The Paradox of Church and World: Selected Writings of H. Richard Niebuhr

2015

General Introduction:

Reexamining H. Richard Niebuhr

The ancient Christian paradox of church and world is one with which Helmut Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962) wrestled deeply, and often profoundly, over the course of his career as a prominent twentieth-century American theologian. Long before him, St. Luke demonstrated his awareness of it in his two-volume New Testament account of the life of Jesus and the early Christian church. More specific insights surfaced in the second-century Epistle to Diognetus, which asserted that nowhere do Christians live in cities of their own or practice an eccentric way of life[1] because, as the church father Tertullian (155–240) put it in addressing the provincial governors of the Roman Empire, they sojourn with you in the world, abjuring neither forum, nor shambles, nor bath, nor booth, nor workshop, nor inn, nor weekly market, nor any other places of commerce.[2] Perhaps the best source for this paradox, however, has always been the Gospel of St. John, where Jesus prays to his Father on behalf of his disciples, They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world (John 17:16-18 nrsv). On the basis of this text, Christians have tended to believe that as the Son of God, Jesus, who was not of the world, came into the world to reveal the truth about God. While here, he called disciples out of the world they were in, only to send them back into it for the purpose of carrying on the same saving mission for which he had come.

As the body of Christ, the church, therefore, is always to be in but not of the world. While the steps in this process of reasoning are logical ones, the concluding idea that it yields is not. To be in the world and at the same time not of the world are seemingly contradictory notions. Yet because both are in fact true, they form a paradox, two truths about the church that must be dynamically kept in tension with each other as it engages the world into which its Lord continues to send it.

H. Richard Niebuhr’s insights into this paradox are reflected in the three major works for which he is still remembered. The first was published in 1929 as The Social Sources of Denominationalism. While it employed sociological analysis in order to explain the multitude of denominational divisions in American Protestantism, this book was also an exposé of a church that had repeatedly become of the world into which it had been sent. To him, it made no difference whether one looked at denominations in terms of class, region, nation, immigrant origins, or racial identity. All of them of were guilty of worldly accommodation.

His second major work, which came off the press in 1937, put greater emphasis on the opposite side of the paradoxical relationship between church and world. In The Kingdom of God in America, he combed through the records of America’s religious past in search of places where faith in God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit had altered the surrounding world in which its churches had been at work. In the process, the book succeeded not only in bringing the Puritans, Jonathan Edwards, and the later evangelical revivalists out of the dark cellar to which secular historians had relegated them, but in helping encourage a subsequent generation of religious historians to give more extensive attention to the role of their theology in the shaping of American culture. Here he also chose to depict the church’s relationship to the world as a dialectical movement that was expressed in the direction toward God and the direction toward the world which is loved in God, in the pilgrimage toward the eternal kingdom and in the desire to make his will real on earth.[3]

Appearing in 1951, his book Christ and Culture outlined five distinct Christian attitudes toward the world. Between the two extremes of worldly (Christ of culture) and separatist (Christ against culture) types of behavior on the part of the church, he placed three mediating varieties, all of which sought to keep the church in its in-but-not of relationship with the world. The synthesist type (Christ above culture) commended the world for its civilized achievements, but still needed the church to point it to a godly center of value. The dualist type (Christ and culture in paradox) vested Christians with a double citizenship and called upon them to give allegiance to the church and to the state in each of these two kingdoms. For the conversionist type (Christ the transformer of culture), the entire world, while corrupted by human sinfulness, remained the one sphere of divine activity, and for this reason proponents saw the church’s mission as one aiding of its redemption by calling upon societies as well as individuals to turn away from their idolatries and to make God the focus of their faith. Frequent references to one or more of these same five categories on the part of contemporary church leaders and scholars seeking to explain the Christianity’s present or past relationship to a particular society clearly attest to the enduring value of this important book.

My own interest in this important feature of H. Richard Niebuhr’s thinking exceeds the span of a church career that has taken me from seminary teaching to two parish pastorates, to a judicatory leadership position, and then back to adjunct teaching in another seminary setting. In the historiography course my graduate school program required me to take, the professor called upon me to write a paper comparing the work of Ernst Troeltsch and Niebuhr. I am still grateful for this assignment because it set the table for a doctoral dissertation that involved me in a closer examination of those features of Niebuhr’s life that helped to shape his interpretations of America’s religious history. My own religious upbringing served to pique my interest in researching his early years in the Evangelical Synod of North America, a small church body similar to my own Midwestern Lutheran denomination in terms of its German immigrant origins. Along the way, I even discovered that the religious lineage of my paternal grandfather, George W. Diefenthaler, was in fact German Evangelical. The fact that he was born on July 4, 1878 and given the middle name Washington by his parents, moreover, has led me to believe that my grandfather’s family was as eager as Niebuhr’s to embrace the new world of America that had become their home. In my dissertation, I argued that over the course of his career, Niebuhr explored all five of the church-world relationship types that he ultimately set forth in Christ and Culture. With the assistance of Professor Timothy Smith and a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, this work was transformed into H. Richard Niebuhr: A Lifetime of Reflections on the Church and the World, published by Mercer University Press.

