The starting point for any consideration of the priest’s role as an observer and interpreter of culture has to begin with H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, published in 1951¹. This was the definitive book on the subject, and remains the definitive book: as someone once said, books by theologians don’t remain in print, and they certainly don’t remain in print for fifty years. It is in short, a classic, which means that it “is a work of genius that a later culture must take into account once that work has had a chance to leave its marks.”² No wonder, as Glen Stassen has said, Christ and Culture:

is studied in graduate and undergraduate classes; it is required reading in courses in colleges, universities, and seminaries. It is used primarily not to introduce the theology of H. Richard Niebuhr, but to introduce a systematized representation of the various dominant forms of Christian belief. Often it serves as a basic text in the systematic study of Christian ethics, but more probably just as frequently as an orientation to Christian theology more generally.³

Niebuhr’s book had its origins in a lecture series given at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Texas in the autumn of 1949 (it is worth bearing in mind the political and social context in which Niebuhr was working, at the time of the original lectures and in the preparation of the book for publication in 1951. We’ll see the importance of context in the criticisms made of the book in later years.)

In the book Niebuhr presents a problem (the “enduring problem”) and five typologies with which the problem may be addressed. The problem is the relationship of what Niebuhr variously, and imprecisely, calls the “relations of Christianity and civilization” or “exponents of a Christian civilization and the non-Christian defenders of a wholly secularized society” or “the problem of human culture”⁴. Niebuhr eventually settles on the polarity which gives the book its title: “Culture” on the one hand, “Christ” on the other⁵. Recognising that in a work of typology, definitions are vital, Niebuhr sets out to give a working definition of his two terms. There is nothing definitive about his definitions: both sections of the opening chapter are tentatively titled “toward a definition of…”. Even so, for many of Niebuhr’s later critics, the definitions are part of the weakness of this thesis.

To begin with, simply, Niebuhr looks to define “Christ” by defining “Christian”: a Christian is someone:

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 deliverer from evil.⁶

So far, so comprehensive, it might seem. But Niebuhr recognises that there has been a innumerable variety in the working out and the living of this definition. Even so, he asserts that these workings out all have their origins in the single expression of who Jesus Christ was:

… this Jesus Christ is a definite person, one and the same whether he appears as a man of flesh and blood or as risen Lord. He 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… But there always remain the original portraits with which all later pictures may be compared and by which caricatures may be corrected. And in these original portraits he is recognizably one and the same.⁷

(Which seems to beg the question somewhat.)

For Niebuhr this fundamental unity in the original portraits of Christ can be seen most clearly in an examination of his various virtues. It is not enough, for Niebuhr, to say with religious liberalism that Jesus is love, for all the expressions of Jesus’s love are directed to and through God the Father: “Jesus Christ’s love of men was not merely an illustration of universal benevolence but a decisive act of divine Agape.” In other words, the only adequate way of describing Jesus’s possession and expression of the virtue of love is to say that “his love was that of the Son of God.”⁸ Similarly, although Jesus may be said to be an exemplar of hope (in eschatological interpretations), radical obedience (existentialist), faith and faithfulness (orthodox Protestantism), humility (monasticism), the Christ of the New Testament, for Niebuhr, may possess these virtues but he isn’t defined by them:

each of them [these virtues] is expressed in his conduct and teaching in a manner that seems extreme and disproportionate to secular, cultural wisdom. But he practices none of them and requires none of them of his followers otherwise than in relation to God.⁹

Each of the virtues may be understood as “due to that unique devotion to God and to that single-hearted trust in Him which can be symbolised by no other figure of speech so well as by the one which calls him Son of God.”¹⁰

We’ll look at what Niebuhr thinks finding meaning in Christ involves next time.

1. H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and culture, (New York, HarperSanFrancisco, [1951] 2001). [↩]
2. Martin E. Marty, Foreword to the fiftieth anniversary expanded edition of H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and culture, (New York, HarperSanFrancisco, [1951] 2001), p. xiii. [↩]
3. Glen H. Stassen (probably), ‘Preface’ to Glen H. Stassen, D. M. Yeager and John Howard Yoder, eds. Authentic Transformation: A New Vision of Christ and Culture (Nashville: Abbandun Press, 1996), p. 9. [↩]
4. Niebuhr, Christ and culture, p 1,2. [↩]
5. in the interests of strict accuracy, the book should have been titled, as we shall see, Christ and/or/instead/because of/above Culture [↩]
6. Niebuhr, Christ and culture, p. 11. [↩]
7. Niebuhr, Christ and culture, p. 13. [↩]
8. Niebuhr, Christ and culture, p. 18,19. [↩]
9. Niebuhr, Christ and culture, p. 19. [↩]
10. Niebuhr, Christ and culture, p. 27. [↩]