H. Richard Niebuhr

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

Life

Niebuhr was the son of pastor Gustav Niebuhr and studied Protestant theology a . a. at Yale University , where he received his PhD in 1924. As an ordained pastor of the Evangelical Synod of North America , a predecessor of the United Church of Christ , he worked in St. Louis from 1916 to 1918 , then taught at Eden Theological Seminary and Elmhurst College until he was appointed professor of theological ethics in 1931 the Yale Divinity School was called. There he worked until his death in 1962. In the same year he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was his older brother.

Teaching

Niebuhr was influenced by both Karl Barth and Ernst Troeltsch , thus combining neo-orthodox and liberal theology. He criticized the immanent idea of ​​the kingdom of God in the social gospel movement , but in his most famous work Christ and Culture pleaded for a culture-transforming Christianity. Among other things, he dealt with the sovereignty of God and the importance of historical relativism for the Christian certainty of faith.

Works

• The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929)
• The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry (1956)
• The Kingdom of God in America (1937)
  • The Thought of the Kingdom of God in American Christianity , 1948
• The Meaning of Revelation (1941)
• Christ and Culture (1951)
• Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (1960)
  • 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• Theology, history, and culture: major unpublished writings .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 [u. a.]: Yale Univ. Press, 1996.

literature

• Paul Ramsey (Ed.): Faith and Ethics: The Theology of H. Richard Niebuhr. 1957
• James F. Gustafson : Helmut Richard Niebuhr . In: Theological Real Encyclopedia . Volume 24, 1994, pp. 468-470.
• Richard Crouter : Reinhold Niebuhr ( 1892-1971 ) and H. Richard Niebuhr ( 1894-1962 ) . In: Classics of Theology; 2: From Richard Simon to Karl Rahner. - Munich: Beck, 2005, pp. 258-288 ISBN 3-406-52801-5

Web links

• Literature by and about H. Richard Niebuhr in the catalog of the German National Library
• The Niebuhrs at Elmhurst College