CHRIST AND CULTURE

CHRIST AND CULTURE

To Reinie

CHRIST AND CULTURE

Copyright, 1951 , by Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporate.ct, Printed in the United States of America

All rights in this book are reserved. No part of the book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written per­ mission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address:

Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. , 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N. Y. 10022.

First HARPER TORCHBOOK edition published 1956

CONTENTS FOREWORD ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

]. The Enduring Problem I. THE PROBLEM

II. TOW ARD A DEFINITION OF CHRIST

III. TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF CULTURE

IV. THE TYPICAL ANSWERS

2. Cbrist Against Culture I. THE NE’V PEOPLE AND

” THE WORLD

”

II. TOLSTOY ‘ S REJECTION OF CULTURE

III. A NECESSARY AND INADEQUATE POSITION

IV. THEOLOGICAL PROBLEMS

3. Tbe Cbrist of Culture

ix xi

1 11 29 39

I. ACCOMMODATION TO CULTURE IN GNOSTICISM AND ABELARD 83 II.

” CULTURE-PROTESTANTISM

” AND A. RITSCHL 91

III. IN DEFENSE OF CULTURAL FAITH I 0 I IV. THEOLOGICAL OBJECTIONS 108

4. Christ Above Culture I. THE CHURCH OF THE CENTER

II. THE SYNTHESIS OF CHRIST AND CULTURE

III. SYNTHESIS IN QUESTION

5. Christ and Culture in Paradox I. THE THEOLOGY OF THE DUALISTS

II. THE DUALISTIC MOTIF IN PAUL AND MARCION n1. DUALISM IN LUTHER AND MODERN TIMES lV. THE VIRTUES AND VICES OF DUAI.ISM

vii

116 120 141

viii CONTENTS

6. Christ the Transformer of Culture I. THEOLOGICAL CONVICTIONS

II. THE CONVERSION MOTIF IN THE FOURTH GOSPEL

III. AUGUSTINE AND THE CONVERSION OF CULTURE

IV. THE VIEWS OF F. D. MAURICE

7. A “Concluding Unscientific Postscript” I. CONCLUSION IN DECISION

II. THE RELATIVISM OF FAITH

III. SOCIAL EXISTENTIALISM

IV. FREEDOM IN DEPENDENCE

Index

230 234 241 249

257

FOREWORD

The present volume makes available in print and in expanded form the series of lectures which Professor H. Richard Niebuhr gave at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in January, 1949, on the Alumni Foundation. This lectureship was inaugurated in 1 945. Since that time the Seminary has had the privilege of present­ ing to its students and alumni at the time of the midwinter convoca­ tions the reflections of leading Christian thinkers on important issues and, in part, of stimulating the publication of these refl.ec� tions for the benefit of a wider audience.

The men and their subjects have been:

1945-Ernest Trice Thompson, Christian Bases of World Order 1946-Josef Lukl Hromadka, The Church at the Crossroads 1947-Paul Scherer, The Plight of Freedom 1948-D. Elton Trueblood, Alternative to Futility 194g-H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture 1950–Paul Minear, The Kingdom and the Power 1951 -G. Ernest Wright, God Who Acts

Dr. Niebuhr makes a distinguished contribution in this dear and incisive study in Christian Ethics.

Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Austin, Texas

DAVID L. Srrrr, President.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The following essay on the double wrestle of the church with its Lord and with the cultural society with which it lives in symbiosis represents part of the result of many years of study, reflection and teaching. The immediate occasion for the organization and written composition of the material was offered by the invitation of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary to deliver and to publish a series of lectures on the subject. Back of the efforts to condense my observations and reflections into five lectures and then again to refine and elaborate them in the revision lie many other attempts at comprehension and organization of the complex data. Directly antecedent to the Austin lectures were courses in the history and the types of Christian ethics which I offered to students of the Divinity School of Yale University.

“When a work has been so long in preparation the debts accumu­ lated by the author are so many and so great that public acknowl­ edgment is embarrassing since it must reveal his lack of adequate gratitude as well as of adequate ability to appropriate the gifts that have been offered him. There are reflections in this book which I regard as the fruits of my own effort to understand but which, nevertheless, are in reality ideas which I have appropriated from others. Some of my former students, should they read these pages, will be able to say at this or that point, “This is a fact or an inter­ pretation to which I called my teacher’s attention,” but they will look in vain for the footnote in which due credit is given. Fellow students who have written on related subjects will be in the same situation. Yet there is more pleasure than embarrassment in acknowledging this unspecified indebtedness to members of that wide community in which all know that none possesses anything that he has not received and that as we have freely received so we may freely give.

I am most conscious of my debt to that theologian and historiar;. xi

xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

who was occupied throughout his life by the problem of church and culture-Ernst Troeltsch. The present book in one sense un­ dertakes to do no more than to supplement and in part to correct his work on The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches. Troeltsch has taught me to respect the multiformity and individu­ ality of men and movements in Christian history, to be loath to force this rich variety into prefashioned, conceptual molds, and yet to seek logos in mythos, reason in history, essence in existence. He has helped me to accept and to profit by the acceptance of the relativity not only of historical objects but, more, of the historical subject, the observer and interpreter. If I think of my essay as an effort to correct Troeltsch’s analyses of the encounters of church and world it is mostly because I try to understand this historical relativism in the light of theological and theo-centric relativism. I believe that it is an aberration of faith as well as of reason to absolutize the finite but that all this relative history of finite men and movements is under the governance of the absolute God. Isaiah 10, I Corinthians 1 2 and Augustine’s City of God indicate the con­ text in which the relativities of history make sense. In the analysis of the five main types which I have substituted for Troeltsch’s three, I have received the greatest help from Professor Etienne Gilson’s Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages, as well as fruitful sug­ gestions from C. J. Jung’s Psychological Types.

