In similar manner the idea of the coming kingdom was robbed of its dialectical element. It was all fulfillment of promise without judgment. It was thought to be growing out of the present so that no great crisis needed to intervene between the order of grace and the order of glory. In its one-sided view of progress which saw the growth of the wheat but not that of the tares, the gathering of the grain but not the burning of the chaff, this liberalism was naïvely optimistic.
A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.
— H. Richard Niebuhr
From H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 193
Helmut Richard Niebuhr (1894-1962) was an American Protestant theologian who for three decades taught Christian ethics at Yale Divinity School. The naïve optimism of the sort of theological liberalism critiqued by Niebuhr was both humorous and chilling. It nails the essence of an empty spiritually that sees itself as wholly good but demonizes and quashes any talk of acknowledging personal sin and repentance as oppressive and traumatizing.
The theology of Richard Niebuhr was described as “Christian realism,” an American counterpart to European neo-orthodoxy, according to Mark Noll.
I was introduced to the writing of H. Richard Niebuhr through reading Christ & Culture, which took insightful analysis on the types of approaches Christians, whether orthodox or heterodox, employed in interacting with the rest of civilization: Christ Against Culture (distinguishing between earthly and heavenly verities), Christ of Culture (accommodationist / cultural Christianity), Christ above Culture (neither antagonism nor assimilation), Christ and Culture in Paradox (kingdom and culture are distinct spheres and the latter alone can never discover the former), and Christ Transforming Culture (limited participation without deeming the world inherently evil in total).
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