Hans Küng > Quotes

“No peace among the nations
without peace among the religions.

No peace among the religions
without dialogue between the religions

No dialogue between the religions
without investigation of the foundation of the religions.”
― Hans Kung, Christianity: Essence, History, and Future

“If you cannot see that divinity includes male and female characteristics and at the same time transcends them, you have bad consequences. Rome and Cardinal O'Connor base the exclusion of women priests on the idea that God is the Father and Jesus is His Son, there were only male disciples, etc. They are defending a patriarchal Church with a patriarchal God. We must fight the patriarchal misunderstanding of God.”
― Hans Küng

“historical arguments; traditional apologetics breaks down here. Since man is here dealing with God and this by definition means with the invisible, impalpable, uncontrollable, only one attitude is appropriate and required : believing trust, trusting faith.”
― Hans Küng

“Everyone agrees the celibacy rule is just a Church law dating from the 11th century, not a divine command.”
― Hans Küng

“The face he showed in Jesus is really his true and single face.”
― Hans Küng, On Being a Christian

“The Pope would have an easier job than the President of the United States in adopting a change of course. He has no Congress alongside him as a legislative body nor a Supreme Court as a judiciary. He is absolute head of government, legislator and supreme judge in the church. If he wanted to, he could authorize contraception over night, permit the marriage of priests, make possible the ordination of women and allow eucharistic fellowship with this Protestant churches. What would a Pope do who acted in the spirit of Obama?”
― Hans Küng

“The comprehensive organization of the church, with its solid roots and the manifold forms of charitable help to the many who were poor and in distress; • Christian monotheism, which commended itself as the progressive and enlightened position in the face of polytheism, with its wealth of myths; • The lofty ethic, which, tested by ascetics and martyrs to the point of death, showed itself to be superior to pagan morality;”
― Hans Küng, The Catholic Church: A Short History

“What a revolution! In less than a century the persecuted church had become a persecuting church. Its enemies, the “heretics” (those who “selected” from the totality of the Catholic faith), were now also the enemies of the empire and were punished accordingly. For the first time now Christians killed other Christians because of differences in their views of the faith. This is what happened in Trier in 385: despite many objections, the ascetic and enthusiastic Spanish lay preacher Priscillian was executed for heresy together with six companions. People soon became quite accustomed to this idea. Above all the Jews came under pressure. The proud Roman Hellenistic state church hardly remembered its own Jewish roots anymore. A specifically Christian ecclesiastical anti-Judaism developed out of the pagan state anti-Judaism that already existed. There were many reasons for this: the breaking off of conversations between the church and the synagogue and mutual isolation; the church’s exclusive claim to the Hebrew Bible; the crucifixion of Jesus, which was now generally attributed to the Jews; the dispersion of Israel, which was seen as God’s just curse on a damned people who were alleged to have broken the covenant with God . . . Almost exactly a century after Constantine’s death, by special state-church laws under Theodosius II, Judaism was removed from the sacral sphere, to which one had access only through the sacraments (that is, through baptism). The first repressive measures”
― Hans Küng, The Catholic Church: A Short History

“Does not simply contain God's word: it becomes God's word for anyone who submits trustfully and in faith to its testimony.”
― Hans Küng

“I speak for myself and many others of like mind in saying that we are not Christians because of the church hierarchy and we are not Catholics because of the pope in Rome.”
― Hans Küng, Can We Save the Catholic Church?

“To be no more than scholarly reflection on its object from one particular standpoint, which is anyway one legitimate standpoint among others.”
― Hans Küng, On Being a Christian

“The Christian state religion was crowned by the dogma of the Trinity. Only now can this term be used, since the Second Ecumenical Council, of Constantinople, convened by Theodosius the Great in 381, defined the identity of substance of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son. The creed supplemented by this council, and therefore called the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, is still in use in the Catholic Church today—alongside the brief Apostles’ Creed. So much did it finally come to be taken for granted that centuries later it was to be turned into great music by the greatest composers of Christianity (Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, in their settings of the mass). After this council, what the three Cappadocians (from Cappadocia,”
― Hans Küng, The Catholic Church: A Short History

“Even manifestly senseless suffering and death can have a meaning, can acquire a meaning. a hidden meaning.”
― Hans Küng, On Being a Christian

“It considers this Jesus as ultimately decisive, definitive, archetypal for man in these various dimensions of his.”
― Hans Küng, On Being a Christian

“Lay people are usually unaware that the scrupulous scholarly work achieved by modern biblical criticism … represented by scrupulous academic work over about 300 years, belongs among the greatest intellectual achievements of the human race. Has any of the great world religions outside of the Jewish-Christian tradition investigated its own foundations and its own history so thoroughly and impartially? None of them has remotely approached this. The Bible is far and away the most studied book in world literature.”
― Hans Kung

“• Clear answers to problems like guilt and atonement, dying and immortality; • And with all this, still a wide-ranging assimilation to Hellenistic-Roman society. Once the freedom of religion”
― Hans Küng, The Catholic Church: A Short History

“As pope, with his charismatic appeal and with the theatrical talent that he had retained from his youth, he brought to the Vatican what Ronald Reagan brought to the White House: a media-wise great communicator who understood how to use his charm, his athletic image and his symbolic gestures to make even the most conservative teaching or practice seem palatable.”
― Hans Küng, Can We Save the Catholic Church?

“Through this interpretation of the biblical teaching on the Fall, Augustine, who had a brilliant capacity for analytical self-reflection far exceeding that of any other author of antiquity, effectively poisoned the entire Western Church with his doctrine on original sin, which is rejected down to this day by the Eastern churches.”
― Hans Küng, Can We Save the Catholic Church?

“Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that everyone of them fell ill because he had lost what the religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook. This of course has nothing to do with a particular creed or membership of a church.”
― Hans Küng, Does God Exist: An Answer For Today