Since then, controversy has erupted among scholars over the enduring value of Niebuhr’s typology. The first salvo came in 1989 from Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon in their book Resident Aliens. As they provocatively put it, "We have come to believe that few books have been a greater hindrance to an accurate assessment of our situation than Christ and Culture."[4] The situation on their minds was the post-Constantinian world to which Christians had been awakened and in which churches were already struggling to find their bearings. While Niebuhr in fact shared the conviction of these authors that God, not the nations, rules the world, and stated this at many points throughout his writings, they viewed him as a prime example of the Christendom, first brought into being by the Emperor Constantine in 313 ce, in which the church had consistently sought to make its faith credible to the prevailing culture in order to retain its position of privilege. In the last days of Christendom in America that followed World War II, Niebuhr could be just as critical as they were of the fusion of Christianity with right- and left-wing political agendas. And yet these two well-respected theologians pictured his Christ-the-transformer-of-culture model as the church that liberal, mainline, American Protestantism aspired to be, one that busied itself with making America a better place in which to live and sought to transform society into something of which Jesus might approve.[5]

In taking this position they shared the thinking of John Howard Yoder, one of the sharpest critics of Niebuhr’s typology. Yoder had in fact stated his objections well before Hauerwas and Willimon but did not publish them until 1996, in an essay entitled How H. Richard Niebuhr Reasoned. Put off by the weaknesses of his own Anabaptist tradition highlighted in Christ and Culture, Yoder targeted Niebuhr’s implicit assumptions, the criteria he employed for evaluating each of his types, and the logic of his presentation, all of which he was ready to regard as demonic because they deceptively predisposed readers to see the superiority of the fifth position.[6] In addition, Yoder took issue with Niebuhr’s monolithic view of culture, which in his estimation blinded Niebuhr to the diversity of cultural attitudes most any group might exhibit, and he chided him for failing to put Christ into the context of the robust New Testament confession of him as Lord. Having said all of this, however, he provided no cogent reason to reject the conversionist model he accused Niebuhr of favoring, and his apologetic call for the church, out of obedience to its Lord, to set itself apart as an alternative culture in order to join Christ in liberating the world from the grip of demonic principalities and powers only seemed to confirm rather than repudiate Niebuhr’s assessment of the separatist model.[7]

Yoder also seconded Hauerwas and Willimon’s criticism of Christ and Culture as a prime example of repressive tolerance.[8] Niebuhr insisted that the relative nature of everyone’s intellectual constructs not only ruled out the possibility of making any of his five types the last word, but kept all the others in play when it came to assessing church-world relationships in ever-changing contexts. To think otherwise would be usurping a position that belonged to God alone. Tolerant equiprobabilism was the derisive term Yoder coined for such thinking. To him, Niebuhr’s appeal to God as only source of absolute certainty was a diversionary tactic he was using in order to avoid affirming any definite plan of action.[9] In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to his book, Niebuhr had in fact stated that his understanding of God as the ultimate reality to whom persons of faith might look for guidance kept his thinking from becoming relativistic. It required one to stand within a larger human community and to enter into dialogue with other present and past interpreters of church-world relationships. It also encouraged the making of specific decisions, albeit humbly and as a confession of one’s own faith.[10] Yet Yoder remained bold enough to charge Niebuhr with thinking that he had found a way to eat his cake and have it too. In keeping with the tolerant, inclusive, and pluralistic outlook of his Ivy League graduate school culture, his use of divine transcendence to forbid anyone else’s claim to the truth actually served to put himself in a better position to have the last word.[11]

At about the same time, Glen H. Stassen and D. M. Yeager served to moderate Yoder’s hefty barrage of criticisms. Both sought to interpret the meaning of Niebuhr’s conversionist model in light of some of his other writings on the subject of church and world. Their major criticism was that Niebuhr was reluctant to spell out a specific set of ethical principles or concrete courses of action that might flow from this model. Yeager in particular upbraided him for his failure to prophetically address instances of oppression, violence, and abuse of power during the years following the publication of Christ and Culture.[12] In an article in 1946, Niebuhr had stated that the mind of Christ was the church’s norm, one that it set forth as a confession of its faith and expressed in codes of conduct. But when the church substitutes for the person of Christ some set of metaphysical or legal propositions, to him it had begun to lose its character as church and to become a dogmatic or legal society.[13] Nevertheless, Stassen saw this as a deficiency in need of correction. Taking his cue from Yoder, he proceeded to list seven bedrock normative practices for the church to follow in order to bring the incarnate reality of Christ to the attention of the world.[14]

