Formerly an associate professor of religion at Walla Walla College, College Place, Washington, Charles Scriven is currently the senior pastor at Sligo Seventh-day Adventist Church in Takoma Park, Maryland. In The Transformation of Culture he charts and critiques the concepts in Christian social thought that have arisen since H. Richard Niebuhr's analyses.
After an introductory acknowledgment of his indebtedness to Niebuhr, Scriven uses the Anabaptist stance on social ethics as a credible biblical paradigm to assess what he considers the true Niebuhrian heritage. He argues that Niebuhr's earlier view on the church's relation to society is the more biblical one. It is the earlier view that points to the Anabaptist posture of seeing the church as a change agent without resorting to even considering the possibility of violence.
Scriven identifies, reviews, and high lights the distinctive features of three major Christian streams of thought (Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anabaptist) in post-Niebuhr social ethics. In this way he clarifies pertinent issues and establishes the challenging questions that need a response from transformational Christian discipleship and ethics. Scriven feels that the Anabaptists' position is a truer witness of Christ's radical ethics than are the more moderate stances of the classical Lutheran or Calvinist modes.
The book provides an informed analy sis of thinkers—including Gilkey, Gutierrez, and Yoder—whose writings have shaped Christian social philosophy. Be cause of its selective paradigms and the attempt to represent authors in historical sequence, the reader is able to understand the present landscape of Christian social thinking with some precision. However, at times the repetition of each writer's themes and the frequent references to Niebuhr and the Anabaptists make one wish the author would move ahead with his argument.
Scriven provides a good overview of both the chief thinkers in the area of Christian social ethics and of the issues to keep in mind. His critique of the various writers exposes the weak links in their ethical chains. While his attempts to be objective and sympathetic dilute some what the persuasiveness of his position, ultimately he builds a strong case for the use of the gospel as a transformer of society that does not depend upon force.
Overall, the book is a tour de force that merits reading.
