Marx is master and teacher for Marxists and Freud for Freudians. Jesus of Nazareth is certainly also master and teacher for the life of Christians. But he is also essentially more than that. As the one who was killed and raised to life, he is for believers the living authoritative embodiment of his cause. In all that he is, in all that he said, did and suffered, he personifies the cause of God and the cause of humanity. And so he calls us to discipleship. For some this is too lofty a word, and in its challenge almost alarming. But do not let us misunderstand what discipleship means. Certainly the living Christ does not call merely for adoration without practical commitment, nor simply for us to say "Lord, Lord" or "Son of God, Son of God." But neither does he call us to literal imitation. It would be presumptuous to want to imitate him. No, he calls for personal discipleship, not in imitation but in correlation, in correspondence. That means that I commit myself to him and pursue my own way in accordance with his direction - for each of us has his or her own path to follow. It is not that we must. We are not compelled. Making his way our own was understood from the very beginning as a very great opportunity, not a "must" but a "may," not a law to be obeyed slavishly but an unexpected chance and a true gift that is (and this word too has often been misunderstood) a genuine grace on which we are permitted to rely - a grace that presupposes no more than this one thing; that I grasp it confidently and try to adapt my life to it.
It is clear in this that the Christianity and, even more so, the Catholicism of Hans Kung is not that of the official orthodox Church or churches. Those inevitably turn what Kung presents as "a very great opportunity" "a may" into a "must" laws to be obeyed under obedience to a command but followed, as best we can, as a matter of choice.
One of the worst things about organized churches is the inevitable tendency to make themselves about the institution of the church, protecting its interests and its traditions, not of living out and promoting the living out of the Gospel. Protecting its hierarchy, its orthodox tenants, its real estate and its regional hegemony, a tendency which started even before the time of imperial persecutions,* never mind the time that Constantine began establishing a supposedly Christian kingdom of this world of exactly the kind that Jesus declared he didn't have, wouldn't have.
Perhaps that enormous, perhaps fatal accommodation of the worldly powers by Christianity was necessary for Christianity to survive and spread, but it was not done without an enormous cost to the Jesus movement, which had to move away from the radical Gospel which was replaced by orthodox holdings that began to spring up before Constantine began to put imperial force behind codifying church law, inevitably leading to the long history of bloodshed in the name, not of the Gospel but of the semi-secular laws and orthodoxy that were guaranteed to accommodate the kingdoms of this world more than taking the chance on following the teachings of Jesus.
Even within the various churches, there has always been a tension between those who wanted to get back to the Gospel of Jesus and those worldly clerics and authorities who were, in that putrid word from current American politics, "institutionalists." Like those who are held up as heroic protectors of their "institutions," the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, etc, like that man who were were guaranteed was a stalwart and dependable protector of the rule of law and constitutional order, Robert Mueller, it is clear that there is something seriously inadequate and seriously wrong with the ersatz virtue they embody. In every way they are analogous to such other institutionalists, even deputed saints, such as Thomas More who, for all his many and even heroic virtues,* was a man of worldly powers, whether it was in service to the increasingly depraved tyrant of England, Henry VIII or the Pope, Clement VII* a Pope who was known as a statesman, facing the consequences of the Catholic Church as a worldly power, having to choose to either please the King of England or that of Spain, only one of the myraid of worldly problems that came with that status as a worldly power.
This paragraph from Kung's book is part of his elucidation of what Christians are to do and, also, where the power to do that comes from. For non- and anti-Christians, the statements about that are bound to be everything from incomprehensible to outrageous. That is certainly, in no small part, due to the long history of sectarian strife, of declarations of heresy and the long history of forced conversions to specific sects of Christianity. But today, in largely secular states where religious freedom is the law, that habit is most like a pantomime of outrage over the question of converting people.
Again, the name of the book is Why I Am Still A Christian, it isn't, "Become A Christian Or You're Goin' To Burn In Eternal Fire - Let God Sort Them Out". This is a book that is clearly encouraging the conversion of those who claim to be Christians to the religion that Jesus of Nazareth taught, which is certainly different from any particular denomination or sect or even general kind of Christianity. In considering what is essential to the teachings of Jesus, I come up with:
The Shama as Jesus articulated it, loving God with all of your being and others as yourself.
Doing for the least among us, the destitute, the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the alien living among us, etc. what we would do for God (Jesus was especially radical in associating these dirty, diseased, despised, un-kewel, unfashionable, needing people as incarnations of God).
The need to forgive, over and over and over again (perhaps it's as an Irish guy, that's the one I find the hardest).
The radical economic justice of the parable of the workers in the vinyard, in which compensation for labor gives generously and equally, more generously and equally than hourly wage requirements imagine.
The even more radical and for most people nearly impossible requirement of giving up all property to give to those least among us. That is definitely something that hardly any church or denomination has required of its authorities and hierarchs and preachers. It is something that a few, very radical Christians have tried to practice, certainly St. Francis was the greatest example in the West, but which most of us only manage in "correlation and correspondence". The history of the early Franciscan movement, sabotaged by the worldly clerics and as many an early deputed Franciscan worked with them to force the Franiscans into holding property, a settled life, intellectual as well as material attainments that Francis warned against, is a microcosm of the historical deviation of Christianity from the Gospel of Jesus. But there have always been dissidents who wanted to restore Franciscan spirituality to its origins, which were certainly not in the teachings of Francis, he, himself, found them in the teachings of Jesus.
None of this is simple in practice, it is, though, the best hope for the West to ever get back on the road of egalitarian democracy, social and economic justice, of a decent life for everyone, and for the entire world. If you can find the same thing in another religious tradition, in as strong a form that will lead people, in large numbers, onto the same road, I have no problem with you doing it under some other name. But without as strong an authoritative proponent of it as Jesus is supposed to be for Christians, I doubt it will have much success. I would think that Islam, if they can find it in the teachings of Muhammad, may, well find that same road, given the strong teaching for equality in Islam, they might be more successful than Christianity, though they have their own history of violence and worldly rule to deal with before they can get back onto that road. Jesus explicitly rejected that route, though you'd hardly know that from the long history of those who claimed to follow him. If they had the Crusades, for a start, would not have happened.
* I will take a major diversion in the order of the book to deal with this point next.
** Clement VII, was notably a real intellectual, among other things he approved of the Copernican cosmology about a century before the last of the "Humanist Popes" took offense over Galileo insulting him and returning Catholic cosmology to the earlier orthodox scientific system in which Earth was the center of the universe. Clearly, the situation concerning that matter is far more complex than the conventional Brit-atheist lore concerning the Galileo trial would have its suckers believe.
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