In 1999, on the fiftieth anniversary of the lectures at Austin Presbyterian Seminary on which Niebuhr based Christ and Culture, the American religious historian George Marsden stated somewhat provocatively that Niebuhr’s analysis in its present form could be near the end of its usefulness. In his assessment of Niebuhr, however, he sought to provide a positive answer to the question embedded in the original title of his lecture, Can These Categories Be Saved? For one thing, he pointed out that Niebuhr’s book had appeared during the period immediately following World War II; in the midst of the debates then taking place over the future of Western civilization, he was attempting to counter those secularists who viewed Christianity as a foe rather than a friend in the shaping of a better future for the world. In answer to the multiculturalist objections to the book, he also stressed that Niebuhr was writing in the consensus era of American history, when building a healthy and unified mainstream culture was the chief objective. In response to critics who emphasized that Niebuhr’s categories were historically inadequate, moreover, Marsden stated his belief that they could be salvaged if they were not seen as mutually exclusive. Virtually every Christian and every Christian group expresses in one way or another, as he put it, all five of the motifs. Furthermore, he felt that adding more categories to the celebrated typology was unnecessary because the five Niebuhr had originally proposed remained extremely useful analytical tools as long as one recognized the complexity of any real historical subjects.[15]

When the fiftieth anniversary of Christ and Culture in 2001 became the occasion for the publication of a new edition of the book, other scholars weighed in on the side of Niebuhr. In his foreword, Martin Marty lauded the book as a classic—not only because one could not go back to a thought world that existed prior to Niebuhr without confronting his typology and recognizing the marks it had left but also because the circle of persons finding it useful for evaluating the relationship between religion and society had been broadened to include scholars of other world religions and the growing number of self-identified Christians not connected with any church. He also stated that instead of imposing straitjackets, building silos, or hermetically sealed containers in order to confine and define the Christian writers whom he selected to support each of his types, Niebuhr had in fact created five zones designed to illustrate how Christians wrestle with a dominant culture.[16]

In his preface, subtitled An Appreciative Interpretation, James Gustafson—a student, colleague, and friend of Niebuhr—took more direct aim at the critics. His chief target was Marsden, who, in attempting to save Niebuhr’s categories, had in Gustafson’s estimation retained the same wrong assumptions as those who were trying to discount their value. Gustafson argued that judgments about the historical adequacy of Niebuhr’s work were beside the point because it was never Niebuhr’s intention to write a history of Christian theological ethics. His ideal types were in fact heuristic devices to enable readers to understand materials and issues to which they refer. Gustafson, moreover, saw Niebuhr as a teacher who wanted to show the readers of the book, as he did his students, how rather than what to think about church-world relationships by encouraging them to thoughtfully compare various historical options. In addition, he asserted that Niebuhr’s undogmatic mind remained one that after careful consideration, could persuasively but undramatically articulate his theological and ethical judgments. According to Gustafson, when Niebuhr’s real purpose was properly understood, the book could also enable one to locate the church-world positions of vocal critics such as Hauerwas and Yoder and consider the possible implications in light of the other types.[17]

More recently, conservative evangelical scholar D. A. Carson put forth his evaluation of the Niebuhr typology in his Christ and Culture Revisited. Rather than launching a frontal assault, he found reasons to side with earlier critics in viewing Niebuhr’s types as mutually-exclusive choices that pointed to Christ-the-transformer of culture as the one Niebuhr intended to prescribe. Like Yoder, he deemed Niebuhr’s Christ to be sub-biblical and his concept of culture to be in need of sharper definition. He also shared Hauerwas and Willimon’s contempt for the intolerance of tolerance, which the relativism that governed Niebuhr’s thinking about them could easily reinforce. In place of Niebuhr’s fivefold paradigm, moreover, Carson proposed a single holistic model for assessing church-world relationships grounded in what he regarded as the great turning points in redemptive history as these were set forth on the pages of the Old and New Testaments.[18] Niebuhr would have probably flagged Carson’s paradigm as a form of biblicism because it made a book rather than God the object of faith. To Niebuhr, the Bible functioned as a dictionary that enabled one to interpret more precisely the ways in which God was continuing to reveal himself in the public and private experiences of contemporary life.[19] Carson acknowledged that different features of his biblical paradigm might receive greater emphasis in certain historical and cultural contexts. Nevertheless, for him all of his turning points remained non-negotiables.[20]

Other participants in this debate over the value of Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture could be cited, but the ones I have highlighted appear to be of three types: critics (Hauerwas and Willimon, Yoder, and Stassen), defenders (Marty and Gustafson), and fixers (Marsden and Carson). Like Niebuhr, I am mindful of the hazards of constructing typologies and acknowledge that some of his analysts might fit in more than one category. But it is their differing perspectives on Niebuhr and their lively discussion of his ideal types that serve to confirm the enduring quality of his work. The debate has prompted me to assemble this collection in order to give Niebuhr more of a chance to speak for himself. Most of the aforementioned scholars, despite their differences, recognize the need to investigate the larger corpus of Niebuhr’s thoughts in order to achieve a more complete picture of his approach to church-world relationships. While some have attempted to do this, all have tended to ignore his formative years as a budding scholar and church leader in the Evangelical Synod of North America. With this book, I am hoping to help correct this deficiency.

