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Authentic Transformation: A New Vision of Christ and Culture
The study of Christian ethics in North America has been profoundly influenced during this century by the work of H. Richard Niebuhr. That influence is felt nowhere as keenly as in the widespread use of his classic text, Christ and Culture. Yet certain central flaws exist in Niebuhr's work on Christ and culture, particularly in its lack of concrete norms for the church's transformative engagement with the world. Scholars have long realized that further work must be done in this area if the church is to speak the word of the gospel adequately in the midst of a pluralistic and changing culture. In this book, Glen H. Stassen, D. M. Yeager, and John Howard Yoder push Christian ethical reflection beyond Niebuhr by offering an analysis and critique of Niebuhr's well-known fivefold typology of the relation of Christ to culture. They wrestle with the issue of how the actual, working church goes about being an agent of the transformation of culture. Unlike Niebuhr, whose description of the transformationist ideal had little grounding in the concrete existence of the church, the authors reflect on those practices through which congregations seek both to embody faithfulness to Jesus Christ and to be the church in their culture. As a prologue to this analytical and constructive task, the volume contains a previously unpublished essay by H. Richard Niebuhr, "Types of Christian Ethics", in which he laid out the framework of the typology he would later expand in Christ and Culture.
300 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1995
About the author
Glen H. Stassen
16 books11 followersGlen Harold Stassen was a Southern Baptist theologian who helped define the social-justice wing of the evangelical movement in the 1980s and played a role in advancing nuclear disarmament talks toward the end of the Cold War.
Stassen studied nuclear physics at the University of Virginia and worked briefly in a naval laboratory after graduation before deciding that he could not contribute to the development of nuclear weapons. He quit to attend Union Theological Seminary in New York City and received his doctorate from the Duke Divinity School in Durham, N.C., in 1967.
He taught at Kentucky Southern College (now part of the University of Louisville) and Berea College in Kentucky before joining Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. There, Dr. Stassen clashed with administrators who urged faculty members to place ideas like prohibiting abortion, the subordination of women in the family and the literal truth of biblical texts at the core of their teaching.
More than personal rectitude and obedience to rules of behavior, Dr. Stassen argued, Christian ethics demanded organized action to save the world from self-destruction.
“Christians need more than an ethic of ‘just say no,’ ” he wrote. “Jesus didn’t just say no to anger and revengeful resistance, but commanded transforming initiatives: ‘Go make peace with your brother or sister; go the second mile with the Roman soldier.’ ”
What Christians needed, he said, was “an ethic of constructive peacemaking.”
Dr. Stassen championed a pragmatic approach to social justice and world peace. In a series of books beginning in 1992, he outlined a program of grass-roots activism to reduce military spending, improve the lives of the disadvantaged and give citizens a voice in international conflict resolution.
Dr. Stassen’s version of political activism in the 1980s and ’90s put him at odds with leaders of the religious right, who were focusing on opposing abortion and gay rights.
Dr. Stassen was among the few prominent evangelical leaders to publicly challenge the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the leader of the Moral Majority, over his electioneering on behalf of Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns in 1980 and 1984. And he was among the few to criticize Reagan over his domestic spending cuts, his military buildup and his use of the phrase “evil empire” in 1983 to describe the Soviet Union.
He went on to help mobilize the international disarmament movement that, by some accounts, played a role in removing intermediate range nuclear missiles from Western Europe in the late 1980s and early ’90s.
Theologians had long wrestled with the Christian response to war, and whether it was ever morally justified to kill. Two schools of thought had emerged: pacifism, which said it was never justified, and “just war” theory, which described circumstances in which killing in war was morally defensible. Dr. Stassen advocated what he called a third option: preventing wars from starting in the first place.
In Just Peacemaking: Transforming Initiatives of Justice and Peace (1992) and a dozen other books on nonviolence and conflict resolution, Dr. Stassen described techniques for hard-nosed negotiating in which both parties admit culpability for past deeds, take a clearheaded measure of the interests of the other side and sometimes make calculated unilateral initiatives.
“Biblical realism,” as he described the mind-set for negotiations like these, “is about diagnosing sin realistically and seeking deliverance, not merely about affirming some high ideals.”
- summarised/edited from The New York Times Obituary
Stassen studied nuclear physics at the University of Virginia and worked briefly in a naval laboratory after graduation before deciding that he could not contribute to the development of nuclear weapons. He quit to attend Union Theological Seminary in New York City and received his doctorate from the Duke Divinity School in Durham, N.C., in 1967.
He taught at Kentucky Southern College (now part of the University of Louisville) and Berea College in Kentucky before joining Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. There, Dr. Stassen clashed with administrators who urged faculty members to place ideas like prohibiting abortion, the subordination of women in the family and the literal truth of biblical texts at the core of their teaching.
More than personal rectitude and obedience to rules of behavior, Dr. Stassen argued, Christian ethics demanded organized action to save the world from self-destruction.
“Christians need more than an ethic of ‘just say no,’ ” he wrote. “Jesus didn’t just say no to anger and revengeful resistance, but commanded transforming initiatives: ‘Go make peace with your brother or sister; go the second mile with the Roman soldier.’ ”
What Christians needed, he said, was “an ethic of constructive peacemaking.”
Dr. Stassen championed a pragmatic approach to social justice and world peace. In a series of books beginning in 1992, he outlined a program of grass-roots activism to reduce military spending, improve the lives of the disadvantaged and give citizens a voice in international conflict resolution.
Dr. Stassen’s version of political activism in the 1980s and ’90s put him at odds with leaders of the religious right, who were focusing on opposing abortion and gay rights.
Dr. Stassen was among the few prominent evangelical leaders to publicly challenge the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the leader of the Moral Majority, over his electioneering on behalf of Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns in 1980 and 1984. And he was among the few to criticize Reagan over his domestic spending cuts, his military buildup and his use of the phrase “evil empire” in 1983 to describe the Soviet Union.
He went on to help mobilize the international disarmament movement that, by some accounts, played a role in removing intermediate range nuclear missiles from Western Europe in the late 1980s and early ’90s.
Theologians had long wrestled with the Christian response to war, and whether it was ever morally justified to kill. Two schools of thought had emerged: pacifism, which said it was never justified, and “just war” theory, which described circumstances in which killing in war was morally defensible. Dr. Stassen advocated what he called a third option: preventing wars from starting in the first place.
In Just Peacemaking: Transforming Initiatives of Justice and Peace (1992) and a dozen other books on nonviolence and conflict resolution, Dr. Stassen described techniques for hard-nosed negotiating in which both parties admit culpability for past deeds, take a clearheaded measure of the interests of the other side and sometimes make calculated unilateral initiatives.
“Biblical realism,” as he described the mind-set for negotiations like these, “is about diagnosing sin realistically and seeking deliverance, not merely about affirming some high ideals.”
- summarised/edited from The New York Times Obituary
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September 5, 2013
Not the most enjoyable book I've read, but a necessary update to H. Richard Niebuhr's classic Christ and Culture. It opens with a previously unpublished article by Niebuhr, followed by a rather incisive critique by Yoder, and two responses by Yeager and Staasen, in which they attempt to give concrete norms for authentic transformation.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review