http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2014/02/kung-the-confused
By Carl Trueman
Hans Kung is planning to take his life. Or so he said in an interview last week in the British Catholic weekly, The Tablet. Kung is suffering from Parkinson’s disease, macular degeneration, and polyarthritis in his hands. Determined not to go gentle into that good night, he has apparently decided that he will at some point travel to Switzerland in order to be assisted in committing suicide. His reasoning is threefold: he does not wish to live when there is no quality of life; his life is a gift from God and he intends to give it back to God; and death, like birth, is “our own responsibility.”
It is perhaps no surprise that someone who has spent a lifetime opposing the teaching of his own church on so many different issues (to the complete confusion of Protestants such as myself, I hasten to add) should choose to end his life in breaking one last church taboo. It is surprising, though, that his reasoning seems so weak. The analogy between birth and death seems entirely inappropriate to the case Kung is trying to make. His birth, after all, was no more his responsibility than my birth was mine. That is not just basic Christian teaching; it is a really rather obvious fact of life.
It would appear, therefore, that his own analogy should mean that his death is not his responsibility either, that there are much wider issues at play. And the language of responsibility and gift seems rather plastic as well: if life is a gift, if it comes to me from another, then my responsibility is not simply to myself, as Kung seems to assume. Indeed, to talk of having responsibility simply to myself is specious anyway. Such is really no responsibility at all, merely egoism scantily clad in the rhetoric of a hollow morality. Responsible only to myself, I am simply going to do exactly what suits me at any given point in time. Kung the radical libertarian: Who would have thought it would come to this?
For the rest, see:
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2014/02/kung-the-confused
By Carl Trueman
Hans Kung is planning to take his life. Or so he said in an interview last week in the British Catholic weekly, The Tablet. Kung is suffering from Parkinson’s disease, macular degeneration, and polyarthritis in his hands. Determined not to go gentle into that good night, he has apparently decided that he will at some point travel to Switzerland in order to be assisted in committing suicide. His reasoning is threefold: he does not wish to live when there is no quality of life; his life is a gift from God and he intends to give it back to God; and death, like birth, is “our own responsibility.”
It is perhaps no surprise that someone who has spent a lifetime opposing the teaching of his own church on so many different issues (to the complete confusion of Protestants such as myself, I hasten to add) should choose to end his life in breaking one last church taboo. It is surprising, though, that his reasoning seems so weak. The analogy between birth and death seems entirely inappropriate to the case Kung is trying to make. His birth, after all, was no more his responsibility than my birth was mine. That is not just basic Christian teaching; it is a really rather obvious fact of life.
It would appear, therefore, that his own analogy should mean that his death is not his responsibility either, that there are much wider issues at play. And the language of responsibility and gift seems rather plastic as well: if life is a gift, if it comes to me from another, then my responsibility is not simply to myself, as Kung seems to assume. Indeed, to talk of having responsibility simply to myself is specious anyway. Such is really no responsibility at all, merely egoism scantily clad in the rhetoric of a hollow morality. Responsible only to myself, I am simply going to do exactly what suits me at any given point in time. Kung the radical libertarian: Who would have thought it would come to this?
For the rest, see:
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2014/02/kung-the-confused
I read _On Being A Christian_ long ago. My impression was that the liberals both in and out of Rome took the church's social position in the Western world way too much for granted, and had no sense how ridiculous they looked doing all the running they could to remain a respectful five paces behind their cultured despisers.
ReplyDeleteKueng's (can't do umlauts) comment about how we take responsibility for our own births strikes me as just about the most confused comment I've ever heard. None of us makes the choice to be born, last time I checked. I suppose it's Kueng's belief in human autonomy that leads him into saying something foolish when he's been praised by all and sundry as someone wise.