On Being a Christian (Christ sein) was published by R. Piper & Co. Verlag in Munich in 1974 (English translation by Edward Quinn published by Doubleday in 1976), and it became an international bestseller — an extraordinary achievement for a work of serious theology. Küng addressed the book to modern people who found themselves unable to accept traditional Christian teaching in its institutional form but who were not ready to abandon the Christian tradition entirely.
Küng’s argument proceeds through a systematic examination of the challenges that modernity poses to faith: the critiques of religion offered by Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche; the findings of historical-critical biblical scholarship; the plurality of world religions; and the moral failures of the institutional church. He takes each challenge seriously — he does not dismiss secular critique as irrelevant or misguided — and then argues that authentic Christian faith can survive these challenges because it is not dependent on the institutional structures and dogmatic formulations that the critiques demolish.
The “Christ” to whom Küng directs the reader is not the Christ of the creeds or the scholastic theologians but the historical Jesus of the Gospels — a figure whose message (radical love, commitment to justice, trust in God, solidarity with the marginalized) remains compelling and relevant regardless of what one thinks about metaphysical questions like the Trinity or the two natures.
Collecting On Being a Christian
First German edition (R. Piper, Munich, 1974). First English edition (Doubleday, New York, 1976): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First English edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- First German edition: $30–$80
- Paperback editions: $5–$12