¹ The work of which we have made the greatest use in this article is The Interpretation of Christian Ethics (New York, 1935)Google Scholar. References to it will be put in parenthesis in our text (not in footnotes), and will give merely the page number. A second book, Reinhold Niebuhr, His Religious, Social and Political Thought, edited by Kegley, C. and Bretall, R. (New York, 1956), will be referred to as KBGoogle Scholar.

² A French student of Niebuhr has remarked that his language creates a problem — not because English is a foreign language to a Frenchman, but because Niebuhr's English is peculiar to himself. Vignaux, G., La theologie de I'histoire chez Reinhold Niebuhr (Neuchâtel-Paris, 1957), p. 8Google Scholar.

³ KB, p. 441.

⁴ Williams, D., “Niebuhr and liberalism,” in KB, p. 196Google Scholar.

⁵ This has been done by Hoffmann, Hans, Die Theologie Reinhold Niebuhrs im Lichte seiner Lehre von der Sünde (Zurich, 1954)Google Scholar. Its English translation by Smith, Louise Pettibone is The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr (New York, 1956)Google Scholar Cf. Carnell, Edward J., The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1951)Google Scholar.

⁶ Bennett, John C., “Reinhold Niebuhr's Social Ethics,” in KB, p. 72Google Scholar.

⁷ Niebuhr, R., “Reply to Interpretation and Criticism,” in KB, p. 434Google Scholar.

⁸ Ibid., p. 435.

⁹ The “Intellectual Autobiography” which Niebuhr recently composed (KB, pp. 3–23; published in 1956) provides a very convenient check on the persistence of many of the ideas enunciated in the Interpretation.

¹⁰ For example, the Interpretation asserts that the type of pessimism that believes in a “‘total depravity’ resulting from a complete corruption of the ‘image of God’ in man” … “is developed most consistently in Augustinian-Lutheran theology” (p. 90). But in The Nature and Destiny of Man, lectures delivered in 1939 (four years after the appearance of the Interpretation), Niebuhr notes with much greater accuracy that “Augustine is very explicit in his affirmation that the evil of sin cannot completely destroy the goodness of what God has created in man” (I, p. 267). This development is illumined by a remark in the “Intellectual Autobiography” (KB, p. 9), referring to the author's early years at Union Theological Seminary: “I am … surprised to note in retrospect how late I was in studying the thought of Augustine carefully.”

¹¹ In the field of Christology, Niebuhr's thought seems to have developed noticeably after the Interpretation. Cf. the Conclusion of the present article, especially notes 47–50. Some of Niebuhr's later writings also evince an insistence on the personality of God, for example, KB, pp. 19, 432 f., which the Interpretation would hardly have prepared us to expect.

¹² The present article was submitted to Professor Niebuhr for examination before the final revision was made. He replied: “I want to express my appreciation for the fairness with which you have dealt with my thoughts, though we hold quite different positions. There are one or two judgments which I am inclined to challenge, but they are not important, and so I return this manuscript to you without any suggestions or changes.…” (Letter of Sept. 18, 1959). Some revisions have been made in this article since the receipt of that letter; they have not altered the basic judgments made in the original, but only the manner of expression.

¹³ Niebuhr, , “Intellectual Autobiography,” in KB, p. 4Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 3. In 1920 Niebuhr made a significant entry in his diary: “I think since I have stopped worrying so much about the intellectual problem of religion and begun to explore some of its ethical problems there is more of a thrill in preaching.” Leaves From the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (Chicago 1929; p. 45 of the 1957 re-edition by Meridian Books).

Recently, Niebuhr declared that anyone who reads his Faith and History (1949) “would be fair in concluding that I have not, in years of theological study, proceeded very far from my original ethical and apologetical interests” (KB, p. 9). Similarly: “I have never pretended to be a theologian” (ibid., p. 439).

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 5.

¹⁶ Father Charles E. Coughlin was also beginning his ministry in the diocese of Detroit during this same period. There is, between the early careers of these two men, a remarkable coincidence, which is all the more significant in view of their ideological divergences. Both were profoundly disturbed by the economic injustices they witnessed, and were led to undertake crusades for the restoration of social justice. They even became national figures, one by his books and university lectures, the other by his radio addresses, at about the same time, when the great depression of the early nineteen-thirties accentuated the actuality of their critiques.

¹⁷ One of his first undertakings was to debunk the highly acclaimed generosity of Henry Ford. KB, p. 5.

¹⁸ Niebuhr, , “Ten Years That Shook My World,” in The Christian Century, April 26, 1939, p. 545Google Scholar.

