H. Richard Niebuhr

Helmut Richard Niebuhr (1894-1962) was an American Christian ethicist best known for his 1951 book Christ and Culture and his 1960 book Radical Monotheism and Western Culture. The younger brother of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Richard Niebuhr taught for several decades at Yale Divinity School. A prominent ecumenical theologian, Niebuhr devoted much time to issue of the relationship of the unity of God to the disunity and pluralism in religion. He is considered a neo-orthodox theologian, critical of the Social Gospel movement radicals who appeared to have lost their faith. His crowning work on Christian ethics, The Responsible Self (1963) was published after his death, and never received the exposure it deserved because the secularization and radicalization of Christian theology in the 1960s took center stage in America amidst the Vietnam War.

Life

Niebuhr was raised in Missouri, the son of Gustav Niebuhr, a minister in the Evangelical Synod of North America who had immigrated from Germany. He attended Elmhurst College" and Eden Theological Seminary. He was ordained a minister in the Evangelical Synod in 1916. (The Synod merged in 1934 with the Reformed Church in America; the subsequently formed Evangelical and Reformed Church united in 1957 with the Congregational Christian Churches to form the United Church of Christ.) He taught at Eden Theological Seminary from 1919 to 1922 and managed to earn a master's degree at Washington University in St. Louis during this time. In the summer of 1921 he studied at the University of Chicago where he was influenced by the social psychology and philosophy of George Herbert Mead.

In 1920 H. Richard Niebuhr married Florence Marie Mittendorf and later had two children. His son, Richard Reinhold later bacame a professor of theology at Harvard Divinity school.

As a native speaker of German with theological and philosophical training, he was sought by Yale to translate works of German writers. From 1922-1924 Niebuhr studied full time at Yale Divinity School and earned his Ph.D. His doctoral thesis was on "Ernst Troeltsch's Philosophy of Religion." Troeltsch was a prominent German scholar whose works The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, and The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions were not yet accessible in English. translated He taught at Yale from 1931 to 1962, specializing in theology and Christian ethics. Niebuhr continued to address the issues raised by Troeltsch throughout is life.

Niebuhr was invited to remain at Yale to teach, but returned to Elmhurst College to become its president. The college grew and was accredited under his tenure. In 1927 he returned to teaching at Eden Theological Seminary, where he published his first book, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929) in which he showed how the various Christian denominations in America were shaped by the various nations and cultures of Europe. He began to work towards reform that could overcome these differences and develop Christian unity. In 1930 he spent a sabbatical leave in Germany and made a side trip to Stalin's Russia. He studied the "German Realists" Karl Barth and Paul Tillich and was forced to juxtapose continental thought and the prevailing Social Gospel idealism in the United States.

In 1931, Niebuhr finally accepted his standing invitation to teach theology at Yale, where he spent the rest of his career teaching theology and Christian ethics. He translated and published Paul Tillich's The Religious Situation (1932). While an influential writer at Yale, Niebuhr remained primarily a teacher of church ministers helping them to guide church members to reconcile their Christain faith with a largely secular culture.

In 1960 Niebuhr was invited to give the Robertson lectures at the University of Glasgow, and he repeated them at Cambridge University and the University of Bonn. As he was preparing for retirement in 1963, he died suddenly on July 5, 1962, unable to produce his planned comprehensive exposition of ethics. However, we have a glimpse of what he was planning thanks to the work of his son Richard and colleague James Gustafson who assembled and published pieces which had been written.

Teachings

As the world situation deteriorated in the 1930s, he increasingly voiced concern that religious people were too influenced by cultural fads and not adequately grounded in the Christian faith. In The Church Against

Niebuhr was concerned throughout his life with the absolute sovereignty of God and the issue of historical relativism. He considered Karl Barth and Ernst Troeltsch to be his main influences. He accepted from Barth and neo-orthodoxy the absolute transcendence of God. He believed that God is above history, that he makes commands upon the human being, and that all history is under the control of this God. Niebuhr borrowed often from Paul Tillich's notion of God. He was comfortable describing God as Being-itself, the One, or the Ground of Being. In this regard, Niebuhr held a middle ground between the dogmatic conservativism of Karl Barth and the liberal theology of Paul Tillich.

Niebuhr was also concerned with historical relativism. While God may be absolute and transcendent, human beings are not. Humans are a part of the flux and movement of the world. Because of this, the ways in which God is apprehended are never permanent. God is always understood differently by people at different times in history and in different social locations. Niebuhr's theology shows great sensitivity to the ways in which expressions of faith differ from one religious community to another.

Niebuhr was, by training, a Christian ethicist. In this capacity, his biggest concern was the way in which human being relate to God, to each other, to the communities they are a part of, and to the world. Niebuhr's theological ethics can be described as a relational. His greatest ethical treatise is "The Responsible Self", published shortly after his death. It was intended to be the seed of a much larger book on Ethics which was never written due to his sudden death. In "The Responsible Self", Niebuhr deals with the human as a responding agent. Humans are always "in response" to some influence, whether God, another human being, a community, the natural order or history, or their self.

His most famous work is "Christ and Culture." It is often referenced in discussions and writings on a Christian's response to the world around him. In the book, Niebuhr gives a history of how Christianity has responded to culture. he outlines five prevalent viewpoints: Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ transforming culture.

Works

• The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929)
• The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry (1956)
• The Kingdom of God in America (1937)
• The Meaning of Revelation (1941)
• Christ and Culture (1951)
• Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (1960)
• The Responsible Self (1962)
• Faith on Earth: An Inquiry into the Structure of Human Faith (1989).

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