Introduction
Why should anyone care about Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971, not to be confused with his brother, H. Richard)? For any Christian who desires to be involved in social problems, Reinhold Niebuhr provides a unique perspective that challenges our complacency and provides great wisdom on how and how not to engage in society. Niebuhr explains Christian theology in a way that challenges everyone to seek after greater justice and love. At the same time, his teaching encourages great humility in our endeavors because of the universal taint of every endeavor with our own sinfulness and pride.
Reinhold Niebuhr was certainly a theologian, but he was a theologian who was always interested in social problems. He wanted to apply his theology to the world for his own political activity and the instruction of others. In that way, his theology is unique because it is so oriented toward social problems without being triumphalistic or partisan. On the other side, his analysis of social problems is unique because of his theological perspective.
[Note: Read a shorter version of this article here]
Niebuhr’s Thesis: Man’s Nature Limits Society’s Possibilities
Niebuhr’s basic idea is deceptively simple: human beings are what they are. For Niebuhr, this means that human beings are free and creative but also beset by anxiety over their limitations and tempted to an egotism or pride that claims status and prerogatives far above what is their due. Of course, human beings often do not claim to do this. They deny it, even to themselves. So, there is always a measure of self-deception in their actions. Niebuhr explains that in spite of the new situations of the modern era, the self has not fundamentally changed. He says:
Its misery is still compounded of both “death and sin,” that is, of both the essential brevity of a life concerned with such ultimate matters; and of the evil into which it falls by attempting to avoid or obscured the brevity and insignificance of its life (The Self & the Dramas of History, 218).
In every social and political situation, we are dealing with human beings who are composed of freedom, anxiety, and sin.
Reinhold Niebuhr’s life and activity spanned the time in which World Wars I & II, the Great Depression, the rise of communism, the Civil Rights movement, and the Cold War took place. This provided ample opportunity for him to meditate on the great problems of power, politics, and society. Much of his writing deals with practical and theological insight into these matters.
Examples of the Application of Niebuhr’s Thesis
Niebuhr’s view of Marx illustrates his perspective. Niebuhr believed that Marx was on to something in seeing how human beings could unjustly weight systems in their favor, even without their own awareness of it. He believed that this fit well with the biblical picture of human beings’ tendency to sin, egotism, and pride. People tend to exalt themselves and their own groups and preserve their power and privilege at last partially at the expense of others and with an element of injustice.
He believed that Marxism was in serious error in thinking that this tendency could be eliminated by revolution or economic reconfiguration. He writes,
[Marxism] therefore assumes that the socialization of property will eliminate human egotism. Its failure to understand the perennial and persistent character of human egotism in any possible society, prompts it to make completely erroneous estimates of human behavior on the other side of a revolution (The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, 111).
In other words, egotism is a perpetual problem that will not be eliminated in history and certainly not by a revolution. Instead, it could make matters worse because of its concentration of economic and political power in one institution. This provides more opportunity for injustice, not less.
Another example is the issue of race. This was a big concern for Niebuhr, and he was strongly in favor of the Civil Rights movement. He would have wanted to see it go much further. What Niebuhr did was to place the problem of race in a broader context. He said that it was rooted in the natural love of those close to us combined with our anxiety for their survival and status and the egotism or pride that tends to exalt our own groups and look down at others. This is a perennial problem for the human race rooted in human creation, anxiety, sin, and self-deception. So, he warned against thinking that “civilized” people could easily overcome it. He says, “it is foolish to regard race pride as a mere vestige of barbarism when it is in fact a perpetual source of conflict in human life” (ibid., 143).
Using a Realist View to Solve Social Problems
What Niebuhr was saying is that we need to take a realistic view of human nature into account as we seek to analyze and solve problems. As Niebuhr’s colleague, John C. Bennett, put it, “In general we can say that Niebuhr’s theological teaching about human nature determines the limits of what should be attempted in society and that it is one of the factors which determine the direction of ethical action” (in Kegley and Bretall, eds., Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious Social and Political Thought,, 48). For example, understanding the deep roots of the problem of racism, it should lead us to be more creative, persistent, and pervasive in our attempts to bring various groups together. “A democratic society must, in other words, seek proximate solutions for this problem in indeterminate creative ventures [in overcoming the problems of racism]” (The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness,, 144).
Niebuhr’s strong warnings against romantic illusions in politics is an important one, and it resonates with people today. As Arthur Schlessinger put it in his preface to Charles C. Brown’s excellent book on Niebuhr,
Niebuhr’s warnings against utopianism, messianism, self-deception, and vainglory strike a chord today. We really cannot play the role of God to history. We must strive day by day as best we can to attain decency and clarity and proximate justice in an ambiguous world (Charles C. Brown, Niebuhr and His Age: Reinhold Niebuhr’s Prophetic Role and Legacy, ix).
