Reinhold Niebuhr

PREFACE

Reinhold Niebuhr had an enormous influence on twentieth-century theologians and on the public perception of theology. This was true not only for the generation who read his books and heard his sermons but also for subsequent students, pastors, and public leaders who have absorbed his ideas indirectly, sometimes without knowing it, and sometimes through the works of his critics. In this book, I hope to introduce Reinhold Niebuhr and his Christian realism to new readers who will make use of his ideas in a different historical and social context.

I have been encouraged in this by the warm reception these reflections have received in many church classes and study groups in Dallas, especially in an interfaith seminar at Thanksgiving Square and in my own congregation at Northaven United Methodist Church. I have also drawn on material from previously published lectures, especially for the last chapter of this book. Christian Realism: A Legacy and Its Future was my presidential address to the Society of Christian Ethics in 2000. It appeared in The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics (Decatur, Ga.: Society of Christian Ethics, 2000): 3–18. Reinhold Niebuhr: Impact and Implications began as a lecture to the Niebuhr Society in November 2004. It appeared in Political Theology 6, no. 4 (2005): 459–71.

Although I have discussed Niebuhr in almost every course I have taught over thirty years, I had never devoted a full semester exclusively to his work until spring 2006 at Perkins School of Theology of Southern Methodist University. The experience made me sorry I had not done this more often, though I suppose that it was the ability of those students, rather than my handling of the material, that made the seminar exceptional.

Oleg Makariev, my research assistant, improved these pages with his meticulous editing and prodigious memory, as he has improved most of my writing during these past four years. John Burk prepared the selected bibliography at the end of the book, and Stephen Riley checked the notes.

INTRODUCTION

Living the Christian life is not easy. It involves a high standard of righteousness learned from an ancient text, but lived in contemporary circumstances. It presupposes we will fall short of the requirements, but insists that we measure our accomplishments against that standard nonetheless. In the end, the Christian trusts in God’s final judgment, even though the evidence of history is ambiguous and the immediate advantage often seems to lie with power and not with goodness.

Reinhold Niebuhr understood these tensions and complexities. He saw the teachings of Jesus rooted in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets. Because this prophetic justice requires more of us than we can ever deliver, we inevitably choose what part of this impossible ideal we will try to live today, and we leave the rest of it to stand in judgment on our best efforts. Bearing witness to so many different audiences, we inevitably speak truth to some at the price of being misunderstood by others. We appear as deceivers, yet true.¹ We say we act with God’s final judgment in mind, but we commit what we do to a future that we cannot control and can only partly predict. The moral choices of which we would like to be most certain are, when we examine them, always ambiguous.

Nevertheless, Niebuhr’s ambiguity is in service of Christian faith, and the uncertainty is meant to provoke us to action. Indeed, prophetic faith and moral action would be impossible without ambiguity and uncertainty:

The dominant attitudes of prophetic faith are gratitude and contrition; gratitude for Creation and contrition before Judgment; or, in other words, confidence that life is good in spite of its evil and that it is evil in spite of its good. In such a faith both sentimentality and despair are avoided. The meaningfulness of life does not tempt to premature complacency, and the chaos which always threatens the world of meaning does not destroy the tension of faith and hope in which all moral action is grounded.²

Niebuhr gave the name of Christian realism to this approach to theology, which begins with the obstacles to faith and charts its course by identifying the inadequate and mistaken views it must reject or move beyond. This negative, dialectical method set Niebuhr in opposition to much of the received wisdom of his time, yet he came to represent active, living Christian faith for many of his contemporaries, both in the church and in the worlds of politics and diplomacy.

Niebuhr was so deeply engaged with the issues of his time that his thought cannot really be separated from the events and movements to which he responded. His active life, which spanned two-thirds of the twentieth century, brought him into contact with many religious, cultural, and political leaders, and his immense output of books, articles, and lectures influenced people far beyond his immediate circle of students and colleagues.³ The development of his thought traces the history that he lived.

Reinhold Niebuhr was born just west of Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1892. His parents, Lydia and Gustav Niebuhr, lived their married life in a series of parson-ages of the German congregations that Gustav served as pastor, culminating in a move to Saint John’s Evangelical Church in Lincoln, Illinois, in 1902. This typical Midwestern town became home to Reinhold, two older children, Walter and Hulda, and his younger brother, Helmut Richard.

