NEO-ORTHODOXY

Modernization

The most important development in theology in the 1940s was neo-orthodoxy, a significant reformulation of the Calvinist core of Protestantism. Guided by Protestant theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr and his brother H. Richard Niebuhr, as well as Swiss theologian Karl Barth and German exile Paul Tillich, neo-orthodoxy harmonized liberal Protestantism with a host of modern concepts—including existentialism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism—to revitalize the Calvinist emphasis on sin and individual free will. Like Catholic modernism and the reconstruction of Conservative and Reform Judaism, the neo-orthodox intellectual movement began during the Depression but became most important in the 1940s. During the decade, events such as World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed to sanction the neo-orthodox worldview, which was based on the insufficiency of human reason and good will. Disseminated in hundreds of seminaries in the 1940s and 1950s, neo-orthodox theology was profoundly influential with Protestant clergy.

Sin

Perhaps the most important aspect of neo-orthodoxy was its reformulation of the concept of sin. Orthodox Calvinism insisted that sin was innate in individuals; only the redeeming power of God could overcome it. Neo-orthodox theologians argued much the same by use of modern concepts. To Reinhold Niebuhr, sin was the human capacity for solipsism, for making oneself the center of the world. Like Sigmund Freud he postulated a fundamentally unconscious and wicked side to human decency, a side against which the penitent Christian must endlessly strive. Such a notion sat uncomfortably with the more optimistic mainline Protestantism of the era. After the calamities of World War II, however, many believers began to embrace Niebuhr's reformulation of human sin.

Paradox

Calvinist orthodoxy considered human beings both potentially divine and actually depraved; neo-orthodoxy also considered human nature as fundamentally paradoxical. To Niebuhr, human advance was inevitably plagued by backsliding moments of shattering barbarism, and societies, because they compounded the paradoxical essence of individuals, were inevitably rocked by bloodletting and civil war. He favored the parable of the Tower of Babel, a stunning technological achievement whose foundations were hopelessly flawed. Niebuhr's insight was almost prophetic: his allusion to the Tower of Babel was often cited after the development of the atomic bomb. For Niebuhr, humanity's essential paradox meant that the greater the achievement of civilization, the greater civilization's potential for evil. Such a theology explained to many how Germany, one of the world's great cultures, could have disintegrated into Nazism.

Loneliness

The neo-orthodox theologians were deeply influenced by the existentialist philosophy prominent in Europe during the interwar period, seeing in it a more modern expression of the orthodox Calvinist notion of loneliness and dread. The philosophy of Danish thinker SØren Kierkegaard was particularly appealing, because he argued that existential dread was derived from human sin. Such dread was also a function of the isolation and loneliness of the individual, whom the neo-orthodox theologians argued would remain desperate and lonely without God's saving grace. The neo-orthodox emphasis on the loneliness of the human condition appealed to many who faced the traumas of the war experience without assistance.

Hope and Faith

In order to resolve the sinfulness, paradox, and loneliness that plagued the human condition, neo-orthodox theologians recommended religious conversion and pious behavior. "Man does not know himself truly except as he knows himself confronted by God," wrote Niebuhr in the manifesto of neo-orthodoxy, his two-volume The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941, 1943). "Only in that confrontation does he become aware of his full stature and freedom and of the evil in him." For neo-orthodox theologians, only acceptance of God's salvation can mediate human tragedy, granting finite humans a sense of infinite possibility, making possible progress despite human destructiveness, and perfecting moral behavior in light of innate depravity. The neo-orthodox sense of human limits and humility had enormous appeal after the upheavals of the war and the Holocaust and offered a powerful corrective to the more Utopian estimates of human nature characteristic among some Protestants during the Depression. As such, neo-orthodoxy became an important component of postwar Protestantism and perhaps the best restatement of the Protestant tradition in the twentieth century.

Sources:

Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven Sc London: Yale University Press, 1972);

Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 1985).