1. How to Think about Culture: Reminding Ourselves of Niebuhr
How to Think about Culture: Reminding Ourselves of Niebuhr
Before plunging into this subject, we had better find some agreement as to what we mean by “culture.”
Not very long ago, “culture” commonly referred to what is now meant by “high culture.” For instance, we might have said, “She has such a cultured voice.” If a person read Shakespeare, Goethe, Gore Vidal, Voltaire, and Flaubert, and listened to Bach and Mozart while reading a slender volume of poetry, all the while drinking a mild Chardonnay, he was cultured; if he read cheap whodunits, Asterix, and Eric Ambler — or, better yet, did not read at all — while drinking a beer or a Coke, all the while listening to ska or heavy metal and paying attention to the X-Box screen with the latest violent video game, he was uncultured. But this understanding of “culture” must, sooner or later, be challenged by those who think of “high” culture as a species of elitism, as something intrinsically arrogant or condescending. For them, the opposite of “high culture” is not “low culture” but “popular culture,” with its distinct appeal to democratic values. But even the appeal to “popular culture” is not very helpful for our purposes, because it appeals to only one part of “culture”: presumably there are various forms of “unpopular culture” out there too.
Today, “culture” has become a fairly plastic concept that means something like “the set of values broadly shared by some subset of the human population.” That’s not bad, but doubtless the definition could be improved by a bit of tightening. Probably the most important seminal definition, arising from the fields of intellectual history and cultural anthropology, is that of A. L. Kroeber and C. Kluckhohn:
Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiment in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand as conditioning elements of further action.1
Not a few other definitions say something similar. Brief and to the point is the one-liner definition of Robert Redfield: “shared understandings made manifest in act and artifact.”2 The widely cited definition offered by Clifford Geertz combines succinctness and clarity: “[T]he culture concept . . . denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life.”3
Doubtless the details of these definitions could be debated and refined; indeed, a significant minority of anthropologists and others are suspicious of the entire concept of culture.4 The primary reason has to do with confusion between what “culture” means and what “metanarrative” means. The critics offer two dominant arguments. First, they insist, we simply must reject the pretension that a metanarrative is possible: there is no big explanatory story that makes sense of all the little stories. And if we reject the notion of metanarrative, we cannot continue to talk about culture, since culture is bound up with universal or even transcendental assumptions. Second, all such discussions presuppose that we who are discussing culture somehow stand outside it, and that is impossible. For instance, any discussion between Christ (and thus Christianity) and culture is incoherent, since all forms of Christianity are inherently and unavoidably embedded in cultural expression. How can there be a dialogue with only one partner?
Some of these challenges I will attempt to address in the third chapter. This is not (yet) the place to probe the matter in any detail. It is enough for the moment to point out that my own use of “culture” will nestle comfortably in the domain of the definitions I’ve already provided, in particular the contribution of Geertz. These definitions presuppose that there are many cultures and make no pretensions about assigning transcendental value to any of them.5 That all exemplifications of faith, Christian and otherwise, are necessarily expressed within forms that are cultural cannot reasonably be denied. What that means for the dialogue is still to be worked out.
That brings me to the nub of the issue I want to address.
In the move from the old covenant to the new, the locus of the covenant people passed from the covenant-nation to the international covenant-people. That inevitably raised questions about the relationships this people should have with the people around them who were not part of the new covenant. In political terms, Christians had to work through the relationship between the church and the state, between the kingdom of God and the Roman Empire. Somewhat different answers were called up by different circumstances: contrast, for instance, Romans 13 and Revelation 19. But the issues the church faced by being an international community claiming ultimate allegiance to a kingdom not of this world were much more than governmental. They also had to do with whether Christians should participate in socially expected customs when those customs had religious overtones (e.g., 1 Corinthians 8), with styles of governance (e.g., Matthew 20:20-28), with an array of relational expectations (e.g., Philemon; 1 Peter 2:13–3:16), with the challenge of persecution (e.g., Matthew 5:10-12; John 15:18–16:4; Revelation 6), and much more.
All of these dynamics changed with the Constantinian settlement, of course — but that does not mean that from the beginning of the fourth century, the tensions were all resolved and the debates silenced. The challenge of how to respond to official persecution obviously declined in the Empire after the accession of Constantine, but other questions had to be thought through. For instance, just war theory, articulated in pagan form by Cicero, took on distinctively Christian forms once believers faced increasing responsibilities of political leadership.6 “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s,” the Master had said (Mark 12:17), and unpacking that utterance, in the context of the entire corpus of New Testament documents, was unlikely to achieve stable resolution in a generation or two. In the political arena alone, Christians produced masses of literature as they attempted to work out appropriate relations between Christ and culture.7
Yet it is not my intention to treat the history of these debates, except to note in passing that we must never fall into the trap of supposing that we are the first generation of Christians to think about these things. My focus is on how we should be thinking about the relations between Christ and culture now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We have the same biblical texts that earlier generations of Christians thought their way through, of course, but our reflections are shaped by six unique factors.
(1) Especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, discussion of these matters cannot ignore the programmatic analysis of H. Richard Niebuhr. I shall return to him in a moment.
(2) We live at a time when diverse voices are clamoring for the right to dictate what the relationships between Christ and culture ought to be.
(3) Owing to modern communication technology and to immigration patterns that have made many megalopolises around the world into extraordinary centers of multiculturalism, debates rage regarding what is “cultural” in “multicultural.”
(4) This in turn has precipitated debates over the relative merits of one culture over another, or, alternatively put, over whether one ever has the right to affirm the superiority of one culture over another. That in turn, of course, feeds into debates over religious claims, since religions, too, under the definition of “culture” already given, are necessarily forms of cultural expression. What gives a religion, any religion, the right to claim its own superiority or even uniqueness?
(5) In much of the Western world, though not, by and large, elsewhere, confessional Christianity is in serious decline. That means the inherited status quo in most Western countries cannot continue unquestioned. We are forced to think through, yet again, what the relationship between Christ and culture ought to be.
(6) The actual history of tensions between church and state varies enormously from state to state in the Western world and beyond, making it difficult to make generalizations, or even discuss examples, without numerous caveats. For instance, the now-proverbial “wall of separation” between church and state colors all debates in the United States, yet there is no similar wall, though there are similar freedoms, in the United Kingdom. In France, the “laïcité française” is in part a function of a deeply rooted historical anticlericalism that finds no parallel, until very recently, in, say, the Scandinavian countries or the United States.