In 1929, well before the appointment to the Yale Divinity School faculty that would give him a platform for addressing all of mainline American Protestantism, Niebuhr told members of his German-immigrant church body that ultimately the problem of church and world involves us in a paradox; unless the church accommodates itself to the world it becomes sterile inwardly and outwardly; unless it transcends the world it becomes indistinguishable from the world and loses its effectiveness no less surely. The relationship between the two was one he also chose to depict in dynamic terms: The rhythm of approach and withdrawal need not be like the swinging of the pendulum, mere repetition without progress; it may be more like the rhythm of the waves that wash upon the beach; each succeeding wave advances a little farther into the world with its cleansing gospel before that gospel becomes sullied with the earth.[21] As his first two books, The Social Sources of Denominationalism and TheKingdom of God in America, more clearly demonstrate, Niebuhr understood that the church was inevitably shaped by the world it set out to shape, and in some cases even succeed in shaping. Many of America’s religious historians continue to employ this hermeneutic in order to adumbrate our past and thereby help us identify a preferred pathway into the future.[22]

Over the course of his career, the terminology Niebuhr employed to describe this paradox became progressively more nuanced. Already in Social Sources, he recognized that from a sociological standpoint the church could become as worldly as the world into which it was being sent. Subsequently, in Kingdom of God, he drew a distinction between Christianity as movement and as institution, stating that the true church is not an organization but the organic movement of those who have been ‘called out’ and ‘sent.’[23] By the time he wrote Christ and Culture, he had abandoned this terminology altogether. For world, he substituted culture, which he defined as the realm of human activity. Despite its godless ways, the world to him was still God’s creation and the object of his redemption. Furthermore, the term Christ permitted him to separate more clearly those features of the church that made it as corruptible as its culture from the gospel message it was called to bring to that culture’s attention.[24] In spite of Niebuhr’s change in terminology, I have chosen to use the terms church and world on all the pages that follow, as I am principally interested in keeping the focus on his profound understanding of the paradoxical nature of their relationship.

The existential character of so much of what Niebuhr said about church-world relationships also motivates this book. His deep faith in a transcendent God, whom he believed was also omnipresent in the world, made every event potentially revelatory. Therefore, it is helpful to examine at least some of his responses to key events in the world and the church during his lifetime. Niebuhr did not see himself as a professional historian. Instead, he brought his considerable historical knowledge to bear on his assessments of contemporary developments. Nor did he fit the ivory tower academic stereotype. Niebuhr’s chief commitment was always to the church of his day. Hence, I have purposely selected writings in which he was addressing church members, both lay and clergy.

I also need to say a word about the process of choosing documents for this collection. To keep the book within the established parameters, I needed to make some hard choices. There were also theological gems that I would like to have included but did not because they have been published or republished elsewhere. I direct the attention of all interested parties to William Stacy Johnson’s fine collection of chiefly unpublished Niebuhr documents, H. Richard Niebuhr: Theology, History, and Culture, and to Kristine A. Culp’s The Responsibility of the Church For Society and Other Essays by H. Richard Niebuhr. In addition, two other criteria drove my choices. One was that I wanted to present documents that illustrate the context in which aspects of Niebuhr’s church-world thinking developed in each of the three major periods in his adult life: formative years in the Evangelical Synod (1914–1929), the decade of the Great Depression (1930–1940), and World War II and its aftermath (1941–1962). The other was that I wanted to inject an element of variety into the selection of Niebuhr’s writings in terms of their theological density.

Finally, I respectfully disagree with Hauerwas and Willimon’s assessment of Niebuhr, and more particularly his book Christ and Culture, as a relic of the Christendom era that has now passed away. The writings of H. Richard Niebuhr I have chosen will demonstrate to readers that in some ways, he was a Christian thinker who was ahead of his time with respect to the applicability of the age-old paradox of church and world. Not only that, but in the epilogue I will make a case for inviting him to the table for conversations about the challenges facing the post-Constantinian church in the twenty-first-century world of North America.

