A Gospel of Serene Tension

...He was an unsentimental dystopian and an unrelenting social activist—and he had a reasonably consistent theory to reconcile the clashing positions...

...After Bruce Barton, in The Man Nobody Knows, made Jesus out to be a super-Rotarian, a go-getting Babbit, Niebuhr wrote: "The gospel of Jesus is not a gospel of obvious success, but of ultimate success through obvious failure...

...He was no mushhead...

...The claims on his name have proliferated in recent months, particularly in conservative circles, partly as a result of the interest stirred in Niebuhr by Fox's biography...

...Society was not to blame for all our ills...

...In his youth, Maritain wrote: "I will be a Socialist and I will live for the revolution...

...10—for the same reason James Madison did almost 200 years earlier: a profound distrust of human nature, with its inherent concentration on self-interest and its endless capacity to identify that self-interest as the will of the Lord...

...He believed we must seek perfection, he also believed we can never attain perfection...

...This sense of uncertainty, especially against the background of man's sad story in history, inevitably spawns a sense of helplessness, of futility, of not-caring, of cynicism...

...Niebuhr prescribed the tincture of tension...

...Brown's selections tend more toward presenting Niebuhr as the religious philosopher...

...Perhaps there could not be any definitive statement...

...Is it good or bad to think and act as an individual deeply concerned with your own personal or parochial needs...

...He wanted stouthearted men "who have substituted some new illusions for the abandoned one...

...Man's potential for good makes democracy possible...

...In an Interpretation of Christian Ethics, Niebuhr proclaimed that love is an "impossible possibility...

...The two men were alike in many respects...

...But, he would hasten to add, if you become submerged in the group to the point of losing your personal identity, you are no longer a person, you are an indistinguishable drop in a totalitarian ocean...

...Man is both a social animal and a lonely hunter, a herd creature and a rogue elephant...

...Because his speeches and writings are heavily laden with economic and political material, many think of Niebuhr as being, above all else, a social reformer motivated by notions about the inherent goodness of man, another bleeding heart doing his daily good deed...

...As he pondered his decision, those questions would, typically, trigger an avalanche of others: When they named the street for him were they paying tribute to an idea of his they did not really comprehend or, if they did, was it one of his well-established and highly popularized concepts that he himself had come to have second thoughts about...

...Uncertainty—in the world of science they called it "indeterminacy"—was a law of nature...

...WhileFox does, of course, use many direct quotes from Niebuhr, his prose lacks the fullness of style, the structural strength and the cumulative power that can be found in Niebuhr's own pieces...

...In his serious yet sprightly biography, Richard Fox sums up Niebuhr's first significant work, Leavesfrom the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, as a "portrait of the young man as a paradox, doubting believer, self-critical prophet...

...Both accepted the positive contributions of an ego-driven capitalism and the simultaneous need to tame the bourgeoisie with socially imposed, humanly oriented limits and purposes—that is, to balance and integrate the individual with the community...

...Give us the courage to change what should be changed...

...That's the other half of him...

...Man will feel in that tension between what is and what ought to be the very glory of life, and will come to know that the perfection which eludes him is not only a human possibility and impossibility, but a Divine fact...

...But, he would hasten to add, self-involvement too easily expresses itself in greed, in economic exploitation and political oppression...

...The will to live is thus transmuted into the will to self-realization...

...Still, privately Niebuhr would undoubtedly be pleased that Fox did what he did, for his approach is truly Niebuhrian...

...The Theology of Freedom: The Legacy of Jacques Maritain and Reinhold Niebuhr By John W. Cooper Mercer...

...Man, being more than a natural creature, is not interested merely in physical survival but in prestige and social approval...

...When the Republican Right-wing separated individual freedom from social obligation, Niebuhr wrote (1965): "The resistance to 'big government' is frightening, particularly since all our problems are on a national scale...

...For Niebuhr there was an answer...

...Reinie was a rough debater...

...Give us the wisdom to distinguish one from the other...

...Doubt was at the core of Niebuhr's belief and belief was at the core of his doubt...

...He was, to use his term, a "Christian realist...

...as internal economic circumstances improved and external threats lessened, Communism would become more democratic...

...That conviction made Niebuhr a socialist and and a Socialist...

...In the 1968 Presidential campaign, the last Niebuhr was to witness, his profound misgivings about Vietnam led him to support Hubert Humphrey only reluctantly...

