Niebuhr's Life and Thought
BLANSHARD, BRAND
Niebuhr's Life and Thought THE COURAGE TO CHANGE By June Bingham Scribners. 414 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by BRAND BLANSHARD Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Yale University; author, "Reason...
...author, "Reason and Goodness" Here is A success story of a novel kind...
...After two broadening years at Yale, he took the pastorate of a small church in Detroit, where he remained for 13 years...
...Her solution is to alternate a chapter of story with a chapter of theory...
...He came to New York as a professor at Union Theological Seminary, and quickly became a national figure...
...Niebuhr apparently even believes in the resurrection of the body...
...To be sure, she allows dissenters to raise their rasping voices at times, but the last word is always Niebuhr's...
...More than that, he is a conservative theologian with a heavy infusion of the Old Testament and Augustine in his veins...
...He believes that God created man pure...
...The mere philosopher will want more light on all this than Niebuhr offers...
...Just before the War he was invited to give the Gifford lectures in Edinburgh, where crowded houses listened to him as an unofficial spokesman of his country...
...For Reinhold Niebuhr is a deeply committed religious man...
...He loves large, mouth-filling phrases and sweeping generalities: "the endless relativities of human relations," "provisional and tentative structures of meaning in nature, life and history...
...Yes, I dare say...
...But he is, after all, a bit of a genius...
...And such explanation as he does offer is not much helped by the form in which it is put...
...At a time when the misery of sharecroppers was at its worst, he helped buy a cooperative farm for sharecropper refugees in Mississippi, and became the president of it himself...
...Niebuhr's thought is not a closely articulated whole, and his interests are so widely scattered that they can be dealt with separately...
...He would admit that he cannot make out all these things by reason, and that they are not completely intelligible...
...that God is perfectly good and just in spite of all we see around us...
...Reinhold Niebuhr began his life in the prairie village of Wright City, Missouri, the son of the immigrant pastor of a local German Church...
...Like other early worshippers of "the God that failed," Niebuhr is thoroughly disillusioned with Communism, and opposed to any appeasement of it...
...June Bingham tells Niebuhr's story well...
...that we are all sinful before God even when we are doing our duty...
...He is an irrepressible human dynamo...
...Time put him on its cover...
...The young man from Wright City had arrived...
...editors begged him for his opinions...
...He lectured every week-end in colleges and wrote countless articles and reviews, interspersing them with solid treatises on ethics and politics...
...This serves surprisingly well...
...I cut my eyeteeth fighting Ford," he says...
...But revelation can supplement reason and even correct it...
...Then his star shot up like a meteor...
...If Niebuhr would only talk of the love of those that love you, and not about "love within the bounds of consanguinity and intimate community," we should all catch more of the important things he has to say...
...He spoke and wrote so effectively on pohtics, in this magazine and many others, that ambassadors found themselves quoting him and secretaries of state admitting his influence...
...In politics, at any rate, Niebuhr has been well ahead of public opinion, which in time has generally swung around to his side...
...He began as a pacifist, but came to see that this merely played into the hands of such a monster as Hitler, so he gave up pacifism and neutralism to become an ardent supporter of intervention...
...that to make faith a matter of reason is sinful pride...
...And perhaps it is unreasonable to ask that genius should ever run in harness...
...that our own experience of forgiveness may be a case of that descent...
...He was all for Socialism in the days of the depression, and he was surely right in thinking that at least Roosevelt's semi-Socialism was inevitable...
...Bingham's attitude toward her hero is pretty much the same in all fields...
...He insists that "the antinomies of history are not able finally to overcome the meaning of human existence...
...And so, I suspect, he is...
...that by misusing his free will, man has brought corruption upon himself, and that this persists as original sin...
...Mrs...
...Even though a stroke at the age of 60 seemed to put an end to everything, he has gone on, pecking out with one hand on his typewriter or dictating to relays of secretaries three or four more books as well as shoals of articles...
...He has earned it...
...For if ye love them which love you, what thanks have ye?' " I wondered how anyone who had lived with the beautiful and simple King James Bible long enough to quote the second sentence could also have written the first...
...To his biographer he is as inspired as the Old Testament prophets that he venerates, and ever so much more sensible...
...He attended a small denominational college in Elmhurst, Illinois, which at that time gave no recognized degree, and then went for three years to the equally modest Eden Theological Seminary...
...No fair-minded person will begrudge Niebuhr his success...
...that even man is not wholly in nature, but is in part supernatural himself...
...He has also had "the courage to change," even at some cost of consistency...
...Her great problem was how to weave into his biography an account of his far-ranging and difficult thought...
...The boy who had never taken a doctor's degree now had honorary doctorates showered upon him by Oxford and Glasgow, by Harvard, Princeton and Yale...
...that God descends on occasion from his eternal habitat into history and diverts its current...
...Nor has he lacked courage on internal issues...
...His early associations with the Left made him an easy mark for the yapping pack of McCarthyites, but he turned and publicly rended them nevertheless...
...But they will probably also look with wonderment at what is the moving force behind it all...
...Most New Leader readers will give Niebuhr full marks for such a record...
...But one of Mrs...
...Washington sought his advice...
...He has thrown himself into public causes with great courage and incredible energy...
...Bingham's many passages from Niebuhr gave me pause: "Love within the bounds of consanguinity and intimate community is devoid of special merit...
...The Ford Company's opposition to unionism brought him into conflict with it even in his youthful Detroit days...
...He seemed to be effectively buried...
Vol. 45 • May 1962 • No. 10
