Time & Perspective Quote by Hans Kung

Pluralism rarely flatters the people who benefit from certainty. Kung’s line refuses the polite fiction that religions are basically the same with different décor. He insists on the awkward fact that traditions don’t just disagree about God; they disagree about the moral plumbing of everyday life: what counts as harm, who counts as fully human, what “help” even looks like. That’s why the sentence keeps stacking binaries (helpful/unhelpful, right/wrong, good/evil). It’s not rhetoric for its own sake; it’s an x-ray of how comprehensive these frameworks are, how they reach from bedroom to ballot box.

The intent isn’t to sneer at faith. It’s to clear space for a project Kung spent decades advancing: a “global ethic” that could be shared across religions without pretending their differences don’t matter. The subtext is a warning to both sides of the culture-war reflex. To the relativist: you can’t just declare all values interchangeable when communities encode conflicting moral logics. To the fundamentalist: you can’t claim your moral vocabulary is self-evident when others, equally serious, organize moral life around different authorities, texts, and histories.

Context matters here: Kung was a postwar Catholic theologian shaped by Vatican II and later disciplined by the Vatican, making him unusually sensitive to the gap between institutional certainty and moral reality. The line works because it’s candid without being nihilistic: difference is real, and any credible ethics has to start by admitting that.