The Epistle to Diognetus, in The Apostolic Fathers in English, 3rd ed., trans. and ed. Michael W. Holmes (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 288–301. ↵

Tertullian, The Apology, in Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian, The Ante-Nicene Fathers 3, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and Arthur Cleveland Coxe (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), 17–60. ↵

H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1937), xiv–xv. ↵

Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989), 40. ↵

Ibid., 39–43. ↵

John Howard Yoder, "How H. Richard Niebuhr Reasoned: A Critique of Christ and Culture," in Authentic Transformation: A New Vision of Christ and Culture (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 42–55. ↵

Ibid., 71–76. ↵

Hauerwas and Willimon, Resident Aliens, 41. ↵

Yoder, How H. Richard Niebuhr Reasoned, 81. ↵

H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1951), 230–56. ↵

Yoder, How H. Richard Niebuhr Reasoned, 82. ↵

See D. M. Yeager, The Social Self in the Pilgrim Church, and Glen H. Stassen, Concrete Christological Norms for Transformation, in Authentic Transformation: A New Vision of Christ and Culture (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 91–126, 127–89. ↵

H. Richard Niebuhr, The Norm of the Church, The Journal of Religious Thought 4 (Autumn–Winter 1946–1947): 10–11. ↵

Stassen, Concrete Christological Norms, 164–67. His list of bedrock practices include: 1) not judging, but forgiving, healing, and breaking down barriers that marginalize or exclude; 2) delivering justice; 3) evangelism, preaching the gospel and calling for repentance and discipleship; 4) nonviolent transforming initiatives; 5) love of enemy; 6) mutual servanthood; and 7) prayer. ↵

George Marsden, Transforming Niebuhr’s Categories, Insights: Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary 115, no. 1 (Fall 1999): 4–15. ↵

Martin E. Marty, Foreword, in H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), xiii–xix. ↵

James M. Gustafson, Preface: An Appreciative Interpretation, in H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), xxi–xxxv. ↵

D. A. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 1–58. ↵

See, for example, H. Richard Niebuhr, Reformation: Continuing Imperative, The Christian Century 77 (March 2, 1960): 250. ↵

Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited, 59–65. ↵

H. Richard Niebuhr, The Church in the Modern World, The Keryx 20 (May 1929): 10, 29. ↵

See, for example, Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Grant Wacker, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2014). ↵

Niebuhr, Kingdom of God in America, xiv. ↵

On the basis of his other writings, Niebuhr would acknowledge that human understanding of Christ and thegospel are also subject to corruption, and that for this reason, these same truths must remain subject to correction. See H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, 11–39. ↵

Formative Years in the Evangelical Synod

1

The Evangelical Synod and the New World of America

H. Richard Niebuhr was a cradle member of the Evangelical Synod of North America. His father, Gustav Niebuhr, had emigrated from Germany as a young man, attended the Synod’s Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, and served as a parish pastor in San Francisco, Wright City and Saint Charles, Missouri, and Lincoln, Illinois. His mother, Lydia Hosto Niebuhr, was the American-born daughter of the Evangelical pastor with whom Gustav worked in the first of his charges, as well as an unflagging source of support as her husband carried out his ministry. Like his brother Reinhold, born two years before him, Richard followed the prescribed path to ministry in the Evangelical Synod by leaving home as a teenager to attend Elmhurst College, the denomination’s preparatory school near Chicago, and going on to seminary at Eden.

For the decade and a half after his seminary graduation, Niebuhr pursued a career of distinguished service to the Evangelical Synod. Following his ordination in 1916, he served as the pastor of Walnut Park Evangelical Church in north St. Louis. In 1919, he was appointed to the Eden Seminary faculty. Then, after a two-year leave to complete both his Bachelor of Divinity and PhD at Yale Divinity School, he became president of his alma mater, Elmhurst College, in 1924. He returned to Eden Seminary in 1927, this time as academic dean, a position he held until he went back to Yale in 1931, this time to join the divinity school faculty. During this same period, he also chaired the committee conducting the negotiations that eventually led to the merger of the Evangelical Synod with the German Reformed Church in 1934.

Unlike the other German immigrants that by 1840 had started coming in greater numbers to the Midwest, especially the Lutherans, those who were drawn to the Evangelical Synod had no serious objections to a union church identity. In fact, congregations chose to retain the Evangelische name of the German state churches composed of Lutheran and Reformed elements, resulting from a union the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III had first initiated in 1817. In so far as they agree, the Augsburg Confession, Luther’s Small Catechism, and the Reformed Heidelberg Catechism formed their confession of faith. Disagreements were relegated to the light the Holy Scriptures might shed on them and to liberty of conscience.[1]

In addition, the warm concern for the physical as well as the spiritual welfare of both the individual and society that the Innere-Mission (Home Mission) movement championed among German Evangelicals was just as evident in the New World denomination. Gustav Niebuhr, for example, vigorously supported the Synod’s Emmaus Homes for the care of epileptics. Also, while serving his parish in Lincoln, Illinois, he not only oversaw the work of a newly constructed Deaconess Hospital, but took an active interest in the budding deaconess movement for women desiring to do this kind of church work.[2]