¹⁸ “Liberal Christianity is essentially an appropriation of the genuine achievements, and an accommodation to the characteristic prejudices, of this bourgeois culture which first came to flower in the Renaissance, which gained some triumphs and suffered some checks in the Reformation, which reached its zenith in the early part of this century, which revealed its internal anarchy in the World War and its inability to defend itself against lower forms of civilization in the present hour. … liberalism, I must hasten to add, is something more than either the spirit of tolerance on the one hand, or a liberal economic theory on the other. … What is it? I should say primarily faith in man; faith in his capacity to subdue nature, and faith that the only subjection of nature achieves life's final good; faith in man's essential goodness, to be realized when man ceases to be spiritual and returns to nature (romanticism), or when he ceases to be natural and becomes rational; and finally faith in human history, which is conceived as a movement upward by a force immanent within it.” Ibid., p. 543.

²⁰ KB, p. 6.

²¹ According to Bennett, John C., Niebuhr's colleague at Union Theological Seminary, writing in KB, p. 65. Niebuhr's Reply in the same volume describes Professor Bennett's chapter as “a very thorough analysis of the history of my social theories” (p. 433)Google Scholar.

²² He once declared that “whatever measure of Christian faith I hold today is due to the gradual exclusion of alternative beliefs through world history.” “Ten Years That Shook My World,” in The Christian Century, April 26, 1939, p. 546.

²³ Niebuhr, , “Intellectual Autobiography,” in KB, p. 9. In fact, he goes on to elaborate a theory of a “circular relation between faith and experience” (P. 16)Google Scholar.

²⁴ When he speaks of “Orthodox Christianity,” Niebuhr generally has Protestant Christianity chiefly in mind. There is no special reference to the dissident Christian churches of the Orient which are commonly called Orthodox, although he would doubtless apply to them also much of what he says about “Orthodox Christianity.” The Roman Catholic Church would also be intended in many of his criticisms of “Orthodoxy,” although it is occasionally specifically exempted, and is, on the other hand, singled out for some special criticisms (especially for its “demonic pretensions,” p. 232).

It would be very difficult to delimit with precision the segments of Protestantism which he classifies as Orthodox. In the present writer's opinion he has in mind not so much the original Protestantism of the Reformers, as evolved forms of Protestantism to be found in the churches of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (to the extent, of course, that they had resisted liberal tendencies). It would be safe to take Fundamentalism as a clear type of this kind of “Orthodoxy.”

²⁵ To avoid confusion, note that Niebuhr speaks of the transcendent as a source in two respects: it is a source of meaning by being both source and goal of existence.

²⁶ “The human mind is forced to relate all finite events to causes and consummations beyond themselves. It thus constantly conceives all particular things in their relation to the totality of reality, and can adequately apprehend totality only in terms of a principle of unity ‘beyond, behind, and above the passing flux of things’ (Whitehead)” (p. 66).

²⁷ In all that Niebuhr says about the transcendent as goal or fulfillment, there is manifestly reference to human life and endeavor, even when he speaks of the goal “of life” or “of existence” without any further qualification. It is man's effort that is conceived as having a transcendent goal and fulfillment. As source, on the contrary, the transcendent is related to the whole of existent reality, not just to human striving. This inadequation between the two aspects of the transcendent is not intended by Niebuhr; nothing in his language suggests that he is even aware of it.

²⁸ In one of his more recent statements on this matter, Niebuhr declares: “The Christian faith holds out the hope that our fragmentary lives will be completed in a total and larger plan than any which we control or comprehend …” KB, p. 6.

²⁹ It should be kept in mind that (as was noted above) Niebuhr avoids attributing existence to the transcendent at all.

³⁰ Elsewhere he declares: “Somewhere, somehow, the unity of the world must be or become an established fact and not merely a possibility” (p. 55).

³¹ Cf. section IV of the present article.

³² An entirely different reason for identifying the goal with the source is suggested in the following lines: “… the insistence upon the Creation as a work of God always saves prophetic religion from contempt for the partial and imperfect values of history and a consequent identification of religion with a passive contemplation of a transcendent ideal beyond existence” (p. 214).

³³ It is the “Idea of the Good,” of Book VI of the Republic which is here identified with the God of Judgment. But even without this explicit reference, it would be clear enough that Niebuhr thinks of essences (or the ideal, or the transcendent) in a Platonic spirit. Note, however, that the only other explicit reference to Plato that is made in the Interpretation describes him as a “rationalist” (cf. p. 24 f.).

³⁴ Why is this distortion necessary? Niebuhr does not attempt to give a fundamental explanation. Such reasons as can be gleaned from his remarks will be indicated below, in connection with his rejection of “philosophical,”that is, rational explanations.

