One Church-World Paradigm

Summary

The role of theologians in the Church is somewhat like that of research scientists in an industrial firm. It is the job of such scientists to further the projects and goals of the company as they are established by its president and board of directors. If a scientist decides to set policy and to abandon company goals, he is stepping out of his proper role and will soon find himself unemployed. In the same way, a theologian who denies official Church teaching is not fulfilling his role. On the other hand, world can be defined as the earth, together with all of its countries, peoples, and natural features.

Introduction

Few books have been used as broadly in Christian colleges and seminaries in the past half century as H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture. His five classic typologies of how Christ can relate to culture--Christ against culture, Christ in "paradox" with culture, and so on--have influenced two generations of Protestant and Catholic thinkers.

But in recent decades scholars have become aware that Niebuhr's typologies need to be rethought in light of changing circumstances. While Niebuhr wrote at a time when it was still possible to speak of Christendom, Christianity since that time has held less and less sway over American and European intellectuals and other shapers of culture. As such, Christianity has found itself increasingly marginalized. (Bonhoeffer 147)

Discussion

The most influential mapping of historical models for understanding Christianity and culture is H. Richard Niebuhr's classic Christ & Culture. The book is a minor theological classic, having influenced several generations of theologians with its five-fold typology. I'll give a very brief description of his definition of culture and his typology, after which I will provide an alternative which differs from the five he mentions.

Niebuhr begins by marking out the notion of culture. He writes, “What we have in view when we deal with Christ and culture is that total process of human activity and that total result of such activity to which now the name culture, now the name civilization, is applied in common speech. Culture is the 'artificial, secondary environment' which man superimposes on the natural. It comprises language, habits, ideas, beliefs, customs, social organization, inherited artifacts, technical processes, and values. This 'social heritage,' this 'reality sui generis,' which the New Testament writers frequently had in mind when they spoke of 'the world,' which is represented in many forms but to which Christians like other men are inevitably subject, is what we mean when we speak of culture.” (Benne 78)

After having defined culture he proceeds to list five ways of viewing the relationship between Christ and culture. First, he writes of the Christ against Culture model (he lists Tertullian, the Anabaptists, Tolstoy, etc., as historical proponents of this model), in which Christians are “against” culture or attempt to withdraw from the surrounding culture. Second, he describes the Christ of Culture model (Gnostics, Abelard, Locke, Schleiermacher, etc.), in which the proponents are very much at home in their cultural context, even to the point of ...