Despite this ecumenical frame of mind and heart, the Evangelical Synod was slow in adapting to its New World context. Niebuhr’s brother Reinhold remembered it as a little Germany: congregations continued to use their native tongue in worship and confirmation classes and to operate their own parochial schools. Little or no knowledge of English was necessary for most of their clergy to function. More than four decades after its founding, Eden Seminary petitioned the Synod for permission to add a faculty member to teach classes in English; this request was turned down because the Synod’s board of directors feared that this might deprive vacant German-speaking congregations of the kind of pastor they needed. Hence, some American-born ministerial students who began their preparation at Elmhurst College were forced to learn to improve their German. When they arrived at Eden, they were the only ones on campus capable of conducting classes in America’s official tongue.[3] Until World War I, the Synod also kept close ties with the union church in Germany. Eden Seminary in particular took from it not only its academic standards, but most of its faculty and nearly half of its students. Since he was an American-trained pastor, therefore, Gustav Niebuhr was denied an appointment to its faculty.[4]

Like their father, Richard and Reinhold believed it was time for their Synod to come out of her shell and enter the mainstream of America’s culture.[5] At Eden, the brothers found in Samuel D. Press a mentor who was willing to listen to their kind of voice. While he had studied theology in Germany, Press did not disavow his native-born American roots. He not only became the first professor to teach his seminary classes in English; he freely introduced his students to the theological contributions of Americans like Jonathan Edwards and Mark Hopkins. In his course on the Old Testament prophets, moreover, he repeatedly drew his students’ attention to the utterances of Amos as a model in addressing contemporary social problems.[6]

At the same time, it took the cataclysm of a world war to shake the Evangelical Synod out of its ethnic isolation. The outbreak of conflict on the European scene in 1914 created a loyalty issue for pastors and members of their congregations. Pro-German sentiments were natural and common enough to motivate another Niebuhr brother, Walter, to serve briefly as a war correspondent accompanying the Kaiser’s armies on the battlefields of eastern Europe. Like him, Richard soon questioned the tremendous sacrifice of human life on all sides that warfare entailed. In addition, Reinhold chose to cite disloyalty as a suspicion that German-Americans had brought upon themselves.[7] For Richard, it became another reason for making English the primary language for worship in the north St. Louis congregation he was serving.

Once America entered the war in 1917, Richard Niebuhr joined his brothers in endorsing the Allied cause. When Reinhold became the executive secretary of the Synod’s War Welfare Commission, Richard stepped forward to take care of its business and correspondence in the St. Louis area. He also enlisted as an army chaplain, though he never served troops in combat because orders for him to report for chaplaincy schooling did not come until the summer of 1918. As William Chrystal has pointed out, these patriotic gestures became a matter of necessity for the Niebuhr family and their Evangelical Synod. Despite what they said and did to the contrary, German immigrant ties still made Reinhold subject to government investigation, and Walter resigned from the Creel Commission because he was suspected of being a Kaiserite and a fifth columnist. Furthermore, wartime patriotism, which Reinhold in particular had grounded in President Woodrow Wilson’s plans for a more lasting peace, quickly gave way to disillusionment on the part of the entire Niebuhr family when the Treaty of Versailles brought most of those same plans to naught.[8]

Nevertheless, World War I was a catalyst for the Americanization of the Evangelical Synod. For Richard, reform of its education system for preparing church workers was the place to begin. He and Reinhold believed that the programs at Elmhurst and Eden, patterned as they were on German models of higher education, had given them insufficient exposure to the social and physical sciences and had failed to challenge them when it came to researching primary sources. He not only called for more attention to the need for graduate scholarships, but became something of a consumer of graduate-level classes himself. Besides the work he did for his doctorate at Yale, Niebuhr enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis, Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary in New York, the University of Michigan, and the University of Chicago. In addition, he advocated for equally sweeping revisions in congregational educational programming.

The Synod positions Niebuhr assumed during the 1920s provided him with a golden opportunity to make changes in his church body’s educational system. During his three-year tenure as president of Elmhurst College, the initiatives he advocated included accreditation, curriculum revision, reorganization of the faculty into eight departments, a faculty ranking system, a salary scale, and a program of sabbatical leaves. He also drew up a set of ambitious plans to create a school endowment, expand the campus facilities, and open Elmhurst’s doors to students interested in careers other than church work, to women, and to the community at large. The creation of a federation of several small Protestant colleges in the Chicago area was also part of his vision.

H. Richard Niebuhr scholars tend to overlook these years of his life. I have chosen the writings that follow not only to illustrate the formative influence on him of the Evangelical Synod, but to demonstrate the beginnings of his strong determination to help this immigrant church become a denomination that would more fully take up its role in the world of America to which its members had been coming for nearly three-quarters of a century.

Youth

Written toward the end of H. Richard Niebuhr’s second year as a student at Eden Seminary, this poem expresses the heady optimism of a young idealist. World War I, which began later that year, was a crushing blow. At this point, Niebuhr had no inkling of the difficult days that were to come for the church in which his spiritual formation was taking place. On the other hand, the poem provides evidence of his lifelong sense of being a participant in the history of the whole Christian church on earth and of God being present in every moment of its unfolding story.

Source: The Keryx 4, no. 3 (June 1914): 1.

