Reinhold Niebuhr

The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) was a major figure in the "Neo-Orthodox" movement in Protestant theology, which reoriented the entire thrust of theological and biblical studies from the 1920s on.

Reinhold Niebuhr was born in Wright City, Mo., on June 21, 1892, the son of an immigrant German Evangelical and Reformed minister who served as pastor to German-American communities in small towns. Early deciding to enter the ministry, Niebuhr studied at Elmhurst College and Eden Theological Seminary and then spent 2 years at Yale Divinity School. After receiving his master of arts degree from Yale in 1915, he left the academic world to take his first and only pastorate—a small mission church in Detroit, where he remained until 1928.

At the time Niebuhr arrived there, the automobile industry was just beginning its rapid expansion, and Detroit was developing into one of America's major cities. Many of the employees of the Ford Motor Company lived in his parish. He had the opportunity to observe at firsthand the impact of industrial society upon the factory workers. As Niebuhr said much later, "The resulting facts determined my development more than any books I may have read." He watched the dehumanizing effects of assembly line speedups and irregular job opportunities upon workers unprotected by legal or associational powers. By the end of the 1920s he was questioning seriously the basic assumptions of liberal Protestantism and the Social Gospel, on which he had been nurtured. In public he urged churchmen to examine critically the capitalist social order, and he pressed for greater realism concerning the pervasiveness and subtlety of human pride or sin. His first book, Does Civilization Need Religion? (1927), reflected these attitudes.

In 1928 Niebuhr moved to New York City to join the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, where he remained until his retirement in 1960. He reached New York just as the Depression began and found all about him confirmation of his ideas concerning the severe strictures of capitalism. For a time he became a Socialist, influenced strongly by the Marxist critique of a floundering capitalist society; but at the same time his theological perspective was becoming more conservative, and he was reaching back to recover and reassert the classic formulas of Christian doctrine.

Niebuhr was not a systematic theologian. He was pragmatic, stressing a dialectical, problematic approach in his intellectual inquiries. In a series of important books published during the 1930s and early 1940s, his mature reflections on the relationship of the Christian faith to the industrial, technological world gradually unfolded. Moral Man in an Immoral Society (1932) was a full-scale attack upon liberal Protestantism, especially its lack of understanding of the nature and use of power in modern society. In Interpretation of Christian Ethics (1935) he replaced his largely critical and destructive polemics against liberalism with an attempt at a constructive restatement of the relation of ethics to politics. In Beyond Tragedy (1937), a series of essays that originally had been sermons, Niebuhr reasserted the centrality of human sinfulness in explaining and understanding the human predicament and offered Christ's crucifixion as the most profound means of transcending that human condition. He also stressed the importance of myth as a method for making comprehensible to modern man the biblical world view, which he now so vigorously espoused.

All of Niebuhr's previous work was knitted together in more comprehensive and systematic form with the publication of the Gifford Lectures, which he delivered in Scotland in 1939, under the title The Nature and Destiny of Man (2 vols., 1941, 1943). This work was his principal intellectual achievement. Nearly all of his subsequent books sought to expand upon selected aspects of this richly varied material. The central concern of the work was an inquiry into the nature of selfhood. Niebuhr demonstrated that his vision of human existence was, at its core, ambiguous. Man was "both free and bound, both limited and limitless." Moreover, it was the Christian faith, above all other world views, that perceived most clearly this ambiguity and proposed means to cope with, and perhaps even to overcome, the anxiety that was inevitably a product of that ambiguity.

Niebuhr persistently tried to relate his religious insights to the concrete political and social problems of the contemporary world. He involved himself actively in politics, once as a Socialist candidate for local office, later as one of the founders of Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal study group within the Democratic party. He preached often on college campuses throughout the nation, involved himself in the ecumenical movements of national and international church bodies, and produced an endless stream of articles for popular journals, both religious and secular. He also continued to publish more serious studies in theology and politics. Two especially important analyses of democracy, Children of Light and Children of Darkness (1944) and The Irony of American History (1952), appeared at a time when the Western democracies were facing fundamental ideological and spiritual challenges.