³⁵ Not long ago, the rise of Billy Graham provoked Niebuhr to make the following clear statement of the positive results of liberalism: “… we are in danger of sacrificing one of the great achievements of ‘liberal’ theology, namely, the absolute honesty with which it encouraged the church to examine the scriptural foundations of its faith. This honesty involved not only loyalty to the truth but also fidelity to the standards of the whole modern world of culture, which rightly insisted that no facts of history could be exempted from historical scrutiny in the name of faith. Christianity was a historical religion. It rested upon the facts of history as interpreted by faith. But the faith would have to be profound enough to remain secure, even though peripheral myths with which former ages surrounded the truth of faith in the hope of validating it were disproved. In short, this honesty toward the scriptural foundations of the faith was not only an act of loyalty to the whole enterprise of modern culture; it was also a method of purifying the Christian faith. For this honesty made it imperative for the believer to accept Jesus as the Christ because the relevation of God in Christ validated itself to him existentially and did not require the confirmation of ‘signs and wonders.’ It is this distinct gain of liberal Christianity which is now imperiled, with the general loss of the prestige of liberalism and the general enhancement of orthodoxy.” — “Literalism, Individualism and Billy Graham,” in The Christian Century, May 23, 1956, pp. 640 f.

³⁶ “Philosophy is, in a sense, a mediator between science and religion. It seeks to bring the religious myth into terms of rational coherence, with all the detailed phenomena of existence which science discloses. … If theology is an effort to construct a rational and systematic view of life out of various and sometimes contradictory myths which are associated with a single religious tradition, philosophy carries the process one step farther by seeking to dispense with the mythical basis altogether and resting its world view entirely upon the ground of rational consistency. … This rationalization of myth is indeed inevitable and necessary, lest religion be destroyed by undisciplined and fantastic imagery or primitive and inconsistent myth” (pp. 13 f.).

³⁷ Cf. supra, note 13. In making this remark to explain why he foreswore graduate study and an academic career, Niebuhr seems to take epistemology to represent philosophy in general, at least, as its principal part. In this he is acquiescing in the dominant philosophical outlook of the post-Kantian period. On the other hand, the fact that he instinctively turned away from a philosophy thus centered around epistemology is indicative of a healthy intellectual realism that might have exerted a healthy influence on contemporary philosophy. But Niebuhr, unable to find or to formulate a philosophy that was both objective and rational, turned to a “symbolic” mode of discourse which largely cut him off from any direct influence on philosophical thought.

³⁸ Rational religion can avoid this development only at the price of an “optimistic identification of the Absolute with the totality of things, a conclusion at variance with tragic realities of existence and detrimental to high moral passion” (p. 24).

³⁹ Niebuhr points out that the mystical extreme of rationalism which he has described fails to attain even that “final source of life's meaning” for which it seeks, because it “ends by destroying the meaning of life” (p. 23). This critique is quite in the spirit of Aristotle's observation that Plato's ideas “help, in no wise, either towards the knowledge of other things … or towards their being, if they are not in the individuals which share in them” (Metaphysics XIII, 5, 1079b15). Niebuhr, however, seems not to be aware either of Aristotle's criticism, or of the epistemology which he proposed as proof against such criticism.

⁴⁰ Note that Niebuhr is here taking historical realities as symbols of the transcendent. The term myth applies most naturally to a fiction by which a profound truth is symbolically expressed, for example, the “myths” of Creation, Judgement, etc., which will be discussed below. But in the “mythical religion” expounded by Niebuhr, the limited goods that man can achieve in the historical world are also symbols of the transcendent.

⁴¹ This term is not used by Niebuhr. We use it, not in order to emphasize the Platonic drift of his thought, but because no other term seems capable of expressing the relation between the “actual” and the “ideal” which makes us obliged to the former by reason of the latter.

⁴² Paul Tillich speaks of Niebuhr's “rejection of the ontological question within theology” (KB, p. 36). Niebuhr replies that he does not “depreciate” the Aristotelian rationalism that Tillich is defending, but insists that the freedom of man and of God elude the grasp of a rational ontology (ibid., pp. 432 f.). He holds that “the philosophies which emphasize ontological categories, whether in naturalistic, idealistic, or mystical terms, in short, annul man in his undoubted historic existence” (ibid., p. 18).

⁴³ Interpretation, p. 23. The phrase is cited by Niebuhr from Morris Cohen, Reason and Nature, p. 146. We have seen that Niebuhr himself does not furnish any reasons why the transcendent can be known only through symbols. His arguments against philosophical inquiry rest on the supposition that all philosophy is of a rationalistic type; they do not therefore imply any conception of the ontological relationship between the world and the transcendent.

⁴⁴ In his “Reply to interpretation and criticism,” Niebuhr objects to the equating of his position with that of Bultmann (KB, pp. 438, 446). “I do not think that Bultmann makes a sufficient distinction between the pre-scientific myths and what I have elsewhere defined as the myths of permanent validity, without which it is not possible to describe the ultimate realities in conditions of the temporal world” (p. 438). He even goes on to regret that he ever used the word myth to describe the transcendent significance of Jesus, “particularly since the project for ‘demythologizing’ the Bible has been undertaken and bids fair to reduce the Biblical revelation to eternally valid truths without any existential encounter between God and man” (p. 439). Although these texts were published twenty years after the Interpretation, they are in perfect accord with it.