My life is strong with the strength of years

That were and are to be;

My soul is bold with the vanquished fears

And the victories I shall see;

My thoughts are the gleam of a prophet’s dream,

The light for men unborn—

The heritage of death is mine,

To give the living a right divine,

And to put the wrong to scorn.

My hands are filled with deeds of fame

Of soldier, saint and sage;

My heart has brought the martyr’s flame

A fire to burn and rage;

The sacrament of their blood is spent,

To hallow and make me true—

Their faith, their strength are mine to share,

Mine is the blessing of their prayer,

I’ll be the answer, too!

I am both yesterday and to-day,

And to-morrow is mine to choose,

Mine is the victory in the fray,

And mine the blame, to lose.

But I am a son of the Mighty one,—

I battle in His name:—

His strength is mine to do the right,

My arm is His to win the fight—

Should I be put to shame?

The Hope of the World/Eden and the War

During his last year at Eden Seminary, Niebuhr served as the editor of its student publication, The Keryx. These two brief editorials demonstrate how deeply affected he was, and would be throughout his life, by the human toll of modern, industrialized warfare. While he shared the sympathy many members of his Evangelical Synod felt for the German cause, he also saw America as a nation that stood in the vanguard of world progress. Already in 1914, moreover, he was placing his hope, as he would in subsequent world conflicts, in a divine purpose that transcended victory by either side—a purpose that would serve to further God’s kingdom on earth.

Sources: The Keryx 4, no. 4 (September 1914), 13–14; The Keryx 4, no. 5 (December 1914), 13.

The Hope of the World

The heavy pall of death lies on the whole wide world. Destruction grins with hideous malice from the blackened devastation of ruined cities, that once lifted their proud domes and spires to the eternal blue. Gaunt misery stalks over trampled fields where golden grain, that was to nourish men, lies trodden in the dust; stalks stealthily into the huts of peasants, into the silent cities, where the noisy wheels of industry are stilled. Famished women shriek to feel its cold breath, cold as from a tomb; palsied men cannot drive its ominous presence from their doors, and wondering, wide-eyed children begin too soon to understand the woe of life, that is the woe of death.

The cold rain drizzles on marred faces of the dead, staring with blank eyes up to a dismal heaven. The shambles reek with blood—blood, and death as far as the eye can see. But even the bitterness of dying seems sweeter than the agony of living, living in blood of comrade and of foe.

Men have unlocked the doors of hell and mankind lies crushed beneath its iron terror.

The clutch of death is at the throat of humanity. And we, far from its awful presence, feel the breath of the world choking and sobbing, the terror of death beating in its heart. Overpowered by the inutterable [sic] woe of brother-men, we are so weakly helpless to alleviate their pain. We would share their agony if it might thereby be lessened. We would gladly give our lives if death might thereby be satiated. But there is naught to do.

Naught to do? Nay, there is much to do, new life to give, a new world to build, a new heaven to raise. In the heart of America beats now the life of the world. The burden of man’s progress rests in its hands. America must be strong to bear the burden onward and upward. America must not fail in the crisis.

Death shall not be victorious! Oh, America, you are the womb of life today. Pray to your God, that your child may be a man-child, strong unto peace, strong to bear the sorrows of a world, to dry its tears and bring a new life, a new hope to those in the shadow of death.

Eden and the War

We at Eden have a most eager interest in the progress of the European war, especially because of the fact that several of our comrades have friends and relatives in the struggle. One of Cramer’s brothers was killed in an engagement in France, while the other lies wounded in a hospital. Many others have relatives for whom they fear—so Jersak, whose parents reside upon the battle-fields of the Russo-German conflict. Beccken, Bergstraesser and Stange have had news of the death or wounding of persons very close to them.

The greater part of us can happily and with a good, clear conscience place our sympathies on the side of German. Not only because we trace our descent from Germany, or because our education is under direct German influence, but because we have the conviction that under all the diplomatic sugar-coated statements, there is some truth and justice to Germany’s claims.

Nor are we at Eden men among those who pray for an unconditional peace at any price. Although our hearts yearn for Germany victorious, our prayer has been and will be that peace may come only when it shall be to the furthering and strengthening of the kingdom of God in the belligerent nations as well as for the world. Not a peace based upon sentimentality, but a peace bringing a moral victory to all nations is our prayer. We know that suffering has furthered the kingdom of God heretofore on earth, and we know that this terrible scourge of war can and will be used by the Omnipotent for humanity’s uplift and for the extension of the kingdom of heaven.

The Purposes of Catechetical Instruction

An often-overlooked biographical detail is the fact that in 1919 Niebuhr served as the Evangelical Synod’s Sunday School Executive, a position that gave him the opportunity to actualize some of his hopes for educational reform in his church body. Confirmation was the equivalent of believer’s baptism in the Synod, a rite of passage that was preceded by a period of intensive catechetical instruction. The experience was a source of great pride among the Synod’s congregations and their families. In this essay, therefore, Niebuhr took a bold step by calling for the modification of this tradition. Yet he was convinced that religious education involved not just inculcating abstract truths through memorization but also preparing young people for real-life situations in the world.

