Niebuhr set out in his book, Christ and Culture, five types or solutions to what he called the “enduring problem” of the relationship of Christ and Culture.

The first type described is “Christ against Culture”, what Yoder later glossed as “radical tension”.  Here the apparent New Testament contrast between “the Church” and “the World” is emphasised, with true followers of Christ called to remove themselves from a corrupt and corrupting culture. The world is rejected and a new order is to be followed. Individual exemplars of this attitude are Tertullian and Tolstoy: group exemplars include early monasticism, Mennonites (to the later ire of John Howard Yoder) and, to a lesser extent, the Society of Friends.

The second type, “Christ of Culture,” describes the way in which Christ has been proclaimed as the embodiment of all that is noble and desirable in humanity and human culture: in this type Jesus is also the “Messiah of their society, the fulfiller of its hopes and aspirations, the perfecter of its true faith, the source of its holiest spirit.”¹ Historical exemplars of this attitude include the Christian Gnostics Basilides and Valentinus, Peter Abelard, and the eighteenth-century rationalists such as John Locke, and Immanuel Kant. The group exemplar is best represented by the “Cultural Protestantism” of nineteenth century Germany (and Niebuhr presents a defence of culture faith which was counter-cultural for his times).

These first two type are the extremes of Niebuhr’s typology. He assigns the last three to a median type, in which there is a common goal “to maintain the great differences between the two principles and in undertaking to hold them together in some unity”, what he calls “the church of the centre”².

The third type, “Christ above Culture,” refuses to accept the polarities of the first type and the simple accommodationism of the second. Instead its proponents approach the problem not as if it were a simple either/or but a more nuanced both/and. There is a synthesis between Christ and culture, analogous to the synthesis between the dual natures in Christ himself. The synthesist “affirms both Christ and culture [as] one who knows that the Christ who requires his loyalty is greater and more complex in character than the easier reconciliations [Type 1] envisage.” The same is true for the synthesist’s relationship to culture: “both divine and human in its origin, both holy and sinful, a realm of both necessity and freedom, and one to which both reason and revelation apply.”³ Historically, synthesis is represented by the early apologists such as Justin Martyr, and Clement of Alexandria, but most completely by Aquinas. Hence, the group exemplar is the fullness of the Catholic tradition.

The next solution to the problem, “Christ and Culture in Paradox”,  Niebuhr labels “dualist”: not in the sense of a Manichean reading of the relationship between the material and spiritual worlds, but in the sense of wanting to provide a both/and answer to the problem. Niebuhr identifies proponents as dualists for the way they recognize the reality of both law and grace, wrath and mercy, revelation and reason, time and eternity. Despite (or because?) recognising the fallen nature of culture, as a product of man’s fallen nature, these dualist Christians recognised as well that they need to live within both realities: law and grace, wrath and mercy and so on. The dualist:

is under the law, and yet not under law but grace; he is a sinner, and yet righteous; he believes, as a doubter; he has assurance of salvation, yet walks along the knife-edge of insecurity. In Christ all things have become new, and yet everything remains as it was from the beginning.⁴

This is a tension, but it is a creative and an affirming tension, for the dualist asserts that this world is the world we have and the world made, in its origins by God:

… the dualist knows that he belongs to that culture and cannot get out of it, that God sustains him in it and by it; for if God in His grace did not sustain the world in its sin it would not exist for a moment.⁵

Individual and group exemplars of this type are Martin Luther and the Lutheran Christians. But this is not an ultimately convincing solution to the problem, for, as Niebuhr did not point out, but should have, paradoxes are contradictions you like, and a solution cannot be ultimately based upon preferences.

The final type, “Christ the Transformer of Culture” is Niebuhr’s preferred solution to the problem; what John Howard Yoder has called the synthesis of syntheses. The ‘conversionist’ (according to Gorringe) is the clear-eyed realist. He recognizes the implications of creation, atonement and redemption, and the possibility that culture may have some part to play in humankind moving from sinful self-centeredness to Christ-centeredness. Niebuhr claims Augustine (“without the anti-Pelagian treatises”⁶), John Calvin, and (bizarrely) F. D. Maurice as examples of this type. The conversionist is seen “not to reject the cultural tradition he has inherited, but to transvalue it, to redirect, reinvigorate and regenerate it.”⁷

What these five solutions mean today, we will look at in the next post.

1. Niebuhr, Christ and culture, p. 83. [↩]
2. Niebuhr, Christ and culture, p. 41, 116. [↩]
3. Niebuhr, Christ and culture, p. 121. [↩]
4. Niebuhr, Christ and culture, p. 157. [↩]
5. Niebuhr, Christ and culture, p. 156. [↩]
6. Gorringe, Furthering humanity, p. 15. [↩]
7. Gorringe, Furthering humanity, p. 15. [↩]