Most of these points will be explored later, but it is worth expanding a few of them here, so as to clarify the challenges we face. We must not overlook the sheer diversity of the voices that constitute this challenge. In much of the Western world, despite the fact that Christianity was one of the forces that shaped what the West became (along with the Enlightenment, and a host of less dominant powers), culture is not only moving away from Christianity, it is frequently openly hostile toward it. Christianity can be tolerated, provided it is entirely private: Christian belief that intrudes itself into the public square, especially if it is trying to influence public policy, is most often taken, without examination, as prima facie evidence for bigotry and intolerance. In most of the Western world, this sneering condescension has become dominant in many public organs only within the last quarter-century or so — though obviously it advanced farther, faster, and earlier in deeply anti-clerical countries like France and in distinctly secular countries like Australia than in countries with a once-strong national church like England or with a pronounced Bible belt like America. Even in the latter two cases, the strength of the assault depends on both geography and social location: it is strong in the north of England, the Pacific Northwest, and the New England states of the United States, and in segments of the culture such as the media and the institutions of tertiary education.
Meanwhile, in some ways the world has become more furiously religious.8 In the Western world, more so in Europe than in North America, this is experienced in terms of rising numbers of Muslims — a trend that is bound to continue, granted the fact that the birth rate of the more traditional European population is not sufficiently high to maintain itself in a single European country. And, of course, all of us who live in large urban centers necessarily interact nowadays with Hindus, Sikhs, and even animists, as well as with secularists. As the new slogan puts it, “Nobody is leaving anyone else alone and isn’t ever again going to.” The multiplicity of religious claims is here to stay, and governments are going to have to get used to it. The urgency of thinking afresh about Christ and culture is becoming more acute.9
Inevitably, Christians respond in various ways. Some advocate one form or another of withdrawal. Others want to gain more access to the media. Still others put forth valiant efforts to influence government and pass appropriate legislation. Some, whether consciously or unconsciously, develop a two-tier mentality, one for Christians and church functions, and one for the broader cultural encounters that take up most of the rest of the week. Still others think little about these matters but simply want to get on with evangelism and church planting.
Both the rising hostility in the West toward Christianity and the responses Christians offer make certain assumptions as to what the relationship between Christ and culture ought to be. So also do the competing voices of other religions. For instance, if we are to adapt the labeling approach of Niebuhr, we might call the strongest hostility “Culture over Christ.” Alternatively, where strong voices insist that religion, including the Christian religion, ought to be restricted to purely private matters, then what is being said, of course, is that Christ and culture belong in separate spheres, the former private and the latter public. When some Christian voices hold up the model of Abraham Kuyper, whom we shall think about later, they have clearly moved into the “Christ above culture” paradigm (what Niebuhr further specifies to be the “conversionist” model). Richard Bauckham sees two opposing dangers. On the one hand, some Christians attempt to embed their faith in the culture, and run the risk “of dissipating Christianity into something indistinguishable from other options in Western culture.”10 On the other hand, some retreat so far from engagement with the world that they scarcely engage directly with it, creating for themselves an alternative rationality, largely defensive in posture, which Bauckham identifies with “fundamentalism.”11
Even when no theoretical position is formally adopted, a theoretical position is usually presupposed. When practical advice is given to Christians by firm voices that articulate one heritage or another, some sort of relationship between Christ and culture is invariably assumed. Whether anyone in that tradition has systematically thought about this larger relationship is another matter. To take some examples: (1) Nancy Pearcey claims that when the “total truth” of the gospel is articulated and defended, Christianity is liberated from its cultural captivity,12 which in this case is predominantly tied to American forms of postmodernism. (2) Stassen and Gushee advocate a form of kingdom pacifism.13 (3) Another work, a collection of essays preserving diverse points of view, worries over the impact of globalization, and the diverse ways in which America rules over an “empire.”14 Meanwhile, (4) Gorringe’s “theology of culture” is essentially an attempt to ground a fairly left-wing socialism in Christian theology.15
At the moment, I am neither criticizing nor defending any of these stances. I am merely pointing out that every one of them presupposes some sort of relationship between Christ and culture, even though that relationship is usually not directly addressed.
That brings us, then, to the place where we must remind ourselves of Niebuhr’s useful taxonomy of the possibilities. I shall try to describe the options he lays out for us as carefully as I can. I will attempt a little evaluation as I proceed, but most of the evaluation will await the next two chapters.
H. Richard Niebuhr
Niebuhr offers us five options, each option taking up a chapter, the five being enveloped by a lengthy introduction and a “concluding unscientific postscript.” The purpose of the book, Niebuhr writes,
is to set forth typical Christian answers to the problem of Christ and culture and so to contribute to the mutual understanding of variant and often conflicting Christian groups. The belief which lies back of this effort, however, is the conviction that Christ as living Lord is answering the question in the totality of history and life in a fashion which transcends the wisdom of all his interpreters yet employs their partial insights and their necessary conflicts.16
The problem is not new. Christians had to confront it during the days of the Roman Empire. In certain important respects, the Empire was tolerant: the vast array of religions and customs were not only tolerated but encouraged. Christianity’s insistence that Jesus alone is Lord (however nonpolitical Christians were at the beginning of the Christian era) was simultaneously despised and seen as a threat. As then, so today: strong voices assert that “all consideration of the claims of Christ and God should be banished from the spheres where other gods, called values, reign” (9).
If he is going to talk about “Christ and culture,” Niebuhr must provide reasonably clear definitions of both “Christ” and “culture,” and so he devotes several pages to each. He is fully aware that every understanding of “Christ” is at best partial; no one confession says everything, thereby capturing the objective truth, the essence of Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, he insists, “If we cannot say anything adequately, we can say some things inadequately. . . . Though every description is an interpretation, it can be an interpretation of the objective reality. Jesus Christ who is the Christian’s authority can be described, though every description falls short of completeness and must fail to satisfy others who have encountered him” (14). However disparate or complementary these descriptions may be, Jesus “can never be confused with a Socrates, a Plato or an Aristotle, a Gautama, a Confucius, or a Mohammed, or even with an Amos or Isaiah” (13). This prepares the way for Niebuhr to talk about the strengths and weaknesses, as he sees them, of the liberal Christ, the existentialist Jesus, and so forth, and in particular of the various virtues that Christians cherish as they think of Christ — faith, hope, obedience, humility, and others. In short, Niebuhr wishes to be broadly comprehensive, accepting as “Christ” the various portraits of Jesus Christ found in dominant strands of Christendom.