This might lead one to think that Niebuhr’s view of the prospects for improvement of our situation was a rather pessimistic one. This is not an accurate assessment. Niebuhr warned against an overly optimistic view, but he also warned against seeing any particular situation as immune to a solution. He says: “If hopes are dupes, fears may be liars” (The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, 176). He believed that serious, creative ventures could overcome social problems, and so he was in many ways an optimist. He challenged the pessimism and optimism of his day this way,
There is no limit to either the sanctification of individual life, or social perfection in collective life, or to the discovery of truth in cultural life; except of course the one limit, that there will be some corruption, as well as deficiency, of virtue and truth on the new level of achievements (The Nature and Destiny of Man 2.156).
Niebuhr’s belief in the possibility of transformation and change was rooted not only in a belief in the capacity of human beings for justice. It was rooted in a belief in the grace of God. Niebuhr believed that God did not let human pretensions go on and on. He confronted them. In the cross of Christ, God has shown the sinfulness of all human beings: “The Cross represents a perfection which contradicts the false pretensions of virtue in history and which reveals the contrast between man’s sinful self-assertion and the divine agape” (ibid., 2.89). The doctrine of justification by faith alone says that all human beings are sinful and inclined to egotism and human pride. Everyone one of us stands condemned and is justified freely by God’s grace. This sinfulness remains in human beings, but God’s transforming power in sanctification is continually available to enable them to live a life of imperfect yet real love.
Niebuhr warned, however, that we must not let the absolute ideals of righteousness keep us from solving “the proximate problems” of justice. We should be careful not to let our continued imperfection keep us from seeking to make things better or from dealing with unjust actions. For example, both sides in World War II and the Cold War were in an absolute sense in sin and in need of forgiveness. At the same time, the cause of the Allies was still one worth fighting for in a relative sense, i.e., comparing the righteousness of the two sides.
Niebuhr presents what might be called a realist view of politics and social activism. It is rooted in the understanding of the problems, limits, and potential of human nature. Niebuhr’s conviction was 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” (Man’s Nature and His Communities, 24–25). Niebuhr’s approach was to use the biblical view of man to help us analyze the complexities of our social and personal problems and to inform the parameters of the solutions. Using this framework, Niebuhr offers much wisdom and guidance for how those who hold to a biblical view can engage with the world, contribute to its discussions, and move toward solutions.
A Series of Articles
In this series of articles, I want to flesh out Niebuhr’s perspective. My goal is to demonstrate the wisdom that Niebuhr derived from careful consideration of the biblical view of man and the situation in the world. This will be an extended meditation on Niebuhr’s theology that is practical, i.e., geared toward engagement in the world. The basic outline is to explore what Niebuhr says about human beings as created and fallen into sin and then to look at how God deals with sin and brings salvation to individuals and societies. You can read the full outline here. I will add links in the outline as I proceed.
A careful meditation on Niebuhr’s work has helped me to see some of the depths of my own sin and understand the grace of God more clearly. It has condemned my own complacency toward social problems and provided me with a framework to understand and engage with many issues from a biblical perspective. I hope that these discussions can do the same for you. Ultimately, I hope that you will be encouraged to engage with Niebuhr himself. At the end, I will provide an annotated bibliography to aid you in doing so.
1.1. The created goodness, freedom, creativity, and potential of human beings
Human beings are limited and even sinful. Reinhold Niebuhr spoke eloquently to these limits. However, Niebuhr also constantly reminded us of the goodness of human beings and their amazing creative potential as beings made in the image of God.
Niebuhr did not believe that human beings were “timeless” creatures. Humans are ethnic and family beings. The determinists have recognized these factors and explained them well, but they overplayed their hand. Humans are also capable of transcending their own time and place.
The self is a creature, but it is also creator. It has freedom to act differently than it has before. Compare this to the animals. They always form the same culture. There is no ability to transcend their nature and look beyond it.
Whenever human beings interact with each other, they create unique “dramas” that are a mixture of their situation and their free reaction to it. This means it’s very hard to predict history. Of the 19th century historians, only Jacob Burckhardt predicted the rise of totalitarian governments in the 20th century. Because history is so complex, this means that it is hard to definitively refute even the most outlandish interpretation of history (The Self and the Dramas of History, 43–44). Humans can transcend their situation in dizzying array of creative endeavors.
