Reinhold Niebuhr

Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr (June 21, 1892 – June 1, 1971) was a Protestant theologian and prolific writer who is best known for his development of Christian Realism. He was a parish minister in Detroit for 13 years, and later taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York City for over 30 years. He had a way with words that makes him one of the most quotable 20th century Americans. Although he never earned a doctorate degree, he was awarded 18 honorary doctorates, including one from Oxford.

Niebuhr's theology was practical, stressing Christian social ethics based on a realist understanding of human nature. His writings reflect a prophetic dialogue with the social gospel, World War I, pacifism, industrial labor disputes, Marxism, American isolationism, the Great Depresssion, World War II, and the atomic bomb. He is a crucial contributor to modern just war theory.

Biography

Niebuhr was born in Wright City, Missouri, USA, to Gustav and Lydia Niebuhr. Gustav was a liberally minded German Evangelical pastor. Niebuhr decided to follow in his father's footsteps and enter the ministry. He attended Elmhurst College, Illinois, where there is a large statue of him, graduating in 1910 and then going to Eden Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. Finally he attended Yale University where he received his Bachelor of Divinity Degree in 1914 and was a member of Alpha Sigma Phi Fraternity. His brother Helmut Richard Niebuhr and sister Hulda also became seminary instructors. Like his family and fellow students, Niebuhr began as a believer in the social gospel that prevailed at the time.

Christian Realism

In 1915, Reinhold became an ordained pastor. The German Evangelical mission board sent him to serve at Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit, Michigan. The congregation numbered 65 on his arrival and grew to nearly 700 under his leadership. The increase was partly due to the tremendous growth of the automobile industry which was centered in that region. Niebuhr called Detroit a "frontier industrial town." The problems of industrial justice came to him as he ministered to his own parishoners in a congregation that included both industrial laborers and wealthy business leaders, who helped pay for a new church building. Henry Ford came to represent the capitalist system to Niebuhr. Finding the liberal idealism of the social gospel too idealistic to adress these issues, Niebuhr became disillusioned with its utopian visions of moral progress. Much of his writing in the 1920s constitued a polemic against the social incompetence of Protestant liberalism to halt abuses of economic and political power. His first book Does Civilization need Religion? (1927) was a result of this Detroit experience. He criticized pastors who naively taught their inherited religious ideals "without any clue to their relation to the controversial issues of their day."

During World War I, Niebuhr had traveled to Europe on speaking tours with YMCA leader, Sherwood Eddy. This provided Niebuhr with a national stage for his for his speeches and writings. He spoke at a national student convention in Detroit in 1923 and became acquainted with Henry Sloane Coffin, who later became President of Union Theological Seminary and who offered Niebuhr, despite his lack of a Ph.D., a teaching position designed just for him in "Applied Christianity." Niebuhr accepted this in 1928. His life in New York was hectic, as he taught, traveled, wrote, and joined many social organizations.

In 1930 Reinhold Niebuhr married one of his students, Ursala Keppel-Compton, who had been an honor student at Oxford before going to Union. She was erudite and accomplished. She taught religion at Barnard College down the street from Union Seminary for many years and later became head of the department. Together they had two children, Christopher and Elizabeth, and their home life was happy.

In 1923 Niebuhr visited Europe to meet with intellectuals and theologians to discuss postwar Europe. The conditions he saw in Germany under the French occupation dismayed him and reinforced the pacifist views he had adopted in disgust after World War I.

In 1928, Niebuhr became Professor of Practical Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Before arriving at the seminary, Niebuhr captured the meaning of his personal experience at his Detroit church in his book Leaves From the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic. While teaching theology at Union Theological Seminary, Niebuhr influenced Dietrich Bonhoeffer of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church.

During the 1930s Niebuhr was a prominent leader of the militant faction of the Socialist Party of America, promoting assent to the United front agenda of the Communist Party USA, a position in sharp contrast to that which would distinguish him later in his career. According to the autobiography of his factional opponent Louis Waldman, Niebuhr even led military drill exercises among the young members.

During the outbreak of World War II, the pacifist leanings of his liberal roots were brought under challenge, and he began to distance himself from the pacifism of his more liberal colleagues, becoming a staunch advocate for the war. Niebuhr soon left the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a peace oriented group of theologians and ministers, and became one of their harshest critics. This departure from his peers evolved into a movement known as Christian Realism, and Niebuhr is acknowledged as its primary advocate. Christian Realism provided a more tough-minded approach to politics than the idealism that was held by many of Niebuhr's contemporaries. Within the framework of Christian Realism, Niebuhr became a supporter of US action in World War II, anti-communism, and the development of nuclear weapons.