Niebuhr’s approach to what “Christ” means in his title “Christ and Culture” prompts two initial reflections. First, for him, “Christ” is not infinitely plastic. He includes no fundamentalist Arians, for instance, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses; nor does he include the Mormon Jesus. Nevertheless, the sweep of the interpretations of “Christ” that he embraces is doubtless too broad, if one is trying to limit oneself to the forms of confessional Christianity that explicitly and self-consciously try to live under the authority of Scripture. As a result, certain elements of his understanding of the possibilities of the relationship between Christ and culture should, I think, be ruled out of court, where they are decisively shaped by a frankly sub-biblical grasp of who Christ is. Obviously, I shall have to return to this point. Second, Niebuhr is fully aware that all human understanding is necessarily both partial and interpretative — or, to use the contemporary category, all human knowledge is necessarily perspectival. Human finiteness, let alone human fallenness, warrants this assessment. Postmoderns, especially American postmoderns, tend to give the impression that every thinker who came before them, not least those nasty moderns, were all under the delusion that genuine human knowing was absolutist. Quite frankly, this assessment of modernism is, in many cases, a caricature: modernist though he is, Niebuhr is thoroughly aware that human knowledge is partial and perspectival. Yet he wisely avoids the extreme postmodern position that concludes that knowledge of the objective is impossible. We may say some true things inadequately, even if we cannot say anything adequately, that is, with the knowledge of omniscience, with omniperspective. Despite the calumnies of many postmoderns, Niebuhr is not the only modern who is conscious of human limitations.17
Turning to what he understands by “culture” (29-39), Niebuhr wants to avoid the technical debates of anthropologists. The culture with which we are concerned, he says, “is not a particular phenomenon but the general one, though the general thing appears only in particular forms, and though a Christian of the West cannot think about the problem save in Western terms” (31). Then he writes:
What we have in view when we deal with Christ and culture is that total process of human activity and that total result of such activity to which now the name culture, now the name civilization, is applied in common speech. Culture is the “artificial, secondary environment” which man superimposes on the natural. It comprises language, habits, ideas, beliefs, customs, social organization, inherited artifacts, technical processes, and values. This “social heritage,” this “reality sui generis,” which the New Testament writers frequently had in mind when they spoke of “the world,” which is represented in many forms but to which Christians like other men are inevitably subject, is what we mean when we speak of culture. (31; italics his)
Moreover, although Niebuhr refuses to speak of the “essence” of culture, he is prepared to describe some of its chief characteristics: it is always social (i.e., it is bound up with human life in society), it is human achievement (presupposing purposiveness and effort), it is bound up with a world of values which, dominantly, are thought to be for “the good of man” (32-35). Again, culture in all its forms and varieties is concerned with the “temporal and material realization of values” (36). And so, since the achievement of these values is accomplished “in transient and perishing stuff, cultural activity is almost as much concerned with the conservation of values as with their realization” (36; italics his).
As with Niebuhr’s definition of Christ, so with his definition of culture: we must engage in a little preliminary evaluation before we can proceed. Niebuhr’s definition of culture embraces “ideas” and “beliefs” as well as customs, social organization, inherited artifacts, and the like. On the face of it, if culture embraces ideas, beliefs, values, customs, and all the rest, it is hard to see how it can avoid embracing Christianity — in which case, once again, it is difficult to see how it is possible to analyze the relation between Christ and culture, when, under this definition, Christ appears to be embraced by culture. Niebuhr survives this problem by restricting culture to the domain of the “temporal and material realization of values,” and by associating “culture” with what the New Testament means by “world”: that is, by “culture” he means something like “culture-devoid-of-Christ.” Then, as the discussion progresses and he works out what the relationship between Christ and culture might be, that culture might, for instance, be “transformed” by Christ, so that it is no longer “culture-devoid-of-Christ” but now something that it was not before: “culture-transformed-by-Christ.” The slipperiness of the “culture” terminology is palpable.
What is becoming obvious is that Niebuhr is not so much talking about the relationship between Christ and culture, as between two sources of authority as they compete within culture, namely Christ (however he is understood within the various paradigms of mainstream Christendom) and every other source of authority divested of Christ (though Niebuhr is thinking primarily of secular or civil authority rather than the authority claimed by competing religions). If we do not recognize that the polarities Niebuhr sets up are along such lines, the rest of his elegant discussion simply becomes incoherent. Our task now, however, is to try to understand his fivefold paradigm in his own terms, before we think it through afresh, so for the time being I will retain his use of the terminology.
(1) Christ against Culture
That Niebuhr’s understanding of what “Christ” and “culture” mean lies along the line of competing authority claims is strikingly illustrated in his summary of the first paradigm: “The first answer to the question of Christ and culture we shall consider is the one that uncompromisingly affirms the sole authority of Christ over the Christian and resolutely rejects the culture’s claims to loyalty” (45). This stance is found in the book of Revelation, where it is made all the more acute because Christians are threatened with persecution. But it is also forcefully depicted in 1 John. Despite its profound elaboration of “the doctrine of love” (46) — it is this Epistle which declares, “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16) — nevertheless “the central interest of the writer . . . is quite as much the Lordship of Christ as the idea of love” (46). Loyalty to this Christ has entailments in the doctrinal, moral, and social realms. Moreover, “[t]he counterpart of loyalty to Christ and the brothers is the rejection of cultural society; a clear line of separation is drawn between the brotherhood of the children of God and the world” (46-48).
Nevertheless, this “Christ against culture” stance is still not in its most radical form, since John also takes it for granted “that Jesus Christ has come to expiate the sins of the world” (49). Tertullian states it in radical fashion: Christians constitute a “third race,” different from Jews and Gentiles, and called to live a way of life quite separate from culture. Indeed, Niebuhr avers, Tertullian
replaces the positive and warm ethics of love which characterizes the First Letter of John with a largely negative morality; avoidance of sin and fearsome preparation for the coming day of judgment seem more important than thankful acceptance of God’s grace in the gift of his Son. (52)
Inevitably, then, “Tertullian’s rejection of the claims of culture is correspondingly sharp” (52). And the worst thing in the culture is pagan religion, especially as it reflects idolatry, polytheism, false beliefs and rites, sensuality, and commercialization. But this religion touches everything in the ancient world, so that for the Christian, political life must be shunned, and so also military service, philosophy, and the arts. Of course, learning is important for the believer, so “learning literature is allowable for believers” (55, citing On Idolatry x), but not teaching it, since teaching it enmeshes the teacher in commending the literature, with the result that one ends up commending and affirming “the praises of idols interspersed therein” (55).