The flirtation with Marxism and support of pacifism characteristic of Niebuhr in the early 1930s gave way to disenchantment with communism and a willingness to support "realistically" the use of force in international politics as the world was engulfed in World War II. Urging the participation of the United States in the power politics of the postwar period, Niebuhr became a major influence on the thinking of high-ranking academicians and government officials. (Consistently enough, the massive extension of American power into Southeast Asia provoked criticism from Niebuhr comparable to that directed against the Communists in the immediate post-World War II period.)

His health seriously impaired by a stroke in 1952, Niebuhr was forced to limit his activities. He died in Stock-bridge, Mass., on June 1, 1971. He was one of the major spokesmen for Protestant theology in the 20th century.

Further Reading

An important statement by Niebuhr concerning his intellectual and personal development is included among a series of illuminating essays by many scholars edited by Charles Kegley and Robert Bretall, Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought (1956). An engaging, perceptive biographical study is June Bingham, Courage to Change (1961). Ronald H. Stone, Reinhold Niebuhr: Prophet to Politician (1972), emphasizes his political philosophy. A useful, brief pamphlet that analyzes the salient points in Niebuhr's system of ideas is Nathan Scott, Reinhold Niebuhr (1963).

Additional Sources

Bingham, June, Courage to change: an introduction to the life and thought of Reinhold Niebuhr, Lanham: University Press of America, 1993.

Brown, Charles C. (Charles Calvin), Niebuhr and his age: Reinhold Niebuhr's prophetic role in the twentieth century, Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992.

Clark, Henry B. (Henry Balsley), Serenity, courage, and wisdom: the enduring legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr, Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 1994.

Fox, Richard Wightman, Reinhold Niebuhr: a biography, New York: Pantheon Books, 1985; San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, 1985.

Stone, Ronald H., Professor Reinhold Niebuhr: a mentor to the twentieth century, Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992. □

NIEBUHR, REINHOLD 1892-1971

Protestant theologian

Number One Theologian

America's preeminent religious intellectual in the middle third of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr was also an important figure in social and political affairs. His picture graced the cover of Time magazine's twenty-fifth anniversary issue in 1948, and two years later the same publication called him "the number one theologian of United States Protestantism." His professional reputation was the equal of his public acclaim. The foremost philosopher of Protestant neo-orthodoxy, Niebuhr in his reconstruction of the faith was highly influential among theologians. He is perhaps best known for his "Serenity Prayer," first published in 1951:

God, give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed;

give us the courage to change what should be changed;

give us the wisdom to distinguish one from the other."

Background

Born on 21 June 1892, Niebuhr was of German descent. His father was a minister in the German Evangelical Synod, a small, conservative, midwestern denomination. His father preached a combination of liberal ecumenism and conservative piety, oppositions his son would become famous for reconciling. Early on, Niebuhr decided to follow his father into the ministry. Like his father, he studied at the Eden Theological Seminary in Wellston, Missouri. When his father died in 1913, Niebuhr took his place at his father's pulpit in Lincoln, Illinois, but with a grant to study at the Yale Divinity School in hand, he soon made his way east to New Haven, Connecticut. He was graduated in 1915 and assumed the pulpit of the Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit. There he was immediately occupied with the effect of World War I on the German American congregation. Viewing the Prussian monarchy as authoritarian and corrupt, he tied to mobilize opinion in favor of American intervention against Germany and sought to quell German nationalism among his congregants. His efforts set a precedent for the future, and he would spend his career as engaged in political and social issues as he was concerned with spiritual questions, especially after he took a position at the Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1928.