...Nothing but madness will do battle with malignant power and 'spiritual wickedness in high places.' The illusion is dangerous because it encourages terrible fanaticisms...

...A lonely paragraph, a sentence, sometimes even a piece of a sentence—always elegantly written—can be lifted out of context to make Niebuhr pro-war or pacifist, radical or conservative, chauvinist or internationalist...

...It must therefore be brought under the control of reason...

...The collection of essays and addresses edited by Robert McAfee Brown, The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, is a valuable supplement to the biography...

...Were they honoring him or honoring themselves in the egocentric way of all flesh...

...They are his responses to the demonic, the dark, the devilish element in man...

...for justice cannot be approximated if the hope of its perfect realization does not generate a sublime madness in the soul...

...Any such image is quickly wiped away by the story of his life or by a reading of his works...

...That's one half of Niebuhr...

...He derided the schools of liberal and radical thought that argued "men would be good if only political institutions would not corrupt them," or "they would be good if the prior evil of a faulty economic organization could be eliminated," or "evil is no more than ignorance, and therefore waits for a more perfect educational process to redeem man from his partial and particular loyalties...

...he has a need to go the way of his society and to go his own way, and often confuses the two...

...But, lest the miracle become amadness, let reason step in...

...Niebuhr had little use for Christians who used their " Christianity" to escape their Christian responsibilities...

...If there were, Niebuhr would have committed the ultimate sin of pride, of being a know-it-all, of boasting to God that he had brazenly eaten of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and was, by that act of disobedience, as wise as God himself...

...But they did not come to him late in life, as he became disillusioned with reform...

...The two books reflect a slight difference in emphasis, too: Fox tends to present Niebuhr the social activist...

...Over the course of a lifetime, both men came to realize that no economic system, no political constitution, no reform, no revolution, and no class would offer the ultimate solution...

...After Richard Nixon was elected, Niebuhr hoped, despite his rejection of the Republican program, that the new President would at least end the war as promised...

...One can only hope that reason will not destroy it before its work is done...

...To manage that mix, sweat in tension—and pray...

...Maybe Communism was a dark prelude to a bright continuance of man's unending march toward progress...

...The conflicts between men are thus never simple conflicts between competing survival impulses...

...If he lives at all, he is bound to seek the realization of his true nature...

...For well over the next half century he would deliver sermons, write essays, compose books, engage in debates, and turn out editorials dripping with such paradoxes...

...It was the last insight—man's capacity for sin and sacrifice, man's egoism and altruism—that made Niebuhr's life an unending war against the Utopians and sentimentalists, on the one hand, and the cynics and escapists, on the other...

...But then came Hitler...

...where Reinie chose to seat himself and sweat...

...Capable of biting sarcasm, devastating one-liners and penetrating logic, he did not hesitate to put a public dunce cap on his critics and then dump them down in someforgotten corner...

...At the unripe age of 21, he preached that Matthew 10:39 "expresses the paradox of all life: that self-preservation means self-destruction and self-destruction means self-preservation...

...Niebuhr's endless pursuit of the paradox was not a rhetorical gimmick...

...It is good to think of yourself as a "political animal" driven by a "social instinct," as part of a group...

...To a significant degree, the evolution of Maritain and Niebuhr may be attributed to Russian Communism: The proletariat had made the revolution, but the abolition of private property and capitalism did not abolish the lust for power...

...The most important of these illusions," he wrote in Moral Man and Immoral Society, "is that the collective life of mankind can achieve perfect justice...

...There was nothing simple about the Niebuhrian tension—a tension not only between what is and what should be, between the real and the ideal, but also between man and nature, between the individual and society, and—perhaps most important—between man and himself...

...When the image of Nixon appeared, Niebuhr engaged in the only disobedience he could manage...

...In his secular way, he traced evil to the human psyche and its proclivity toward patricide, matricide, sibling rivalry, and an extended galaxy of neuroses...

...Conservatives refer to his anticommu-nism, his belief in original sin, his rejection of all Utopias, his advocacy of a strong defense posture, his opposition to the centralization of power...

...Richard Fox's biography, a masterpiece of research, analysis and lean rhet o-ric, is mainly about Niebuhr's thoughts...

...Hence, Niebuhr spent most of his adult life fighting for democracy and against capitalism...

...Niebuhr would answer, Yes...

...Quite the opposite: The democratic way was the only way...

