Much of what this means was spelled out in Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (1960). In the West, Niebuhr wrote, human faiths have taken three forms. Henotheism regards the limited group as the center of value, and it values people and things according to how they serve the group’s ends. Polytheism is committed to different causes in different contexts; persons and things are valued for their contributions to diverse ends. A third form of faith, radical monotheism, emerged in Israel and in Jesus Christ. This faith apprehends that God the creator, the power of being, is also the redeemer or the center of value. Therefore the community of moral concern is no longer a closed society or limited group but the entire community of being. Relations among God and all creatures are seen to be matters of covenantal responsibility.
Radical faith conflicts with the other forms. In politics, for example, henotheists judge people in light of loyalties to a particular nation or race. Polytheists estimate persons by their unequal contributions to knowledge, economic production or the arts. But radical monotheists insist on equality because all people are equally related to the one universal center of value. From this perspective, it seems clear that whenever politics capitulates to lesser devotions, justifications for gross manipulations, injustice and oppression follow close behind.
Again, radical monotheists also protest whenever loyalty to God is displaced by devotion to holy communities and their artifacts. In The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry, Niebuhr contended that, in the name of radical faith, Christians need to oppose narrower ecclesiocentric, bibliocentric and even christocentric loyalties. As Niebuhr observed in a manuscript posthumously published as Faith on Earth: An Inquiry into the Structure of Human Faith, "questions about faith arise in every area of life."
God and Ourselves: The Witness of H. Richard Niebuhr by Douglas F. Ottati
