In The Last Resort - Post 3 from Why I Am Still A Christian

ARGUING FOR CONTINUING CHRISTIANITY out of some notions about what we are all to think was some high point of Christianity it in the past is a hopeless cause. That is because there is little in that history, especially among those with authority and power deputed to have been "Christian" popes, patriarchs, bishops, most "Christian" monarchs and others crowned in a mockery of Christian sacramentalism such as will be seen in Britain in a few months . . . but whose adherence to the Gospel of Jesus, the words of the Epistles in the rest of the New Testament and their actions and those under their command whose history is more useful to attack Christianity with than a demonstration of it.  If Christians had acted as Jesus instructed, as Paul and James, etc. had instructed, there would be no crisis in Christian credibility, Christianity would not be held to have blood on its hands and past the crown of its head. It would be uniformly praised except by those who love evil.  Marjorie Taylor Green, the rest of the Trumpian Republican-fascists, Putin's regime, the incumbent Patriarch of Moscow would despise the word instead of covering it with filth by associating it with what they do.

If we were in the habit of being honest about the history of "American democracy," with its history of genocidal conquest, its history of chattel slavery and its unofficial continuation in Jim Crow and lynch-law, the subjugation of other racial, ethnic, religious minorities, LGBTQ+ oppression, the wage-slavery and not unoften fatal abuse of workers, the poor, the destitute, etc. we would have to hold that our secular American republic and the Constitution INCLUDING THE BILL OF RIGHTS under which all of those evils flourished is as discredited.  I would say an honest appraisal would be that it would have to stand as more discredited.  The teachings of Jesus were never administered as law by institutions he established in the way that secular, civil law has been administered under the terms set out on our Constitution. What is permitted under the Constitution is a direct result of the terms in the Constitution as laid down by those the Constitution gives authority to.  The evils allowed under law to persist in the secular republic are official governance in a way that the teachings of Jesus, the last word in the definition of what is Christianity, have never been.  He said his kingdom was not of this world. There is not a "Christian country" about which that same point cannot be made because there has never been a "Christian" government, including under the papacy.

As I said the other day, if we are to believe the prophetic words of Jesus, of the New Testament, perhaps including the prophesy of much of the Hebrew Scriptures, we should expect the real golden period of Christianity is to come and when it does come, gold is not going to be the right adjective identifying it but equality, charity, and following the other commandments.  It will not be by any deputation that it will be known but by its fruits.  I would very much recommend reading the short, lesser read but enormously important letter of James for examples of what I'm thinking about.  

How do we know today what we can still rely on, in the last resort?  Certainly every day we receive more and more rules of behavior, "traffic regulations," maxims.  But as we all know, regimentation is not the same thing as having values.  On the contrary, the more regulations, regimentation, planning, and organization we have, and the more laws, requirements, forms, and "the pressure of circumstances" gain control in all spheres of life, the more people feel disoriented and lose insight and oversight; and the more people feel to be losing control over their lives, the more they demand clear sign posts to help them through the confusion of rules, regulations and outside pressures.  In this disoriented age, people long for a fundamental orientation, for some system of essential values, for a commitment.  It is the commitment to these essential values, not to society's superficial rules and regulations, which is the theme of this book.

As I said, I am not a pessimist.  People are no worse today than they were in the past, when values were more abundant. . .

I will break in here to say that, as indicated above,  this may be the single statement in the book I disagree with the most. I don't believe it is true that values were "abundant" in the past even if they may have been more so than today.  That is except in a marginal sense that the values under discussion, as Kung is about to make clear in this discussion, specifically "Christian values," had a marginally greater effect in some aspects of social life and in some instances politics and law. Some.  And that is true entirely because the Christian Churches, imperfect followers of the Gospel, the Law and the Prophets those were, extremely up and down in that, NEVERTHELESS HAD TO DEAL WITH WHAT JESUS SAID and they had more influence on the secular leaders, at times, though frequently and in large areas, little to no influence.  And the Churches were, at times, far more influenced by secular politics and economics than they made up for any inclination to promote Christian values. Those were certainly never more than imperfectly followed and were certainly nothing like universally applied.  

Most of the Gospel of Jesus, for example, the Sermon on the Mount or the "What you do for the least among you," passages of it, has never found much of anything like a place in civil law, not even under most of democracy.   People certainly were, if anything, despite what laws there were against everything from petty cheating to torture and murder, whenever they were able to, people of all classes were not much inclined to treat those not of the dominant group as they insisted on their having a right to be treated, themselves.

In Western counties, whites as a group (with exceptions) were certainly not inclined to treat Black People, People of Color, as equally holding a right to good or just treatment. Nominal Christians were not inclined to treat Jews as they, themselves, wanted to be treated.  In their imperial holdings they were even less inclined to, the genocides of the inhabitants of the Western hemisphere, conducted, to begin with, by anointed princes and monarchs and on the excuse of spreading Christianity as they were really about theft and enslavement, are among the chief violations of the Gospel of Jesus. In the writings of the Calvinist Cotton Mather, his excuses for genocide were given precedent from some of the most vicious books of the Old Testament.

