Hans Küng is an interesting figure. Early on in his career, he produced some fine theological works — his study on Karl Barth was recognized as an important Catholic work on Barth. However, as has become apparent throughout his life, his theological problem is the same as many others: he over-idealizes the advances of the Enlightenment, and uses its ideals to judge and criticize religious tradition. He doesn’t use it to only become self-critical within Catholicism, but he also uses it to engage and criticize any and all world religions. Obviously, elements of the Enlightenment helped provide important correctives in society, but, if the Enlightenment project is followed through to the end, not only does the positive value of religious difference vanish, but also the kinds of things the Enlightenment wanted to remove, such as the intolerance which leads to violence, return. But now they are far worse than before, because they have been entirely secularized. After all, once grace and the supernatural underpinnings of society have been removed, then what happens in the world, such as the rise of violent nationalism leading to world wars, is difficult if not impossible to overcome.
It is because of this that one needs to pay careful attention of Küng’s criticism of Islam in a recent speech in London. His criticism of Islam is simple: it’s “stuck in the Middle Ages,” and it has not gone through the reforms of the Enlightenment. Apparently, he is not sure whether or not Islam could last through such reforms (despite the fact that many Muslim scholars are already pushing for it, as I previously reported). Of course, one could wonder if any religion could last a complete embrace of the Enlightenment (just look at the United States: the secular philosophy of the Enlightenment, replacing religious sensibilities with politics, has crippled Christianity from within, turning Christians to political partisanship as the means to live out their faith). Indeed, one can say, if one completely takes on and agrees with the Enlightenment project, revelation ends, and dogma ends up being jettisoned. It’s no wonder that those who follow the Enlightenment, in whatever religious tradition they come from, sound more like one another than they do as members of a particular religious faith.
Nonetheless, I found much of what Küng said, according to the TimesOnline article on the lecture, to be interesting and worthy of note. Not because I agree with him (although, I think there are elements of what he said anyone could agree with), but because I think he presents and shows us what the end product of a Catholic engagement with the Enlightenment is like. The outcome of his theological work should become a warning: something is wrong with the Enlightenment, and a careless, uncritical embrace of its doctrines can only destroy religion, not build it up.
Küng tries to make links between traditional Catholicism with Islam. In doing this, I think we can find his true target in this speech, and it is not Islam. It’s about Western society and his fight with traditional Catholic theology because it has rejected his own theological project. He is using Islam as a tool to criticize the Catholic hierarchy and its embrace of tradition. Thus, he wants people to believe that an embrace of tradition makes one “trapped in the Middle Ages.” Now look at Islam. It’s also trapped in the Middle Ages. We don’t like what we see in Islam, so why should we follow their example and look to the past and be trapped by its ways of thought? The best thing to do is become “liberal” and follow the Enlightenment. Just look at what good it has done for Christianity and Judaism:
“After the Reformation, Christianity had to undergo another paradigm shift, that of the Enlightenment. Judaism, after the French Revolution and Napoleon, experienced the Enlightenment first, and as a consequence, at least in Reform Judaism, it experienced also a religious reformation. Islam, however, has not undergone a serious religious reformation and so to the present day has quite special problems also with modernity and its core components, freedom of conscience and religion, human rights, tolerance, democracy.” (TimesOnline)
Of course, freedom of conscience and religion, human rights, and tolerance at least were also Catholic ideals in the “Middle Ages.” They might not have always been lived out, but are they really lived out today? And if one reads the writings of Bl. Raymund Lull or Nicholas of Cusa, for example, one will find out how such values come from Catholic tradition, and not the Enlightenment. And, I must say, the Enlightenment with its criticism of religion demonstrates that its so-called “tolerance” goes only so far.
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