SPIRITUAL VOLCANO
Smith, Huston
Spiritual Volcano Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought, edited by Charles W. Kegley fc Robert W. Bretall. Macmillan. 440 pp. $6.50. Reviewed by Huston Smith AGENERATION...
...Nor can social contrivance eliminate it, for the problem lies in man himself not his institutions (contra Rousseau and Marx...
...In the social realm "justification by faith" means finding the courage to engage in social action without closing our eyes to the moral ambiguities such action always involves...
...Niebuhr's rounded answer, as it comes from these pages, runs: Man's essence is freedom...
...The radical character of this freedom precludes any timelessly valid ethical demands except love...
...Rooted as it is in man's will, this thrust for power is a permanent feature of the human situation...
...In this sense man is always a sinner...
...What is the Biblical view of man and his situation...
...Sin can never be eliminated from human life...
...The social philosophy rising from this foundation begins with the recognition of power as the basic social problem...
...In power, sweep, depth, and relevance, theology has become one of the most vigorous components of contemporary intellectual life...
...The picture of Niefcuhr that emerges is this* of a spiritual volcano—fiery, restless, indignant not of injustice only but of smugness and sentimentality as well...
...It can, however, be reduced (and love proportionately increased), most effectively by the realization (faith) that our fragmentary lives will be completed in a larger plan than any which we control or comprehend, a part of this completion being the forgiveness of the sin we have fallen into by our frantic efforts to save ourselves...
...Today when Harvard goes looking for a successor to these giants, it calls Paul Tillich...
...His refutations of these have become so familiar, however, that most readers will look to this book for a clarification of the alternative position—Biblical faith—from which his volleys have been fired...
...Those who regard theology as "the triumph of language over thought" will find here refreshing evidence to the contrary...
...Though love cannot be expected in the social order, it remains relevant as a judgment upon every social arrangement or program, saving us from idolatry or false pride and providing a sense of direction...
...Scarcely half over, the Twentieth Century has already established itself theologically as the most creative since the Thirteenth...
...A reporter once likened interviewing Niebuhr to tossing a newspaper into an electric fan: your questions come back in a thousand shreds, ripped with distinction, driven in a whirlwind of allusions and implications...
...The book opens with an intellectual autobiography Niebuhr wrote for the occasion and concludes with his reply to his critics...
...The best that can be hoped for in the relation between nations and interest, therefore, is proximate justice and equality, both most likely to be achieved through a balance of power pragmatically arrived at...
...there is less direct personal experience of the effects of the group's action, and there is endless opportunity to cloak the group's behavior with false idealism...
...Reviewed by Huston Smith AGENERATION ago American thought was dominated by philosophers—James, Royce, Peirce, later Santayana and Whitehead...
...In the Kegley-Bretall volume twenty peers ranging from Tillich to Schlesinger cast searching and critical eyes over the forty years of Niebuhr's thought...
...But love is never fuUy embodied in any human motive or act, because* man, sensing intuitively his finitude and insignficance, tries to overcome them and complete his own life by fighting for position and prestige...
...No growth in reason (contra liberalism and scientism) will overcome it for, lying deeper in man than reason itself, it will turn reason to its own devices...
...Ablest when on the attack, Niebuhr has aimed his guns at "three great illusions of our culture"—liberalism, Marxism, and scientism...
...When individual wills become compounded in groups, genuinely moral action becomes proportionately more diEicult, for loyalty to others in the group obscures the unethical nature of the group's desires...
Vol. 20 • July 1956 • No. 7
