Radical Monotheism and Western Culture by H. Richard Niebuhr
This book presents in revised and expanded form the Montgomery Lectures on Contemporary Civilization which Dr. Niebuhr gave at the University of Nebraska in 1957. The six chapters were originally three lectures. To them are added four supplementary essays that expand and complement the ideas in the Lectures. Published in Louisville, KY by Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993. Originally published, New York, Harper, 1960. This material prepared for Religion Online by Richard and Sue Kendall.
PDF by ANGEL (
[email protected])
Forward by James M. Gustafson Dr. Gustafson introduces Niebuhr's book as making theology and theological thinking intellible by showing their continuities with other forms of thinking and activity, while at the same time reintepreting other forms of activity in the light of theology.
I: Introduction: Theology and Faith This introduction deals with the conflict of faiths in our Western Culture ...a conflict between radical monotheism and polytheism, or henotheism (a social faith which makes a finite cultural or religious society the object of trust and loyalty).
II. The Idea of Radical Monotheism This chapter contrasts polytheism, social faith and radical faith in the One God.
III. Radical Faith - Incarnate and Revealed in History This chapter focuses upon the persons and movements through whom radical monotheism finds expression in human history and in all of human life.
IV. Radical Monotheism and Western Religion Dr. Niebuhr asks, how has monotheistic faith affected human religion as piety, (reverence and prayer); and how has it affected the "organized religions," Judaism and Christianity.
V. Radical Faith in Political Community Is the conflict between polytheism, henotheism and radical monotheism also expressed in the political community, and if so, in what ways?
VI. Radical Faith and Western Science The struggle between henotheistic and monotheistic faith in the West appears in natural science as well as theology; in national as in church life.
Essay I - Theology in the University This essay was originally entitled, "Theology--Not Queen but Servant," from The Journal of Religion, January 1955. Dr. Niebuhr examines what a modern university would be like which is directly responsible not to a nation or a culture or religion but to a radical monotheism of the universal and transcendent.
Essay II - The Center of Value This essay is from Moral Principles of Action, Edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen (Harper and Bros., 1952). Dr. Niebuhr contrasts relational value theory and a monotheistic central value theory, with the recognition of many other possible, relative value systems--each of them tentative, experimental and objective., none of them an absolute. God only is absolute.
