H. Richard Niebuhr

Helmut Richard Niebuhr (born 3 September 1894 in Wright City, Missouri, † July 5, 1962 in New Haven, Connecticut) was an American theologian and ethicist.

Life

Niebuhr was the son of the pastor Gustav Niebuhr and studied from 1912 Protestant theology, among others at Yale University, where he received his doctorate in 1924. As an ordained pastor of the Evangelical Synod of North America, a predecessor church of the United Church of Christ, he worked from 1916 to 1918 in St. Louis, then taught at Eden Theological Seminary and at Elmhurst College, until he to 1931 as a professor of Theological Ethics Yale Divinity School, was appointed. There he worked until his death in 1962.

The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was his older brother.

Teaching

Niebuhr was influenced by both Karl Barth and Ernst Troeltsch, so combined neo-orthodox and liberal theology. The immanent conception of the kingdom of God in the social gospel movement, he criticized, but pleaded in his most famous work, Christ and Culture for a kulturtransformierendes Christianity. He focused mainly on the sovereignty of God and the importance of historical relativism for the Christian faith certainty.

Works

• The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929 )
• The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry (1956 )
• The Kingdom of God in America ( 1937) ( German: The idea of God's kingdom in American Christianity, 1948)
• The Meaning of Revelation (1941 )
• Christ and Culture (1951 )
• Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (1960) ( German: Radical Monotheism: Theology of Faith in a Pluralistic World, 1965)
• The Responsible Self (1962 )
• Faith on Earth: An Inquiry into the Structure of Human Faith ( 1989).
• Theology, history, and culture: major unpublished writings. Edited by William Stacy Johnson. New Haven [ inter alia ]: Yale Univ. Press, 1996.