American Protestant theologian and ethicist, younger brother of Reinhold, whose work at Yale Divinity School over three decades quietly shaped American academic theology in ways the more flamboyant Reinhold did not. H. Richard was the more systematic thinker, the more historically and methodologically careful, and the one more interested in how Christian communities actually believe and live rather than in the grand political engagements that made his brother famous.
The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929) was his first major book and a strikingly sociological account of how American Protestant divisions reflect class, region, and race as much as theological difference. The Kingdom of God in America (1937) argued that American Christianity had been most itself when it held together divine sovereignty, Christ's transforming love, and the present experience of the Kingdom — and had failed when any one of the three was lost. The Meaning of Revelation (1941) reoriented theology around the question of how a historical community understands its own past in light of the events it takes as revelatory.
His most widely read book, Christ and Culture (1951), set out a fivefold typology of Christian responses to surrounding culture — Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, Christ the transformer of culture — that has been taught in seminaries ever since. The Responsible Self (1963, posthumous) developed a distinctive ethics of response: neither the teleological ("what is the goal?") nor the deontological ("what is the rule?") but the cataleptic — "what is going on, and what is the fitting response?"
He taught Harvey Cox, James Gustafson, Paul Ramsey, and a generation of American Christian ethicists whose quieter work proved at least as durable as his brother's louder arguments.