The Conscience & Human Goodness
Human beings also have a conscience. The conscience, according to Niebuhr, is the self transcending itself and judging itself. Sin is not an inevitable part of human being’s created nature. Though he is fallen, “it is not inevitable that man offend God in his creativity. [God] places limits on finite man, but this does not mean that he is a slave to nature” (The Self and the Dramas of History, 79). There is nothing inherently wrong with human beings based on their finitude. Being finite is not bad. What is bad in human beings is the result of a wrong response to our finite nature.
Even though human beings are “fallen” into sin, this does not mean that they are completely evil. A basic goodness remains in human nature. As Niebuhr says in various places based on Romans 7, there is a law in our mind that wars against the law in our members, the flesh or sinful nature. The political realists, according to Niebuhr, “are inclined to obscure the residual moral and social sense even in the most self-regarding men and nations” (Man’s Nature and His Communities, 31). An example of this is Augustine. Augustine criticized the Roman government, but he did not appreciate the genuine accomplishment of justice that was underneath it (Ibid., 44-45). In every society, some elements of created goodness remain.
Humans as Community Creatures
Humans are also made for community. The Western middle class often misses how important community is. “The individual requires community more than bourgeois thought comprehended” (The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, 3). This is seen in that even when they oppose a community, they often do it in the name of another community, as when people opposed the communist society in which they lived in the name of the free world.
Human beings are communal beings belong to specific families and ethnic communities. They are born to particular people and belong to particular tribes or groups. This community can have a very positive effect on human beings. “By the responsibilities which men have to their family and community and to many common enterprises, they are drawn out of themselves to become their true selves” (ibid., 56). Community gets us out of ourselves and into a larger world. The larger the group, the larger the enterprise that is possible.
Racism is an evil that is rooted in anxiety over one’s group’s survival, honor, or prosperity combined with an exaltation of one’s group at the expense of another. We must recognize, though, that it is rooted in an initially good impulse that is then perverted, namely, the love of those most closely connected to us. This illustrates how every evil impulse has a created good behind it of which it is a perversion:
Racial prejudice, the contempt of the other group, is an inevitable concomitant of racial pride; and racial pride is an inevitable concomitant of the ethnic will to live. . . . There are spiritual elements in every human survival impulse; and the corruption of these elements is pride and the will-to-power.
This love, often carried to excess, of our own group is a significant part of the story of the human race. It informs much of Niebuhr’s view of society, which he fleshes out especially in Moral Man and Immoral Society.
Transcending Yet Limited
Niebuhr looks at human beings as ironic, one of his favorite words. He sees them as able to see the whole universe but occupying a very small place in it. Humans are able to transcend the world but limited in it.
In The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 1, Niebuhr explains that there are three elements to the doctrine of human beings. First, “the height of self-transcendence in man’s spiritual stature in its doctrine of ‘image of God’” (150). This is the amazing potential of human beings and describes their nobility, conscience, and ability to accomplish many great things.
Second, “[i]t insists on man’s weakeness, dependence, and finiteness” (ibid.). Even while human beings are great, they are still limited. While traveling to the moon (transcendence), a programming error or meteorite can end her life. A human can produce the plays of Shakespeare and yet be mistaken about the way disease occurs. Humans are an amazing creature but also a very limited and finite one.
Limitation is not sin. Sin arises from what we do with our greatness and limitations. Will we accept our limitations humbly and trust in God? Or will we seek to deny our limitations, even at the expense of the well-being of others? That is the third element of Niebuhr’s teaching on human beings:
[This view] affirms that evil in man is a consequence of his inevitable though not necessary unwillingness to acknowledge his dependence, to accept his finiteness and to admit his insecurity, an unwillingness which involves him in the vicious circle of accentuating the insecurity from which he seeks escape (ibid.).
This is human pride, and it is the root sin of human sinfulness. This is what will occupy us in the next few posts. Before we look at human pride, we must consider the bridge between creatureliness and sinful pride: anxiety.
1.2. The Bridge Between Sin & Created Goodness: Anxiety
Richard Lovelace explains that it is the view of Søren Kierkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich that anxiety is at the root of much sin. According to psychologist Rollo May in his book Anxiety, anxiety first came to the fore as an issue in the 19th century.[1] The most prominent person to make this issue central was Søren Kierkegaard in his book The Concept of Anxiety and other writings.[2] Tillich and Niebuhr were building on Kierkegaard in much of their thought.
