Reinhold Niebuhr Remembered

I stumbled across this piece from Time Magazine (1971):

Monday, Jun. 14, 1971
Death of a Christian Realist

In the decade before World War II, liberal Protestant theology in the U.S. had become a stagnant residue of the social gospel. There was an uncritical assumption that the sins of society would be inevitably overcome with education and religious good will; the concept of individual sin was formally acknowledged but widely ignored as a potentially meaningful element in normal life.

Into this comforting, wan world of theological thought came Reinhold Niebuhr, loosing the sobering wind of "Christian realism." Original sin stemming from Adam's fall was to be taken seriously but not literally, said Niebuhr. Man's great sin was willful pride, a universally "entrenched predatory self-interest" that exists in everyone, "benevolent or not." To ignore this basic reality—and man's need to struggle constantly against it—could only lead to moral and political confusion. The individual, Niebuhr contended, cannot excuse his immoral actions by "attributing them to the actions of others, even though there has been a strong inclination to do so since Adam excused himself by the words: The woman gave me the apple.' "

Niebuhr's theology was often called an American version of Karl Barth's neo-orthodoxy, but Niebuhr was very much an American original. He himself criticized Barth for being too controlled by the Bible and so far above the social tumult that he fostered "eschatological irresponsibility." For the past four decades, Niebuhr has been preeminent in his field, the greatest Protestant theologian born in America since Jonathan Edwards. Last week Niebuhr died at 78 in Stockbridge, Mass., the same town where Edwards once lived in exile—banished for his too-demanding theology. The funeral was held in the church where Edwards had preached.

Free Spirit. Niebuhr left behind him not only a heritage of theological realism but a career of political involvement almost unique in his profession. He insisted that man is the image of God not merely as a creature but as a morally responsible free spirit. Nevertheless, Niebuhr was not sanguine about the effectiveness of individual self-improvement; the acknowledgment of man's inevitable self-pride, he believed, should lead neither to despair nor to unproductive popular preachments about "positive thinking." The cross of Christ, he said, shows that "God's mercy must make itself known in history, so that man in history may become fully conscious of his guilt and his redemption." Though choices in a sinful society are morally ambiguous, a sensible effort must be made to balance conflicting, selfish powers.

Niebuhr's fresh, demanding analysis brought theological ethics into the midst of the secular arena, influencing the pragmatic liberalism of many prominent Americans, including George Kennan, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and James Reston. Niebuhr was a prime mover in Americans for Democratic Action and New York's Liberal Party. His political biography reads like a history of the left in his time: socialist disillusionment with capitalism, then with Marxism; pacifism, later abandoned during the rise of American isolationism and European fascism in the 1930s; cold war strategy to counter Communist expansion, followed by apprehensions about U.S. power.

Niebuhr was often a step ahead of history. In 1932, he advised Negroes to organize Gandhian campaigns of nonviolent coercion rather than count on white benevolence. He first protested military involvement in Viet Nam when John F. Kennedy was President.

Niebuhr was a preacher's kid from Missouri who said that he got into Yale Divinity School because they were hard up for students; his degree was from Elmhurst (Ill.) College, a small, then unaccredited school run by his Lutheran denomination, the Evangelical Synod of North America, now part of the United Church of Christ. "I desired relevance rather than scholarship," he recalled and, rather than earn a doctorate, he plunged into an industrial parish in Detroit. His 13 years as pastor there honed his moral passion. After visiting a sick, unemployed Ford worker in 1927, he wrote bitterly: "What a civilization this is! Naive gentlemen with a genius for mechanics suddenly become arbiters over the lives and fortunes of hundreds of thousands."

Golden Age. In 1928, the tall, balding pastor began a 32-year teaching career at Union Theological Seminary in New York; his presence helped make that period Union's golden age. In 1930, he ran unsuccessfully for Congress on the Socialist ticket; a year later, he married one of his students, a bright, elegant Briton.* They had two children, a son and a daughter.

Before World War II, Niebuhr seemed almost singlehandedly to goad idealistic Protestants into supporting the imminent war against Nazism; he founded the journal Christianity and Crisis to promote his views. Once that war ended, it was the growing power of the Soviet bloc that worried him. Communism was "cruel and fanatical," he wrote, because of its illusion that private property caused the sins of man and any means was justifiable to eradicate it.

During his active years, Niebuhr was a 17-hour-a-day dynamo who kept students breathless with rapid, challenging lectures and intense conversations in his unostentatious, book-lined office in the seminary tower. He lived a disciplined, mildly ascetic life and produced 17 major books, plus a torrent of trenchant speeches and articles—often turned out at the last minute. Generous but no word mincer, Niebuhr called pacifists "parasites," death-of-God theologians "infants," and White House religious services "complacent conformity." In 1952, he had a heart attack, the first of several physical ailments that slowed but did not stop his activity.

Liberal Drift. "People always wonder about people of faith—whether they live it," remarks Niebuhr Biographer June Bingham. "The last 20 years of his life were years of severe pain. He bore them with grace and humor." In those same years a younger generation of Protestant liberals was drifting away from Niebuhr's concept of constantly contending self-interest to revolutionary, third-world romanticism. He had decried "a too-simple social radicalism [that] does not recognize how quickly the poor, the weak, the despised of yesterday may, on gaining a social victory over their detractors, exhibit the same arrogance." It was a comment typical of his hardheaded, pragmatic realism in human affairs. His successor as the leader of Protestant thought cannot avoid dealing with Niebuhr's forceful logic; he will have to abandon it deliberately or build on it.