H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ And Culture

Christ and Culture, authored by H. Richard Niebuhr in 1951, is a book which discusses how a Church or a Christian is to interact with ones culture. Niebuhr systematically answers this question by placing the church into the following five categories they have utilized through history to answer this question: "Christ against culture," "the Christ of culture," "Christ above culture (Christ synthesizing with culture)," "Christ and culture in paradox," and "Christ the transformer of culture."
Reading this book more that fifty years since it was penned, I believe Christ and Culture to somewhat dated, yet still highly relevant today. This review will discuss Niebuhr's five categories, his strengths, weaknesses, and what I see as a missing element
I strongly agree with the Missio Dei and believe that Christ is the fulfillment of culture. I believe Christ can be found all through out culture, be it in film, the arts, in nature, etc and that the church should be incorporating the Missio Dei as its heartbeat, showing the culture where God is already present while in essence providing a cultural specific apologetic. It is my hope that Niebuhr is wrong and that Christians will embrace this ‘Christ of culture' theological viewpoint. This portion may go toward the end of the
These two realities cannot be entirely separated. Here, people are "obligated in the nature of his [man's] being to be obedient to God," which includes God in Christ and Christ in God (118). In this view human culture and God's grace are mysteriously linked together (119). Niebuhr focuses on the synthesist's view with a profound sentence and says, "We cannot say, ‘Either Christ or culture,' because we are dealing with God in both cases. We must not say, ‘both Christ and culture,' as though there were not great distinction between them; but we must say ‘Both Christ and culture,' in full awareness of the dual nature of our law our end, and our situation" (122). This synthesis in a sense sounds like the Christ of culture, yet once Niebuhr examines the duality of the Christian life, it becomes apparent how synthesizes place Christ above culture. In particular Niebuhr focuses on the synthesis Thomas Aquinas and professes that Thomas' "way of solving the problem of culture and Christ has become the standard way for hosts of Christians" (129). Thomas places Christ far above culture. He believes that only God can set the will of man and that eternal happiness if found only in Christ Jesus (131-133). However, the problem that Niebuhr states with Aquinas is that he is a Christian Aristotelian who gains the law not from the Bible, but from nature (135). I agree with