Christ and Culture (Torchbooks)

I didn't know anything about Niebuhr. I learned about him one day from a material maintaining that to shape your spirit you should start with a classic language (Latin or Greek); also for getting a large religious perspective, beyond any dogmatic seclusion, any parochial confinement, you should read Niebuhr.Actually there were two brothers Niebuhr; both of them were great theologians. They lived in the US and belonged to the Protestant Church. Reinhold Niebuhr was the most famous; but I started by buying a book of the other, H. Richard Niebuhr, for a very cheap reason (as I was completely ignorant on both brothers, I bought the cheapest book I found). It was a very small book, annotated on almost all pages. The annotations were in Chinese: the guy who had read the book before me was a Chinese. The book was Christ and Culture. I think it is one of the most important theology books I have read.Christ and Culture - you can think also at it as Faith and Culture: what is the relationship between them.Niebuhr considers five different types of Christ-Culture relationships (of course, nobody could be strictly framed in one type or another):1. Faith against Culture (Tolstoi) - faith denies culture, you should make the choice - the risk is that denying the culture can lead to denying the world, it means denying God's Creation - also denying culture is actually a cultural fact, which leads to paradox2. Faith framed in Culture (Jefferson, Renan) - faith is a cultural phenomenon, explained through cultural facts - it means that faith is rationalized - which leads to keeping from faith only the rational3. Faith and Culture in sync (St. Thomas Aquinas) - faith and culture do not deny one another (as it was in the first case) - they live in agreement - the elements of faith that cannot be explained rationally belong to the realm of Revelation4. Faith and Culture in paradox (Luther, Kierkegaard) - though faith and culture do not deny one another (as it was in the first case) they do not live in agreement (as it was in case 3) - any act beyond faith (it means any cultural act, even keeping God's commandments, even good deeds) is alien to faith, alien to God, because it fatally belongs to this world, so it is idolatry - the faithful has to realize this tragic paradox; there is no escape from culture as we have to live in this world - keeping faith is the only way to salvation (while living in the world)5. Faith transforming Culture (Calvin) - the faith should be used as a driving force in transforming the culture (the society), leading it towards DivinityLet me quote here a little bit from the foreword (written by Martin E. Marty): Augustine left us The Two Cities, Pascal left us the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Kierkegaard brought us the Either/Or - they polished the archetypes; we have in the twentieth century I and Thou (Martin Buber), The Nature and Destiny of Man (Reinhold Niebuhr) and Christ and Culture (H. Richard Niebuhr).I tried to read The Nature and Destiny of Man, but I was not in the mood - I should take it sometime later. I also started to read I and Thou, several times, I was too lazy. But Christ and Culture, I read it breathlessly.It's not my first theology book. I have read some books of the great Christian Orthodox theologians of the Twentieth century (Schmemann, Lossky, among others) and I could talk days in a row about them - about their rigor, about the beauty of Eastern Christianity, that I belong to. The book of Niebuhr is different, and maybe one should start with it, to read then Tillich, to continue then in his own ways, while free of any parochial closeness.

