Footnotes, Chapter 3
Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship: A New Perspective (Eller)
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In Dru’s and in Rohde’s selections from Kierkegaard’s journals, the number identifies an entry rather than a page; the date following is that of the particular entry.
1. Attack upon "Christendom," p.34.
2. A brief account of this entire development is given by George Huntston Williams in his Introduction to Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers, in The Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1957), 25:26-27.
3. Troeltsch, op.cit., 2:162-63.
4. Ibid., 2:465-67.
5. Brunner, Dogmatics, 3:31.
6. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (Meridian Books, 1957).
7. Liston Pope, Milihands and Preachers (New Haven: Yale Un. Press, 1942).
8. One need not go far to document this contention. See, for example, a book like J. Milton Yinger's Religion, Society and the individual-An Introduction to the Sociology of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1957), probably the most widely used textbook in its field. The Niebubrian view is written into the basic assumptions of the presentation (see 142ff.); and in the selection of readings, passages from Niebuhr and his followers dominate (see particularly 415ff).
This influence may be particularly strong among groups that come from a sectarian background. This certainly has been my experience both as a student and a functionary in the Church of the Brethren. The Niehubrian typology is regarded as the key by which we under-stand ourselves. In the ethics course at seminary (taught by an instructor of Mennonite background) Niebuhr and Pope were mandatory reading-plus a paper by Ernest Lefever, written as a student project for classes taught by Niehuhr and Pope, in which Brethren history is interpreted according to Niehuhrian categories.
It is standard procedure in scholarly and even popular circles among the Brethren to thank God that we have evolved out of our infantile sectarianism to the place that we now rank as a denomination, or church, along with the best of them. And the article by Val Clear, "Reflections of a Postsectarian," The Christian Century, 80 (Jan. 16, 1963), 72-75, suggests that the same mentality holds in other groups as well.
9. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (N.Y.: Harper Torchbooks, 1959), ix-x; cf. 1ff.
10. Niebuhr, The Social Sources of/ Denominationalism, 19.
11. Ibid., 19-20.
12. For example, the English Baptists (Troeltsch, op.cit., 2:707-708).
13. Ibid. 2:1007-09.
14. Pope, op.cit., p.120.
15. Troeltsch, op.cit., 2: 991-92.
16. See particularly
Claus-Peter Clasen, "The Sociology of Swabian Anabaptista,"
Church History 32 (1963), 150ff. Works such as Roland
H. Bainton, The Age of the Reformation (Princeton:
VanNostrand, 1956) and Franklin Hamlin Littell, The Origins
of Sectarian Protestantism (New York: Macmillan [1952] 1964), and
George Huntston Williams,op.eit. and The Radical
Reformation (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962),
are also to the point.
17. Troeltsch,
op.cit., 2:698, 699, 701.
18. Trocltsch,
op.cit.,2:742ff.
19. Troeltsch,
op.cit., 2:656ff.
20.
Brunner, Dogmatics, 3:40.
21. Notice in
this regard that any sort of biblicism or moralistic
legalism, although an error into which sects as well as churches often
have fallen, is not an inherent aspect of sectarianism but actually an
anti-sectarian trend in the direction of objectivization rather than
greater freedom of the Spirit.
22.
Brunner, Dogmatics, 3:135; cf. 134ff.
23. Ibid., 234-36.
24. Ibid., 27.
25. See Niebuhr's
Christ and Culture (NY: Harper, 1951).