Theology: Taking Inventory

There comes a season when a church man must take inventory of his lifeand thought, keeping what still seems valid to him and casting the chaff to the wind. For Reinhold Niebuhr, 73, the inventory spans half a century of ministry, including 32 years as a professor of Christian ethics at Manhattan’s Union Theological Seminary and authorship of 20 volumes on theology and political philosophy. In a thin book called Man’s Nature and His Communities (Scribner; $3.95), Niebuhr makes his summing-up. The volume is partly a confession of past errors, partly an ex planation of the reasons that led him to various public stances, partly an assertion of his deep faith in the pluralistic and open U.S. society.

Ford Motors as Baal. The errors that Niebuhr confesses in this book of “my old age” are mostly errors of social and political philosophy. He was never a Communist sympathizer. He was always critical of an ideology that promised to build Utopia by destroying human freedom. Nevertheless, he was strongly influenced by Marx, and believed in the capacity of socialism to realize more fully than any other political system the Christian ideals of social justice and equality.

What chiefly impelled him to this view was ministering to a parish in Detroit from 1915 to 1928. He saw the Ford Motor Co. as a devouring god Baal that dehumanized and depersonalized man, and Henry Ford I as a false prophet who “promised to solve all social problems but aggravated most of them.” As Niebuhr saw it, Ford’s boast of a $5-a-day wage was nothing but a sham, since most of his workers were employed only sporadically and had no insurance against unemployment, illness and old age. In the same pragmatic way, the slaughter of World War I made him turn with cold fury against the kind of Protestantism that believed in progress and the natural perfectibility of mankind, and talked about “great ideals and principles without any clue to their relation to the controversial issues of the day.” Briefly, he embraced pacifism.

From his qualms about society, which were strengthened by the “world depression and the rise of Nazi terror,” Niebuhr derived his basic theological belief in the sinfulness of man, developed in his magnum opus The Nature and Destiny of Man. But Niebuhr did not construct an either-or theology, one that views man as living either in sin or in grace. His is a both-and theology, one that closely adheres to the Biblical conception of the paradoxical coexistence of sin and grace, good and evil. This strong reassertion of the central paradox of the Gospels, wrote the Rev. D. R. Davies in his study of Niebuhr’s thought, constitutes “one of the most vital and profound contributions to contemporary Christian thought.” This concept is akin to the mystery of faith—in St. Paul’s words, “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”—that formed, then and now, the cornerstone of Niebuhr’s religious vision.

Socialism Rejected. Thus shaped by experience and his own deep thought, Niebuhr came to reject socialism, while retaining his “strong conviction that a realist conception of human nature should be made the servant of an ethic of progressive justice and should not be made into a bastion of conservatism, particularly a conservatism which defends unjust privileges.” He became increasingly enthusiastic about “the virtues of an open society which allows freedom to all religious traditions, and also freedom to analyze and criticize all these traditions through the disciplines of an empirical and historical culture.”

A similar openness made Niebuhr revise his opinions of other faiths. Starting from a “purely Protestant viewpoint,” he felt “an increasing sympathy for the two other great traditions of Western culture, Jewish and Catholic.” His admiration for both “had the same socially pragmatic prompting”; he thinks that, unlike some Protestants, the Catholics and Jews “never had any doubt about the social substance of human existence.” But a truly pluralistic society, says Niebuhr, must “necessarily include the right of nonbelievers to convict the believers when faith is not fruitful of justice.”

The essence of Christianity, says Niebuhr, lies precisely in another both-and paradox—its combination of “realism and idealism,” its Messianic vision and its attempt to establish God’s kingdon on earth. “Man’s reach is always be yond his grasp,” Theologian Niebuhi concludes. Man’s ultimate “predicament” lies in the fact that “his creative freedom is limited to the limits of man as creature.”