Ute Seela

I din’t feel quite excited to start my visit to Indonesia jetlagged with a two-hour lecture by a Swiss Catholic theologist in his 80’s… To be surprised about some 300 listeners (especially students it seemed) filling up the lecture hall quickly… Hans Küng apparently is quite a hero in Indonesia, at least for students with a religious interest. A former companion of Pope Benedict alias Joseph Ratzinger and a current ‘mate’ of Kofi Annan, Küng makes people listen. Although underpinned with much detail on the changing interpretations within Judaism, Christianity and Islam (‘paradigm shifts’), his message is quite simple: the three big religions have core values in common and the most general one is what is called the ‘Golden Rule’: “do not do unto others what you do not want others to do unto you”.

Küng has written countless books about the major religions. For more than twenty years now he has been working on a Global Ethic. Its basic declaration has been adopted by the Parliament of the World’s Religions and supported by the UN General Assembly just a few weeks after 9/11. Hans Küng heads the Global Ethic Foundation which carries out inter-religious research and education and stimulates inter-cultural and inter-religious encounter. His institute has worked with Desmond Tutu, Shirin Ebadi, Tony Blair and many other public figures.

His lecture in Yogyakarta was organised by the Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies which heads the Pluralism Knowledge Programme in Indonesia. Together with two other organisations (among which another Hivos-supported organisation: The International Center for Islam and Pluralism ICIP) CRCS also contributed to an exchange with leading Islamic thinkers of the two big Indonesian muslim organisations Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama.

Küng concludes with the basic rules that all three monotheistic religions have in common:

• You shall not kill
• You shall not steal
• You shall not lie
• You shall not commit sexual immorality.

Sounds familiar… I guess the devil is in the detail…