scriptural, though as we shall see, Kung's use of the New Testament in particular is at times eccentric. It is not that he did not have other sources, for it is easy to forget over time that Kung was as thorough a scholastic as Karl Rahner, and his footnotes are as multiple and sweeping as those of the Theological Investigations of Father Rahner himself. It is also a reflection of that time that, if memory serves me correctly, English references are rare and American references nonexistent.

Kung finds the New Testament not only a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the Kingdom, but also a kind of family history of the Reign's organic unfolding. He tends to contrast the freedom of the Pauline churches to experience the Holy Spirit in charismatic and unstructured ways, against the churches of the so-called Pastoral Letters where history and lines of authority are more clearly defined. While he can hardly deny the validity of such developments, clearly Kung wishes that there was room today for the Pauline vision of ecclesiology.

Certainly an area of particular interest is the papacy. Kung examines Matthew 16 in contrast to Matthew 18. Both speak of the authority of the reign of God to forgive sin, though in the former chapter this power is personified in Peter, while in the latter the forgiving authority is a broader family power. Kung, of course, has never made a secret of his concern over papal centralization. In this work, he does allow that the historic Apostolic Succession has in its own way been a blessing for the Church, but I would not exactly call it a ringing endorsement, either.

It hardly needs to be said that Kung's is a utopian view of the Church, but then one could say that the Vatican II documents themselves talk about the Church in this way. It may be that this radical freshness and pristine purity found in much of the Council's official language stands as a stark contrast to what actually was then and is now. There is much to the arguments of O'Malley, Schloesser, Komonchak and Ormerod in last year's publication cited above that the Church, almost unconsciously, must in this present day seek to minimize Vatican II as just another of the twenty-one councils to avoid a profound institutional schizophrenia.

The graves of the millions who died in the 20th century carnage are witness to the fact that no church council of that century could ever be seen as "business as usual." This, I think, is what those with long memories understand as the "Spirit of Vatican II" (a term, sadly, hijacked by the Council's enemies unhappy with parochial excesses.) It is the mind frame of the post-World War II era that brings such an edge to the writings of Kung, including our work at hand. It is the reason why "The Church" needs to remain on bookshelves, so that future generations will remember a day when the Church, its bishops and its theologians, came together in collective shame and guilt but nurtured by a pontiff of extraordinary hope and determination, to begin again at square one. Hans Kung and other participants of the Council did not seek to dismantle the Church but to rediscover it. "The Church" remains as one of the critical road maps of their quest...and hopefully, of ours.