In 1952, he wrote The Irony of American History, in which he shared with his readers the various struggles (political, ideological, moral and religious) in which he participated. His writings reflect a penetrating criticism of the social gospel liberalism of his youth and his search for alternatives. For a while he tried to synthesize various elements of Marxism and Christianity. Both his political experience and his deepening Christian values, however, caused him to abandon the work in favor of an ideology he called Christian Realism. These views meshed the Augustinianism of the Reformation with his own hard-won political wisdom. His views were formalized in the Gifford lectures published as The Nature and Destiny of Man, which is considered his magnum opus and comes as close as he ever did to a systematic presentation of his practical theology.

Niebuhr made insightful observations on the human condition, emphasizing its social and political aspects. No other theologian has made such a deep impact upon the social sciences. For over two decades his ideas were the most important influence on theology in American seminaries.

The writings of Niebuhr are placed squarely in the middle of a very painful time in the history of the world and of America. Having suffered one World War and a Great Depression, Niebuhr wrote about the injustice of humanity and the need for people to tear down the systems that increased the injustice in the world. In the rise of fascism and the horrors of World War II in Europe, Niebuhr saw an evil which demanded opposition by force, even by Christians. Taking this lesson further, he wrote concerning the need for a form of democracy that would empower people and rid the world of the human sin of lording power over others. In the beginnings of his work as a vocal social justice proponent, he was a strong democratic socialist. Railing against Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal as being unattainable, after the war he saw his writing as too idealistic and began to fall into line with the New Deal and the Vital Center of the Democratic Party. Niebuhr’s work was a great voice within the rising tide of welfare capitalism.

Niebuhr was read widely by Christian leaders in the postwar years, most famously by Martin Luther King, Jr., and influenced the evolving postwar American national identity. He unintentionally inspired an American psyche that evoked a mythological worker of justice in the world—a notion that he stressed was a vision of what might be, not a description of America at the time. Niebuhr saw America as moving in the direction of justice, despite failures of racial equality and foreign policy in Vietnam. Writing about class equality, he said "We have attained a certain equilibrium in economic society by setting organized power against organized power".

He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.

Niebuhr has been credited with authorship of the Serenity Prayer used by Alcoholics Anonymous. On this he said: "Of course, it may have been spooking around for years, even centuries, but I don't think so. I honestly do believe that I wrote it myself."

Bibliography

• Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, Richard R. Smith pub, (1930), Westminster John Knox Press 1991 reissue: ISBN 0664251641, diary of a young minister's trials
• Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study of Ethics and Politics, Charles Scribner's Sons (1932), online edition, Westminster John Knox Press 2002: ISBN 0664224741
• Interpretation of Christian Ethics, Harper & Brothers (1935), online edition
• Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of Tragedy, Charles Scribner's Sons (1937), ISBN 0684718537, online edition
• The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, from the Gifford Lectures, (1941), Volume one: Human Nature, Volume two: Human Destiny, 1980 Prentice Hall vol. 1: ISBN 0023875100, Westminster John Knox Press 1996 set of 2 vols: ISBN 0664257097
• The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, Charles Scribner's Sons (1944), online edition, Prentice Hall 1974 edition: ISBN 0023875305, Macmillan 1985 edition: ISBN 0684150271
• Faith and History (1949) ISBN 0684153181
• The Irony of American History, Charles Scribner’s Sons (1952), online edition, 1985 reprint: ISBN 0684718553, Simon and Schuster: ISBN 0684151227
• Christian Realism and Political Problems (1953) ISBN 0678027579
• The Self and the Dramas of History, Charles Scribner’s Sons (1955), online edition, University Press of America, 1988 edition: ISBN 0819166901
• Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, D. B. Robertson editor, (1957), Westminster John Knox Press 1992 reprint, ISBN 0664253229
• Pious and Secular America (1958) ISBN 0678027560
• The Structure of Nations and Empires (1959) ISBN 0678027552
• The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses, (1987), Yale University Press, ISBN 0300040016

External links

• Reinhold Niebuhr books and articles online
• Quotations from Niebuhr's Love and Justice
• Reinhold Niebuhr quotations from BrainyQuote
• "The Neo-Orthodox Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr" – article by Paul Foreman
• Reinhold Niebuhr lectures and sermons on compact discs available from Union Theological Seminary

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