FAITH AND HISTORY A COMPARISON OF CHRISTIAN AND MODERN VIEWS OF
HISTORY BY REINHOLD NIEBUHR NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNERS SONS
COPYRIGHT, 1949, BY CHARLES SCRIBNERS SONS E-11.59 VJ Printed in
the United States of America All rights reserved. No part of this
book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of
Charles Scribners Sons To My Colleagues on the Faculty and To the
Students of Union Theological Seminary In their fellowship the
exposition of doctrine is subjected to critical understanding. Thus
the sun and the rain is provided, without which no fruit of mind
and spirit can ripen. 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 preachersmessage. 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 vii viii Preface 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 ofthe 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. I should like to express my gratitude to Dean Luther A...
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