Christianity: Essence, History, Future
The second volume in the Religious Situation of Our Time series initiated with Ku{}ng's Judaism (1991) constitutes this massive "paradigm analysis" of Christianity. It is tempting to refer to boththe volume and the series as "magisterial," though Ku{}ng's rocky relationship with the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church gives that adjective a decidedly ironic twist. The book is further evidence of Ku{}ng's already well established place in a tradition of German systematizers whose systems, though driven by laudably global motivations, have had ambiguous global consequences. This book continues Ku{}ng's application of Thomas Kuhn's paradigm analysis--developed as a way to think about the structure of scientific revolutions--to religion. It is not so much a "history" as an examination of five "constellations" of Christianity (the Jewish Christian apocalyptic, Hellenistic Byzantine, Roman Catholic, Reformation Protestant, and Enlightenment modern paradigms) that constitute a still-present past of Christianity. This is an important contribution to the understanding of Christianity's present fragmentation and also to ecumenical conversation to the extent that it resists the temptation to think of later paradigms as rendering earlier paradigms obsolete; that all five paradigms coexist in Ku{}ng's analysis is a reminder that ecumenical conversation has to reckon with translation and (sometimes) untranslatability.Steve Schroeder--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.