Of course, Tertullian cannot be quite as consistent in this “Christ against culture” position as he seems, for he rejects the charge that Christians are “useless in the affairs of life,” for, as he points out,
we sojourn with you in the world, abjuring neither forum, nor shambles, nor bath, nor booth, nor inn, nor weekly market, nor any other places of commerce. . . . We sail with you, and fight with you, and till the ground with you; and in like manner we unite with you in your traffickings — even in the various arts we make public property of our works for your benefit. (53, citing Apology xlii)
Nonetheless, as Niebuhr points out, this “is said in defense,” while when he admonishes believers, Tertullian’s counsel is primarily to “withdraw from many meetings and occupations” (53).
Niebuhr traces the same impulse through the Rule of St. Benedict, through some Mennonite groups (he does not mention them, but in North America one automatically thinks of the Amish), and the early Quakers. In some detail, he takes us through the later writings of Leo Tolstoy. But Niebuhr insists that all these are merely “illustrations of the type”: one finds similar groups “among Eastern and Western Catholics, orthodox and sectarian Protestants, millenarians and mystics, ancient and medieval and modern Christians” (64). It really does not matter whether these groups understand their own significance in mystical or apocalyptic terms. The type is found equally in monasteries and in a Lutheran Kierkegaard. I suppose that today we would add that this position is also found in Stanley Hauerwas.
Niebuhr muses that this position is both “necessary” and “inadequate” (65-76). The stance is often heroic, principled, morally stalwart, and uncompromising. Historically, the monasteries helped to conserve and transmit the Western cultural tradition, while Quakers and Tolstoyans, “intending to abolish all methods of coercion, have helped to reform prisons, to limit armaments, and to establish international organizations for the maintenance of peace through coercion” (67). The position is inevitable:
The relation of the authority of Jesus Christ to the authority of culture is such that every Christian must often feel himself claimed by the Lord to reject the world and its kingdoms with their pluralism and temporalism, their makeshift compromises of many interests, their hypnotic obsession by the love of life and the fear of death. . . . If Romans 13 is not balanced by 1 John, the church becomes an instrument of state, unable to point men to their transpolitical destiny and their suprapolitical loyalty; unable also to engage in political tasks, save as one more group of power-hungry or security-seeking men. (68)
Yet however inevitable, the position is inadequate. The most radical Christians inevitably make use of the culture, or parts of the culture. “In almost every utterance Tertullian makes evident that he is a Roman, so nurtured in the legal tradition and so dependent on philosophy that he cannot state the Christian case without their aid” (69-70). Similarly, Tolstoy is intelligible only as a nineteenth-century Russian. In all of our confession of Christ, we are using words, and words are culturally embedded, even words like “Christ” and “Logos” and “love.” When Tertullian commends modesty and patience, he is partly indebted to Stoic categories; when Tolstoy speaks of nonresistance, it is impossible not to discern the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “The difference between the radicals and the other groups is often only this: that the radicals fail to recognize what they are doing, and continue to speak as though they were separated from the world” (76).
Niebuhr finds four theological problems with this position. (a) There is a tendency in such radical movements to use “reason” to refer to the methods and content of knowledge within the “culture,” and “revelation” to refer to their own Christian faith. Unfortunately, however, “[t]hey cannot solve their problem of Christ and culture without recognizing that distinctions must be made both with respect to the reasoning that goes on outside the Christian sphere and to the knowledge that is present in it” (78). (b) These radicals give the impression that sin abounds in the culture, while light and piety attach themselves to Christians. But this fails to wrestle adequately with the sin that is found among Christians, as it fails to recognize the “common grace” (though that is not Niebuhr’s expression) amply demonstrated in the world. (c) This position often seeks to defend itself with new laws, new rules of conduct, that are so unbending and so precise that grace itself seems demoted to a second or third tier. (d) Above all, the “knottiest theological problem” with this position, according to Niebuhr, is “the relation of Jesus Christ to the Creator of nature and Governor of history as well as to the Spirit immanent in creation and in the Christian community” (80-81). This is in part a Trinitarian challenge; even more, it is the temptation to convert “their ethical dualism into an ontological bifurcation of reality” (81) that ends up in Montanism, in the inner light of Quakerism, in Tolstoy’s spiritualism.
(2) The Christ of Culture
This second position is adopted by people who hail Jesus as the Messiah of their society, the one who fulfills its best hopes and aspirations. They are Christians “not only in the sense that they count themselves believers in the Lord but also in the sense that they seek to maintain community with all believers. Yet they seem equally at home in the community of culture” (83). They do not seek Christ’s sanction for everything in their culture, but only for what they find to be the best in it; equally, they tend to disentangle Christ from what they judge to be barbaric or outmoded Jewish notions about God and history. “Sociologically they may be interpreted as nonrevolutionaries who find no need for positing ‘cracks in time’ — fall and incarnation and judgment and resurrection” (84).
In the early centuries of the Christian church, they are best exemplified by the Gnostics. Although its most notable leaders were in time condemned by the church, “[t]he movement represented by Gnosticism has been one of the most powerful in Christian history.” “It sees in Christ not only a revealer of religious truth but a god, the object of religious worship; but not the Lord of all life, and not the son of the Father who is the present Creator and Governor of all things” (88-89).
