CHURCH AND WORLD IN PERSPECTIVE: THE FORMATION OF H. RICHARD NIEBUHR'S ETHICAL PARADIGM, THE

Trinity Journal, Spring 2006 by Armstrong, Jonathan

It is ironic that H. Richard Niebuhr (1919-1962) would be remembered as one of America's greatest religious ethicists when his first two published monographs were not works of moral theology but methodologically avant garde treatises on American church history. And yet, it was through these early works of historiography that he laid the ideological foundation for his later ethical originality. From the experience of drafting these remarkably different thoughtexperiments, The Social Sources of Denominationalism and The Kingdom of God in America, Niebuhr discovered the dialectical form of theological modeling now associated with his name. H. Richard Niebuhr approached ethics from a profoundly historical perspective. In his lifelong intellectual pursuit of the relationship of church and world, Niebuhr sought not an illusory, ahistorical plateau from which to survey the theological landscape. In this article, we will explore the historiography of Niebuhr's early works and discover that it was through a radical shift in his comprehension of history that he arrived upon the dynamic, ethical thesis proposed in his best known book, Chnst and Culture. The lessons learned from history and from the discipline of writing history furnished the structure of H. Richard Niebuhr's ethics.

I. THE SOCML SOURCES OF DENOMINATIONALISM (1929): THE DEPENDENCE OF CHURCH ON CULTURE

Although it would be inaccurate to claim that political and economic analyses of religious history were unprecedented at the time when Niebuhr published his first monograph, it should be noted that the sociological perspective was largely unrepresented in American scholarship.1 In Europe, Ernst Troeltsch from the University of Heidelberg and his renowned colleague Max Weber had already published landmark treatises exploring the thesis that the major developments of ecclesiastical history could not be adequately explained through theological inquiry alone, but that an extensive investigation of the socioeconomic condition was also necessary. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber argued that theological convictions and social conditions are intimately and inextricably united. "Capitalism was the social counterpart of Calvinist theology," as R. H. Tawney famously paraphrased Weber's conclusion.2 In 1906, Troeltsch delivered a lecture in the place of his friend Weber, who was circumstantially unable to speak at the Ninth Congress of German Historians as scheduled. In his noteworthy address, which was later expanded and published as Protestantism and Progress, Troeltsch contended that the theological dogmas of Calvinism and the social doctrines of democracy were essentially inseparable.3 In 1922 at Yale Divinity School, Niebuhr decided to devote his dissertation research to the religious thought of the socio-economically oriented, religious historian Ernst Troeltsch.4

Before doctoral studies, Niebuhr penned several articles in which he asserted his firm embrace of the social gospel. Throughout The Social Sources of Denominationalism, Niebuhr's indebtedness to the ideology of the social gospel is never far beneath the surface.5 In 1921, in an essay entitled, "Christianity and the Social Problem," Niebuhr declared: "The social gospel is no new gospel. It is the Sermon on the Mount and the message about the Kingdom of God.... It is Paul's description of the universal church and John's vision of the end."6 According to the classic definition of Walter Rauschenbusch, the social gospel's principal theological insight is that sin is organically rooted in the social order and that salvation is therefore not primarily an individual transaction but a communal process.7 While Niebuhr did not unreservedly accept this social conception of moral responsibility, he agreed with Rauschenbusch that the doctrine of sin should be the organizing structure of any systematic theology: "The character of a religious movement is probably more decisively determined by its definition of the sin from which salvation is to be sought than by its view of that saving process itself."8 At this time in his life, Niebuhr maintained that the individualistic comprehension of sin was represented predominantly among the socially privileged and those ecclesial communities that had disassociated themselves from the disenfranchised.

Following in the academic footsteps of Ernst Troeltsch, whose monumental work The Social Teaching of the Christian Church had advanced an economically driven historiography among ecclesiastical historians, Niebuhr focused the research for his first monograph upon the economic factors involved in the emergence of denominationalism.9 In The Social Sources of Denominationalism, Niebuhr explains that he is not attempting to construct a merely social analysis of religion but one which adequately portrays the complexity of the formation of human conviction:

This does not mean that an economic or purely political interpretation of theology is justified, but it does mean that the religious life is so interwoven with social circumstances that the formulation of theology is necessarily conditioned by these.10