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 twentieth-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 Depression, 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 now 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 parishioners 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 address these issues, Niebuhr became disillusioned with its utopian visions of moral progress. Much of his writing in the 1920s constituted 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."

Niebuhr's writing and preaching on industrial justice and other social issues gained him a national reputation quickly. He impressed YMCA leader Sherwood Eddy and traveled with him to Europe in 1923 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. At a national student convention in Detroit, he 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, Dietrich Bonhoeffer of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church came to Union as a German fellow. He and Niebuhr engaged in debates on the relation of faith and works. Niebuhr could not accept the traditional Lutheran view that faith and works were in separate realms. He argued that ethics could not be called ethics in relation to faith alone but required concrete social action. That year, Niebuhr sailed for Germany where he met his brother Richard, who was studying Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics. Niebuhr wrote back that debating with Barthians was hopeless. They had abstracted salvation from the political sphere and awaited salvation “from above history.” These debates helped Niebuhr formulate a Christian realism in which history was an essential stage for human salvation.

In 1930, Reinhold Niebuhr also met and fell in love with one of his students, Ursala Keppel-Compton, who had been an honor student at Oxford before going to Union. In December 1931, he sailed for England and married her. She was erudite and accomplished. On returning to the United States she taught religion at Barnard College down the street from Union Seminary and later became head of the department. Together they had two children, Christopher and Elizabeth, and their home life was happy.

During the early 1930s, Niebuhr was, for a short time, 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. His infatuation with the communists was very brief. After a few meetings, he was frustrated by the dogmatism and their refusal to entertain criticism or enter into rational discussions.

Moral Man and Immoral Society

Niebuhr's experiences to this point had led him to the realization that good Christians were members of all kinds of groups that fought and struggled with one another, exhibiting unchristian behavior. In World War I, German Christians fought against American Christians; in Detroit, Christian industrialists exploited Christian workers. And, most recently he had seen idealistic socialists advocating violent revolution, which challenged his former acceptance of pacifism. In 1932, this problem, still existing today, became the subject of his book Moral Man and Immoral Society.

In this book, Niebuhr concluded that there is a necessary but uneasy relation between ethics and politics. A rational political justice not under the influence of a moral ideal will quickly degenerate into folly. Yet, moral idealism untempered by political reality is futile. Society makes justice the highest moral ideal, but this cannot be accomplished without one group interest bumping into another, causing friction and necessarily employing force. The individual however, must make unselfishness the highest moral quality, and societies without numerous individuals voluntarily sacrificing and living unselfishly can not attain the justice they seek. The highest standard given by Jesus is "love [that] desires no returns for itself."

Power Politics

In Reflections on the End of an Era, Niebuhr's 1934 book, an end to the utopianism of the social gospel was proclaimed. Several years into the depression, Niebuhr had accepted the Marxist idea that capitalism was unable to reform itself, yet he felt that Roosevelt's New Deal was a more pragmatic approach to the problem than communist revolution. After visiting Stalin's socialist experiment in Russia in 1934, Niebuhr was convinced that he had swallowed too much of the propaganda about the possibilities for building a more just society through such a revolution. He became a staunch critic of the communist utopianism, which in practice displayed disregard for human rights and lacked checks and balances on power.

Niebuhr promoted the idea that power had to be checked by power and he spoke with renewed appreciation for Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers who had designed a system of checks and balances on power. Such checks had placed realistic limits on the abuse of power that the communists had failed to appreciate. He observed that labor unions had arisen to check the power of the capitalists. By themselves, acting in the selfish interests of workers, they could destroy the economy and they had to be balanced against the productive power of capital.