Source: Religious Education in the Evangelical Synod, 1920–1923: Official Report of the Third National Convention of the Evangelical Sunday Schools, St. Louis, Missouri, June 28–July 3, 1923 (Board of Religious Education of the Evangelical Synod of North America), 235–42.

May I begin by making a change in my announced subject: There are two words in it to which exception may be taken: catechetical and instruction. They are both good words but they do not deserve to be exalted too much. I should like to substitute the terms: The Purposes of the Pastor’s Class in Christian Education. It would be carrying coals to Newcastle were I to try to show how necessary it is to have a purpose in mind—a real purpose—in our work as educators; yet it is evident that frequently our teaching is being carried on without a definite purpose in mind—often because we have so many purposes that we cannot center upon one. The purposes which are presented to us by tradition and modern education theory—all claiming to be the only purposes which deserve any kind of consideration—need to be criticized by every individual teacher, certain ones need to be eliminated, certain ones put into a subordinate position, and the right, guiding purpose so established.

The first purpose which we may eliminate as a purpose but may reintroduce as a means is represented by that word instruction. Instruction has been the traditional aim of the pastor’s class, and for that reason the catechism has been the main handbook also. Our work must not be conceived as instruction for several reasons: First of all because the Christian religion is not a system of doctrines which can be taught as a set of propositions. We have inherited from the reformation and even more from the eighteenth century an intellectualistic idea of Christianity which is quite in contrast to its true genius. The catechisms, in general, were written at a time when Christianity was looked upon as essentially a system of right beliefs. The purpose of the catechetical class was to give the children a system of right beliefs about God, about Jesus, about man, sin, immorality, the church, etc.

Now it is apparent that Christianity as the religion of Jesus Christ and of Paul, and as the religion which you and I seek to cultivate, is not primarily a matter of right beliefs at all, but primarily a matter of right attitudes—of right sentiments and right thoughts—but of a right direction of the will primarily. Christianity is spirit life. And we are very far today from believing that right belief alone is a guide to right action. Yet it is evident, I think, that while Christianity is not primarily intellectual, it contains a large intellectual element and that there is need for theology in Christian education. But theology is not the primary thing, and the teaching of theology is not our purpose.

Secondly, instruction is not our aim because the child is not primarily intellectual. The idea behind our catechism and behind much of our teaching is that the child is a little adult, and a very intellectual little adult at that. Most adults are not intellectual enough to be touched deeply by our catechetical instruction. Men, modern psychology has amply demonstrated, are not primarily thinking, but primarily acting beings. When we speak to them in intellectual terms only we are speaking over their heads the large part of the time. Add to this the fact that the truths which Protestantism is concerned about are abstract truths, or truths which can be clothed only in very abstract language, and the fallacy of an intellectual aim in catechetical instruction becomes even more apparent. [Otto] Baumgarten in that excellent little book Neue Bahnen, writes; A fundamental law of all newer pedagogy demands consideration of child nature and its naivete. ‘When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child.’ But how do we usually speak with our children? As if they were interested in the inner life, as if they stood in constant inner conflict with themselves, as if they lived under the oppressive sense of sin, as if they yearned for salvation! As if there were any continuity in a child’s thinking upon inner questions; as if it of its own accord, without being forced, reflected upon an unseen world, or upon its self! But all instruction in Christianity turns about the hidden man of the heart, about the concern for the eternity of the inner world. And especially Lutheran Christianity is completely dependent upon Paul, who not only put off all that was childish but who was as unchildlike as ever any one was, who constantly looked upon the state of childhood from the viewpoint of its incompleteness and weakness." Protestantism, Baumgarten goes on to say, is much more in danger than Catholicism of being ineffective in its instruction because of this inner character of the religion which it teaches. The child thinks only in concrete terms, but in instruction we must use abstract terms. Yet we need not do so nearly to the extent to which we do. For instance, it is possible to teach concretely about the life of Jesus, but only abstractly about the nature of the exalted Christ. But our catechetical instruction takes the exalted Christ into consideration a great deal more than the Jesus of the synoptic Gospels.

Again instruction is not a correct purpose because the primary principle of education is that we learn by doing, by expression, by activity. But we are too often concerned merely with impressions when we conceive our aim to be instruction. Impressions which are not expressed cannot stay in the mind; they almost literally pass into one ear and out of the other. The kind of truths which we place our emphasis upon in instruction can never be expressed, except intellectually.

Furthermore, instruction is not a correct aim because it emphasizes the amount of the material. We must get through the catechism we say, and we are very glad if we finish the book a few weeks before Palm Sunday and so have ample time for review. In the long run it makes very little difference whether we get through the book or not. If the child is not led into the right attitude to God and man learning the whole of the book doesn’t do any good. And if half of