Post Christendom

This thoughtful, challenging and accessible book makes an excellent addition to the growing literature exploring issues of faith and discipleship from the perspective of post-Christendom. Indeed, the title is explicit in its recognition of the perspective from which it is written. Craig Carter not only quotes with appreciation from Post-Christendom: Church and Mission in a Strange New World, but his book would fit very well into the Anabaptist Network’s ‘After Christendom’ series.

Carter, an associate professor in Toronto, offers here a trenchant critique of one of the most influential texts on social ethics in the 20th century, H Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture (published in 1951). Acknowledging the popularity and longevity of this book in academic and more popular circles, Carter nevertheless argues that Niebuhr’s approach is fundamentally flawed by the assumed but unacknowledged Christendom framework that pervades his work.