Essays by Niebuhr
FITCH, ROBERT E.
Essays by Niebuhr Pious and Secular America. Reviewed by Robert E. Fitch By Reinhold Niebuhr. Dean, Pacific School of Religion; Scribner. 150 pp. $3.00. author, "Decline and Fall of Sex" "It is...
...In a way, this first essay and the one that follows it are Niebuhr's comment on the "return to religion" in the United States today...
...In this essay the emergence of Lenin and of Franklin D. Roosevelt is adduced as an example of significant contingency in history...
...Niebuhr sees the problem as arising from the perpetual pride of any ma-j ority dealing with any minority, and from the fact that the Jew resists assimilation both ethnically and religiously...
...It is also significant that all of these essays are fairly recent in composition, having been written or published in the years 1956 and 1957...
...But the topics covered are as various as higher education in America, the impulse for perfection and the impulse for community, justice for the American Negro, the relations of liberty and equality, developments in Russia and in the United States, the relations of Christians and Jews in Western civilization, and the blend of mystery and meaning in life...
...It is true that, in some way or another, most of it bears on the relationship of the religions to the social and political life of America...
...After case studies in Britain, France and the United States, he concludes that liberty and equality are valuable regulative principles but are not realizable goals...
...Philosophical forms of theology which try to digest this mystery rationally must oscillate between the structural "being" of Aristotle, or the undifferentiated "ground of being" of Neo-Platonism...
...No degree of metaphysical speculation can ever derive the reality of historical purpose and meaning from the concept of 'being.' If we believe man's historical existence to be meaningful, we do so by faith and not by reason...
...Niebuhr finds that history is recalcitrant to rational patterns of coherence...
...His main concern is with the tension between liberty, on the one hand, and unity and stability, on the other hand...
...He notes the union of the secular perfectionism of the Enlightenment and the sectarian perfectionism of the frontier as it proposed to bring about Utopia through the philosophic exercise of reason and the religious exercise of love...
...But, declares Niebuhr, in the purely religious affirmation of his last chapter, it is only the revelation in Christ which illumines the mysteries of creation and of the self...
...It is later in this volume that he states his principle: "The problem is always to be sufficiently empirical to acknowledge the obvious facts as we experience them, even though the acknowledgment threatens the rational system by which we try to establish the coherence of things...
...And he remarks that, while both Judaism and Christianity are "covenant faiths," they differ in their views of Messia-nism, of grace and law, and of the relationship of the universal to the particular in history...
...Niebuhr insists that contingent existence points beyond itself to an unconditioned mystery of being...
...The contents of this volume, however, cannot really be brought under one rubric...
...For he does not try to prove, like the idealist, that these two values are essentially one...
...author, "Decline and Fall of Sex" "It is as rare an achievement for the pious man to be charitable as for the rational man to be 'reasonable.' " While this aphorism does not define the contents of Reinhold Niebuhr's latest collection of essays, it does help to indicate both the point and the tension of his inquiry...
...The essay on Russia and America has for its subtitle, "a study in historical contingency...
...With reference to the popular evangelist, Niebuhr feels that Christians must agree with discriminating secularists that "the presentation of such a simple version of the Christian faith as an alternative to the discredited Utopian illusions is very ironic...
...It is with reference to this last item that Niebuhr gives an interpretation of the state of Israel...
...I am constrained to believe, also, that the concluding essay on "Mystery and Meaning" is in part an answer to the impressive ontology of Paul Tillich...
...The discussion of the relation of Christians and Jews in Western civilization was first read as a paper before a joint meeting of the faculties of the Jewish Theological Seminary and of Union Theological Seminary...
...One essay that exhibits the freshness of Niebuhr's insight is the essay in which he discusses liberty and equality...
...At some length he comments on the Jew's exceptional capacity for civic virtue...
...the tension between equality and the inevitable hierarchy of function in any community...
...Here we get explicit judgments on Fifield and Peale and Billy Graham...
...nor does he try to show, like the pluralist, the way they in part compete and in part cooperate with one another...
...and there is a shrewd empirical analysis of why the agrarian Oriental nations were more receptive to Communism than were the industrialized middle-class countries of the West...
...Men will seek for a metaphysical validation of such a faith in vain...
...The opening essay on "Pious and Secular America" gives the title to the book, and initiates the exploration of a polarity in our culture with which Niebuhr is especially concerned...
Vol. 41 • June 1958 • No. 25
