In quintessentially modern fashion, Niebuhr framed his book in terms of two highly abstract words: Christ and Culture. What kind of book would he have written—what kind of cultural influence would his book have had—if he had been assigned the title Jesus and the Cultures? Christ is a Greek translation of a Hebrew word; Jesus is the name of a Hebrew man who radically redefined the meaning of that Hebrew word by applying it to his ministry of healing, confrontation, reconciliation, and suffering. Culture is a broad and abstract word, but the historical Jesus of Nazareth, and his first-century followers and biographers, lived very consciously not in “culture” but in the midst of many “cultures.”

—Culture Making, p.180