⁴⁵ Note that in Niebuhr's system, Judgment is equivalent to condemnation and precedes Redemption. This manner of relating Judgment and Redemption has a certain scriptural foundation, particularly in the Old Testament; but it is also dictated by the logic of Niebuhr's system.

⁴⁶ Why the transcendent ideal must be conceived, not merely as the fulfillment of existence, but also as its ground, has been explained in section II of the present article.

⁴⁹ “Jesus no less than Paul, was not free of these historical illusions. He expected the coming of the Messianic kingdom in his lifetime; at least that seems to have been his expectation before the crisis in his ministry. Even when he faced the cross rather than triumph he merely postponed the ultimate triumph to a later future, though to a rather proximate one” (p. 57).

It should be noted, that in his later writings, Niebuhr has occasionally made statements that seem to attribute a more than human value to Jesus Christ. Cf. note 50.

⁴⁸ They saved it from the extinction with which the Babylonian captivity threatened it (p. 30); they purged it “of the parochial and puerile weaknesses of its childhood” — without, however, rationalizing it (p. 26); they elevated it “by their interpretation of the meaning of catastrophe” in terms of the Redemption myth, and they extended the Redemption so as to include “more than the fortunes of Israel” (p. 30).

⁴⁹ “The Jesus of history actually created the Christ of faith in the life of the early Church” (p. 120). This Christ, as understood by orthodox Christianity, is a “true and mythical symbol of both the possibilities and limits of the human” (p. 15). The life of Jesus was not a redemptive act in the sense attributed to it by Catholic (or Lutheran) theology; rather, “His historic life is related to the transcendent Christ as a final and ultimate symbol of a relation which prophetic religion sees between all life and history and the transcendent” (p. 120). Niebuhr says nothing to indicate by what title the historic life of Jesus is “a final and ultimate symbol.” On the other hand, he warns us that “the relation of the Christ of Christian faith to the Jesus of history cannot be discussed within the confines of this treatise in terms adequate enough to escape misunderstanding” (p. 120).

⁶⁰ In 1956 he declared that “the Christological center of my thought has become more explicit and more important” (KB, p. 439). How true this is may be gauged by the avowal he makes (ibid.).

“I have come gradually to realize that it is possible to look at the human situation without illusion and without despair only from the standpoint of the Christ-revelation. It has come to be more and more the ultimate truth. If it is reduced to something other than its Scriptural content, if, for instance, Jesus is revered as an exemplary man and example, all the confusions and sentimentalities of secular idealism are multiplied” (KB, p. 439). But Niebuhr has never formulated his Christology, and it is hard to say whether the text just cited represents a change from the views he held in the Interpretation, or whether (as we are inclined to suspect), he would feel able to make both statements simultaneously.

Professor Paul Lehmann, of Princeton Theological Seminary, declares that “Christology is the leit-motiv of Reinhold Niebuhr's theology.” He adds that the most explicit and elaborate statement of Niebuhr's “Christological concern” (sic!) is to be found in Faith and history (New York, 1949), especially chapters IX-XI and XIII (KB, p. 253).

⁵¹ Cf. supra, note 19.

⁵² This applies, we believe, not only to the notions we have discussed, but to countless others, for example, Niebuhr's views on mysticism, asceticism, sacramentalism, religious authority; likewise to his appraisals of St. Augustine and St. Thomas; and to much of his interpretation of Scripture. It must be remembered that Niebuhr does not profess to be a theologian (or historian); he relies largely on the experts in these fields, and it would appear that many of his ‘experts’ have a pronounced liberal outlook. His reply to Professor Alan Richardson of Nottingham, England, on the question of Christ's Resurrection, is typical: “My impression was that historical scholarship seemed to indicate that the story of the empty tomb was an afterthought and that the really attested historical fact was the experience of the risen Christ among his various disciples” (KB, p. 438).

We have already noted (note 10) that when Niebuhr began to read St. Augustine's own works, he abandoned the “total depravity” interpretation of Augustine which Niebuhr had accepted presumably from some history of dogma.

⁵³ If we may venture a conjecture, it is that Niebuhr has not adverted to the distinction between seeing a truth and “feeling” an obligation. He treats them as one, hence has no need of a bridge from one to the other. A similar criticism could be made of his concepts of the “meaningfulness” of life, of symbol, of “organic contact,” and in general of every concept in his system that links theology and ethics. A study of these notions from the point of view of the confusion of the moral and ontological orders would cast significant light on the structure of Niebuhr's thought.

⁵⁴ KB, p. 3.