H Richard Niebuhr Quotes

A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.

Religion makes good people better and bad people worse.

Men are generally right in what they affirm and wrong in what they deny. What we deny is generally something that lies outside our experience, and about which we can therefore say nothing.

Everyone has some kind of philosophy, some general worldview, which to men of other views will seem mythological.

We must fight their falsehood with our truth, but we must also fight the falsehood in our truth.

It is imperative that the past of the pilgrims' progress be intentionally carried forward into the present as we work into our future. Without it we cannot know who we are, why we are here, or where we can go. Without a common past to live out of we become aimless and wandering individuals instead of a pilgrim people.

Nothing is as evanescent in history as the pansophic theories that flourish among the illuminati of all times under the bright sunlight of the latest scientific discoveries; and nothing can be more easily dismissed by later periods as mere speculation.

When we go back and tell our life story with honesty and compassion, the theologian H. Richard Niebuhr wrote ," we understand what we remember, remember what we forgot, and make familiar what had before seemed alien.

The discussions of the prior generation, shaped by H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture (see chapter three above), still presumed “gospel” and “culture” as two disparate and divergent categories and realities. An incarnational and pentecostal approach to culture realizes that while distinct, the gospel always comes through culture and that culture can—indeed, must!—be redeemed for the purposes of the gospel.

The great Christian revolutions came not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen when someone takes radically something that was always there. —H. Richard Niebuhr

In anticipation, H. Richard Niebuhr’s critical description of liberal theology in general has become a classic: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministration of a Christ without a cross.

H. Richard Niebuhr’s critical description of liberal theology in general has become a classic: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministration of a Christ without a cross.”[181]

small but influential segment of liberal Christianity rejects all the central doctrines of Christianity. H. Richard Niebuhr famously summed up their credo: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”3

H. Richard Niebuhr argued in Christ and Culture that the great problem with the “Christ against culture” type was how advocates of that type understood the “relation of Jesus Christ to the Creator of nature and Governor of history as well as to the Spirit immanent in creation and in the Christian community.” 49 According to Niebuhr, the over-concentration of radical Christians (Tolstoy is his primary example) on the lordship of Christ results in an ontological bifurcation of reality. Their rejection of culture is joined to a suspicion of nature and nature’s God in a manner that obscures the goodness of God’s creation.

Frequently I remember something H. Richard Niebuhr wrote after having spent a number years trying to formulate a comprehensive perspective on faith. He likens faith to a cube. From any one angle of vision, he points out, the observer can see and describe at least three sides of the cube. But the cube has back sides, a bottom and insides as well. Several angles of vision have to be coordinated simultaneously to do any real justice in a characterization of faith

This-worldliness may seem more objective other-worldliness to those who have never faced there own presuppositions. When they do face them they become aware that their ultimate dogma is at least as much a matter of faith as is the the dogma of the other-worldly man.

This-worldliness may seem more objective than other-worldliness to those who have never faced there own presuppositions. When they do face them they become aware that their ultimate dogma is at least as much a matter of faith as is the the dogma of the other-worldly man.

Such theology does not undertake to be the science of God for it knows that the Transcendent Universal is known or acknowledged only in acts of universal loyalty and in transcending confidence, precedent to all inquiry and action. Loyalty and confi- dence of that sort, it knows, are not demonstrated more in so-called religious acts of mind or body than in so-called secular activities. Hence it calls attention to the way in which every individual, group, and institution is directly related to the Transcendent—whether positively in trust and loyalty or negatively in distrust and disloyalty. The part that these convictions have played in the political field in the development of what we call democracy has again become the subject of considerable discussion. What does it mean to a state that it is "under God"; without absolute sovereignty; directly responsible to the Transcendent; one institution among many with similar responsibilities to the same One; having citizens who are first of all citizens of another, prior, and universal Commonwealth? The alternative to pluralistic democracy in which every man is a king or every minority or majority group the court of last resort is not a dictatorship of an individual or a class or of the common will, but a democracy in which loyalty to the universal Commonwealth and its Constitution is maintained though no single human power or institution-including the church or the people-can represent that Great Republic or do anything except point to it and try to be loyal to it.