Explanation of Anxiety
The first thing to note about anxiety in these writers is that anxiety itself is not derived from sin but from man’s finitude. According to Niebuhr, anxiety is derived from two facts. Man is transcendent and able to look above and beyond the contingency of nature but yet at the same time caught up in the contingency and flux of the world.[3] We can see this anxiety in Psalm 8. There, the Psalmist asks, “What is man that you are mindful of him?” This question is rooted in the fact that human beings are small, but there is obviously an element in man that has a large enough view of things that he can see that he is small. It is his strength and his weakness combined together that make him anxious. Rollo May provides an explanation:
Whenever possibility is visualized by an individual, anxiety is potentially present in the same experience. In everyday experiential terms, this may be illustrated by our recalling that every person has the opportunity and need to move ahead in his development—the child learns to walk, and moves on into school, and the adult moves into marriage and/or new jobs. Such possibilities, like roads ahead which cannot be known since you have not yet traversed and experienced them, involve anxiety.[4]
It is our involvement in the world and yet our ability to see beyond it that constitutes anxiety. Anxiety is the uncertainty that arises from seeing many paths and not knowing which one is right. This involves man’s greatness and his weakness. He can only take one path, and it may be the wrong one. He cannot foresee all of the difficulties of each path. At the same time, his mental powers are great enough to envision himself taking a variety of paths and to see some of their challenges. This is the source of our anxiety. As Kierkegaard says, “. . . anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.”[5]
It is important to note that this situation itself is not sin or sinfulness. Anxiety arises from our finiteness and constitutes the occasion for temptation but is not in itself sinful. As Niebuhr notes: “Anxiety is the internal description of the state of temptation. It must not be identified with sin because there is always the ideal possibility that faith would purge anxiety of the tendency toward sinful self-assertion.”[6] Man’s unconscious guilt and independence from God do cause anxiety, but this is not the origin of humans’ anxiety. At the same time, man’s attempt to escape insecurity by his own efforts often increases his anxiety.
Though it is our finiteness and ability to see it that causes anxiety, we can still think of different “objects” of anxiety that become the basis for our internal anxiety. Paul Tillich provides a helpful division of these various “objects” of anxiety into three types.[8] The first is anxiety over fate and death. This is the most common and obvious. We will die, and we know not our time. The second type of anxiety is the anxiety of meaninglessness. He writes:
The anxiety of meaninglessness is anxiety about the loss of an ultimate concern, of a meaning which gives meaning to all meanings. This anxiety is aroused by a loss of a spiritual center, of an answer, however symbolic and indirect, to the question of the meaning of existence.[9]
According to Tillich, this has been the most dominant type of anxiety in the modern era.[10] The final form of anxiety is anxiety over guilt and condemnation. “. . . literally, [man] is required to answer, if he is asked, what he has made of himself.” Transcending ourselves, we can ask whether or not what we have done is right, and this can produce anxiety.[11] These distinctions help flesh out the problems of anxiety and point us toward the way in which human beings seek to overcome their anxiety.
The Pride Solution
Faced with his own finiteness yet his ability to see to some extent the big picture, man has two options: pride or trust.[12] Niebuhr explains eloquently how pride develops in response to anxiety. He writes:
This ability to stand outside and beyond the world, tempts man to megalomania and persuades him to regard himself as the go around and about whom the universe centers. Yet is too obviously involved in the flux and finiteness of nature to make such pretensions plausibly.[13]
Because he can see so much, he is tempted to imagine that everything he can see or conceive moves around him as the center. This is a sort of “compensatory egoism” aimed at overcoming anxiety. This is what Niebuhr would call “pride.” We shall examine it in much more detail in the next post.
Applications of This Teaching to Social Life
It’s a temptation to think that social problems can be solved if we get to a point where everyone has enough food, housing, or provision. These are noble goals, but they are not solutions to societal conflicts which are rooted in anxiety as well as physical needs. Responding to Erich Fromm, Niebuhr writes: “[Fromm] does not realize that the desire for security or for prestige is, like all human desires, indeterminate. There is no point at which the self, seeking its own, can feel itself self-satisfied and free to consider others than itself” (The Self & the Dramas of History, 139). The eye of man, as the Preacher says in Ecclesiastes, is never satisfied. New attainments lead to new desires and ambitions.
Consequently, Marxism is based on an illusion. “But there is no basis for the Marxist hope that an ‘economy of abundance’ will guarantee social peace; for men may fight as desperately for ‘power and glory’ as for bread” (The Children of Light & the Children of Darkness, 63). Satisfaction of one desire or need merely points our anxiety in different directions.
America is a good illustration of this point. America is a land of abundance. The irony of America is that its abundance has not relieved its anxieties. As Niebuhr put it, “The irony of America’s quest for happiness lies in the fact that she succeeded more obviously than any other nation in making life ‘comfortable,’ only finally to run into larger incongruities by which it escaped the smaller ones” (The Irony of American History, 63). America’s experience demonstrates that anxiety needs a different sort of solution. “But all such strategies cannot finally overcome the fragmentary character of human existence. The final wisdom of life requires, not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it” (ibid.).