Although Gnosticism died out in time,18 the “Christ of culture” position was further developed after the Constantinian settlement, in the rise of “so-called Christian civilization” (89). In the medieval period, Abélard is the best exemplar, even though his thought was far removed from Gnosticism. Formally, Abélard merely quarrels with the church’s way of stating the faith; in reality, “he reduces it to what conforms with the best in culture. It becomes a philosophic knowledge about reality, and an ethics for the improvement of life” (90). It was within this framework that Abélard offered the moral theory of the atonement
as an alternative not only to a doctrine that is difficult for Christians as Christians but to the whole conception of a once-and-for-all act of redemption. Jesus Christ has become for Abélard the great moral teacher who in all that he did in the flesh . . . had the intention of our instruction, doing in a higher degree what Socrates and Plato had done before him. (90)
If in medieval culture “Abélard was a relatively lonely figure,” since the eighteenth century “his followers have been numerous, and what was heresy became the new orthodoxy.” Niebuhr is referring, of course, to what he calls “culture-Protestantism.” Its defenders “interpret Christ as a hero of manifold culture” (91). Both John Locke, with his The Reasonableness of Christianity, and Immanuel Kant, with his Religion within the Limits of Reason, belong here. So also does Thomas Jefferson, who could write, “I am a Christian in the only sense in which he [Jesus Christ] wished any one to be” (cited on 91-92), after cutting up the New Testament so as to preserve only the bits that commended themselves to him. Niebuhr lines up Schleiermacher, Emerson, F. D. Maurice, and others in this camp, but devotes principal attention to Albrecht Ritschl. After all, Ritschl’s theology “had two foundation stones: not revelation and reason, but Christ and culture” (95). Ritschl achieved the reconciliation of Christ and culture that he wished, largely by appealing to his understanding of the kingdom of God. The kingdom “denotes the association of mankind — an association both extensively and intensively the most comprehensive possible — through the reciprocal moral action of its members, action which transcends all merely natural and particular considerations” (cited on 98). By this understanding of the kingdom, then, Jesus becomes the Christ of culture in both senses: “as the guide of men in all their labor to realize and conserve their values, and as the Christ who is understood by means of nineteenth-century cultural ideas” (98).
Niebuhr sees considerable strengths in this heritage. It has attracted many people to Jesus, precisely because it does not make him seem as alien as the first position does. Moreover, Niebuhr asserts,
[t]he cultural Christians tend to speak to the cultured among the despisers of religion; they use the language of the more sophisticated circles, of those who are acquainted with the science, the philosophy, and the political and economic movements of their time. They are missionaries to the aristocracy and the middle class, or to the groups rising to power in a civilization. (104)19
Moreover, Jesus himself, though he was more than a prophet, nevertheless “like an Isaiah showed concern for the peace of his own city” (105). Though to him nothing was as important as one’s “soul,” yet he not only forgave their sins but healed the sick as well.
For the radical Christian the whole world outside the sphere where Christ’s Lordship is explicitly acknowledged is a realm of equal darkness; but cultural Christians note that there are great differences among the various movements in society; and by observing these they not only find points of contact for the mission of the church, but also are enabled to work for the reformation of the culture. The radicals reject Socrates, Plato, and the Stoics, along with Aristippus, Democritus, and the Epicureans; tyranny and empire seem alike to them; highwaymen and soldiers both use violence; figures carved by Phidias are more dangerous temptations to idolatry than those made by a handy man; modern culture is all of one piece, individualistic and egoistic, secularistic and materialistic. The cultural Christian, however, understands that there are great polarities in any civilization; and that there is a sense in which Jesus Christ affirms movements in philosophy toward the assertion of the world’s unity and order, movements in morals toward self-denial and the care for the common good, political concerns for justice, and ecclesiastical interests in honesty in religion. (106)
At the same time, Niebuhr can identify theological and other objections to this position. Cultural Christians are often assailed, not only by the orthodox, but by outsiders: pagan writers criticized Christian Gnostics, and both John Dewey and Karl Marx rejected Christian liberalism. They suspect that what is to them a compromised position will weaken the purity of their paganism, or of their liberalism, or of their Marxism — just as, from the other side, the orthodox suspect that these cultural Christians have sacrificed too much of what is essential to Christianity. Indeed, it is hard to deny that they “take some fragment of the complex New Testament story and interpretation, call this the essential characteristic of Jesus, elaborate upon it, and thus reconstruct their own mythical figure of the Lord.” What this fragment is turns out, inevitably, to be “something that seems to agree with the interests or the needs of their time. . . . Jesus stands for the idea of spiritual knowledge; or of logical reason; or of the sense for the infinite; or of the moral law within; or of brotherly love” (109). I suspect that we could add today that Jesus stands for inclusion, for tolerance, for spirituality. Further, these cultural Christians have no firm grasp of “Christian views of sin, of grace and law, and of the Trinity” (112). For instance, they do not grasp how endemic sin is, how it corrupts not only all human beings but all of human nature. Theirs is a moralism that understands little of grace, because it understands little of the need for grace. And God himself easily becomes redefined: “Gnostics need more than a Trinity, liberals less. All along the line the tendency in the movement is to identify Jesus with the immanent divine spirit that works in men” (114).
(3) Christ above Culture
Unlike the “Christ against culture” position, and unlike the “Christ of culture” position, this stance, “Christ above culture,” Niebuhr understands to be the majority position in the history of the church. But it surfaces in three distinct forms, which constitute the three final entries in his fivefold typology.20
Niebuhr calls these three, together, “the church of the center” (117). At the heart of this stance is a creedal point:
One of the theologically stated convictions with which the church of the center approaches the cultural problem is that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Father Almighty who created heaven and earth. With that formulation it introduces into the discussion about Christ and culture the conception of nature on which all culture is founded, and which is good and rightly ordered by the One to whom Jesus Christ is obedient and with whom he is inseparably united. Where this conviction rules, Christ and the world cannot be simply opposed to each other. Neither can the “world” as culture be simply regarded as the realm of godlessness; since it is at least founded on the “world” as nature, and cannot exist save as it is upheld by the Creator and Governor of nature. (117-18)
Despite this starting point, the church of the center also holds to strong convictions “about the universality and radical nature of sin,” and about “the primacy of grace and the necessity of works of obedience” (118-19), even though there are highly divergent understandings of how these things work out. Granted these commonalities, however, there are three groups: the synthesists, the dualists, and the conversionists. At this juncture Niebuhr focuses exclusively on the synthesists.
Synthesists seek a “both-and” solution. They maintain the gap between Christ and culture that the cultural Christian never takes seriously and that the radical does not even try to breech — yet they insist that Christ is as sovereign over the culture as over the church. “We cannot say, ‘Either Christ or culture,’ because we are dealing with God in both cases. We must not say, ‘Both Christ and culture,’ as though there were no great distinction between them; but we must say, ‘Both Christ and culture,’ in full awareness of the dual nature of our law, our end, our situation” (122). That is what is presupposed in Jesus’ utterance, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21, as cited on 123). That is also why we are to be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority apart from what God himself has instituted (Romans 13).
