I was perusing the thrift store this evening, and picked up a copy of Niebuhr's (H. Richard, Reinhold's younger brother) Christ and Culture. I've spent my evening reading it, rolling it around in my head, and I am just beginning to react... slowly. A great deal of it is an articulation of ideas I have not been able to lay my own words to. His essential point is that Christ has and will continue to fundamentally challenge culture because he necessarily and fundamentally transcends it. That is to say, humans are finite and changing and will continue to encounter God differently over time, however God, and Christ will always challenge that culture because he is outside of and larger than it. I am excited to keep reading and thinking. It is a beautiful conversation.
A few excerpts (these are now underlined in blue pen in my book).
"The antagonism of modern, tolerant culture to Christ is of course often disguised because it does not call its religious practices religious, reserving that term for certain specified rites connected with officially recognized sacred institutions; and also because it regards what it calls religion as one of many interests which can be placed alongside economics, art, science, politics, and techniques."
His ongoing argument from there is fundamentally that the cultural demand to set religion, and particularly Christianity, apart from the rest of culture is a modern equivalent of Rome's demand on the Church to accept religious plurality for the good of the empire.
"When [Christianity] makes the effort to distinguish, contrast, or combine rational ethics with its knowledge of the will of God, it deals with the understanding of right and wrong developed in the culture with good and evil as illuminated by Christ."
So good.
"However great the variations among Christians in experiencing and describing the authority Jesus Christ has over them, they have this in common: that Jesus Christ is their authority, and that the one who exercises these various kinds of authority is the same Christ."
This is a snippet of a beautiful section dedicated to the centrality of Christ as the unity of the Church. Good, good stuff. Stuff to chew on, think on, thank God for.
"... the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand."
- C.S. Lewis