1.3. Pride as Response to Anxiety
Faced with his own anxiety, man has two options: pride or trust.[14] We shall explain how the first option develops in the life of sinful man and return later to the second option. Niebuhr explains eloquently how pride develops in response to anxiety. He writes:
This ability to stand outside and beyond the world, tempts man to megalomania and persuades him to regard himself as the go around and about whom the universe centers. Yet is too obviously involved in the flux and finiteness of nature to make such pretensions plausibly.[15]
Because he can see so much, he is tempted to imagine that everything he can see or conceive moves around him as the center. It is what Richard F. Lovelace calls a “compensatory egoism” aimed at overcoming anxiety.
Niebuhr explains that there are three types of pride: pride of power, reason, and morality. These three types of pride parallel the three types of anxiety mentioned by Paul Tillich: anxiety over existence, meaning, and guilt (see the previous article).
Pride of Power
The pride of power is either believing one is more secure than he really is or seeking to gain security at the expense of others. “The ego does not feel secure and therefore grasps for more power in order to make itself secure. It does not regard itself as sufficiently significant or respected or feared and therefore seeks to enhance its position in nature and society.”[16] This can involve either a complacency about one’s position or an attempt to make oneself secure emotionally or physically at the expense of other people. As Niebuhr notes, “The truth is that man is tempted by the basic insecurity of human existence to make himself doubly secure and by the insignificance of his place in the total scheme of life to prove his significance.”[17] The trouble is that our weakness and finiteness “become the more apparent the more we seek to obscure them, and . . . generates ultimate perils, the more immediate insecurities are eliminated.”[18] This is the pride of power.
Pride of Reason
The pride of reason is based on man’s limited perspective. The temptation is to make our knowledge more “final” than it is. As Niebuhr notes, “This is a very obvious fact but no philosophical system has been great enough to take full account of it. Each great thinker makes the same mistake, in turn, of imagining himself the final thinker.”[19] This is so pervasive that Niebuhr says it is at least an element of all knowledge: “All human knowledge is tainted with an ‘ideological’ taint. It pretends to be more true than it is. It is finite knowledge, gained from a particular perspective; but it pretends to be final and ultimate knowledge.”[20] This is our attempt to overcome the anxiety of meaninglessness. As Niebuhr notes, “The pretensions of final truth are always partly an effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge. Man is afraid to face the problem of his limited knowledge lest he fall into the abyss of meaninglessness.”[21]
Pride of Morals and Religion
The third type of pride is moral pride. This occurs when we make our own moral perspective ultimate: “Since the self judges itself by its own standards it finds itself good. It judges others by its own standards and finds them evil, when their standards fail to conform to its own.”[22] Often, this limited moral perspective claims the sanction of religion, and thus religion becomes the tool of the ego:
The ultimate sin is the religious sin of making the self-deification implied in moral pride explicit. This is done when our partial standards and relative attainments are explicitly related to the unconditioned good, and claim divine sanction. For this reason religion is not simply as is generally supposed an inherently virtuous human quest for God.[23]
Even the Christian faith can become a tool of our pride. Niebuhr says:
The worst form of self-assertion is religious self-assertion in which under the guise of contrition before God, He is claimed as the exclusive ally of our contingent self. . . . Christianity rightly regards itself as a religion, not so much of man’s search for God . . . but as a religion of revelation in which a holy and loving God is revealed to man as the source and end of all finite existence against whom the self-will of man is shattered and his pride abased. But as soon as the Christian assumes that he is, by virtue of possessing this revelation, more righteous, because more contrite, than other men, he increases the sin of self-righteousness and makes the forms of a religion of contrition the tool of his pride.[24]
Thus, even man’s highest activities can be turned into tools of our pride. As soon as we grasp the basic anxiety of man’s existence, we must be alert to human pride that seeks to make man bigger than he is in order to overcome his smallness and relative insignificance in the scheme of things.
Some Applications to Social Problems
- Those who advocate any cause often have motivations of self, even though they are serving a “cause.” “A person may be thoroughly ‘devoted’ to a cause, a community, or a creative relationship, and yet he may, within terms of that devotion, express his final concern for his own prestige or power or security.” (The Self & the Dramas of History, 18).
- In a polarized society, it’s very easy for one side to see the pretensions and selfish motivations of the other side. But it’s not to easy to see their own. “. . . we have had such an ironic conflict between the pious and the rationalists [in the United States], each of them aware of the hypocrisy of the other but neither of them aware of the dishonesty in themselves” (Ibid., 151).