Synthetic answers were attempted by Justin Martyr. The first great representative of this type, however, is Tertullian’s contemporary, Clement of Alexandria. For instance, in discussing the rich, he can, on the one hand, appeal to great Stoic virtues of thankful generosity, sounding at times like the quintessential cultural Christian. But he goes farther, and gently “issues a clear Christian call to respond to the love of the self-impoverished Lord” (124). Yes, a Christian must be a good person, in accordance with the standards of “a good culture,” but Christ invites people to attain more, and gives them grace to achieve it: love of God for his own sake. “This sort of life is not of this world, and yet the hope of its realization and previsions of its reality fill present experience.” Thus Clement’s Christ “is not against culture, but uses its best products as instruments in his work of bestowing on men what they cannot achieve by their own efforts” (127).
But perhaps the most important synthesist is Thomas Aquinas, who “represents a Christianity that has achieved or accepted full social responsibility for all the great institutions” (128). Thomas understood that Christ is far above culture, and never tried “to disguise the gulf that lies between them” (129). Yet he manages to combine without confusing “philosophy and theology, state and church, civic and Christian virtues, natural and divine laws, Christ and culture” (130). Niebuhr seeks to demonstrate this in the way in which Thomas “sought to synthesize the ethics of culture with the ethics of the gospel” (130) and in his theory of law (135). No less importantly, “Thomas’ synthesis was not only an intellectual achievement but the philosophical and theological representation of a social unification of Christ and culture” (137). Even though that unification was promptly broken by the stresses of the fourteenth century, and further torn apart by the Reformation and the Renaissance, it marked a comprehensiveness of synthesis one is hard pressed to find again in later times. None of this should be despised: “Man’s search for unity is unconquerable, and the Christian has a special reason for seeking integrity because of his fundamental faith in the God who is One” (141). Others have of course insisted on the importance of social and civil institutions, but what “distinguishes the synthesist of Thomas’ sort is his concern to discover the bases of right in the given, created nature of man and his world” (142).
But Niebuhr is not blind to the problems of the synthesist version of Christ above culture. Christians of the other groups “will point out that the enterprise in and of itself must lead into an error,” for the effort to bring Christ and culture, grace and works, God’s work and human work, the temporal and the eternal, all into one neat system, is bound to lead “to the absolutizing of what is relative, the reduction of the infinite to a finite form, and the materialization of the dynamic.” Moreover, all such syntheses are themselves culturally conditioned. For instance, “[t]he hierarchical view of natural order in Thomas Aquinas is historical and medieval” (145). Moreover, Thomas, as has often been observed, “lacked historical understanding” (196). Further, the passion to synthesize “leads to the institutionalization of Christ and his gospel” (146). Indeed, however much they profess the contrary, the synthesists simply “do not in fact face up to the radical evil present in all human work” (148). And that brings us to the next section.
(4) Christ and Culture in Paradox
This is the second of the groups that belong to the “Christ above culture” pattern. The first were synthesists; these are dualists.
For the dualists, the fundamental issue in life is not the line that must be drawn between Christians and the pagan or secular world, but between God and all humankind — or, “since the dualist is an existential thinker — between God and us; the issue lies between the righteousness of God and the righteousness of self.” If we are to think about Christ and culture, we must begin with reminding ourselves of what Christ came to do: he came to effect “the great act of reconciliation and forgiveness” that has been undertaken by this Christ (150). Sin is in us; grace is in God. In one sense, this group is much like the first, those who hold to the “Christ against culture” position. But in that position, there is a tendency to put the strongest emphasis on the distinction between “them” and “us”; in this dualist position, by contrast, we are all lost, we are all sinners. “Human culture is corrupt; and it includes all human work, not simply the achievements of men outside the church but also those in it, not only philosophy so far as it is human achievement but theology also, not only Jewish defence of Jewish law but also Christian defence of Christian precept” (153). To understand dualists, Niebuhr asserts, we must see that they are not passing judgment on other human beings, but on all, including themselves. If they speak of the corruption of reason, they include their own.
The other thing that must be kept in mind is that for these believers the attitude of man before God is not an attitude man takes in addition to other positions, after he has confronted nature, or his fellow men, or the concepts of reason. It is the fundamental and ever-present situation; though man is forever trying to ignore the fact that he is up against God, or that what he is up against when he is “up against it” is God. (153)
“Hence the dualist joins the radical Christian in pronouncing the whole world of human culture to be godless and sick unto death. But there is this difference between them: the dualist knows that he belongs to that culture and cannot get out of it, that God indeed sustains him in it and by it; for if God in His grace did not sustain the world in its sin it would not exist for a moment.” And thus the dualist “cannot speak otherwise than in what sound like paradoxes” (156). Those paradoxes spill over into law and grace, into divine wrath and divine mercy, and the dualist cannot evaluate culture without thinking of these ongoing paradoxical realities.
Niebuhr argues that there are few clear-cut, consistent dualists (as he has described them), but he finds the dualist motif in Paul, a motif which is then taken in a rather different direction by Marcion, and preserved in a more direct line of succession in Augustine, and powerfully in Luther. Yet this is still a subset of the “Christ above culture” paradigm:
Christ deals with the fundamental problems of the moral life; he cleanses the springs of action; he creates and recreates the ultimate community in which all action takes place. But by the same token he does not directly govern the external actions or construct the immediate community in which man carries on his work. On the contrary, he sets men free from the inner necessity of finding special vocations and founding special communities in which to attempt to acquire self-respect, and human and divine approval. He releases them from monasteries and the conventicles of the pious for service of their actual neighbors in the world through all the ordinary vocations of men.
More than any great Christian leader before him, Luther affirmed the life in culture as the sphere in which Christ could and ought to be followed; and more than any other had discerned that the rules to be followed in the cultural life were independent of Christian or church law. Though philosophy offered no road to faith, yet the faithful man could take the philosophic road to such goals as were attainable by that way. . . . The education of youth in languages, arts, and history as well as in piety offered great opportunities to the free Christian man; but cultural education was also a duty to be undertaken. “Music,” said Luther, “is a noble gift of God, next to theology. I would not change my little knowledge of music for a great deal.” Commerce was also open to the Christian, for “buying and selling are necessary. . . .” Political activities, and even the career of the soldier, were even more necessary to the common life, and were therefore spheres in which the neighbor could be served and God could be obeyed. (174-75)
The tensions in all this, Niebuhr asserts, are the tensions of a dialectic thinker trying to face reality. “Living between time and eternity, between wrath and mercy, between culture and Christ, the true Lutheran finds life both tragic and joyful. There is no solution of the dilemma this side of death” (178).
