1951
The Niebuhr brothers, Richard and Reinhold, born two years apart in Wright City, Missouri, were both noted neoorthodox 94 ן } theologians. Although evangelicals found much io argue with in Niebuhiian theology, they cheered when the Niebuhrs started talking about sin. The Niebuhrs felt that the old liberalism was neither biblical nor logical when it soft-pedaled the scriptural teaching about the pervasiveness of sin.
While the Niebuhrs drew much from Karl Barth's thinking and thus were solidly in the neoorthodox school, they developed an American neoorthodoxy that had more social awareness than their European counterparts had.
Reinhold was more of an activist than Richard. Reinhold advocated a form of socialism and ran for office on the socialist ticket. A founding member of the Americans for Democratic Action, he was a pacifist. But when Hitler rose up in Nazi Germany, he switched his views and told Protestants to support military intervention. The goal of Christianity in society is not love as much as it is justice, because of the reality of sin and evil in the world.
Richard had different passions. In his writings he often emphasized the communal dimension of Christian livi ng. He also attacked the major denominations for their failure to challenge trends in American society and called for more prophetic voices to speak truth to the world.
But his best-known book, and the book that has influenced evangelicals as well as neoorthodox and liberal scholars, is Christ and Culture, a classic work about how the church interacts with society.
Niebuhr points out five different ways in which the Christian church has confronted culture:
1. Christ against Culture. In this approach Christians trv to divorce themselves from the world entirely. The Amish might be an example.
2. The Christ of Culture. In this approach Christians identify the faith with aspects of their environment.
3. Christ above Culture. In this approach, Christians try to
form a synthesis between eternal values and certain areas of society.
4. Christ and Culhire in Paradox. In this approach Christians may be active in the world but have little hope of accomplishing anything in it.
5. Christ the Transformer of Culture. In this approach Chris
tians try to shape the world to conform to the norms of Scripture and Christian tradition. It is this approach with which he sympathizes most. i |5 }
In different eras Christians have approached society in all these different ways. Sometimes they've had different approaches in the same era. For instance, in Reformation times, John Calvin worked in the city of Geneva to transform culture, following approach 5, while the Anabaptists shunned the world, following approach 1, and Martin Luther was somewhere in the middle.
Niebuhr called on Christians to understand the various approaches and appreciate the backgrounds from which they had been developed. He also challenged believers to think through their approaches, so they could work within society in a biblical manner, not just reacting to their culture in a knee-jerk way.
Christ and Culture has been foundational reading for scholars and other observers trying to make sense of Christianity in the United States over the last century. We've gone from Triumphalism early in the century, to withdrawal, to a quiescent civil religion, to militant involvement, to selective detachment, and back again.
In the 1980s another book on the same general subject had a substantial impact on Christian thinking— The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America by the Lutheran theologian Richard John Neuhaus (1984). Neuhaus wrote after the rise of the Moral Majority in America, and Niebuhr wrote before, but both are well worth reading.