- The way pride works out in politics is complex. An example is the extension of civil rights to African-Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. This was done in part because of the polemical use communists were making of it. “In each case, national frustration of a less powerful nation may prompt the change of internal or external policy to make the hegemonous nation a better or purer exemplar of a common faith or system of values.” Thus, he encourages us not to think too narrowly of how collectives operate in terms of their self-interest: “This dialectic between the values of a culture and the self-regard of the hegemonous nations reveals that the national interest cannot be simply defined. All the elements of prestige, power, and force must be accounted for” (The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, 78–79).
Sensuality
The fact that humans can in some ways see the whole but only have a limited ability to deal with it causes anxiety. This anxiety tempts human beings to try and make themselves more important and bigger than they are at the expense of God and their fellow human beings. This is man’s pride, and this is man’s sin.
Pride not Sensuality the First Sin
Niebuhr notes that there has always been a tendency within the Christian tradition to see sensual pleasure and lust as the root sin rather than pride. This has often led to an emphasis on sins that involve pleasure or sex and downplaying the pride that can reside in religious impulses themselves. As Niebuhr says:
The pride of a bishop, the pretension of a theologian, the will-to-power of a pious business man, and the spiritual arrogance of the church itself are not mere incidental defects, not merely ‘venial’ sins. They represent the basic drive of self-love, operating upon whatever new level grace has pitched the new life (The Nature and Destiny of Man, 2:137).
The emphasis on the sins of sensuality, says Niebuhr, can completely sidestep the fundamental issues of inordinate self-love or pride.
In fact, Niebuhr explains that sensuality (as he calls is it) is rooted in pride. It is one response to anxiety. Instead of trying to make himself big or righteous or the repository of all knowledge, man seeks to withdraw into a smaller world where he can be lord of all. There, he identifies himself with that small world or with one of his drives, such as the drive for food or sex. It could also be done by exalting a particular nation or race. Niebuhr explains:
Sensuality represents an effort to escape from the freedom and the infinite possibilities of spirit by becoming lost in the detailed processes, activities and interests of existence, an effort which results inevitably in unlimited devotion to limited values (The Nature and Destiny of Man, 1.185).
The reason why humans want to escape the broad world is because it is too difficult to deal with the fact that they are not the center of it.
Self-Deification or Idolatry?
The question then arises, is this inordinate self-love about making oneself a god or setting up a false god? Niebuhr answers that it is both in different respects. He says:
The self is seeking to escape from itself and throws itself into any pursuit which will allow it to forget for a moment the inner tension of an uneasy conscience. The self, finding itself to be inadequate as the center of its existence, seeks for another god amidst the various forces, processes, and impulses of nature over which it ostensibly presides (Ibid., 234).
In other words, man starts by wanting to be the center of the universe, but it is too embarrassingly false. So, he sets up another god that he can connect with and find meaning with. The god always disappoints and so a total escape is sought. Drunkenness is an example of this, but it is also illustrative of the “logic of sin”: “Anxiety tempts the self to sin; the sin increases the insecurity which it was intended to alleviate until some escape from the whole tension of life is sought” (ibid., 235). Sin is a wrong attempt to solve the anxieties of life, and it fails. So, escape is sought.
Sex and the Pattern of Sin
Sex is a particularly powerful example of this. Sexual perversion and sin are not simply an engagement in animal desires. Man’s spirit makes sex something far more than that. Says Niebuhr: “Its force reaches up into the highest pinnacle of human spirituality; and the insecurity of man in the heights of his freedom reaches down to the sex impulse as an instrument of compensation and as an avenue of escape” (ibid., 236). Sex is a way of attempting to be the center of the world.
Of course, this attempt to be the center of the world obviously fails. The result is that a person looks for fulfillment in another. Niebuhr writes, “The deification of the other is almost a literal description of many romantic sentiments in which attributes of perfection are assigned to the partner of love . . .” (ibid., 1.237). Of course, this also fails, because the expectations are “beyond the capacities of any human being to bear, and therefore the cause of inevitable disillusionment” (ibid.).
The ultimate result is that sex becomes a way of escape from all of it: “Thus sex reveals sensuality to be first another and final form of self-love, secondly an effort to escape self-love by the deification of another and finally as an escape from the futilities of both forms of idolatry by a plunge into unconsciousness” (ibid., 239). This is particularly true, Niebuhr notes, of commercialized sexuality. It does not really involve another person at all, and so it involves both the deification of self and the escape from such a futile attempt to deify the self. These attempts “have exactly this characteristic, that personal considerations are excluded from the satisfaction of the sexual impulse. It is a flight not to a false god but to nothingness” (ibid., 236).