Many colleagues, relatives, and friends have helped me with coun­ sel, criticism, and encouragement in the course of the effort to give my reflections the unity and precision which written communication demands in the measure that the complexity of the data and the ability of the worker permit. ! record niy special thanks to my col­ leagues, Professors Paul Schubert and Raymond Morris, to my sister and brother, Professors Hulda and Reinhold Niebuhr, to Mr. Dud­ ley Zuver of Harper & Brothers, at whose suggestion the last chapter was added, to my daughter and to Mrs. Dorothy Ansley who assisted with the typescript, to Professor Edwin Penick, who gave most care­ ful attention to proof sheets and supplied the index, and to my wife. I recollect with gratitude the kindly reception given me at Austin by President Stitt and his colleagues and the part they played in helping me to bring this work to its present, tentative conclusion.

New Haven, Connecticut H. RICHARD NIEBUHR

C H A P T E R I

� The Enduring Problem

I. THE PROBLEM

A many-sided debate about the relations of Christianity and civilization is being carried on in our time. Historians and theologians, statesmen and churchmen, Catholics and Protes­ tants, Christians and anti-Christians participat.e in it. It is carried on publicly by opposing parties and privately in the con­ flicts of conscience. Sometimes it is concentrated on special issues, such as those of the place of Christian faith in general education or of Christian ethics in economic life. Sometimes it deals with broad questions of the church’s responsibility for social order or of the need for a new separation of Christ’s fol­ lowers from the world.

The debate is as confused as it is many-sided. When it seems that the issue has been clearly defined as lying between the exponents of a Christian civilization and the non-Christian defenders of a wholly secularized society, new perplexities arise as devoted believers seem to make common cause with secular­ ists, calling, for instance, for the elimination of religion from public education, or for the Christian support of apparently anti-Christian political movements. So many voices are heard, so many confident but diverse assertions about the Christian answer to the social problem are being made, so many issues

2 CHRiST AND CULTURE

are raised, that bewilderment and uncertainty beset many Christians.

In this situation it is helpful to remember that the question of Christianity and civilization is by no means a new one; that Christian perplexity in this area has been perennial, and that the problem has been an enduring one through all the Chris­ tian centuries. It is helpful also to recall that the repeated struggles of Christians with this problem have yielded no single Christian answer, but only a series of typical answers which together, for faith, represent phases of the strategy of the mili­ tant church in the world. That strategy, however, being in the mind of the Captain rather than of any lieutenants, is not under the control of the latter. Christ’s answer to the problem of human culture is one thing, Christian answers are another; yet his followers are assured that he uses their various works in ac­ complishing his own. It is the purpose of the following chapters 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 neces­ sary conflicts.

The enduring problem evidently arose in the days of Jesus Christ’s humanity when he who “was a Jew and . . . remained a Jew till his last breath”1 confronted Jewish culture with a hard challenge. Rabbi Klausner has described in modern terms how the problem of Jesus and culture must have appeared to the Pharisees and Sadducees, and has defended their repudiation of the Nazarene on the ground that he imperiled Jewish civiliza-

1 Klausner, Joseph, Jesus of Nazareth, p. 368.

THE ENDURING PROBLEM 3 tion. Though Jesus was a product of that culture, so that there is not a word of ethical or religious counsel in the gospels which cannot be paralleled in ] ewish writings, says Klausner, yet he endangered it by abstracting religion and ethics from the rest of social life, and by looking for the establishment by divine power only of a “kingdom not of this world.” “Judaism, how­ ever, is not only religion and it is not only ethics : it is the sum­ total of all the needs of the nation, placed on a religious basis . . . . Judaism is a national life, a life which the national religion and human ethical principles embrace without engulfing. Jesus came and thrust aside all the requirements of the national life . . . . In their stead he set up nothing but an ethico-religious system bound up with hj.s conception of the Godhead.”2 Had he undertaken to reform the religious and national culture, elim­ inating what was archaic in ceremonial and civil law, he might haYe been a great boon to his society; but instead/of reforming culture he ignored it. “He did not come to enlarge his nation’s knowledge, art and culture, but to abolish even such culture as it possessed, bound up with religion.” For civil justice he substi­ tuted the command to nonresistance, which must result in the loss of all social order; the social regulation and protection of family life he replaced with the prohibition of all divorce, and with praise of those who “made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake” ; instead of manifesting interest in labor, in economic and political achievement, he recommended the unanxious, toilless life exemplified by birds and lilies; he ignored even the requirements of ordinary distributive justice when he said, “Man, who has made me a judge or divider over you?” Hence, Klausner concludes, “Jesus ignored everything concerned with material civilization : in this sense he does not belong to civilization.”3 Therefore his people rejected him; and