Niebuhr provides two or three examples of post-Luther dualists, including Kierkegaard, and then he mentions the two most common indictments with which the other groups charge them: dualism tends to lead Christians toward (a) antinomianism, and (b) cultural conservatism. The reason for the latter, it is alleged, is that dualists focus on “only one set of the great cultural institutions and sets of habits of their times — the religious” (188). The result is that they tend to leave other matters — matters of political justice, say, or an institution like slavery — unchanged.
And that brings us to Niebuhr’s final category.
(5) Christ the Transformer of Culture
This is the third subcategory under the “Christ above culture” pattern. The other two were the synthesist and the dualist; this one is the conversionist. And it is vital to understand that Niebuhr is not thinking so much of individual conversion (though doubtless that is to some extent included) as of the conversion of the culture itself.
The conversionists’ understanding of the relations of Christ and culture is most closely akin to dualism, but it also has affinities with the other great Christian attitudes. That it represents a distinct motif, however, becomes apparent when one moves from the Gospel of Matthew and the Letter of James through Paul’s epistles to the Fourth Gospel, or proceeds from Tertullian, the gnostics, and Clement to Augustine, or from Tolstoy, Ritschl, and Kierkegaard to F. D. Maurice. The men who offer what we are calling the conversionist answer to the problem of Christ and culture evidently belong to the great central tradition of the church. Though they hold fast to the radical distinction between God’s work in Christ and man’s work in culture, they do not take the road of exclusive Christianity into isolation from civilization, or reject its institutions with Tolstoyan bitterness. Though they accept their station in society with its duties in obedience to their Lord, they do not seek to modify Jesus Christ’s sharp judgment of the world and all its ways. In their Christology they are like synthesists and dualists; they refer to the Redeemer more than to the giver of a new law, and to the God whom men encounter more than to the representative of the best spiritual resources in humanity. . . .
What distinguishes conversionists from dualists is their more positive and hopeful attitude toward culture. (190-91)
This more positive stance toward culture, Niebuhr writes, is grounded in three theological convictions: (a) While the dualist tends to think of God’s act of creation as merely the mise-en-scène of God’s mighty act of redemption in the cross and resurrection of Christ, conversionists rest more weight on the creation. Although creation is not permitted to overpower redemption, or be overpowered by it, creation is not only the setting for redemption, but the sphere in which God’s sovereign, ordering, work operates. (b) While dualists are sometimes in danger of treating matter, or even human selfhood, as intrinsically evil, with the result that they tend “to think of the institutions of culture as having largely a negative function in a temporal and corrupt world” (193), the conversionist insists the fall is “moral and personal, not physical and metaphysical, though it does have physical consequences” (194). (c) The conversionist adopts “a view of history that holds that to God all things are possible in a history that is fundamentally not a course of merely human events but always a dramatic interaction between God and men” (194). Indeed, the conversionist has a somewhat stronger “realized” component to his or her eschatology than do most other Christians: “For the conversionist, history is the story of God’s mighty deeds and of man’s responses to them. He lives somewhat less ‘between the times’ and somewhat more in the divine ‘Now’ than do his brother Christians. The eschatological future has become for him an eschatological present” (195).
Niebuhr finds this motif especially strong in the Fourth Gospel. Without the Logos, nothing has been created; the world that he made is his home. “John could not say more forcefully that whatever is is good.” For this evangelist, “natural birth, eating, drinking, wind, water, and bread and wine are . . . not only symbols to be employed in dealing with the realities of the life of the spirit but are pregnant with spiritual meaning” (197). The “world” is simultaneously “the totality of creation and especially of humanity as the object of God’s love,” it is “also used to designate mankind in so far as it rejects Christ, lives in darkness, does evil works, is ignorant of the Father, rejoices over the death of the Son” (198). But John does not provide us with any abstract doctrine of sin; rather, he illustrates it, while refusing to define it (199). Within this framework, the gift of God provided through Christ is “eternal life,” but the eschatology of the Fourth Gospel is so realized that this life is substantially enjoyed now, with all that means for all of human existence and culture.
Niebuhr concedes, “We are prevented from interpreting the Fourth Gospel as a wholly conversionist document, not only by its silence on many subjects but also by the fact that its universalistic note is accompanied by a particularist tendency” (204). The same sort of tension is found, Niebuhr avers, in the second-century Letter to Diognetus. But it is in Augustine and other leaders of the fourth century that “[t]he expectation of universal regeneration through Christ emerges” rather more clearly — though here, too, there is no unqualified universalism (i.e., a completely conversionist understanding) because of these theologians’ need to contend on two fronts. They had to stand “against the anticulturalism of exclusive Christianity, and against the accommodationism of culture-Christians” (206). For Augustine, Niebuhr insists,
Christ is the transformer of culture . . . in the sense that he redirects, reinvigorates, and regenerates that life of man, expressed in all human works, which in present actuality is the perverted and corrupted exercise of a fundamentally good nature; which, moreover, in its depravity lies under the curse of transiency and death, not because an external punishment has been visited upon it, but because it is intrinsically self-contradictory. (209)
The moral virtues human beings develop in perverse cultures are not so much displaced by new virtues at conversion, as converted by love. Converted people, the citizens of the holy City of God, who “live according to God in the pilgrimage of this life, both fear and desire, and grieve and rejoice. And because their love is rightly placed, all these affections of theirs are right” (City of God xiv.9, cited on 214). Yet Augustine does not carry this conversionist program to its logical conclusion; he does not “actually look forward with hope to the realization of the great eschatological possibility, demonstrated and promised in the incarnate Christ — the redemption of the created and corrupted human world and the transformation of mankind in all its cultural activity” (215). Instead, he leaps to “the eschatological vision of a spiritual society, consisting of some elect human individuals together with angels, living in eternal parallelism with the company of the damned” (216). Niebuhr finds this step very difficult to understand, and inconsistent with what he takes to be Augustine’s dominant conversionist stance.
Calvin, Niebuhr writes, is similar, making the same move as Augustine. Wesley is in the same tradition, but strengthens his conversionist heritage by becoming the exponent of perfectionism. But the culmination of this line of development is in F. D. Maurice, who is, according to Niebuhr, “above all a Johannine thinker” (220). Maurice sees every person to be in Christ, and the culmination of human destiny is such cultural conversion that ultimately the prayer of Jesus in John 17 is fulfilled: we all become one, even as the Father and the Son are one.
