Menuge, Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture Reexamined

http://www.mtio.com/articles/bissar26.htm

Here’s an excellent article written to describe the different perspectives to Christ and Culture in order to defend Christ and Culture in Paradox over and against Christ Transforming Culture.

Menuge complains that Niebuhr unfairly left the Conversionist perspective without criticism in his book. He believes that Niebuhr does this because he is a “closet” Conversionist. Even though Niebuhr claims that we cannot judge which perspective is correct,

the problem with Niebuhr’s approach is that he does not provide a principle for deciding when one of the five types is operative, and when it is not.

Despite Niebuhr’s lack of commitment to any perspective and his lack of any criteria he does favor the Conversionist perspective:

…Niebuhr’s dialectic approach is at odds with his professed pluralism: he clearly does think the transformationist option is basically correct.

Menuge then begins to criticize the Conversionist perspective. He says,

In practice, the transformationist view is vulnerable to devastating objections. It tends to a utopianism which underestimates the continuing power of sin to totter man-made Towers of Babel.

This is simply a slippery-slope argument. He warns that the danger of the Conversionists is that they will eventually become Accomidationists and then eventually Synthesists. In other words, as they begin to transform their culture, they will eventually begin to favor culture so much that they will have made Christ into a representative of their cultural ideal.

However, like any slippery-slope argument, just because of the potential of abuse, doesn’t mean the idea is flawed. There will always someone who corrupts a good thing- that’s the nature of this fallen world- but that doesn’t mean something didn’t start in the good.

Because the Conversionist perspective is the dialectically-moderate position of all five perspectives, you could just as easily argue that a Conversionist could slip into a Polarity perspective and then digress into Opposition.

This, in a sense, is what the author of this article is doing. He is trying to convince his audience that we should move away from the Christ Transforming Culture to Christ and Culture in Paradox.

Applying this argument to himself, does it mean we should disagree with the Polarity perspective because it potentially could lead people into eventually completely withdrawing from culture as they struggle in keeping the paradox between Christ and Culture? No. Thus neither should we abandon the Conversionist perspective because it might lead in another direction.

Nevertheless, this article reiterates the point that there is sometimes a fine line between each of these perspectives (which is one of the reasons Niebuhr refused to commit to any of them). Rather than say someone is clearly a proponent of any perspective, it is probably better to say they “tend” to a particular perspective. The fact is, if you were to observe anyone in their life, while they might tend to approach culture with a particular perspective, they also might approach it differently at other times and places.