The Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr

...Whatever theology he has developed has grown out of these concerns and preoccupations...

...Out of this tension between man's self-transcending freedom and the inherent limitations of his creatureliness is generated the profound existential anxiety that is the mark of the human situation...

...2) mysticism (Aldous Huxley's "perennial philosophy"), in which the self tries to go beyond all structures of meaning, including itself, in order to lose itself in unconditioned, undifferentiated being...

...Niebuhr, as he gratefully acknowledges, has of late had a particularly appreciative understanding from men in these secular disciplines, which he attributes to the fact that "these disciplines are most critical of the illusions of our culture...

...Niebuhr undoubtedly takes his place in the van of the new theology and among the most influential thinkers of our time...

...and (3) biblical faith, in which "the self's experience with the ultimate in the final reaches of its self-awareness [is interpreted] as a dialogue with God," in an authentic I-Thou encounter...

...Niebuhr's intellectual career has led him into many fields and has driven him to take issue with the dominant tendencies in modern religion and culture...

...He has always, therefore, given generous recognition to the valuable witness that secularism, in certain of its forms, has been able to bear against the perversions and corruptions of the historic religions...

...Controlled by such "practical" interests, Niebuhr's thinking has emerged and taken shape at every point in polemical dialogue with the dominant tendencies in the social, cultural and religious life of our time...

...He came to sec...

...But above all he has stressed that no system of beliefs and "no meticulous obedience to specific moral standards" can be a "substitute for the self's encounter with God, in which the pretensions and pride of the self are broken and it is set free of self and sin...

...Perhaps it is also due to the fact that the kind of theology he teaches seems to them particularly near to their concerns and particularly germane to their problems...

...actually, he is a self embedded in nature, culture and society, yet transcending all of these by virtue of the indeterminate possibilities of his freedom...

...idealism sees him as essentially free spirit or reason...

...How far-ranging has been the thought of this theologian-in-spite-of-himself is reflected in this volume, in which 20 men comment on various aspects of Niebuhr's thinking and Niebuhr replies...

...Man," Niebuhr contends, "is the kind of being that cannot be whole unless he be committed, that cannot establish his life unless he find a center of life beyond life...

...Yet, man is also a creature relative, finite, incomplete...

...but what is really significant is the wide diversity of contributors...

...This dimension of human existence which enables the self "to stand as it were above the structure and coherences of the world" Niebuhr recognizes as the "dimension of the eternal," for it is in this dimension of his being that man is driven beyond himself toward God...

...it must be saved by something which is more than justice...

...The Nature and Destiny of Man...

...But they also confronted Niebuhr with deeper problems as to the nature of man and the potentialities and limitations of his being...

...In his search for ultimate meaning and security, man is confronted with three alternatives: (1) idolatry, in which the self, individual or corporate, absolutizes itself, its interests and values...

...which religious liberalism and secular idealism had combined to deride and obscure...

...Most of the essays are of high caliber, the great majority are sympathetic though critical, almost all are illuminating...

...The human person and man's society," he says, "are by nature historical, and the ultimate truth about life must be mediated historically...

...therefore, the folly and peril of every attempt to establish the Kingdom of Heaven within history, to achieve perfection through human efforts within the historical structures of society and culture...

...his concern over the past four decades has been to give depth and reality to Christian ethics and to reveal the full relevance of the historic Christian faith to the problems and perplexities of our age...

...These problems [cannot be solved] without an answer to the question: In what way is each of these concepts rooted in being-itself...

...Faith is an existential encounter in which man opens himself to the judgment and grace of God, or it is nothing at all...

...The "nature" of man Niebuhr found in his unique dimension of freedom, the capacity of the self to transcend all of the coherences, whether natural, social or rational, through which it is provisionally defined and in which it is provisionally enclosed: Man is a "being forever surpassing himself infinitely" (Pascal...

...History, as neither bourgeois liberalism, the Social Gospel nor Marxism could understand, is not its own redeemer: it remains ambiguous to the very end, "a tragedy in which all are involved, whose keynote is anxiety and frustration, not progress and fulfilment" (Schlesinger...

...yet throughout, as he himself confesses, he has "not strayed very far from [his] original ethical and apologetic interests...

...All problems," he says, "drive us to an ontological analysis...

...In the larger perspective, it is obvious that he belongs with the "neo-orthodox" trend in contemporary Protestant thinking, which has attempted to restate the tradition of Christian faith in terms which are at once more biblical and more existential than either the old orthodoxy or the old liberalism allowed...

...He came to see the radical ambiguity residing at the heart of even human enterprise: he came to see that every achievement of human virtue and rationality bears within itself an element of evil and unreason which becomes demonic precisely to the degree that it is ignored or written off as merely incidental and unimportant...

...Tillich's approach, as it emerges from his recent writings and from his critical essay in this volume, is ontological...

...These new insights resulted in a new and much more sophisticated social philosophy, in a philosophy of social action without Utopian illusions...

...Naturalism sees man as simply part of nature...

...6.50...