...But it took a long time to see that Communism would turn out as it did in the Soviet Union...

...and self-realization involves self-giving in relation to others.'' That is one vital side of man: the person as part of the collective...

...Niebuhr would answer, Yes...

...And the War...

...Bedriddenfor long spells, he continued to hurl his thunderbolts...

...How canaMaritain or a Niebuhr or anybody else stir humans to act...

...It is a succinct summary of the preacher of paradox: God, give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed...

...They became Madisonians, dedicated to a diversity guaranteed by bringing a variety of interests and cultures into one paradoxical polis where safety consisted in numbers—a great number of people and powers to get the strength that is derived from unity, and a great number of interests and ideas to scatter the say-so within the polis...

...Of all these schools with their "fatuous and futile plans," Niebuhr asks, "How is it that an essentially good man could have produced corrupting and tyrannical political organizations or exploiting economic organizations, or fanatical and superstitious religious organizations...

...he should leave his mark on history...

...Reviewed by Gus Tyler Assistant president, ILGWU From Broadway to Riverside Drive, 120th Street in Manhattan becomes Reinhold Niebuhr Place...

...Niebuhr and Maritain also developed a high regard for democratic pluralism...

...It is a very valuable illusion for the moment...

...Everything I will think and know, I will consecr?*e to the proletariat and to humanity...

...So let "madness" work its miracles...

...In The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, written in 1944, Niebuhr spelled out what he held to be our inescapable and eternal inner conflict...

...Should he who excoriated pride as original sin denounce the consecration of a street in his name as a desecration of his teaching...

...Bitterly, a letter he later wrote to an old colleague and comrade denounced Nixon's "madness in extending an unpopular war he was elected to bring an end to...

...Their object was to keep their souls scrubbed so they would not be denied admission to a heavenly otherworld where "cleanliness was next to Godliness...

...Niebuhr believed in original sin...

...and to his true nature belongs his fulfillment in the lives of others...

...His book is more than a biography: It is an invitation to continue the inquiry, to feel the tension, to get into the act—without which religion and life may be a hollow mockery...

...A Christian, in his view, should be more than a well-behaved sojourner on earth...

...These attitudes are essential elements of Niebuhr's philosophy...

...There is no such tome, despite Niebuhr's deep Germanic roots...

...He confessed that because of America's involvement in Vietnam "for the first time" he felt "ashamed of our beloved nation...

...To Reinie, a truth that could notbestoodonitsheadwasnota truth...

...He backed Martin Luther King's strategy of civil disobedience to win civil rights...

...He pushed himself off the mattress and spat out the words, 'That bastard...

...As a Protestant—at several moments perhaps the world's most prominent Protestant clergyman—Niebuhr celebrated the individual, the role of conscience, the rights of man, the power of protest...

...Nonetheless, the essence of Niebuhr can be gleaned from the intertwining threads that run through what he wrote and what he wrought...

...Possessing a darkly unconscious sense of his insignificance in the total scheme of things, he seeks to compensate for his insignificance by pretensions of pride...

...He was a doer as well as a thinker, an actor in his own script...

...He blasted Lyndon Johnson for the "error of regarding the issue of Vietnam as the containment of Communism, when we are in fact dealing with the nationalism of a small nation in Asia...

...He must have a sense of fulfillment, of purpose...

...The Moral Majority focused on the "serenity" line, with its philosophy of acceptance...

...The third half—a third half is possible in the impossible spirituality of Niebuhr's cosmos—is where the tension is...

...The Philadelphia Inquirer ran an ad for an embroidery kit that was headlined: "Amazing Embroidery Offer...

...Maritain and Niebuhr put it theologically: original sin...

...This second trait—the push for power and prestige—is at its worst when it masquerades as the first trait, as an act in the service of mankind...

...Robert McAfee Brown entitles the initial section of his rich, rewarding collection of essays and addresses by Niebuhr, "Pessimistic Optimism...

...One wonders how Niebuhr would have responded to this kind of commentary on his life and works...

...One night in Niebuhr's final year, Fox recounts, "as he lay motionless on his bed, the television news flickered on a few feet away...

...185 pp...

...Isn't democracy just another one of those "fatuous and futile plans...

...Man himself was a source of evil...

...Is it good or bad to think and act as part of a collective...

...So as the world moved toward midcentury, the fate of the Russian experiment remained unclear...

...To his very last day, Niebuhr raised his voice to leave a mark...