Conclusion on Sensuality
Niebuhr’s diagnosis teaches us that the sins of sensuality such as lust, sex, gluttony, or drunkenness, are rooted in the basic problems of reality. That is what makes them so tempting and powerful.
If are going to avoid the sins of sensuality, we have to go back to the beginning. We have to find a better way to deal with the anxieties of life than shrinking our world to fit us or trying to make ourselves big enough to fit it. We have to learn to reconcile ourselves to the ambiguities of life, if we are going to avoid the trap of sensuality.
1.4. Self-Deception
Human beings imagine themselves to be the center of the universe, but they do not generally acknowledge that they are doing this. Much of what they do is distorted by excessive devotion to the self, but they often miss this taint in even good acts. Reinhold Niebuhr says:
Man loves himself inordinately. Since his determinate existence does not deserve the devotion lavished upon it, it is obviously necessary to practice some deception in order to justify such excessive devotion. While such deception is constantly directed against competing wills, seeking to secure their acceptance and validation of the self’s too generous opinion of itself, its primary purpose is to deceive, not others, but the self (The Nature and Destiny of Man, 1:203).
Self-justification of the sins of our actions is in an attempt at self-deception. Humans realize how implausible their pretensions are, so they hide this effort from themselves, albeit imperfectly.
In this attempt, we enlist other people to help. Parenting is an example of this. The child wants to assert its ego and so complains about the parents to justify its self-assertion. The parent asserts his or her own parent and hides its own insecurities under the guise of loving care. “A loving mother will deal wisely with a rebellious adolescent child if she understands that rebellion is an inevitable assertion of the child’s ego but also a natural reaction to the power impulses in the love of even the most loving parents” (The Self and the Dramas of History, 234). Both the child and the parent seek to get other people to agree that there is no element of pride or egotism in this endeavor. They become a partner in the self-deception. “If others will only accept what the self cannot quite accept, the self as deceiver is given an ally against the self as deceived” (The Nature and Destiny of Man, 1.207).
This attempt at self-deception results in the self being in a very tenuous position that leads to even greater anxiety. “The self is afraid of being discovered in its nakedness behind these veils and of being recognized as the author or the veiling deceptions. Thus sin compounds the insecurity of nature with a fresh insecurity of spirit” (ibid.). The attempt to deceive is never quite complete. The weakness and failure of human beings keeps showing through in spite of our best attempts to hide it.
Application of Self-Deception to Social Problems
As I noted in my the article on Niebuhr’s view of pride, it is very easy to make religion an ally of one’s own egotism. As Niebuhr says,
Actually the history of religious fanaticism proves that it is fairly easy to claim identity between the absolute and the contingent value, and thus to claim divine validity for a “Christian” civilization despite all of its moral ambiguities, and to use the Christian faith as a weapon against the foe in all kinds of historic encounters (The Self & the Dramas of History, 149).
The Enlightenment saw this very clearly, and they were right in their analysis. What has often been missed is that this sort of egotism or pride can occur in other contexts. Liberalism has simply not appreciated how the rejection of religious authority in the name of freedom led to a total fanaticism in the French Revolution. They have not been able to process this truth (ibid., 118). Niebuhr puts it this way, the rise of science in Western culture “gave modern culture a special animus against ‘dogma.’ But unfortunately it was not prepared to deal with the hidden dogmas in prescriptions of science itself” (ibid.). The problem is not religion but human beings who seek to exalt themselves beyond measure to deal with the anxieties of life. Religion and science can both become tools of this exaltation, “for human pride is more powerful than any instruments of which it avails itself” (The Nature and Destiny of Man, 2.128). Human pride does not claim to do this and often does not see how these efforts are part of the ego. This is man’s self-deception.
Advocates of religion have often been able to see the pride and egotism in the advocates of science. However, this does not seem to have made them any better at seeing this in themselves. Niebuhr says, “. . . we have had such an ironic conflict between the pious and the rationalists, each of them aware of the hypocrisy of the other but neither of them aware of the dishonesty in themselves” (The Self & the Dramas of History, 151). This is not surprising. As we shall, groups are always much better at seeing the pride and self-deception of other groups than they are of their own.
In ideological conflicts, each group easily sees the inconsistencies of the opposing group, but they miss it in themselves. Liberals see the selective argumentation of conservatives, and conservatives see the selective argumentation of liberals. Few consider the bigger picture. “But no school asks how it is that an essentially good man could have produced corrupting and tyrannical political organizations or exploiting economic organizations or fanatical superstitious religious organizations” (The Children of Light & the Children of Darkness, 17). The problem is human beings not any particular religion, ideology, or political organization.
