The Protestant-Roman Catholic Encounter

Extract

When Hans Küng published his first major work Rechtfertigung—die Lehre Karl Barths und eine katholische Besinnung¹ in 1957 great interest was aroused among Roman Catholic as well as Protestant theologians. The book represents a theological orientation which may be regarded as a new phase in the Roman Catholic encounter with Protestantism. Küng, whose orthodoxy has not been questioned by any of his Roman Catholic reviewers, argues that the Barthian and Roman doctrines of justification are in fundamental agreement. The sola fide and the simul Justus et peccator of the Reformation are, according to Küng, also Roman doctrines. Grace, he avers, is not a habitus in man but is the graciousness and favour of God. Justification is therefore primarily a matter of God ‘declaring man righteous’ and only because of this, ‘making him so’. Forgiveness and imputation of righteousness are thus given the primacy denied to them by Roman theology from the Middle Ages to the present day. Küng's Christocentrism determines his interpretation of the biblical witness: the sinner is declared and made righteous in the death and resurrection of Christ so that the sola fide is sustained in and by the sola iustitia Christi. Whether Küng's claim that the Fathers of Trent actually taught the doctrine of justification, merely shifting the emphasis from the one-sided theocentrism of the Reformation to a more biblical anthropocentrism is historically defensible, is not the point at issue in this context.