"If we are to understand American Christianity we need to take our stand within the movement so that its objects may come into view"

      "Every movement, like every person, needs to be understood before it can be criticized.  And no movement can be understood until its presuppositions, the fundamental faith upon which it rests, have been at least provisionally adopted.  The presuppositions may not be our own; we may find good reason for rejecting them in favor of others; but we cannot understand without occupying a standpoint, and there is no greater barrier to understanding than the assumption that the standpoint which we happen to occupy is a universal one, while that of the object of our criticism is relative."

     H. Richard Niebuhr, The kingdom of God in America (Middletown, CT:  Wesleyan University Press, 1988 [1937]), 12-13.  Yet if "we cannot understand without occupying a standpoint," there is no true standpoint that isn't a standpoint, and in that sense a conviction about the truth of a matter.  I.e. sheer perspectivalism won't do, and, indeed, would issue, in the end, to the very reductionism that Niebuhr is assailing here.  For, as he himself says, "the instrumental value of faith for society is dependent upon faith's conviction that it has more than instrumental value" (12).