Faith and History - A Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of History

Reinhold Niebuhr

• Publisher: Nord Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781406704754, 9781443721257
• eBook ISBN: 9781447496557
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

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 arrangement, 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 preacher's 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 twentieth 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• Half title
• Chapter I The Current Refutation of the Idea of Redemption Through Progress
• Chapter II The History of the Modern Conception of History
• Chapter III Time as the Stage of History
• Chapter IV Similarities and Differences between Classical and Modern Ideas of Meaning in History
• Chapter V The Extravagant Estimates of Freedom in the Progressive View of History
• Chapter VI The Identification of Freedom and Virtue in Modern Views of History
• Chapter VII The Biblical View: The Sovereignty of God and Universal History
• Chapter VIII The Biblical View: Moral Meaning and Moral Obscurities of History
• Chapter IX The Foolishness of the Cross and the Sense of History
• Chapter X The Validation of the Christian View of Life and History
• Chapter XI Beyond Law and Relativity
• Chapter XII False Absolutes in Christian Interpretation of History
• Chapter XIII Fulfillments in History and the Fulfillment of History
• Chapter XIV The Church and the End of History
• Scriptural Index
• General Index