4
full flower. Christendom was alive and well in the United States of the 1950's and theologians
like H. R. Niebuhr felt a responsibility to write and act as a public theologian of an unofficial, yet
very influential, state church. To assume that what was good for America might not be good for
the church was unthinkable; the debate would be over whether it was good for America or not.
The strong call to cultural responsibility and the transformationist or conversionist vision played
extremely well in this context. For example, Paul Ramsey describes the effect that Christ and
Culture had after its publication in 1951:
. . . when Richard Niebuhr's book first appeared almost everyone in America
rushed to locate himself among the "transformationalists": naturalists, process
theologians, personalists, idealists, Lutherans and Anglicans who were sometimes
Thomists, as well as those you would have expected. It was as if the "typology"
or clustering of Christian approaches to man's work in culture and history had
suddenly collapsed in 1951, so universal was the conviction that, of course, the
Christian always joins in the transformation of the world whenever this is
proposed.
4
Liberal Protestantism, at the height of its cultural influence in North America viewed Christ and
Culture as a justification of it cultural leadership, as well as a call for it to continue.
We can see this in the way Niebuhr set up the book. He uses an ideal-typical method,
derived from Ernst Troeltsch, in order to view the history of Christian engagement of culture
through the lens of his five types. Here is a quick summary of the five types.
4
Paul Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience: How Shall Modern War Be Conducted Justly? (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1961), 112-3.