“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”
Richard Niebuhr
What are we to make today of this famous criticism of modern theological liberalism? Niebuhr, with his trenchant sociological insight, meant it as an observation. But it has an edge, namely that faith’s edge, its challenge, had been blunted. How do we assess this today?
First, we may applaud leaving behind the excesses and harshness of these doctrines. Predestination lurches into fatalism and the Father into cruelty- what about the goodness of creation or the theme of ‘God so loved…’?
Fair enough, though the divine love presented in the New Testament is more bracing and mysterious than popular notions of love.
But is it still a correct diagnosis? At one level ‘no’, since the traditional claims have been preserved, for example in our Prayer Book. And the tragedy of the world, and the distortions of culture, drive us to a physic bitter to the taste but sweet to the stomach.
What matters is not this opinion or that about ‘Christ and culture,’ also from Niebuhr’s pen, but rather hearing the sweep of the narrative of the Bible, which is consonant with these themes. And in this hearing we see again the wondrous grace of God to us in Jesus’ death and resurrection, as dawn against a dark background.
+GRS
