Fluent Essays

tudents will write a review that 750 - 1000 word in length about one chapter in the Niebuhr textbook. Half will be summary and half will be the student’s personal reflection.  The reflection should include points that the student agrees and disagrees with Niebuhr about and why. CHRIST AND CULTURE To Reinie CHRIST AND CULTURE Copyright, 1 95 1 , 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 24 1 249 257 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, 1 949, 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. ACKNOWLED GMENTS 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 1 0, 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. H istorians 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. " H e 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 j ustice 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 j ustice 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 2 Ibid., p. 390. 3 Ibid., PP· 373-375. 4 CHRIST AND CULTURE '"two thousand years of non-Jewish Christianity have proved that the Jewish people did not err."4 Not all the Jews of his day rejected Jesus in the name of their culture, and two thousand years of non-Jewish Christianity and non-Christian Judaism may be appealed to in validation of many other propositions than that Jesus imperils culture; but it is evident that those two millennia have been full of wres­ tlings with j ust this problem. Not only Jews but also Greeks and Romans, medievalists and modems, Westerners and Orientals have rejected Christ because they saw in him a threat to their culture. The story of Graeco-Roman civilization's attack on the gospel forms one of the dramatic chapters in every history of Wes tern culture and of the church, though it is told too often in terms of politicai persecution only. Popular animosity based on social piety, literary polemics, philosophical objection, priestly re­ sistance, and doubtless economic defensiveness all played a part in the rejection of Christ, for the problem he raised was broadly cultural and not merely political. Indeed, the state was slower to take up arms against him and his disciples than were other institutions and groups.5 In modern times open conflict J has again arisen, not only as spokesmen of nationalistic and communistic societies but also as ardent champions of human­ istic and democratic civilizations have discerned in Christ a foe of cultural interests. The historical and social situations in which such rejections 4 Ibid., p. 391. 5 "Christianity's battle with the inner faith of the pagan masses, with the convictions of the leading spirits, was incomparably more difficult than was its wrestle with the power of the Roman state; the victory of the new faith was in consequence a far greater achievement than earlier times with their depreciation of paganism have assumed." Geffcken, Johannes, Der A usgang des Griechisch­ Roemischen Heidentums, 1920, p. 1. For other accounts of the conflict see Cam­ bridge Ancient History, Vol. XII, 1 939, and Cochrane, C. N., Christianity and Classical Culture, 1 940. THE ENDURING PROBLEM 5 of Jesus Christ have taken place have been extremely various; the personal and group motivations of opponents have been of many sorts; the philosophical and scientific beliefs which have been arrayed against Christian convictions have often been more sharply opposed to each other than to the convictions them­ selves. Yet in so far as the relation of Jesus Christ to culture is concerned considerable unanimity may be found among these. disparate critics. Ancient spiritualists and modern materialists, pious Romans who charge Christianity with atheism, and nine­ teenth century atheists who condemn its theistic faith, national­ ists and humanists, all seem to be offended by the same elements in the gospel and employ similar arguments in defending their culture against it. Prominent among these recurrent arguments is the conten­ tion that, as Gibbon states the Roman case, Christians are / "animated by a contempt for present existence and by confi­ dence in immortality."6 This two-edged faith has baffled and angered glorifiers of modern civilization as well as defenders of Rome, radical revolutionaries as well as conservers of the old order, believers in continuing progress and desponding antici­ pators of the decline of culture. It is not an attitude which can be ascribed to defective discipleship while the Master is excul­ pated, since his statements about anxiety for food and drink, about the unimportance of treasures on earth, and about fear of those who can take away life as well as his rejection in life and death of temporal power, make him the evident source of his followers' convictions. N either is it an attitude that can be dismissed as characteristic of some Christians only, such as those who believe in an early end of the world, or ultraspiritualists. It is connected with various views of history and with various 6 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Modern Library ed., Vol. I, P· 402. 