Best 35 quotes of Hans Kung on MyQuotes

A Church which abandons the truth abandons itself.

After two world wars, the collapse of fascism, nazism, communism and colonialism and the end of the cold war, humanity has entered a new phase of its history.

All historical experience demonstrates the following: Our earth cannot be changed unless in the not too distant future an alteration in the consciousness of individuals is achieved.

Alluding to hell is a warning that a person can completely neglect his purpose in life. I don't believe in an eternal hell.

And a third thing is the understanding of the Church as a community, a communion which is just a hierarchy but the people of God, whose servants are the priests and bishops.

As a matter of fact, you have deficiencies in all religions, but you have truth in all religions.

At the same time we are aware that our various religions and ethical traditions often offer very different bases for what is helpful and what is unhelpful for men and women, what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil.

But I have to add - and this answers your other question - this catholicity in time and in space is only meaningful for me if there is, at the same time, a concentration on the Gospel.

Even apart from the image of a truly merciless God that contradicts everything we can assume from what Jesus says about the Either of the lost, can we be surprised at a time when retributive punishments without an opportunity of probation are being increasingly abandoned in education and penal justice, that the idea not only of a lifelong, but even eternal punishment of body and soul, seems to many people absolutely monstrous.

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

For many people, the pope is still, to a certain extent, a positive role model and a moral force, although others feel that this aspect has suffered greatly.

God's love does not protect us from suffering. God's love protects us in the midst of suffering.

However, if the religions in essence merely repeat statements from the United Nations Human Rights Declaration, such a Declaration becomes superfluous; an ethic is more than rights.

Humanity today possesses sufficient economic, cultural and spiritual resources to introduce a better global order.

Hundreds of millions of human beings on our planet increasingly suffer from unemployment, poverty, hunger, and the destruction of their families.

I am firmly convinced that there is life after death, not in a primitive sense but as the entry of my completely finite person into God's infinity, as a transition into another reality beyond the dimension of space and time that pure reason can neither affirm nor deny.

I don't cling to earthly life because I believe in eternal life. That's the big distinction between my point of view and a purely secular position.

If priests were allowed to marry, if this would be an optional thing, and if he could have wife and children, he would certainly have less temptation to satisfy certain sexual impulses with minors.

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.

I'm not saying goodbye to life because I'm a misanthropist or disdain this life, but because, for other reasons, it's time to move on.

In my view, the Catholic Church as a community of faith will be preserved, but only if it abandons the Roman system of rule. We managed to get by without this absolutist system for 1,000 years. The problems began in the 11th century, when the popes asserted their claim to absolute control over the Church.

In the last resort, a love of God without love of humanity is no love at all.

It is not certain that everything is certain, neither is it certain that everything is uncertain.

Religion often is misused for purely power-political goals, including war.

That is the Roman way: to give favors to the favorites.

The Epistle to the Romans is an extremely important synthesis of the whole theology of St. Paul.

There will be peace on earth when there is peace among the world religions.

Time and again we see leaders and members of religions incite aggression, fanaticism, hate, and xenophobia - even inspire and legitimate violent and bloody conflicts.

We are conscious that religions cannot solve the economic, political and social problems of this earth.

We should think about whether canonizations, which are an invention of the Middle Ages, still make sense today.

Even manifestly senseless suffering and death can have a meaning, can acquire a meaning. a hidden meaning.

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.

The face he showed in Jesus is really his true and single face.

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?

To be no more than scholarly reflection on its object from one particular standpoint, which is anyway one legitimate standpoint among others.