Over the past few weeks, our news media seems to have been concerned with perhaps 3 main stories. One is, of course, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which is understandable given the scale of the pandemic and the effect on people throughout the world it’s had and continues to have. Another thing we’ve heard a lot about in recent weeks is political scandal, and whether that’s who paid for Boris Johnson’s flat, or Keir Starmer being thrown out of a pub, political scandal is always in the news. The third major strand of news in recent weeks has been the European Football Super League. Why that should be more newsworthy than Russia, America and China facing-off in various parts of the world is something of a mystery to me I must admit but then, unlike me, many people do seem to agree with the ex-Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankley that football is more important than life and death. But amongst all this, one item of news that seems to have slipped under the radar, is the death, last month, of Hans Küng.
I don’t know how many of you have heard of Hans Küng, or have read any of his works but he was, I think, one of the great figures of the Church from the second half of the 20th Century onwards, and one the Church should have paid far more attention to than it did or has. Küng was a Swiss RC priest, but his main claim to fame was as a theologian and author. He was one of the main theological advisors, and the youngest, behind the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 as a result of which, the RC Church acknowledged for the first time that other denominations of the Church are Christian Churches, albeit Churches which, in their eyes, are in error.
And that reflects something of Hans Küng’s own beliefs. His passion was for Church unity, in fact he called disunity in the Church a scandal and a disgrace which should never have happened. But, unlike the mainstream of Roman Catholic thought, he believed that everyone, all Churches, were to blame for disunity. So, whilst he believed that the RC Church was the true, original Body of Christ, he also believed that the RC Church was in error too, and so, equally guilty of causing, deepening and perpetuating disunity in the Church.
Küng set these ideas out in a book published in 1968 called The Church. That was a book he dedicated to the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey and he hoped that his book would form the basis of reconciliation between the Church of England and the RC Church that would lead to full communion between the Churches. But we know that didn’t happen and the RC Church were none too pleased about some of the things Küng had written in his book and he was called to explain himself. 3 years later, he published another book called Infallible? in which he called into question the doctrine of papal infallibility. That eventually led the Church to stripping Küng of his license to teach in the Catholic faculty at Tübibgen University where he was professor of theology. Küng called this his experience of the Inquisition, although the university actually got round the problem by forming a new faculty of ecumenical theology that was outside the Church’s jurisdiction and Küng carried on as professor of theology at Tübibgen until he retired in the late 1990s.
In addition to his belief that the RC Church was also in error, perhaps what really ruffled the Church’s feathers was Küng’s understanding of what needed to happen for Church unity to become a reality. The mainstream RC stance at the time was that other Churches had to change and conform to RC doctrine and practice if unity was to be possible. But Küng’s belief was that all the Churches had to change to make unity a reality. He said that Church unity wasn’t a matter of one Church submitting to another or being absorbed into another, but a matter of all Churches submitting to Christ and becoming absorbed into him.
And it was Küng’s belief that, as the Churches did this and grew closer to Christ, they would automatically grow closer to each other and become more united. And that is an understanding that, I think, flows readily from the image of Jesus as the vine and his disciples as the branches that we read in this morning’s Gospel.
The image of the Church as a great vine or tree is a very common one. Christ is the vine, or the trunk, and we, his disciples who make up the various Churches are the branches. But there is a problem with this image if we look at a vine or tree, or at most plants. Because, as we look at a plant, whatever it is, what we see is a main stem, or trunk from which the branches grow, and through which the branches draw their nourishment. But, as we look, we notice that, as the branches grow, they grow outward, away from the stem. And from the big branches there grow smaller branches. From the smaller branches there grow still smaller branches and so on, each branch growing further away from the main stem and becoming smaller as they do so. We also know that we can take cuttings from plants, we can remove them completely from the main stem but, if we plant them, of perhaps graft them into another plant, they’ll still grow even though they’re no longer connected to the stem that originally gave them life.