6 CHRIST AND CULTURE ideas about the relations of spirit and matter. It is a baffiing attitude, because it--IDates what .seems like contempt for present existence with great concern for existing men, because it is not frightened by the prospect of doom on all man's works, because it is not despairing but confident. Christianity seems to threaten culture at this point not because it prophesies that of all human achievements not one stone will be left on another but because Christ enables men to regard this disaster with a certain equa­ nimity, directs their hopes toward another world, and so seems to deprive them of motivation to engage in the ceaseless labor of conserving a massive but insecure social heritage. Therefore a Celsus moves from attack on Christianity to an appeal to believers to stop endangering a threatened empire by their withdrawal from the public tasks of defense and reconstruction, The same Christian attitude, however, arouses Marx and Lenin to hostility because believers do not care enough about temporal existence to engage in all-out struggle for the destruction of an old order and the building of a new one. They can account for it only by supposing that Christian faith is a religious opiate used by the fortunate to stupefy the people, who should be well aware that there is no life beyond culture. Another common argument raised against Christ by his cul� tural antagonists of various times and persuasions is that he indu�es men to rely on the grace of God instead of summoning them to human achievement. What would have happened to the Romans, asks Celsus in effect, if they had followed the com­ mand to trust in God alone? Would they not have been left like the Jews, without a patch of ground to call their own, and would they not have been hunted down as criminals, like the Christians?7 Modem philosophers of culture, such as N ikolai 7 Origen, Contra Celsus, VIII, lxix (Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. IV, p. 666) . THE ENDURING PROBLEM 7 Hartmann, find in this God-reliance of faith an ultimate an­ tinomy to the ethics of culture with its necessary fOncentration on human effort. 8 Marxists, believing that men make history, regard trust in the grace of God a sleeping pill as potent as the hope of heaven. Democratic and humanistic reformers of society accuse Christians of "quietism," while popular wisdom ex­ presses its tolerant unbelief in grace by saying that God helps those who help themselves and that one must trust in H im but keep one's powder dry. A third count in the recurring cultural indictments of Christ and his church is that they are intolerant, though this charge is not as general as are the former accusations. It does not occur in the Communists' complaint, for it is not the obj ection which one intolerant belief raises against another but rather the dis­ approval with which unbelief meets conviction. Ancient Roman civilization, says Gibbon, was bound to rej ect Christianity j ust because Rome was tolerant. This culture, with its great diversity of customs and religions, could exist only if reverence and assent were granted to the many confused traditions and ceremonies of its constituent nations. Hence it was to be "expected that they would unite with indignation against any sect of people which should separate itself from the communion of mankind and claiming the exclusive possession of divine knowledge, should disdain every form of worship except its own as impious and idolatrous."9 Toward Jews, who held the same convictions as Christians about the gods and idols, Romans could be some­ what tolerant, because they were a separate nation with ancient traditions, and because they were content for the most part to live withdrawn from the social life. Christians, however, were members of Roman society, and in the midst of that society 2 Hartmann, Nikolai, Ethics, 1932, Vol. III, pp. 266 ff. 9 Op. cit., Vol. I, p. 446. 8 CHRIST AND CULTURE explicitly and implicitly expressed their scorn for the religions of the people. Hei:ce they appeared to be traitors who dissolved the sacred ties of custom and education, violated the religious institutions of their country, and presumptuously despised what their fathers had believed true and reverenced as sacred.10 We need to add that Roman tolerance, like modern democratic tolerance, had its limits just because it was carried out as a social policy for the sake of maintaining unity. Whatever re­ ligion man followed, homage to Caesar was eventually re­ quired.11 But Christ and Christians threatened the unity of the culture at both 'points with their radical monotheism, a faith in the one God that was very different from the pagan uni­ versalism which sought to unify many deities and many cults under one earthly or heavenly monarch. The political problem such monotheism presents to the exponents of a national or im­ perial culture has been largely obscured in modern times, but became quite evident in the anti-Christian and especially anti­ J ewish attacks of German national socialism.12 Divinity, it seems, must not only hedge kings but also other symbols of political power, and monotheism deprives them of their sacred aura. The Christ who will not worship Satan to gain the world's kingdoms is followed by Christians who will worship only Christ in unity with the Lord whom he serves. And this is intolerable to all defenders of society who are content that many gods should be worshipped if only Democracy or America or Ger­ many or the Empire receives its due, religious homage. The antagonism of modern, tolerant culture to Christ is of course often disguised because it does not call its religious practices 10 Ibid., p. 448. 