Book description
FAITH AND HISTORY A COMPARISON OF CHRISTIAN AND MODERN VIEWS OF HISTORY
by REINHOLD NIEBUHR. PREFACE: THE theme of this volume was first
presented as the Lyman Beecher Lectures On Preaching at the Yale
Divinity School in 1945. Some of the same lectures were given, by
arrange ment, under the Warrack Lectureship On Preaching at the
Universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen in Scotland in the winter of 1947.
Some of the chapters were used as the basis of lectures given under the
Olaf Petri Foundation of the University of Uppsala in Sweden. I sought
to develop various portions of a general theme in these various
lectureships. In this volume I have drawn these lectures into a more
comprehensive study of the total problem of the relation of the
Christian faith to modern conceptions of history. While the total work,
therefore, bares little resemblance to the lectures, it does contain
consideration of the specific problems which were dealt with in the
lectures. I shall not seek to identify this material by chapters as I
subjected the whole to reorganization. Two of these lectureships usually
deal with the art of preaching, though not a few of the actual lectures
have been concerned with the preachers message. Since I had no special
competence in the art of homiletics I thought it wise to devote the
lectures to a definition of the apologetic task of the Christian pulpit
in the unique spiritual climate of our day. Since several of the Beecher
lecturers in the past half-century sought to accommodate the Christian
message to the prevailing evolutionary optimism of the nineteenth and
early twen tieth centuries, I thought it might be particularly
appropriate to consider the spiritual situation in a period in which
this evolutionary optimism is in the process of decay. This volume is
written on the basis of the faith that the Gospel of Christ is true for
men of every age and that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and
forever. It is, nevertheless, the task of the pulpit to relate the
ageless Gospel to the special problems of each age. In doing so,
however, there is always a temptation to capitulate to the
characteristic prejudices of an age. The preaching of the Gospel was not
immune to this temptation in the past centuries. The real alternative to
the Christian faith elaborated by modern secular culture was the idea
that history is itself Christ, which is to say that historical
development is redemp tive. Typical modern theology accommodated itself
to this secular scheme of redemption much too readily. Meanwhile the
experiences of contemporary man have refuted the modern faith in the
redemp tive character of history itself. This refutation has given the
Christian faith, as presented in the Bible, a new relevance. It is not
the thesis of this new volume that this new relevance could establish
the truth of the Christian Gospel in the mind of modern man. The truth
of the Christian faith must, in fact, be apprehended in any age by
repentance and faith. It is, therefore, not made acceptable by rational
validation in the first instance. It is important, nevertheless, for the
preacher of the Gospel to understand, and come to terms with, the
characteristic credos of his age. It is important in our age to
understand how the spiritual com placency of a culture which believed in
redemption through history is now on the edge of despair.
