Does God exist? The question implies another: Who is God? This book is meant to give an answer to both questions and to give reasons for this answer. Does God exist? Yes or no? Many are at a loss between belief and unbelief; they are undecided, skeptical. They are doubtful about their belief, but they are also doubtful about their doubting. There are still others who are proud of their doubting. Yet there remains a longing for certainty. Certainty? Whether Christians or Jews, believers in God or atheists, the discussion today runs right across old denominations and new ideologies—but the longing for certainty is unquenched. Does God exist? We are putting all our cards on the table here. The answer will be "Yes, God exists," As human beings in the twentieth century, we certainly can reasonably believe in God—even more so in the Christian God—and perhaps even more easily today than a few decades or centuries ago. For, after so many crises, it is surprising how much has been clarified and how many difficulties in regard to belief in God have melted into the Light that no darkness has overcome.

The book presents the transition from traditionalism to modernism in connection to two of Küng's most important books on ecclesiology: Structures of the Church (1962) as representing Küng's traditional theology, and On Being a Christian (1974) as a reflection of his modern approach to Christianity.

A brilliant and encyclopaedic account of the history of Christianity as a series of changing yet overlapping paradigms.

An introduction to theologians who greatly affected Christian thought includes portraits of Paul, Origen, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Karl Barth

Why should one be a Christian? Is there something more to being a Christian than to being human? Just what does it mean to be a Christian, especially in today's modern world? Hans Küng, one of the greatest theologians of this century, ponders these questions and, from a lifetime of study, suggests the answers. He looks carefully at the evidence in the Bible, at the challenges of modern humanisms and of the world-religions, at the questions concerning death, at the local and the universal church, at the individual's own personal decisions, and at the freedom that Christianity brings, including the freedom to serve.On Being a Christian is a vital and important statement about what it means to be a Christian. Hans Küng has himself said of the book, which he regards as his magnum opus, that it intends to "clarify and challenge Christian faith and life at a time when the churches have unfortunately lost rather than gained in credibility. It seeks to bring to light for this present time the original Christian message and particularly the figure of Jesus of Nazareth." The book continues to offer a strong message to today's Christians. As Küng says in the closing of the book, "By following Jesus Christ, people in the world today can live, act, suffer and die in a truly human way; in happiness and unhappiness, life and death, sustained by God and helpful to fellow men and women."

The fact cannot be overlooked that we are in the midst of a sociological crisis of orientation on the grand scale. New problems and needs have become insistent, new fears and longings have come to light. Many are looking for a new foothold, a fundamental certainty, a compass for their life and the life of other human beings. The inconsistencies and ambivalence of the phenomena cannot conceal the fact that religion is attracting greater attention: the old religion and many new ones, the Christian religion as well as the Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist religions. In East and West anyway the God Progress seems to have lost rapidly something of its credibility; belief in a continually better life with the aid of science and technology and also through revolution and socialism has been shaken by serious doubts. And, while the elderly have not been able - with all the aids of psychology - to come to terms with the meaning of death, younger people - supposedly a Òno futureÓ generation, apathetic, noncommittal, nervous, and self-destructive - are asking afresh about the missing sense of life. Meanwhile, though science did the most in the last century to destroy belief in immortality and made stupendous efforts to prolong life, it is medicine today that has broken through the taboos in regard to death and with its research into dying has given new life to the question of death and survival. But has medicine - or perhaps parapsychology - proved that there is life after death?