1 1 Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. XII, pp. 409 ff.; 356 ff.; Cochrane, C. N., op. cit., pp. 1 1 5 ff. 12 Cf. Barth, Karl, The Church and the Political Problem of Our Day, 1 939; Hayes, Carlton J. H., Essays in Nationalism, 1933. THE ENDURING PROBLEM 9 religious, reserving that term for certain specified rites con­ nected with officially recognized sacred institutions; and also because it regards what it calls religion as one of many interests which can be placed alongside economics, art, science, politics, and techniques. Hence the objection it voices to Christian monotheism appears in such injunctions only as that religion should be kept out of politics and business, or that Christian faith must learn to get along with other religions. What is often meant is that not only the claims of religious groups but all consideration of the claims of Christ and God should be ban­ ished from the spheres where other gods, called valu�s, reign. The implied charge against Christian faith is like the ancient one : it imperils society by its attack on its religious life ; it de­ prives social institutions of their cultic, sacred character; by its refusal to condone the pious superstitions of to.lerant poly­ theism it threatens social unity. The charge lies not only against Christian organizations which use coercive means against what they define as false religions, but against the faith itself. Other points are frequently made in the attacks on Christ and Christianity by those who see in them the foes of culture. The forgiveness that Christ practices and teaches is said to be irreconcilable with the demands of justice or the free man's sense of moral responsibility. The injunctions of the Sermon on the Mount concerning anger and resistance to evil, oaths and marriage, anxiety and property, are found incompatible with the duties of life in society. Christian exaltation of the lowly offends aristocrats and Nietzscheans in one way, champions of the proletariat in another. The unavailability of Christ's wis­ dom to the wise and prudent, its attainability by the simple and by babes, bewilder the philosophical leaders of culture or excite their scorn. Though these attacks on Christ and Christian faith under- 10 CHRIST AND CULTURE score and bring into the open-often in bizarre forms-the nature of the issue, it is not defense against them that consti­ tutes the Christian problem. Not only pagans who have rejected Christ but believers who have accepted him find it difficult to combine his claims upon them with those of their societies. Struggle and appeasement, victory and reconciliation appear not only in the open where parties calling themselves Christian and anti-Christian meet; more frequently the debate about Christ and culture is carried on among Christians and in the hidden depths of the individual conscience, not as the struggle and accommodation of belief with unbelief, but as the wrestling and the reconciliation of faith with faith. The Christ and cul­ ture issue was present in Paul's struggle with the Judaizers and the Hellenizers of the gospel, but also in his effort to translate it into the forms of Greek language and thought. It appears in the early struggles of the church with the empire, with the re­ ligions and philosophies of the Mediterranean world, in its rejections and acceptances of prevailing mores, moral princi­ ples, metaphysical ideas, and forms of social organization. The Constantinian settlement, the formulation of the great creeds, the rise of the papacy, the monastic movement, Augustinian Platonism, and Thomistic Aristotelianism, the Reformation and the Renaissance, the Revival and the Enlightenment, liberalism and the Social Gospel-these represent a few of the many chap­ ters in the history of the enduring problem. It appears in many forms as well as in all ages; as the problem of reason and revela­ tion, of religion and science, of natural and divine law, of state and church, of nonresistance and coercion. It has come to view in such specific studies as those of the relations of Protestantism and capitalism, of Pietism and nationalism, of Puritanism and democracy, of Catholicism and Romanism or Anglicanism, of Christianity and progress. THE ENDURING PROBLEM 1 1 It is not essentially the problem of Christianity and civiliza­ tion; for Christianity, whether defined as church, creed, ethics, or movement of thought, itself moves between the poles of Christ and culture. The relation of these two authorities con­ stitutes its problem. When Christianity deals with the question of reason and revelation, what is ultimately in question is the relation of the revelation in Christ to the reason which prevails in culture. When it makes the effort to distinguish, contrast, or combine rational ethics with its knowledge of the will of God, it deals with the understanding of right and wrong developed in the culture and with good and evil as ill�minated by Christ. When the problem of loyalty to church or state is raised, Christ and cultural society stand in the background as the true objects of devotion. Hence, before we undertake to outline and to illustrate the main ways in which Christians have, dealt with their enduring problem, it is desirable that we seek to state what we mean by these two terms-Christ and culture. In doing this we shall need to exercise care lest we prejudge the issue by so defining one term or the other or both that only one of t:he Christian answers to be described will appear legitimate. II. TOWARD A DEFINITION OF CHRIST A Christian is ordinarily defined as "one who believes in Jesus Christ" or as "a follower of Jesus Christ." He might more adequately be described as one who counts himself as belonging to that community of men for whom Jesus Christ-his life, words, deeds, and destiny-is of supreme importance as the key to the understanding of themselves and their world, the main source of the knowledge of God and man, good and evil, the constant companion of the conscience, and the expected de­ liverer from evil. So great, however, is the variety of personal and communal "belief in Jesus Christ," so manifold the inter- 1 2 CHRIST AND CULTURE …