First Major Work

Niebuhr's first major work of theology, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), evidenced his unique fusion of spiritual and temporal concerns. In the 1920s Bethel had been at the center of public discussions of the social changes sweeping through Detroit during the automobile age. Niebuhr liked liberal Protestantism's emphasis on the social gospel and social reform but disliked the moderation with which so many liberal clergy advocated reform. He was at the forefront of a group of Protestant intellectuals calling for the Christianization of industry and lending assistance to union organizing. With the Depression he moved Left, joining the Socialist Party and pressing his advocacy of labor more forcefully. In Moral Man and Immoral Society he tried to reconcile the need for possible labor violence with Christian morality. Attacking by turns liberal Protestantism, Christian pacifism, and dogmatic Marxism, he sought to demonstrate that the ethical imperative of Christian reformers sometimes required violence. He also deployed a host of intellectual arguments to which he would later return, the most important of which postulated that the innate depravity of individuals more often than not led to thoroughly depraved social institutions.

Neo-orthodoxy

His book's deft arguments came at a moment in American intellectual life when many progressive thinkers, such as Edmund Wilson and John Chamberlain, were shifting left. As perhaps the most studied exposition of the problem of Marxism and reform, Niebuhr's book was acclaimed. It had its detractors, however, especially Niebuhr's younger brother, H. Richard Niebuhr, a theologian at the Yale Divinity School. Richard criticized his brother for excessive politicizing and for abandoning more purely theological concerns. H. Richard Niebuhr was at the forefront of American intellectuals rethinking the fundamental premises of liberal Protestantism and constructing a new, more rigorous Protestant theology, neo-orthodoxy, and he brought his brother into this endeavor. Constantly sharpening his ideas off Richard, Reinhold became the foremost public exponent of the new theology, producing a classic two-volume neo-orthodox study, The Nature and Destiny of Man, in 1941 and 1943.

Humanity's Sinful Nature

In The Nature and Destiny of Man Niebuhr expounded the most systematic discussion of neo-orthodoxy. In contrast to the liberal Protestant theologians of the day, he insisted on humanity's imperfection, depravity, sinful nature, and distance from God. He advised readers to maintain a sharp sense of their own humility and to accept Christian faith as the only means by which the existential sufferings of life can be alleviated. Although neo-orthodoxy remained socially progressive, Niebuhr expressed an understanding of the complexity of political action missing in his earlier work and counseled patience, stoicism, and limited expectations—concepts perfectly keyed to the disillusionment of liberals who witnessed the massacre of the Jews or to radicals shaken by the Stalinist purges. Niebuhr himself moved toward the political center, and in his next book, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944), he defended democratic principles in an age that could no longer sustain Utopian optimism.

Activism, Paradox, Protest

As part of his centrism, Niebuhr joined several political groups, such as the Union for Democratic Action and the Americans for Democratic Action (which opposed Henry Wallace's 1948 presidential campaign). He became for a time something of a cold warrior (although never a red-baiter), especially after the 1949 publication of his Faith and History: A Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of History. In this book he argued that the Christian conception of history was a better basis for understanding politics than more recent models of history such as Marxism. The book solidified his public stature as an establishment theologian and led to a close association with the U.S. State Department. He followed it with a well-received meditation on American culture, The Irony of American History (1951), which viewed the nation and the Cold War as fraught with paradox. In the 1960s Niebuhr's own actions were sometimes viewed paradoxically by critics. A figurehead of the establishment, he nonetheless supported the civil rights movement and opposed the Vietnam War. In 1969, at age seventy-six, he was enough of a critic of the establishment that President Richard M. Nixon had him investigated by the FBI. He died 1 June 1971.

Sources:

Charles C. Brown, Niebuhr and His Age: Reinhold Niebuhrs Prophetic Role in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Trinity, 1992);

Kenneth Durkin, Reinhold Niebuhr (Harrisburg, Pa.: Morehouse, 1990);

Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 1986);

Ronald H. Stone, Reinhold Niebuhr: Prophet to Politicians (Nashville: Abingdon, 1972).