What made Maurice the most consistent of conversionists, however, was the fact that he held fast to the principle that Christ was king, and that men were therefore required to take account of him only and not of their sin; for to concentrate on sin as though it were actually the ruling principle of existence was to be enmeshed in still further self-contradiction. (224)
Indeed, Maurice took issue with German and English Evangelicals on precisely this ground (224). Niebuhr quotes Maurice, “I am obliged to believe in an abyss of love which is deeper than the abyss of death: I dare not lose faith in that love. I sink into death, eternal death if I do. I must feel that this love is compassing the universe. More about it I cannot know” (cited on 226).
Although Niebuhr never explicitly aligns himself with any of the five patterns he treats in his volume, what is striking about this fifth paradigm is that he offers no negative criticism whatsoever. Most scholars understand Niebuhr thus to be bestowing his approval.
***
Thus we come to Niebuhr’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript.” We need not follow all of his thought here; it takes us a bit far afield from his own fivefold paradigm. But it is worth picking up two points. First, Niebuhr argues that his study could be extended indefinitely, if it explored a host of other Christian leaders — not only theological thinkers, but a vast array of “political, scientific, literary and military examples of loyalty to Christ in conflict and adjustment to cultural duties.” He is thinking of “Constantine, Charlemagne, Thomas More, Oliver Cromwell and Gladstone, Pascal, Kepler, Newton, Dante, Milton, Blake and Dostoievsky [sic], Gustavus Adolphus, Robert E. Lee and ‘Chinese’ Gordon — these and many more.” One marvels at a few names that have been omitted, such as Abraham Kuyper, perhaps, and Abraham Lincoln, Wilberforce, and Shaftesbury. Nevertheless, Niebuhr’s point is that it is impossible to say, “This is the Christian answer” (231).
Second, while there is no single theoretical answer, Niebuhr holds that there must be movement “from insight to decision” (233), as each believer reaches his or her own “final” conclusion. These decisions are relative in at least four ways. “They depend on the partial, incomplete, fragmentary knowledge of the individual; they are relative to the measure of his faith and his unbelief; they are related to the historical position he occupies and to the duties of his station in society; they are concerned with the relative values of things” (234). Yet even this relativity must be worked out in the context of “faith in the absolute faithfulness of God-in-Christ” (239).
It is hard to overestimate the influence of Niebuhr’s fivefold template, especially in the English-speaking world.21 Our next steps must be to evaluate it, both on its own terms and in the light of biblical theology (chap. 2). At that point we shall bring to bear more recent discussion of culture and related concepts (chap. 3).
1. A. L. Kroeber and C. Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York: Random House, 1952), 357.
2. Cited by Richard A. Shweder, Why Do Men Barbecue? Recipes for Cultural Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 10, which, despite its title, is a serious and insightful volume. I am indebted to Robert Priest for drawing the first chapter of that book to my attention. It offers one of the most helpful surveys of the current debate on the nature of culture of which I am aware. Cf. also Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine, Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
3. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 89.
4. Some of their views are conveniently summarized in Shweder, Why Do Men Barbecue? in the introductory chapter. For more detailed access to their theories, it is helpful to read the following (some of whom Shweder does not discuss): Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970); Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (repr. London: Routledge, 2002); Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991); Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Random House, 1997).
5. Here I am parting company from many older treatments, which, despite their heuristic value, subtly assume some notion or other of “high” culture. For instance, in one of his last works, T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949), asserts that the word “culture” has three different associations, “according to whether we have in mind the development of an individual, of a group or class, or of a whole society” (p. 19; italics his). His thesis is that the culture of the individual is dependent upon the culture of the group, which is itself dependent upon the culture of the whole society. But observe his terminology: he is thinking of the “development” of an individual, group, or society; he readily speaks of “achieving” culture (p. 20). Under the dominant definitions most commonly deployed today, belonging to or being part of a culture is unavoidable.
6. In brief compass, cf. D. A. Carson, Love in Hard Places (Wheaton: Crossway, 2002), 108-44, esp. 143.
7. Beyond all praise is the work of Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, eds., From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999).
8. Small wonder that some scholars comment on the decline of atheism: see, for instance, Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (New York: Doubleday, 2004).
9. This is one of the central themes of David Herbert, Religion and Civil Society: Rethinking Public Religion in the Contemporary World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).
10. Richard Bauckham, God and the Crisis of Freedom: Biblical and Contemporary Perspectives (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 54.
11. Bauckham, God and the Crisis of Freedom, 54-55.
12. Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Wheaton: Crossway, 2004). I have always found “total” to be a rather strange adjective to modify “truth.”
13. Glen H. Stassen and David P. Gushee, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2003).
14. Wes Avram, ed., Anxious about Empire: Theological Essays on the New Global Realities (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004). Cf. Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Owl Books, repr. 2004).
15. See especially T. J. Gorringe’s Furthering Humanity: A Theology of Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
16. H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1951), 2. Hereafter, page references to this book will be given parenthetically in the text.
17. Here, for instance, is Brooke Foss Westcott, writing more than a century ago, criticizing the sort of “history” that von Ranke and others embraced: “There is undoubtedly at present a strong feeling in favour of realistic, external, history; but it may reasonably be questioned whether this fashion of opinion will be permanent, and it is obviously beset by many perils. Realistic history often treats only of the dress and not of the living frame, and it can never go beyond the outward circumstances of an organisation which is inspirited by one vital power” (The Gospel According to St. John: The Greek Text with Introduction and Notes [Grand Rapids: Baker, repr. 1980], cxii).
18. Some argue, of course, that it has returned in some modern forms of “spirituality” and of “new age” theology. Inevitably, there are both parallels and discontinuities. See, for instance, Peter Jones, The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back: An Old Heresy for the New Age (Phillipsburg: P & R, 1992).
19. One cannot help but note that when he here speaks of “the cultured,” Niebuhr has retreated to a “high” use of the term, away from his own working definition.
20. Niebuhr’s breakdown is a bit confusing. It may help some to think of the last three of his five types as: (3) Christ above culture: synthesist type; (4) Christ above culture: dualist type; (5) Christ above culture: conversionist/transformationist type.
21. Many scores of books and essays could be adduced. Even today, when a number of voices are insisting that Niebuhr needs to be revised (see chap. 3, below), social studies continue to appeal to the Niebuhr taxonomy. For instance, when David W. Jones (Reforming the Morality of Usury: A Study of the Differences That Separated the Protestant Reformers [Lanham: University Press of America, 2004]) argues that the different approaches to usury adopted by the various Protestant Reformers are related to the respective cultural location of the Reformers, it is Niebuhr’s typology of culture that shapes his discussion.