The Political Meaning of Christianity
Fox, Richard Wightman
WHERE SIN ABOUNDS THE POLITICAL MEANING OF CHRISTIANITY Glenn Tinder Louisiana State University Press, $29.95,243 pp. Richard Wightman Fox Clenn Tinder calls his book a "personal statement," and...
...I did find it jarring to be told, for example, that "power is intrinsically evil," or that the Aristotelian notion of friendship is "basically selfish...
...But Tinder's prejudices are pronounced so baldly and unselfconsciously that one gets used to them, as one comes to expect the crabby musings of an endearing relative...
...Tinder follows H. Richard Niebuhr in stressing sin rather than the capacity for good, "the grace of doing nothing" (in H. Richard's phrase) rather than the hope that human action could build a better world...
...Insisting repeatedly that "humanity, in Christian terms, is a fallen race" will certainly not gain Tinder a following among liberal Protestants and Catholics...
...One learns that there is real wheat to be sifted from the chaff...
...Nietzsche, in Tinder's view, was concerned to "wipe out the idea that every human being deserves respect...
...In those years Niebuhr challenged Marxist and liberal hopes for a new society because he thought that in their zeal to transform the world, they forgot about the limits imposed by an imperfect human nature...
...Human society can never become a fellowship...
...And on the whole his book is a useful wake-up call, much like the one Reinhold Niebuhr issued in the late 1930s and 1940s...
...At its best the book makes a cogent restatement of Niebuhrian principles-not just Reinhold's but H. Richard's too...
...Catholics and liberal Protestants, he tells us, will find his "Reformation" focus on "fallenness" unpalatable...
...After Vietnam liberals retired en masse to what Robert Bellah called their "lifestyle enclaves...
...Disagreement and doubt are pervasive in almost all nations...
...Thus, Christians do not assume that the antiquity of institutions provides any assurances of their justice or efficacy...
...It would make more sense to instruct them to try believing in politics again...
...Tinder's view is (early) Barthian in its resistance to any limitation that the human mind might impose upon God's freedom of action...
...Responsibility means a simultaneous engagement and retrenchment, a willingness to challenge specific injustices in society without embarking on grandiose programs for delivering the world to some imagined state of perfection...
...Today Tinder makes an identical critique of liberation theology...
...But is it enough today to warn us against utopianism...
...From Reinhold, Tinder takes his fundamental structure...
...I did have to endure yet another assault on poor Friedrich Nietzsche, who was Bloom's designated outside agitator...
...Human beings are paradoxical, both sinners and creatures with a divine likeness...
...They must engage themselves in the world, but they must always keep their distance from it...
...I also had to disregard formulaic put-downs of "the monstrous bureaucratic despotism prevailing today in the Soviet Union"-a rather unnuanced assertion for a book published in 1989-and of student radicalism in the 1960s and liberation theology since that time...
...That is a very misleading characterization of a thinker who argued that Christianity itself, following the Hebraic tradition, had failed to respect human excellence when it endorsed what Nietzsche termed a "slave morality...
...For Christians," by contrast (in Tinder's very H. Richard Niebuhrian formulation), "sin is circumvented only by grace...
...He is an avowed Augustinian in the tradition of Paul, Luther, and Barth...
...That is where human beings struggle to realize God's will and where they encounter the divine judgment upon their self-aggrandizing pretensions (Reinhold...
...To my mind Tinder's analysis of the gap between Christianity and conservatism is the high point of his book...
...Civilization needs religion just as the self needs religion, but it is a prophetic faith, one that chastises society and the self for their inevitable complacency...
...ild new communities...
...But if Christians must resist the liberal temptation to equate the Kingdom with a perfected society, they must also reject the mystical temptation to leave history behind altogether...
...It is because, he writes, "human limits do not imply divine limits...
...One gets the sense in reading Tinder that nothing basic has changed since the late 1930s and 1940s...
...For Reinhold Niebuhr, who always retained his liberal faith that human society could move toward greater justice and community, imago dei meant that people had indeterminate capacities for good as well as evil...
...The consciousness of human fallibility is much keener in Christians than in conservatives," he writes, "for they are skeptical of human works and arrangements that typically command deep respect among conservatives...
...God is not found by escaping the day-to-day realm...
...At best it can aspire to being a balance of power, and Christians can never be fully defined by their participation in society...
...Long-standing customs and traditions embody not only the wisdom of generations but also their iniquity-in particular, the determination of dominant groups to preserve their power and privileges...
...American liberals and leftists are so fragmented and unsure of themselves today that they hardly need to be told to stop being Utopian...
...But Tinder's book is also distressingly "personal" in the sense that he doesn't care much about contextualizing himself, tracing the sources of his ideas, or debating alternative voices...
...Nietzsche faulted Christianity for precisely the reason that Tinder faults Nietzsche...
...He also loves Bonhoeffer and Dostoevsky, and draws heavily on Niebuhr...
...Like Bloom, Tinder can be awful, especially in his belly-aching about the modern world and its malefactors of relativism: "We live in a time of profound confusion...
...It was that Tinder is so good in some places and so bad in others, rather like Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind...
...After encountering such vague and vapid ruminations on page four, it was a struggle to keep reading...
...Yet he might have been much more interpersonal, engaging previous and current thinkers in the conversation that he wishes to spark...
...Catholics and liberal Protestants are not wrong to highlight the potential for good in human striving, or to struggle in the world of power and compromise for a just society...
...that is where God, when it suits him, comes after them to bestow the grace they do not merit (H...
...Tinder does generously concede that his viewpoint is just one possible Christian view of human nature and destiny...
...But his stress on sinfulness seems to him "to follow more closely the directional signs inherent in the life of one who said that the fullest love was giving up your life for your friends and who died at the hands of men of power...
...I was glad I did...
...He provides a warning to that effect...
...It is worthwhile to be reminded that Christian responsibility is not like secular responsibility...
...But what I found most disconcerting was neither the accent on sin nor his decision on the whole to go it alone rather than place himself in a community of fellow thinkers...
...But he should tell us more about how, if at all, his viewpoint speaks to contemporary American liberalism or radicalism...
...There are indeterminate possibilities for good in human history, Tinder grants, but not because of human capacities...
...The idea that God might "change human nature" whenever he pleases sets Tinder off firmly from the liberal Protestant and Catholic worldviews...
...How far God intends, within history, to change human nature and the human situation Christian principles do not permit us to infer...
...Few societies or individuals enjoy untroubled certitude, and judging from the disorder of the world, few societies or individuals are in touch with the truth...
...The virtuous actor in history is not the Christian, but God himself...
...It even goes beyond H. Richard Niebuhr's antiliberal standpoint, according to which God truly acts in history to enact his own will, but does so in spite of the always poor human material he has to work with...
...Conservatives worship past societies the way liberals worship future ones...
...What we need most may be his 1920s and early 1930s social idealism, his faith that despite the brokenness of human existence, people actually can gather in public to build new communities...
...Richard Wightman Fox Clenn Tinder calls his book a "personal statement," and for me it was a disturbing document...
...The Christian self is bifurcated, never at home...
...It may be that the Niebuhrian message we most need today is not his Depression and wartime appeal to "responsibility"-the reining in of political zeal...
...What is oddly refreshing about Tinder's perspective is that it protects him against falling into the grateful arms of conservatives just because he has rejected liberalism...
...If God wants to revise his handiwork, that is his privilege...
...Christians must act historically but always hold their action under a higher judgment...
...It is certainly not circumvented by society, the form sinful men and women give to the fallen world...
Vol. 117 • May 1990 • No. 10
