Christ and Culture: exploring an important topic in conversation with H. Richard Niebuhr

This past weekend in my message, “Approaching Authority with Need,” I turned to the unique passage where Nehemiah approaches King Artaxerxes (Nehemiah 2:1-10) with his heartbroken desire, birthed in prayer, to return to his peoples’ land to rebuild and repair the walls of Jerusalem as part of a larger project of restoring his people. I recognize that Nehemiah has a specific calling in a specific time for a specific work of the return from exile. That being said, I believe this episode of Scripture also points us toward some unique ways that the church and Christians today engage with the culture and world around us.

Behind many contemporary discussions of cultural engagement stands the pivotal theological work Christ and Culture by H. Richard Niebuhr published in 1951. Niebuhr, younger brother to famed theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (sometimes knows as President Obama’s favorite theologian), taught for decades at Yale Divinity School, largely in the domain of Christian theological ethics. The typology H. Richard Niebuhr developed within Christ and Culture is so influential that it is the starting point for nearly every discussion of how Christian cultural engagement should proceed, even when a writer’s agenda may take issue with it.

Here is a summary of Niebuhr’s typology:

1. Christ Against Culture – Sometimes called a withdrawal model, Niebuhr refers to this as the “new law” type, where the church stands against the culture. Examples of this type are Benedictine monasticism and the Quakers.
2. The Christ of Culture – Sometimes called an accommodationist model, Niebuhr refers to this as the “natural law” type, where the church assimilates to the culture. This stands at the opposite side of the spectrum from the ‘Christ Against Culture’ type. Niebuhr offers Clement of Alexandria and 20th century German liberal theology as examples of this type.
3. Christ Above Culture – One of three “median” types between types (1) and (2), this is sometimes called a synthetic model, while Niebuhr refers to it as the “architectonic” type, highlighting ways that the good in culture described in natural law must be built upon by the good revealed in the new law of Christ. St. Thomas Aquinas and Roman Catholic theology following his approach serve as examples of this type.
4. Christ and Culture in Paradox – A second of three “median types,” this is sometimes called a dualistic model, while Niebuhr refers to it as the oscillatory type in which Christians live simultaneously in two different kingdoms, the sacred and the secular. Niebuhr offers Martin Luther and his own brother, Reinhold Niebuhr, as examples of this type.
5. Christ the Transformer of Culture – The third of three “median types,” Niebuhr himself called this the conversionist type, which seeks to transform every part of culture with Christ. While close the type (1), Niebuhr writes: “it makes the gospel its point of departure, but the function of the gospel is not conceived to be the establishing of a new society so much as the conversion of existing society” (liv).

Tim Keller, who served for decades as a pastor in New York City, engages with Niebuhr’s typology of cultural engagement in his notable work Center Church, pointing out the twofold value of models like that of Niebuhr. First, “each of the models has running through it a motif or guiding biblical truth that helps Christians relate to culture” and second, “the use of models helps us…by their very inadequacy” (Center Church 195). That is, Niebuhr’s typology clarifies themes while also showing us the limits of such models. Keller goes on to provide his own model of cultural engagement around four themes (194-217):

1. The Transformational Model
2. The Relevance Model
3. Counterculturalist Model
4. Two Kingdoms Model

Keller is not alone in engaging with Niebuhr’s typology. In his seminal work To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, James Davison Hunter critiques Niebuhr’s typology before providing his own tentative non-framework around three distinct understandings of the world: “defensive against,” “relevance to,” and “purity from” (To Change the World 213-218). Theologian and Biblical scholar, D. A. Carson, penned a book on this theme with his own distinct critique and framework entitled Christ and Culture Revisited, as did theologian Craig Carter in his similarly titled book, Rethinking Christ and Culture: A Post-Christendom Perspective.

In my opinion, what is most important about Niebuhr’s typology, as well as those others mentioned here, is the way it helps us recognize there are different approaches to engaging culture that churches and Christians might take. Taking the effort to recognize our own default (and perhaps unconsidered) approach to cultural engagement, while also seeking to understand other approaches, is invaluable. While the typology inevitably breaks down and we can argue about the validity of different approaches, the discussion around these somewhat diverse approaches is informative and illuminating in itself.