NIEBUHR, REINHOLD 1892-1971

Theologian

Neo-orthodoxy

In 1950 Time magazine called Reinhold Niebuhr the "number one theologian of United States Protestantism." Although a stroke affected his work to some extent Niebuhr remained an influential figure in American religious thought and political affairs throughout the 1950s. He resisted being classified as part of the European movement called Neo-orthodoxy, but his insistence on man's sinful nature and distance from God and the need for the medi- ating presence of Jesus gave some support to those who saw him as representing an American version of the movement. His theology, which greatly affected religious thought during the following decade, was best expressed in The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, a work of two volumes published in 1941 and 1943.

Political Views

The secular world paid more attention to Niebuhr the political thinker than Niebuhr the theologian. But his political views were shaped and developed in a religious context. In his first major book, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), he attacked the Utopian ideas of Marxism and the liberal belief that education could alleviate human suffering. Niebuhr left the Socialist party in 1940 in protest over its pacifistic views of World War II. He increasingly turned to liberal democracy as the system best able to maximize justice and minimize oppression.

Defending the Democratic System

In The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of the Traditional Defense (1944), he attempted to find a religious defense for the democratic system. As he said in The Nature and Destiny of Man, "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination for injustice makes democracy necessary."

Countervailing Power

With other liberal defenders of democracy, Niebuhr contributed to the liberal concept of countervailing power to show how democracy could work, if not smoothly. Competition among various interests in the nation, such as big business, labor, and the federal government, would contribute to the general good. Democracy is "a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems."

ADA

In 1947 Niebuhr joined the organizing Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) in an effort to counter Henry Wallace's Progressive Citizens of America. As the Progressive party, this Communist-infiltrated group supported Wallace in the presidential campaign of 1948. With the collapse of the Progressive movement, the liberal ADA was the dominant force on the left in American politics in the cold war era.

Irony and Paradox

In his last major book, The Irony of American History (1952), Niebuhr displayed his use of irony and love of paradox to discuss the problems faced by a nation that believed in a special destiny, whose actions tended to achieve results contrary to their original aims.

Christianity and Crisis.

Niebuhr served as editor of Christianity and Crisis, a political journal he founded in 1941. In this journal he maintained a running commentary on the current political scene. His influence was more public than Paul Tillich's, though each contributed to the moral tenor of the times. Both were important underpinnings to the moral arguments sustaining the cold war.

Sources:

Charles C. Brown, Niebuhr and His Age: Reinhold Niebuhr's Prophetic Role in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992);

Ronald H. Stone, Reinhold Niebuhr: Prophet to Politicians (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972).

Niebuhr, Reinhold (1892–1971), theologian.The most influential American theologian of the twentieth century, Niebuhr spoke authoritatively about politics and culture as well as the Christian Gospel. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James, he believed that religious vitality was ebbing in the churches and could be revived only by an energetic encounter with the wider world. Like Emerson and James, too, he developed his thinking in tension with secular currents of thought, but unlike them he was also a man of action. He was a gifted political journalist and a tireless political activist from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Born in Missouri to a German immigrant preacher and his second‐generation German immigrant wife, Niebuhr was ordained at the age of twenty‐one into his father's German Evangelical Synod of North America. But he sought a larger sphere, and soon departed for Yale Divinity School, where he received a master's degree in 1915. Yale deepened the liberal Protestant convictions he had inherited from his father: the critical study of the Bible, the Social Gospel, God as forgiving companion rather than irascible judge. As minister of a small middle‐class German Evangelical Synod church in Detroit (1915–1928), he turned it into a thriving liberal institution. By 1928, when he became a professor of ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, he had become, thanks to his masterful oratory and biting essays in the Christian Century magazine, a leading voice of liberal Protestantism.

