Christ & culture clash

Christian Century, July 3, 2002 by James M. Gustafson

PETER R. Gathje, probably in the interest of stirring some intellectual excitement over a sterile "debate," refers not at all to the burden of my Yale Lecture, which was adapted for the preface to the 50th anniversary edition of H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture ("A contested classic, " June 19-26). The burden of my lecture was to argue that one could not understand Niebuhr's purpose in writing the book without knowing the ideal-typical method he used. The historical context of the development of that method by Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch and others was the Methodenstreit zwischen Naturwissenschaften und Geisteswissenschaften in Germany in the last decade of the 19th and the first of the 20th century.

For 50 years I interpreted the book in that light. I had written a B.D. thesis under James Luther Adams on "Max Weber's Methodology," which was accepted in the spring of 1951, the same quarter in which Niebuhr's book was published. I never claimed to be certain of authorial intent about that or any other book I ever interpreted, but was pleased to have Niebuhr's paper "Types of Christian Ethics" (included in the anniversary edition) sent to me last summer by Richard R. Niebuhr. It confirms my half-century supposition that Niebuhr knew the literature and the method, and used it within the parameters of the theorists who developed it.

Critics ought to be arguing about the ideal-typical method, what it sought to achieve and knew it could not achieve. To do that requires knowledge about the methodological controversies in which the methods of the natural sciences were seen clearly to be inadequate for human sciences, and in which ideal-types were designed to produce some critical objectivity for analysis and comparison of intellectual movements and historical events. The method came out of a set of historical circumstances, the central issues of which have not gone away. I have ceased to be surprised, since it happens so frequently, by how celebrators of radical Christian particularism seem to have utter confidence in the objectivity of their interpretations of texts they do not like.

James M. Gustafson
Rio Rancho, N.M.