First, a book recommendation.  Michael Bauman mentioned in a feedback comment the other day that he had written a book that contains interviews with Moltmann and Pannenberg among others.  Obviously, I sent him an e-mail right away that I was interested in it, and Michael sent me a little care package with that book, called Roundtable,  and a couple of others to which he has contributed.  Thanks, Mike!  The book is a great production, and the interviews with Pannenberg and Moltmann are both extremely insightful.  Michael Baumann is professor of theology and culture at Hillsdale College.

And now let me return to our theologians of the late sixties and seventies, still on the Catholic side, and say a few words about Hans Küng.  By the way, that previous sentence will have been one of the very, very rare occasions that you will see the phrase "a few words" and Hans Küng's name together. His books tend to be rather sizeable tomes characterized by German thoroughness (Gründlichkeit), not because he is verbose, but because there is so much content in them.  Still, they are actually easy to read.  

Küng's first work attracted quite bit of attention.  It was entitled Justification, and its thesis was that the Reformation rested on a gigantic misunderstanding.  Using Karl Barth as his representative for Protestantism, he tried to show that both Luther and the Church overreacted, and that it never should have come to a split.  This certainly was an interesting thesis, though it seems to me that it's a whole lot more plausible to let the Reformers speak for the Reformers themselves, in which case there would be an issue after all. In case you're interested, a much more realistic treatment from the Catholic side, that does not try to rationalize away important differences, can be found in Michael Schmaus's 6-volume set Dogma, particularly in the last volume, also entitled Justification.  

Then Küng wrote the book that got him into hot water, out of which he has never totally emerged again.  It was called Infallible? An Inquiry, and--as the name implies, he questioned the doctrine of papal infallibility.  He pointed out the many times that popes had made mistakes, to put it mildly, and that the doctrine was incompatible with other Catholic beliefs.  That's not a good thing for a Catholic theologian to do.  The folks in Rome were stirred up and invited Küng for a visit and a chat.  Küng replied that, unfortunately, he was awfully busy at the moment, and his calendar did not permit him the luxury of a trip to Italy, which did not garner him any sympathy. But there's another interesting wrinkle to this matter: many theologians believe that Küng was attacking a straw person in this book.  He basically interpreted the doctrine of infallibility as implying that a pope is always right in whatever he might say around the clock.  However, when  papal infallibility was declared to be dogma by Vatican I (1870), they had no such absurd idea in mind.  The pope is supposed to be infallible only on the condition that he speaks ex cathedra and specifically points out that he is announcing something that must be believed by all.  Such an occasion has only occurred once since first Vatican council, namely in 1950, when Pope Pius XII declared the bodily assumption of Mary to be a de fide obligatory belief.  

Infallible?  was followed by The Church, which begins with the quote, "Christ promised the kingdom of God; what we got was the Church." I don't have the book in front of me now, and I don't remember whom he was quoting.  Whoever it was meant it in a positive way, indicating that the church is God's fulfillment of the promise, but Küng intentionally gave a more negative meaning to it.  Christ promised the kingdom, and we have to settle for the Church.  Well, that didn't win him any friends in the hierarchy.  I must say, though, that this is a very insightful book.  As long as you keep your salt shaker handy, you can learn quite a bit from Küng's insights in this work.

I don't know that going on with an annotated bibliography is going to keep you amused and edified, so I will try to cut it short.  The tomes kept coming.  Menschwerdung Gottes, a treatise on Hegel's view of the incarnation, which I'm not sure has ever been translated into English, gave way to the blockbuster On Being A Christian, followed by another huge success with Does God Exist?  Each of these books contained just enough controversial assertions to keep the hierarchy interested in conversation with Küng, but Küng refused to go and, as he put it, be catechized.  He now no longer gave silly answers, but came right out and said that any inquiry would be depriving him of his freedom, and he would not be put to the question.  

As a result, in 1979 the Catholic Church decreed that Hans Küng was no longer permitted to teach as representative of the Catholic Church.  It did not excommunicate him or disrobe him from his priesthood.  It did not even say that he could not teach; he remained on the faculty of Tübingen University as professor of ecumenical theology.  However, he could not teach as a specifically Catholic theologian.  

Unsurprisingly, the response from all around Christendom was a thunderous denunciation of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Personally, I find such a response to be downright silly, reminiscent of all the criticisms levelled at the ETS for enforcing its rules for membership.  As I keep saying, if you want to belong to the flat earth society, you should believe in a flat earth.  If your conscience leads you to believe otherwise, you can't be in the club.  It certainly was Professor Küng's right to dissent from the church or not to answer their inquiries into his doctrinal alignment with the church.  But it also was the church's right to say that, in that case, he could no longer represent the church with his teaching.  As a non-Catholic, I'm not sure I'm entitled to pass judgment, let alone condemn the church for passing judgment.  There are plenty of real issues between us as it is.

Küng has continued to write, particularly focusing on ecumenism and interreligious dialog.  For the centennial meeting of the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1993 he wrote the draft of their declaration, entitled A Global Ethic. The draft became the official version without much input from the delegates, which irritated quite a few of them, though they signed it.  It's the kind of statement that on the surface is so vague that it says very little--unless you happen to believe that one ought to kill people in order to impose your values on them.  However, when one reads Küng's own commentary on it, it becomes clear that there is an agenda underneath it, which I will generalize with the statement that religious conservatives (i.e. those who are closely tied to their beliefs) need to bridle their convictions so that we can achieve harmony.  We are all one, as it were, except for the extremists. An extremist, of course, is someone who is not willing to put his beliefs on the table for the sake of harmony. See chapter 4 of my Tapestry of Faiths for a few more details on my reaction.

Hans Küng is adored as martyr by many, rejected by many others.  I have several reactions:

1. His books are good reads as long as you don't mind being warned on page five hundred-something not to jump to any hasty conclusions.
2. Whether he deserved the censure and the revocation of his license is between him and the church.
3. I do wish that, given all of the noise, it would have been about something that carries more substance than Küng's bottom line: that Christ helps us be more human.  Even if that's a desirable goal, you don't need a lot of theology to arrive at that conclusion

The next time I come back to this series the topic will be liberation theology.  

Win,
I think you are absolutely right that the quarrel between the reformers and Rome in the 16th century was no mere misunderstanding. Both sides knew perfectly well what they and their opponents believed -- and that those beliefs were incompatible, as the Tridentine anathemas clearly demonstrate.

I forget where Küng was leading, but I do remember (I believe in Does God Exist?) that he criticized the entire notion of an anonymous Christian as a sort of left-handed compliment. How would any of us feel if some imam stated that we were anonymous Muslims?

I think that I would feel pretty happy, if it turned out that Islam were true.