I'm somewhat split on this one--perhaps not surprising, given the topic of the book!<g>The scope of the book involves Niebuhr's attempts at identifying and categorizing five typologies of 'followers of Christ', with respect to their views concerning what it means to 'follow Christ' and what it means to live in the world. It's an ambitious project, and one which Niebuhr, more often than not, manages to carry off with aplomb, perception and wit.After explaining why he thinks the topic should be addressed, Niebuhr proceeds by attempting to define 'Christ' and 'culture' in ways which--theoretically--any of his typology groups would accept. This leads to his first problem, for Niebuhr's definition of Christ ends up carrying quite a lot of 'high christology' weight. Not that this bothers _me_ (being a conservative Christian), but when I read it I thought--hmmm, there are some people who try to follow Christ who aren't going to accept that sort of definition. Not surprisingly, when Niebuhr reached the second typology (the 'cultural protestants', i.e. the generally liberal revisionists whom even Niebuhr admits feel free to redefine Christ in terms of whatever they think is most popular in culture at the moment), the people whom he mentions as being part of that group would have either denied Niebuhr's definition of 'Christ', or else would have used the form of that definition while self-consciously and explicitly relegating the form to a nebulous cypher: 'insert your own meaning as you see fit'.This leads to the second major problem of the book. Niebuhr pretty obviously (and maybe even with a proper sense of charity) wants to grant some real and useful credit to the second typology group as being valid 'witnesses for Christ'. However, even Niebuhr can see (and admits) that they are not witnessing for Christ so much as importing and reshaping the figure of Christ as an authority to validate whatever the cultural focus-de-jour is. This disparity between Niebuhr's purpose and his data leads to numerous contradictions in that section.For instance, Niebuhr describes Albrecht Ritschl on one page as staying closer to the New Testament Christ than Kant; and then two pages later, Niebuhr explicitly admits that Ritschl's theology was Kantian, and describes it in such terms. Or, relatedly, Ritschl is described as staying closer to the NT than Jefferson and Kant; within the very same paragraph where Niebuhr describes Jefferson and Kant (and Schleirmacher) as 'religion within the limits of reason'--as distinct from Hegel, Emerson and Ritschl who (Niebuhr says) represent the movement toward 'the religion of humanity'. Ritschl is put into some strikingly odd groups for someone whom Niebuhr wants to present as staying particularly close to the NT accounts.The disparities of the second section (and there are many), culminate when Niebuhr quietly turns away from the pure subjectivity of the 'culture-prot' Christians, and presents them as if they were another type altogether: a type which really is seeking a true unity in "the tradition of culture", not artificially importing it in; a type which may actually be trying to use definitive characteristics of Jesus (whatever those are proposed--and cogently defended!--to be) to "discern" this "unity", rather than tossing away any definitive characteristics which happen not to fit the schema of the particular tradition of the particular culture in question. Niebuhr tacitly turns back to a typology which might possibly have real strength, and which really might accomplish something other than the instigation of an illusionary tautology. By Niebuhr's own admission (and by the tacit admission of the actual evidence he allows to be presented as to means and ends), the 'culture-prot' Christians cannot do this; so, to grant them some credit, Niebuhr must identify them purely by taxonomic convenience (so to speak) with the other culture-positive typologies, who _might_ really accomplish the goal of using "the aid of the knowledge of Christ... to discriminate between the spirits of the times and the Spirit which is from God."For certainly, the 'culture-prot' Christians, by holding the shape of the target culture as being the final standard for acceptance or rejection (or manufacture!) of data concerning Jesus, are by definition of their own methodology not discriminating between any kinds of spirits--except insofar as they discriminate between spirits of one time and another. If the 1st century Christians could manufacture a "wonderworking supernatural hero", then we can manufacture whatever kind of Jesus _we_ want. Right?No. We _can_ perhaps do that; but we should not. I have more respect for those "cultured despisers of religion" who have concluded that the early Christians were fairy-tale mongers, and consequently refuse to consider _any_ statement concerning Jesus as being more than a wish-fulfillment gloss (even modern apostate statements); than for those revisionists whose strategy is a conscious embracement of wish-fulfillment illusion. One of these groups might not be blaspheming, in the end, against the Holy Spirit; but one of them definitely is, even if the shape of Jesus they end up with seems to speak in favor of the Son of Man.However, despite the deep problems with Niebuhr's attempt to make his second typology work within his thesis, I do think that he manages to say some internally consistent things about the other four groups (though he verges close on the edge of useless parody in his discussion of the exclusivists). His mis-analysis of the second typology is so out-of-place with the rest of his book, that it sticks out in my mind like a tumor on a generally healthy nose. Or, to put it another way: the rest of his book may not be perfect, but compared to that section on his second typology group, it looks like a masterwork.At any rate, despite the severe intrinsic weaknesses of that one section, I do recommend the book as an otherwise balanced and comparative look at strengths and weaknesses among artificially (but somewhat usefully) distinguished classes of Christians and our attempts to deal both with Christ and the cultures around us.

This book is dated, but the themes can be still relevant today, although controversially.

A good read if a little dated now - but the truths still apply

The classic, and worth rereading, though it does seem dated in places.