(mini)Book Review: "Christ and Culture"

Over the break, I read "Christ and Culture" by Richard Niebuhr. As you can tell from the blog, I've been going a little "old school" in my leisure reading lately. This book is copyrighted in 1956.

Niebuhr tries to establish a framework that can be used to think about how Christians have approached their involvement with culture (which he defines, in part, as human achievement). He admits the weaknesses of putting various thinkers into one category (even though they might be more of a mix of two or more of the categories), but the hope is that it will give the reader a structure to work with (or you might think of it as giving the reader bones on which to hang the proverbial meat). So here's a rundown of the five categories and the examples he uses:

1. Christ Against Culture: Tertullian, Tolstoy, Quakers (Niebuhr includes an interesting quote from Tertullian: "[T]he Christian does everything with a difference; not because he has a different law, but because he knows grace and hence reflects grace; not because he must distinguish himself, but because he does not need to distinguish himself.")
   
2. Christ of Culture: Gnostics, Ritschl
   
3. Christ Above Culture: Clement of Alexandria (God "admonishes us to use, but not to linger and spend time, with secular culture"), Thomas Aquinas, Joseph Butler, Roger Williams,
   
4. Christ and Culture in Paradox(A Christian "is under law, and yet not under law but grace; he is sinner, and yet righteous; he believes, as a doubter...): the Apostle Paul, Marcion, Luther, Kierkegaard
   
5. Christ the Transformer of Culture: John (the writer of the gospel), Augustine, F.D. Maurice

I thought the framework Niebuhr lays out is a useful one. The language is a little dense sometime and I honestly didn't recognize all the theologians he names, but if the subject interests you, I would still recommend the book. It is comforting to know that people have been the same things I have been thinking about for centuries. This is just a general overview, I'll post more thoughts next time.