Once the secular republic was established, it proceeded without using that as an excuse as theft with no Constitutional inhibitions at all.  I would go on about the few notable exceptions to that, especially in the later 20th century when some, such as St. Oscar Romero, the Martyrs of Central America, etc. faced death at the hands of the United States' trained client genocidalists. Something going on as Kung wrote his book and still going on, today. If a Catholic golden age is to be a Christian one, I think it has yet to come and it will be, in no small part, due to the teachings of Vatican II taking hold and being expanded on. Good Pope Francis's recent call to revoke Augustine's "just war" theology would be an epoch-ending reform which would, I am certain, be bitterly objected to by many a billionaire-financed astro-turf "trad-Catholic."  Some of the worst figures in murderous American imperialism -such as assassinated Romero and the four American churchwomen-  and now DeSantis-Trumpism have been officially members of the Catholic church and no one, not even Francis, has ever talked about excommunicating them or banning them in the way Dignity or the Roman Catholic Womenpriests have been.  Similar things can be said about most of the Christian Churches.

More generally about Christians holding power, those with wealth were certainly not inclined to treat the poor and destitute as they would want to be treated despite that admonition, that moral value probably counting by far as the most commonly stated Commandment in both testaments demanding economic justic for "the widow, the orphan, the alien" "the least among you" etc.  

Though those as values are still maintained to some extent as a sentimental vestige of a Christian cultural past, the recent attempt to make those governmental policy is foundering badly in such things as feeding the poor, housing and clothing them, getting medical treatment for them, humane treatment of the incarcerated, just about everywhere thirty-six years after the book was published. And it is exactly those who most strongly and insistently self-identify as "Christians" for political purposes who are the greatest enemies of those most obviously Christian of programs. That has been as true for conservative Catholics, bishops, etc. ever eager to concentrate on a relative handful of prohibitions against sex while ignoring the myriads of commandments of economic and general justice as it has been for the stingiest and most resentful of givers among "work-ethic" Protestants.   And there are plenty of Catholics, Orthodox, etc. who are in a contest with them for that ignominious designation.

Any really "Christian age" on Earth is yet to come, if it doesn't it may be because we have committed suicide as a species as the alternative to it.

That said, needing to deal with things as they are, now, back to the text.

. . . Young people have always been "bad," according to their elders. But this much must be said, if we are to understand the present younger generation in particular; social change has never come about with such speed and complexity as it does today.  Consequently, it becomes increasingly difficult to hold on to essential values, and the danger of spiritual homelessness and rootlessness is growing all the time.  Everyone -young and old- is trying to work things out for themselves, often quite naively.  Some people orientate their lives by the horoscope, others -more scientifically minded- by biological rhythms;  some organize everything according to a planed diet, others according to yoga;  one person swears by group therapy, another by transcendental meditation, a third by political action. But it is not merely a question of individual values;  it is a matter of social values as well.  Ethical questions abound; nuclear energy, gene manipulation, test-tube babies, environmental protection, East-West and North-South conflicts;  and it is becoming increasingly clear that such questions are exceeding the comprehension and overtaxing the powers of individuals.  Today we can do more than ever - but what we should do we simply do not know.

Observer of the real-world as he was, perhaps Kung was too serious a person to realize the enormous percentage of us who organize our lives by even less worthwhile things, the TV or other media schedule or sports schedule or whichever series they are binge-watching. I suspect that that is how most people in the West organize their non-work hours. Those who focus on electronic, allegedly religious sources probably among the least susceptible to the Gospel based Christianity that is remote from their cult devotion.  From what I've seen of "Christian TV" the Antichrist is perfectly at home in it.

It is obvious that I cannot address all these complicated questions in this brief reflection.  But perhaps i can say something of fundamental importance toward their solution, something to which our educational system, geared as it is primarily toward the acquisition of knowledge and diplomas, ought to pay more attention.  Perhaps I can say something that will help provide some ground under our feet, a vantage point, from which all individual problems may be judged: the basis for a commitment to the essential values, that is to say the essential Christian values.

But it is at this very point that inhibitions arise. So, after this first section on the crisis of values, let me in the second section make a few comments which will lead us in the right direction. In this context I should like to introduce the important distinction between what is "nominally Christian" and what is "truly Christian."

I won't comment on the rest of this except to say that the next chapter has some of the most controversial material in the book but you should hold with Kung till he gets to the end of what you think is outrageous because, in the end, you'll likely find that he's more than ready to agree with you.  He may not have 80 pages between point one and point two, as Brueggemann joked Karl Barth often does, but he does like to make a complete point before he sets down conditions to it.  Kung's doctoral dissertation as a Catholic theologian was on the Protestant Karl Barth's theology. The older theologian issued an appreciative statement that the Catholic Kung's dissertation accurately represented his thinking.