Three of the children in this remarkable family were drawn to vocations in theology and ministry. Hulda Niebuhr became a professor of Christian education at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. Reinhold and H. Richard followed the Evangelical Synod’s path toward ministry by studying at Elmhurst College and at Eden Theological Seminary, and both completed further studies at Yale Divinity School.⁴

Reinhold briefly served the congregation in Lincoln, Illinois, following his father’s unexpected death in 1913, but his career began in earnest after his two years at Yale, when he became pastor of a small congregation of middle-class German-Americans in Detroit. The industrial city was a mirror of America’s economic and social problems at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Niebuhr became involved in most of them. He invited union organizers to speak to his congregation, and he served on a city commission organized to improve relations after a race riot in 1925.

Despite his prominence in Detroit, his vision was never strictly local. He began to write widely about problems of church and society for The Christian Century and other publications. He wrote about national politics, traveled in Germany and Russia, and published a memoir of his years as a pastor, writer, and church leader.⁵ The first three decades of the twentieth century took Reinhold Niebuhr far from his small-town background. They took America far from the optimism and religious idealism with which the new century had begun.

When Niebuhr left Detroit to join the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in 1928, his mood and the temper of the times were more focused on the obstacles to peace and justice than on the possibilities for social transformation. The sentimental pieties of American Protestantism were confronting the realities of class and racial conflict at home, Europe on the edge of revolution, and the first stirrings of resistance to colonialism in India. It was becoming harder to imagine that Christian love and American energy could change the world in ways that the typical Sunday morning sermon urged the congregation to believe.

In 1932, Niebuhr published his first major book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, in an effort to change Christian thinking so that it could deal with these new realities. Social institutions are shaped by self-interest and power, he explained, and while individuals may sometimes make sacrifices out of love for their families, friends, or even for their country, groups will never do this. Societies are transformed by people who know how to use power to force change. Exhortations to love are beside the point, and though revolutionaries may dream of perfect justice, the changes they actually bring about will be limited, imperfect, and incomplete.⁶ Once Christians understand that—once they stop fooling themselves, as Niebuhr put it, they will devise more realistic plans for mission and ministry.

The Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’ commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves cannot provide a blueprint for society. The function of Jesus’ teaching is more to remind us of the limitations of all the high-minded plans we make in Jesus’ name or in cooperation with others who think that we can achieve justice if only we set our sights high enough. Responsible choices achieve limited goals, without claiming too much for their achievements and without denying the element of self-interest that remains in even our most moral actions. Human happiness . . . is determined by the difference between a little more and a little less justice, a little more and a little less freedom, between varying degrees of imaginative insight with which the self enters the life and understands the interests of the neighbour.⁷

It is this realism about Christian aspirations and social forces that we will explore in chapter 1 of this book. Precisely because Niebuhr’s influence on subsequent theology and ethics has made his ideas so familiar, we need to remember that this was a shocking renunciation of the idealism of many of his contemporaries. Moral Man and Immoral Society led even some of Niebuhr’s friends and colleagues to suspect that he had abandoned religious hope and taken up a secular view of history and human society. Their suspicions were furthered, no doubt, by the strong influence of Marxism in Niebuhr’s understanding of social conflict, although he also criticized the illusions that the Marxists had about their own ability to create a new and lasting social order.

Niebuhr himself was clear that his realism was a Christian realism. His awareness of human limitations and his suspicion of power drew on the Hebrew prophets. His insistence that Jesus’ commandments are impossible to follow reflected his belief in a Christ whose significance for human history could not be reduced to the wise sayings of a moral teacher. These theological affirmations were apparent in his preaching from the beginning, but during the 1930s, they became more evident in his systematic thinking about ethics and politics. The political and economic crises that swept Europe and America had to be understood in ways that transcended their immediate historical context. With the Western democracies preparing for war against Nazi totalitarianism in Germany and keeping a wary eye on Stalinist dictatorship in the Soviet Union, Niebuhr believed that only a view that could interpret the clash of ideologies and the threats to peace in light of a comprehensive, biblical understanding of human nature would be adequate to the times.

Niebuhr developed his most systematic treatment of Christian theology and ethics in two series of Gifford Lectures, which were delivered in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1939, and published as The Nature and Destiny of Man.⁸ Between the spring and fall lectures, Hitler attacked Poland, and Britain went to war with Germany in September. At one lecture in October, Niebuhr’s audience could hear sounds of an air attack on the naval yards a few miles away.⁹ By that point, the emphasis on power and self-interest that had seemed so pessimistic in 1932 fit the realities very well, and Niebuhr’s theological analysis, which found the results of human sin both in the ambitions of dictators and in the failures of peacemakers, made sense of events in ways that purely political and economic explanations could not.

It was the emphasis on sin that Niebuhr’s audience and subsequent readers remembered best. In the biblical understanding, a person is both created in the image of God and created in finite, limited humanity. Sin is a not a mistake that we might avoid by being more careful about what we do. It is a deliberate misuse of