Eternal life? Life after death as a medical, philosophical, and theological problem.

IT HAS BEEN four years now since Pope John Paul II saw to the revocation of Hans Kung's license to teach as an official Catholic theologian. At the time, the move afforded brief satisfaction to the orthodox, who greeted it as a sadly needed certification of the obvious. But it has also provided Kung with another of the self-dramatizing metaphors that have fueled his immense popularity. Lately he has taken to depicting himself as a renegade sleuth, a seeker after transcendental clues, always several steps ahead of the hidebound officials who approve only well-worn investigative paths. Still, anyone hoping for a clear-cut case had better stick with the cops--at least if this book is a fair record of the evidence its author thinks he has found.

For when all is said and done, the import of Eternal Life? is actually negative. To be sure, Kung does suggest reasons to hope that the answer to Peggy Lee's "Is that all there is?" is "No." He argues at some length for "trust" in "reality," for the reasonability, if not the provability, of the belief that every human being, living, dead, or yet unborn, will somehow share in God's kingdom fully manifest. But he devotes even more space to undermining concrete beliefs about the forms an afterlife might take. Indeed, Kung's procedure leaves one wondering both what the substance of his hope is and what audience he aims to reach.

Perhaps the clue to solving the mystery of the investigation itself lies in the book's genesis in a nine-day lecture series at Tubingen, the German university from whose Catholic faculty Kung was removed but which, in the spirit of the liberal Protestantism long at home there, keeps him employed. Kung retains, indeed has strengthened, an ideal platform from which to address more or less religious persons who find traditional eschatology in particular as incredible as traditional dogma in general.

From this point of view, the lectures seem perfectly tailored. Divided into three sets of three, a sort of modernist novena, they begin by raising the question and canvassing a few answers. Medical experience with the terminally ill, and widely reported near-death experiences (which seem to be almost always blissful), are tamely enough said to highlight the question of eternal life while leaving it open. The thoughts of Freud, Feuerbach, and the great twentieth-century existential philosophers are neatly expounded to pose the great "either-or": Is death a sign of life's absurdity or a vehicle of some larger meaning? Non-monotheistic accounts of death's meaning, especially the doctrine of reincarnation, come up for compressed consideration and are left behind. So far, it seems, Kung's treatment presents few conclusions to which most Continental-trained theologians (or philosophers, for that matter) could not subscribe. The real Kung comes next, over his own "horizon."

His "theological starting-point" is conventional enough: to "confront and reconcile" ordinary human experience with "the history of hope and experience" in the Bible. Kung rightly describes how pre-Christian Judaism came gradually to hope for a general resurrection, anticipated in the apocalyptic writings that began to develop in the second century B.C. Some of this literature is in everyone's Bible (e.g., Daniel), some is of disputed canonicity (e.g., Second Maccabees), the rest is plainly apocryphal. But Kung finds an "embarrassing plurality" of speculative imagery and doctrine in this genre, viewed skeptically by some Jews even in Jesus' time, when belief in resurrection and a Last Day had become widespread. Now, the scholarly consensus reflected in this treatment of the Hebrew Scriptures is by no means as clear when it comes to the Resurrection of Jesus and the faith of the early Church. Nevertheless, Kung tries to wrap in the aura of such a consensus what turn out--no surprise--to be ambiguous views of the New Testament record.

On the one hand, Kung argues that the Easter accounts in the canonical Gospels reveal "insurmountable discrepancies and inconsistencies in the tradition." To the extent that this is true--"insurmountable" gives away what can only be an argumentum ad ignorantiam--its relevance to Christian faith is unclear. But Kung is here in the business of whittling things down, in the name, it seems, of the kind of reverse fundamentalism that has led many Biblical scholars to think that their "scientific" methods yield some theological limit on the Church's teaching. Thus, that the exegetes have identified the "primitive" Easter message, Kung does not doubt; so, for him, it holds a fortiori that the evangelists went in mostly for "legendary embellishment." In truth, the Resurrection was "not an event in space and time," not strictly a "historical event" at all. Strangely, Kung notes that "there was then no means of photographing or registering an event," thus completely ignoring the Shroud of Turin, which has been shown to come from that time and place, and whose causal history, to say the least, is scientifically obscure.

On the other hand, Kung insists that something extraordinary did happen, in the form of experiences that Jesus' followers took to be of Him as alive after His public execution. The Resurrection, in some sense, was a "real event," the prime case of a "wholly new mode of existence in a wholly different dimension of the eternal, described pictorially and in need of interpretation." The person Jesus is alive with God, even though his corpse underwent no physiological change. This sounds odd, coming on the heels of Kung's affirmation of the again-fashionable view that a human being is a "soul-body unity," not a soul that just has a body. Indeed, from a purely logical standpoint, much of Kung's argument consists of non-sequiturs, issuing in a floridly stated minimalism guaranteed to offend the pious.

The same goes for much of the discussion of what used to be called "the last things": heaven, hell, purgatory, judgment, the end of the world, the Devil, and so on. Going beyond mere rejection of images, Kung denies that any of these things exist, or will exist, in senses that mainstream Christians would recognize as distinctively Christian. He does fly from the Hive on one point: He reminds the "political theologians" who think Kingdom Come should be a post-revolutionary worker's paradise that "the consummation comes through God's unforeseeable, unextrapolatable action." The last third of the book, though, telescopes eschatological concern to sharpen the focus on this world, while leaving the next so fuzzy that one naturally wants to ask what we have seen that has not already been displayed more forcefully.

What it comes to is a highly elaborate comforting ritual for jaded intellectuals, offering no more, and arguably less, than do most such rituals. It is a puzzle how Kung manages to retrace a path that liberal Protestantism has long been following to its detriment while apparently thinking that many, Catholic or no, will be moved to follow him.