...How creative this approach may be, in its relevance to human existence at all levels, can be appreciated only by a careful reading of the book itself...

...We see the folly of attempting to complete life and history through our own doing, and yet we recognize that our efforts and achievements have their significant place in a "larger plan" in which our fragmentary meanings will be completed in a way beyond our comprehension or control...

...The recognition of the moral ambiguity [of all economic, social and political institutions...

...His criticism of liberal idealism, religious and secular alike, first led him to a position very close to Marxism, in which he found something of the social realism he was seeking...

...The increasingly biblical cast of Niebuhr's thinking has manifested itself in an emphasis that has brought him into conflict with the basic philosophical outlook championed by Paul Tillich, with whom he is often identified in the popular mind...

...Niebuhr speaks out of the authentic Christian tradition, and it is a vindication of the apologetic vocation he has taken upon himself that what he says is heard with such understanding and appreciation by men of the most diverse creeds and philosophies...

...Here Niebuhr found the classical Christian tradition most illuminating, and his reflections on these problems, supported by his studies in Augustine and the great Reformers and developed against the background of a profound critique of the presuppositions of modern culture, were presented in 1944 and 1943 in the two volumes of the Gilford Lectures...

...He came to realize that the Christian "law of love" was bound to dissipate into irrelevant senlimcutality unless it was able to relate itself to the ambiguous situations of actual life in terms of practical strategies of power and justice, while recognizing that "justice which is only justice soon degenerates into something less than justice...

...He was first stirred out of his liberal idealism and pacifism by, confrontation with the "social realities of a rapidly expanding industrial community" (Detroit), to which he had been sent soon after his ordination...

...For redemption, man even modern science-wielding, history-making man must look beyond...

...For Niebuhr, the ontologizing of life and history is part of the "Greek" tendency to deny the indeterminate freedom of the self and reduce it to reason or nature...

...It is a theology that restates the basic insights of biblical faith "with such irresistible relevance to contemporary experience" that as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., one of the contributors to this volume, long ago pointed out, and as readers of Niebuhr's frequent contributions to The New Leader can testify "even those who have no decisive faith in the supernatural find their own reading of experience and history given new and significant dimensions...

...This disavowal is made in a tone of genial self-deprecation and need not be taken literally...

...he began to see that its "hard" utopianism was but the other side of the "soft" utopianism of the liberal culture, and that in its Communist form it had let to the worst excesses of self-righteous tyranny...

...We must admit," he says, "that there is no guarantee in any theology or form of worship that a community of faith which intends to bring men into contact with God may not be used for essentially idolatrous purposes...

...For by this time Niebuhr had been driven to rediscover the relevance of the classical doctrine of "original sin...

...Striving to overcome this tension and to allay the anxiety gnawing at his heart, man is constantly under a double temptation: either to deny his freedom and lose himself in a welter of organic impulse, which is sensuality, or to deny his creatureliness by attempting in his pride to play the god and pretend to be sole master of his life and destiny...

...For Reinhold Niebuhr, by general consent America's most influential theological thinker, is indeed no theologian in the Continental sense of theological system-builder...

...neither had any sense of sin or of the meaning of sin in the individual and corporate life of mankind...

...Niebuhr's presentation of biblical faith as the only genuine alternative to idolatry or mysticism has not led him to deny or obscure the corruptions to which even biblical faith may fall victim...

...he pointed out, "is tantamount to the discovery why the 'Kingdom of God" is relevant to every historic situation but can never be realized in history...

...Side by side with the theologian and philosopher, in this volume of "The Library of Living Theology," stand the historian and the political scientist, and their contributions are among the best and most perceptive...

...Both Marxism and liberalism reflected the same confidence in man's unlimited capacity for self-salvation through science and social action...

...He has merely been able to make these interests take in all the major concerns of our culture...

...And he goes on to explain: "I have taught Christian social ethics . . . , [and] my avocational interest as a kind of circuit rider in the colleges and universities has prompted an interest in the justification of the Christian faith in a secular age...

...Neither naturalism nor idealism can understand this predicament, for neither sees man in his wholeness...

...This is the theme of his latest book, The Self and the Dramas of History, in which Niebuhr, with acknowledgment of his indebtedness to Martin Buber, describes the self as "a creature which is in constant dialogue with itself, with its neighbor, and with God" in the context of history...

...In this confidence, we may live and work in full responsibility, without lapsing into either self-sufficiency or despair...

...Out of this encounter of faith, insofar as it becomes operative in life, the possibility emerges of a courage and vision beyond the resources of human wisdom and virtue, a courage and vision that enable us to accept our limitations and yet make the most of the creative potentialities of our being by seeing both in the larger perspective of the divine purpose...

...yet, it does contain a modicum of truth...

...He has built no system...

...But Marxism, too, soon fell under his criticism...

...Reviewed by Will Herberg Author, "Judaism and Modern Man," "Protestant-Catholic-Jew' "I cannot and do not claim to be a theologian," Reinhold Niebuhr states in the "Intellectual Autobiography" that constitutes the opening chapter of this volume...