In 1935, Niebuhr considered the industrial problem solved and he turned his attention towards the growing problems of fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany. During the outbreak of World War II, he discarded the pacifist leanings of his liberal roots and he began to distance himself from his pacifist 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 through the magazine Christianity and Crisis, which he founded to address social issues the traditional Christian Century was too timid to take on. This departure from his peers evolved into a movement known as Christian realism. Within the tough-minded framework of Christian realism, Niebuhr eventually became a supporter of U.S. action in World War II, anti-communism, and the development of nuclear weapons as a way to check the use of nuclear power against the United States, a doctrine known as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

He began to more fully develop his views theologically by rediscovering the Christian concept of sin in the "Christian realism" of St. Augustine. In An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (1935) and Beyond Tragedy (1937), Niebuhr developed the concept of agape love represented in the total universal unselfishness of Jesus on the cross as an "impossible possibility" in human existence. Agape love was not practical in the achievement of political justice, yet the only adequate final norm of human life. For Niebuhr, the "unique dignity of man" lay in the ability to surmount and transcend historical life and aim at a higher existence. However, human sinfulness was thoroughly embedded in the natural will-to-power, which prompts people to claim more for themselves than they ought.

Niebuhr was able to assemble all of his theological ideas systematically when invited to present the Gifford lectures to the University of Edinburgh in the spring and autumn of 1939. These were published as The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941), the two-volume work for which he is most famous. Niebuhr's theological acumen, prophetic social voice, and national prominence made him a highly demanded consultant on ecumenical affairs and the creation of the National Council of Churches, the World Council of Churches, and a Christian world order.

Niebuhr's realism, which stressed power politics, made an impact on Hans Morgenthau at the University of Chicago, who some now call the father of political realism. However, Morgenthau failed to appreciate the necessity of balancing the political dimension of life with the ethical ideal of agape love.

The Irony of History

In 1952, Niebuhr 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. The United States in attaining victory in World War II and having developed the atomic bomb now found itself as the most powerful nation in the world, a final irony in the history Niebuhr had lived to see. This was an irony in which the Christian faith that guided the nation to its pinnacle of power had no way to balance this power against other powers or to control it through mere idealism. The nation that had been viewed as the model nation and savior of the world was rapidly becoming viewed as the most dangerous world empire and oppressor, both by Christians in the United States and citizens throughout the rest of the world.

Legacy

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 that demanded opposition by force, even by Christians. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.

The wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq reveal the effects of a nation that still hangs onto its ideals while in reality they are trumped by power politics. Niebuhr was the last American theologian to exert national moral influence. No other theologian has made such a deep impact upon the social sciences. It may be argued that Christianity no longer influences United States foreign policy as it did before World War II.

The writings of Niebuhr are placed squarely in the middle of a very painful time in the history of the world and of America. The modern state, industrialization, and globalization have created vast political, social, and economic institutions that can only aim at what Niebuhr called approximate justice. And, as Niebuhr pointed out, institutional religion suffers the same temptations of power and effects of sin as other social institutions. It is in itself inadequate to provide a concrete balance of power in economics or politics, but can only appeal to that final norm of love towards which providence points.

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." .

Niebuhr remains a prophet for our time. The issue of industrial justice, which he thought was resolved in 1935 with labor unions, has arisen as capitalists have moved operations out of the United States and Europe to other countries where checks and balances on power do not exist. However, the fundamental aspects of human nature, both that of individuals and collectives, he so pithily analyzed have not changed. New ways must be sought to limit any concentration of power so that they can perform the tasks necessary to producing a just and prosperous world without being misappropriated by those who would seek to use that power for self-enrichment at the expense of those it is meant to serve.

In addition to his Christian realism, Niebuhr will be remembered for many of his witty epigrams, paradoxical sayings, and uplifting prayers, like the shortened version of his popular Serenity Prayer used by Alcoholics Anonymous:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference.

Works

• 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, vol. 1: Human Nature, vol. 2: 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

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Brown, Robert McAffee, ed. The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses. Yale University Press, 1987 ISBN 0300040016
• Scott, Nathan A., Jr. Reinhold Niebuhr. University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, No. 31, 1963.
• Fox, Richard. Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985 ISBN 0394516591
• Kegley, Charles W., and Robert W. Bretall. Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social and Political Thought. Library of Living Theology, New York: MacMillan, 1956.
• Patterson, Bob E., ed. Reinhold Niebuhr. Makers of the Modern Theological Mind Series, Waco, TX: Word Books, 1977 ISBN 087680508X

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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