The Church by Hans Küng (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Church. By HANs KuNG. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968. Pp. 529. $6.95. To do a " fine-toothed comb review " of this volume is not my intention. Obviously others have combed its pages with a rather critical eye, as the possible mounting of a Roman process suggests. No doubt many questions are raised by the author which are quite apt to incite interest-if not the ire-of anyone on the defensive about the prerogatives of either the "official Church "or scholastic theology. This ought not to be a surprise to anyone, however, since it should have been well known (at least to the sapientes) that H. Kling, like a lot of other people, is fed up both with the formalism in the Church which tends to stymie renewal and the latent rationalism which tempts scholastic theologians. For all its admirable comprehensiveness, The Church is a volume characterized by a few recurrent themes. One of these might be called the humanity of the Church. Indeed, I believe that Kling's ideas about what it means for the Church to be made up of sinful men are quite central to his entire ecclesiology. For the sake of simplification I shall concentrate on this single theme in the paragraphs which make up the remainder of this review. To begin with, here are three rather telling passages from different sections of the volume, transcribed as specimens of Kling's thought on the humanity of the Church, for the purpose of analysis. The first of these is taken from the chapter in which the author discusses the meaning of the Church's being the "creation of the Spirit": To avoid confusing the Spirit and the Church it would be better not to speak of the Church as a ' divine ' reality. The individual believer, after all, does not become a divine reality because he is filled with and governed by the Spirit.... So it is we believe in the Holy Spirit ... ; by contrast we believe the Holy Church.... We do not believe in the Church, in the final analysis we never believe in ourselves (pp. 174-175). Again we have the following paragraph from the chapter on the Church as the body of Christ: It is mistaken and misleading . . . to talk of the Church as a " divine-human " being, a " divine-human " reality, phrases which stress the unity, but overlook the difference between Christ and the Church, and suggest that Christ is simply a part of the Church rather than its Lord, the head of the body. Christ is not wholly contained in the Church. There is no hypostatic union between Christ and the Church any more than there is between Christ and the individual Chris540 BOOK REVIEWS 541 tian.... To talk of the " mystical " body of Christ is misleading, since the word " mystical " is very often taken in the sense of what we nowadays understand by mysticism; this gives rise to a view of the Church as united with the divinity in a way that overlooks human creatureliness and sinfulness, and suggests a direct relationship with Christ, as identification with Christ, which is quite wrong (p. 287). Finally, there is this passage, which deals directly with the question of sinfulness in the Church: Various excuses [for the Church's sinfulness] have been attempted; they are understandable , but not acceptable: (1) Setting apart the "holy" members. . . . (2) Distinguishing between a "holy" Church and sinful members. ... (8) Distinguishing between the " holy " and the sinful parts of the Christian: again there have sometimes been attempts to split up the individual Christian himself. In as far as he is pure, he belongs to the Church; in as far as he is sinful, he does not. These are the sort of notions which can be played with intellectually. It would no doubt be highly convenient if a man could simply split off from his sinful self, and at least be pure within the Church. But man's wretchedness consists precisely in the fact that he cannot leave his evil, his sinful self, on one side; nothing is to be gained by this kind of quantitative separation (p. 828) . To take these passages as a kind...