And isn’t that exactly what we see in the Church? It’s perhaps an oversimplification, but originally, there was the vine, Christ, and one branch, the Church. About 1,000 years ago, the branch split into 2 main branches which we know as the Catholic West and the Orthodox East. 500 years ago, the Western branch split into what became known as the RC Church and the Reformed or Protestant branches of the Church. Our own branch, the Anglican Church grew from somewhere in between these two branches. The Methodist branch of the Church grew from the Anglican branch and then itself split into many other branches. In fact, today, there are 80 independent Churches all calling themselves ‘Methodists’. And so it has and still goes on.
What makes this situation worse, is that these branches shoot and grow because those who found them, tend to think that the branch of the Church they grew from is in error. They think that the branch they grew from has lost its connection with the stem, with Christ the vine. And so they try to grow in a different direction which they believe will bring them closer to the vine. What can make matters even worse is that these branches of the Church can start to believe and act as though they’re the branch which has the closest and most direct connection to the vine, perhaps even that theirs is the only branch that is connected to the vine at all. This seems to have been the pre-Vatican 2 RC understanding, that the RC Church was the only true Church, the only branch that was really part of the vine of Christ. But the RC Church can’t be singled out for adopting that kind of attitude. In one parish I served in, ourselves, the Anglicans, and the Roman Catholics, were effectively excluded from the Churches Together group in the area when a new Baptist minister took over its leadership and refused to include us in any communications or invite us to any events because, and I quote, “Roman Catholics are not real Christians and you’re too close to them.”
It must be said that this situation has existed for a long time and the Church has suffered from people with this kind of attitude throughout its history. In the early Church when the Church was far less divided than it is now and, in effect, the Church could speak with one voice, small branches which wanted to grow in their own way were usually asked to return to the main branch of the Church and only if they didn’t, were they denounced as heretics. Often, because it was obvious that these small branches had separated from the main branch of the Church, they died out. But over the years, the Church has become more divided. The number of small branches of the Church has grown and grown and now the Church can’t speak with one voice.
This in fact is one of the main problems with the doctrine of papal infallibility. In principle, the Pope can only make an infallible statement when he speaks for the whole Church because then he speaks with the authority of the whole Church. But in practice, the Pope doesn’t speak for the whole Church and so he can never speak with the authority of the whole Church.
And it’s this lack of the Church’s ability to speak with one authoritative voice that makes Hans Küng’s words so powerful and so worthy of our attention and respect. Ultimately, there is only one authority in the Church, and it is the vine himself, Jesus Christ. And so, if we want to be connected to the vine, either as individual Christians or as a Church, we need to be connected to Christ. We need, as the saying goes, to be rooted in Christ, to be grafted into Christ, and to draw our nourishment from Christ so that we can grow from him and in him. We need to make sure that we’re not growing and drawing our nourishment from some distant branch of the vine that’s grown far removed from the vine himself, and the way to do that is to make sure that we grow closer to Christ.
Hans Küng said that division in the Church was a scandal and a disgrace that should never have happened. His words echo the words of the Church Fathers, those Christians who were closest in time to Jesus and the Apostles. For the Fathers, disunity in the Church, schism, was the worst of all sins because it was caused by a failure of Christians to do the very thing they’re called to do above all else, it was caused by a failure of Christians to love one another.
The closer we are to Christ, the less likely it is that we’ll fail to love one another and so the less likely it is that Christians will fall out with one another to the extent that it will lead to divisions and disunity in the Church. And the closer we are to Christ, the more likely we’ll be to remember and take to heart his prayer that his Church, and we must always remember that it is his Church and not ours, that his Church will be one. Perhaps then, there will be enough people in the branches of the Church who share Hans Küng’s passion and desire for Church unity to bring it closer to the reality, not only that Hans Küng wanted it to be, but that Christ, our vine, intended it to be.
Amen.
The Propers for the Fifth Sunday of Easter can be viewed here.
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 