Niebuhr Exegetical Criticism

Hays additionally argues that Niebuhr does not engage in any exegetical work of any kind for his ethical developments and uses only a small selection of passages from the New Testament. Niebuhr’s focus in the Gospels is only on Jesus’ sayings in the Sermon on the Mount and his use of Paul’s writings is limited to one chapter of Romans. Where Niebuhr does excel is in his use of passages that stand in tension with his position, he uses them to press in the radical nature and impossibility of his ethic’s demands.
In his hermeneutical criticism, Heys explains the two modes of appeal that Niebuhr employs for his ethical argument. For Niebuhr, it is the idea of love that makes principles, such as equal justice, possible and be believes that our moral decisions should be made based on these principles. He does not make use of the mode of rules or paradigms in his discussion, however, he does rely heavily on the symbolic world, specifically in his portrayal of human nature. The tension that he creates between man’s finitude and his freedom is critical to his ethic, but he fails to consider God’s character as the redeemer of mankind. Additionally, the other sources of authority that Niebuhr relies on for his ethic are reason and experience, and although the influence is present, he does not …show more content…
As Hays points out, an emphasis on the “realistic” approach to Christian ethics comes with one danger for the church which is that it could lose its own particular voice in the process. This danger is one that many churches have fallen into today, in an attempt to be contemporary to the culture, it has adopted many many values that are not in line with scriptural teaching. Thus we find that although his methodology is comprehensive, Niebuhr’s ethical position is too selective in its use of New Testament passages and miscarries under further analysis, particularly while struggling to employ it in the context of the Church