At Union, Niebuhr moved to the center of the national political and intellectual debate. His Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) argued that Christians must engage the world of power politics, and resist evil with force, and even violence, rather than merely preach love and goodwill as the all‐purpose solution to social conflict. His “realism” profoundly influenced Protestant opinion, which moved during the 1930s and 1940s toward support for organized labor at home and for military intervention against fascism abroad. A Socialist party member in the 1930s (and twice a candidate for office), Niebuhr moved in the 1940s toward the political center, from which he lambasted both the communists and the business‐dominated Republicans. His masterpiece, The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941–1943), laid a theological groundwork for the chastened liberalism of the Cold War Era: Human progress was still open‐ended, since men and women were creative beings made in God's image, but they were also sinners who undermined their own achievements through pride and self‐aggrandizement. Democratic, interest‐group politics offered the right combination of freedom and restraint for beings so demonstrably divided against themselves. In this spirit, in 1947, he helped launch Americans for Democratic Action to mobilize the noncommunist left. In the 1960s, however, he sharply criticized the Lyndon B. Johnson administration's escalation of the Vietnam War.
See also Anticommunism; New Deal Era, The; Pacifism; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Charles W. Kegley, ed., Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought, rev. ed., 1984.
Richard Wightman Fox , Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography, 1985; reprint, 1996.

Richard Wightman Fox

Reinhold Niebuhr , 1892–1971, American religious and social thinker, b. Wright City, Mo. A graduate of Yale Divinity School, he served (1915–28) as pastor of Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit, where he became deeply interested in social problems. In 1928 he began teaching at Union Theological Seminary, becoming professor of applied Christianity in 1930; he remained in this post until his retirement in 1960. In the early 1930s he shed his liberal Protestant hopes for the church's moral rule of society and became a political activist and a socialist. A prolific writer, he urged—notably in Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), Christianity and Power Politics (1940), and The Nature and Destiny of Man (2 vol., 1941–43)—clerical interest in social reforms as well as the beliefs that men are sinners, that society is ruled by self-interest, and that history is characterized by irony, not progress. After World War II, he dropped much of his social radicalism and preached "conservative realism." In his later works, such as Faith and History (1949), Niebuhr argued for balances of interests and defended Christianity as the world view that best explains the heights and barbarisms of human behavior. In A Nation So Conceived (1963) he analyzed aspects of the American character. He also wrote Man's Nature and his Communities (1965), Faith and Politics (ed. by R. H. Stone 1968), and The Democratic Experience (with P. E. Sigmund, 1969).

Bibliography: See biographies by R. H. Stone (1972) and R. Fox (1987); studies by H. P. Odegard (1956, repr. 1972), J. Bingham (1961, repr. 1972), N. A. Scott, Jr., ed. (1975); bibliography by D. B. Robertson (1984).

Niebuhr, Reinhold (1892–1971), Missouriborn theologian, received his M.A. and B.D. from Yale Divinity School, was a pastor in Detroit's Bethel Evangelical Church (1915–28), where he was concerned with labor union issues before becoming a professor at Union Theological Seminary (1928–60). His neo‐orthodox theology, treating the relevance of Christianity to modern man and society, holds that because of original sin man cannot reach Utopia through social reform or revolution, but that social dilemmas can be met in terms of the Christian beliefs and spiritual values contained in the Bible. His views are set forth in Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), Reflections on the End of an Era (1934), Beyond Tragedy (1937), Christianity and Power Politics (1940), The Nature and Destiny of Man (2 vols., 1941–43), The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944), Faith and History (1949), The Irony of American History (1952), The Self and the Dramas of History (1955), Pious and Secular America (1958), and Christianity and Power Politics (1969).

Niebuhr, Reinhold (1892–1971). Christian theologian, reflecting especially on social and political issues. After twenty-three years in a Detroit working-class church, he moved to Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he became professor of Christian ethics, remaining there until his retirement. Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) already anticipated his Gifford Lectures, The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941–3). What he looked for was ‘a combination of moral resoluteness about the immediate issues with a religious awareness of another dimension of meaning and judgement’, thereby grounding politics in realism about human frailty.

Niebuhr, Reinhold (1892–1971), American theologian. From 1928 to 1960 he was Professor of Applied Christianity at the Union Theological Seminary, New York. He sought to return to the categories of the biblical revelation and was critical of both liberal theology and metaphysics; he reinstated the doctrine of original sin. He believed that Christianity had a direct prophetic vocation in relation to culture and for a generation his ‘Christian realism’ exercised an influential critique on American social and political institutions.