Quotes from Christ and Culture

By Richard Niebuhr (1951)

• Christianity seems to threaten culture at this point not because it prophesies that of all human achievements not one stone will be left on another but because Christ enables men to regard this disaster with a certain equanimity.#
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• A Celsus moves from attack on Christianity to an appeal to believers to stop endangering a threatened empire by their withdrawal from the public tasks of defense and reconstruction. The same Christian attitude, however, arouses Marx and Lenin to hostility because believers do not care enough about temporal existence to engage in all-out struggle for the destruction of an old order and the building of a new one.#
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• Roman tolerance, like modern democratic tolerance, had its limits just because it was carried out as a social policy for the sake of maintaining unity. Whatever religion man followed, homage to Caesar was eventually required.#
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• The word ‘Father’ on the lips of Jesus is a greater, more faithful, and more heroic word than is evident when fatherhood and deity are identified.#
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• The idea of ascribing “infinite” or “intrinsic” value to the human soul seems wholly foreign to Jesus. He does not speak of worth apart from God.#
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• [Jesus] thought no temporal value as great as the life of the soul; but he healed the sick in body when he forgave their sins.#
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• The fact that Christians have found kinship between Christ and the prophets of the Hebrews, the moral philosophers of Greece, the Roman Stoics, Spinoza and Kant, humanitarian reformers and eastern mystics, may be less indicative of Christian instability than of a certain stability in human wisdom.#
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• As he cannot derive the laws of medical procedure from the gospel when he deals with a case of typhus, so he cannot deduce from the commandment of love the specific laws to be enacted in a commonwealth containing criminals.#
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• If we look to the revelation of God for knowledge of geology, we miss the revelation; but if we look to geology for faith in God, we miss both him and the rocks. If we make a rule for civil government out of the structure of the early Christian community, we substitute for the spirit of that community, with its dependence on Christ and his giving of all good gifts, a self-righteous independence of our own; if we regard our political structures as kingdoms of God, and expect through papacies and kingdoms to come closer to him, we cannot hear his word or see his Christ; neither can we conduct our political affairs in the right spirit.#
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• The Christ who commended a good Samaritan for pouring oil and wine into wounds would scarcely likewise honor a man who, trained in contemporary methods of giving first aid, regarded the Biblical example as his absolute guide.#
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• Faith in this sense is prior to all reasoning, for without a cause – let it be truth, or life, or reason itself – we do not reason.#
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• Such trust, to be sure, is mated with a kind of objective uncertainty; but it is not the uncertainty that makes it faith. To argue so is to be like a moralist who defines duty as that conduct that runs counter to inclination.#
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Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth (1925)

• Judaism is a national life, a life which the national religion and human ethical principles embrace without engulfing. Jesus came and thrust aside all the requirements of the national life. . . . In their stead he set up nothing but an ethico-religious system bound up with his conception of the Godhead.#
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