Why Business Matters to God by Van Duzer Jeff;

Author:Van Duzer, Jeff; [Van Duzer, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2014-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

The Niebuhr Typologies

Your friends’ five different responses correspond to five types of Christian cultural engagement first described by H. Richard Niebuhr in his 1951 classic work, Christ and Culture.[1] After surveying the attitudes and approaches of various church leaders and authors down through history to what he characterizes as “the enduring problem of the relation between the authorities of Christ and culture,” Niebuhr groups these responses into five types: “Christ Against Culture,” “Christ of Culture,” “Christ Above Culture,” “Christ and Culture in Paradox” and “Christ the Transformer of Culture.”[2]

Christ Against Culture. In our hypothetical Bible study, this is Will’s position. Get out! The world is a muddy hole of injustice and degradation. Find some clean place to stand and wait. It is not your job to try to fix it. Leave that to God.

Christ Against Culture sets the call of Christ against the call of culture. It represents a form of shouting from the outside. Because of the fallen nature of the world and its institutions Christians are to remove themselves and to decline to participate.[3] As Louke van Wensveen Siker indicates, when applied to business ethics this position is fundamentally antibusiness. Often, in less thoughtful hands, this position finds expression in a naive chastisement of businesspersons. Business is characterized as nothing more than the expression of sinful greed with resulting unjust and destructive consequences. Good Christians don’t do business.

There is another prevalent and perhaps even more pernicious view that might also be included under this type. This is exemplified by the famous analogy of business to a poker game. In his well-known Harvard Business Review article, Albert Carr suggests that the practice of business can be approached like a game of cards. No one thinks less of a player at the poker table who bluffs successfully. It is all part of the game. If, on the other hand, this same person were to bluff his children, his wife or his fellow parishioners, we would be quick to accuse him of unethical behavior. His conclusion: there are separate ethics for separate spheres of life. “The essential point, I said, is that the ethics of business are game ethics, different from the ethics of religion. . . . No one expects poker to be played on the ethical principles preached in churches.”[4]

This is a complete separation. Church on Sunday. Work on Monday. The Christian’s involvement with God’s redemptive activity is limited to certain ethically compatible spheres of life (e.g., the church, the family, etc.), and the rough and tumble business world is simply to be taken on its own terms.

Christ of Culture. On the other hand, and at the other extreme, the Christ of Culture model finds no real tension at all between the call of Christ and the demands of the dominant culture of the day. Because of the complete alignment between the call of Christ and the call of culture, those holding this view see no need for Christians to be involved in the transformation or critique of culture. This is Emily’s perspective.

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