Küng's Biography as a Philosophical Problem
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Hans Küng, born in 1928 in Sursee (Switzerland) and deceased in 2021 in Tübingen, was a Catholic theologian and one of the most influential religious thinkers of the twentieth century. His life embodies a tension that is philosophically significant.
In 1979 the Church withdrew his authorization to teach as a Catholic theologian. He had criticized the dogma of papal infallibility and thereby crossed a line the institution could not tolerate. Yet Küng remained a Catholic priest and kept his state-funded chair at Tübingen. He was now a theologian without ecclesiastical authorization – someone who belonged to the Church and yet was excluded from it.
This tension is more than biographical anecdote. It embodies the problem of truth and authority. The Church claimed to guarantee truth through authority: what the Pope proclaims ex cathedra is true because he proclaims it. Küng, by contrast, insisted that truth precedes authority: it is not the institution that makes statements true, but their correspondence with the matter itself. If the institution errs, truth must be asserted against authority.
Here a parallel to Hegel’s relation to orthodox religion emerges. Hegel too distinguished between the core (the philosophical truth that religion expresses in pictorial form) and the form (the dogmatic and institutional trappings). Religion contains truth – but this truth must be philosophically explicated in order to be freed from its historically conditioned distortions. Küng practices structurally the same thing: he frees the core of Christianity (recognition, love, reconciliation) from its institutional form (the dogma of infallibility, hierarchy, dogmatism).