...Then there is the other side, as "the will to live is spiritually transmuted into the will to power, or into the desire for 'power and glory...

...His classic, The Nature and Destiny of Man, opened: "Man is, and yet is not, involved in the flux of nature and time...

...How does one live with, and act upon, two contrary thoughts without becoming a schizo...

...Fox, following Niebuhr, assumes that no one has the final word because there is no final word...

...Niebuhr was a passionate liberal (radical) who rejected pacifist talk as consisting of dangerous platitudes, who demanded pluralism as an antidote tocentralized power, who saw communism as self-righteousness soured into sin, who saw the need for social intervention lest the worst in each of us bring out the worst in all of us...

...That two radical young men, one Catholic and the other Protestant, should have converged in this way—notwithstanding their differences to the end— may be a sign of our age...

...Many of the old certainties of Western liberal culture were shattered: Man was not innately good, evil did not come from the outside alone, progress was not guaranteed, the enemy within was as great a danger as the enemy without...

...Beautiful 'Silent Majority' Serenity Prayer Now Yours in Fabulous Stitch-ery...

...They are conflicts in which each man or group seeks to guard its power and prestige against the peril of competing expressions of power and pride...

...According to Niebuhr, man cannot simply live, like a vegetable...

...Fully aware of this incongruity, he invited—and incited—us to reach for the impossible with the expectation that we might thereby approximate the possible...

...To him, man—not money—was the root of all evil...

...How many can one rally withthecry:"Letuslaydownourlives, if necessary, in a crusade whose outcome won't change much...

...The third book, The Theology of Freedom by John W. Cooper, academic dean and associate professor of philosophy and religion at Bridgewater College in Virginia, is a somber effort to find an ecumenical ethic in the fusion of Niebuhr with French Roman Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain...

...Paradox upon paradox...

...If "Reinie" were alive (he died in 1971) he would be in a quandary...

...Both believed in progressive social action...

...June Bingham wrote a biography of Niebuhr called Courage to Change...

...16.95...

...Or should he be pleased that the worth of the message he had been trying to get across for lo so many decades had finally and officially been recognized...

...In addition, speaking the final word would have deprived him of his beloved tension, that joyous agony...

...If that sounds oxymoronic, then all of Niebuhr must be equally self-contradictory...

...The crowning irony—the appropriation of this radical by the reactionaries— came in 1970...

...Freud offered a reason in his Civilization and Its Discontents...

...Andafterthat, the Hitler-Stalin Pact...

...man's potential for evil makes democracy necessary...

...In 1933, Niebuhr wrote: "Marxism gives the key to the real facts of capitalistic civilization...

...The passages dc\ oted lo his personal life really pay no more attention to that side of him than he did...

...The pietists totally separated religion from reality...

...Niebuhr was much too much involved in this world to tolerate a Christianity that paid little mind to economic suffering or political oppression...

...Hemightbedo-ing the same to Fox right now, in the otherworld he did not believe in...

...Hence, Niebuhr spent most of his adult life as an active Socialist and an equally active anti-Communist...

...Denouncing the evils of Stalinism, he said, "We must fight their falsehoods with our truth, but we must also fight the falsehood in our truth...

...The prayer was the three-liner by Reinhold Niebuhr that has become so much a part of the thinking person's culture today, many feel it was always there...

...Reminded that this was rather un-Christian, he retorted that the Scriptures said you should love your enemy, not like him...

...Because he thought and expressed himself in paradoxes, it is possible for various, even opposing, movements to lay claim to Niebuhr—especially now that he is dead and unable to rebuke them for their stupidity or cupidity...

...But Fox, although appearing to be a disciple of Niebuhr's, does not eschew injecting himself into the narrative and repeatedly makes judgments on his subj ect...

...They reached the Madisonian conclusion—Federalist No...

...They were central to his thinking when he founded his Fellowship of Socialist Christians in 1931, when he founded the Union for Democratic Action in 1941, when he joined with Eleanor Roosevelt, David Dubinsky, Walter Reuther, Jim Loeb, and Joseph Rauh in founding the Americans for Democratic Action in 1947, and when he took on a monthly column in The New Leader in 1954...

...Reading these three books by and about Niebuhr, one looks for some carefully constructed document that lays out his total philosophy in the manner of Aquinas' Summa...

...The first feeling of the pro-proletarian thinker was that the dictatorship was only a temporary transition to a subsequent democracy...