Niebuhr found this inability to recognize man’s depravity as a particularly astonishing example of man’s self-deception. No matter how many atrocities human beings have committed in the past century (and this century!), few seem to be able to draw the conclusion that all are fallen in pride and sin, including themselves.
The fact that modern man has been able to preserve such a good opinion of himself, despite all the obvious refutations of his optimism, particularly in his own history, leads to the conclusion that there is a very stubborn source of resistance in man to the acceptance of the most obvious and irrefutable evidence about his moral qualities. This source of resistance is not primarily modern but generally human (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 1.121).
In every age, people seem to be able to see the sins of other groups. It is always hard for human beings to imagine that they are part of the same pride, egotism, and self-deception they see in others, but we all are a part of it. We are all guilty of inordinate self-love and wrongly desiring to be the center of the universe, even if we don’t admit it. For good reason did Jesus ask us, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” (Matt. 7:3).
1.5. Sin, Pride, and Communities
Imagine a committed Democrat and a committed Republican trying to have a reasonable conversation together. In order to see each other’s viewpoints and have a productive conversation, they will need a lot of moral imagination. They will need sympathy, patience, and a commitment to listening. It can happen, but it is a challenge.
Now, imagine that the Democrat and the Republican each bring nine of their friends to the discussion. Having a reasonable discussion just got a lot tougher. This is the heart of one of Niebuhr’s most important insights: communities have much less moral imagination than individuals.
The Immorality of Societies
This does not mean that communities are in themselves evil. We are created for community. Niebuhr noted that the “individual requires community more than bourgeois thought comprehended” (The Children of Light & the Children of Darkness, 3). In fact, man does not really fulfill his potential apart from community. “By the responsibilities which men have to their family and community and to many common enterprises, they are drawn out of themselves to become their true selves” (ibid., 56). We are created for community.
The problem, as I noted in the introduction, is that communities have much less moral imagination than individuals. The individual looks up to the community, but he also can look down on it and be embarrassed by its immorality.
Why is this the case? Niebuhr cites the observations of David Hume:
David Hume declared that the maxim that egoism is, though not the exclusive, yet the predominant inclination of human nature, might not be true in fact, but that it was true in politics. He held it to be true in politics since group action is determined by majority opinion and it would always be true that the majority would be actuated by the egotistic motive (Moral Man & Immoral Society, 141).
Of course, nations do not say that they are driven by egotism. “The common members of any national community, while sentimentally desiring peace, nevertheless indulge impulses of envy, jealousy, pride, bigotry, and greed which make for conflict between communities” (ibid., 16). Just as in the case of individuals, nations deceive themselves about their motives and seek to present them as much less egotistical than they are.
At the same time, this is something we simply have to reckon with. It is part of the limitations of human nature. There is no collective imagination that enables it to move past nationalism to general loyalty and benevolent desire. As Niebuhr puts it, “There is not enough imagination in any social group to render it amenable to the influence of pure love” (ibid., 272).
The rationalists thought that all they needed to do was to organize community. Then, the community would be free of the ignorance of the past communities. The result was that the passions of man were unleashed in ways more terrible than the first. Self-interest and abuse are not eliminated by reason. Ignorance is not the primary problem (The Self & the Dramas of History, 162).
The Power of the Idolatry of Community
The basic problem is pride or human egotism. It is the exaltation of the self. Niebuhr believed that nationalism or community allegiance was a very powerful form of human pride. It was rooted in the natural organic connection that one has to his own place and groups: “the love and pious attachment of a man to his countryside, to familiar scenes, sights, and experiences, around which the memories of youth have cast a halo of sanctity, all this flows into the sentiment of patriotism . . .” (Moral Man & Immoral Society, 92). Niebuhr believed there was a real desire for altruism in the human heart, and the nation or group helped to fulfill this desire. At the same time, the nation can also give vent to human pride, it also “indulges his anarchic lusts vicariously. So the nation is at one and the same time a check upon, and a final vent for, the expression of individual egoism” (93).
Niebuhr explains one of man’s most basic problems, “Man loves himself inordinately. Since his determinate existence does not deserve the devotion lavished upon it, it is obviously necessary to practice some deception in order to justify such excessive devotion” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 1.203). The exaltation of the individual is in so many ways implausible; consequently, humans look for another outlet. The nation is much bigger and more permanent (in some ways) than himself, and yet he is still a part of it. In this way, he can combine altruism and pride in a potent combination that allows him to have his cake and eat it, too:
. . . this worship of the collective self as if it were ultimate and not finite, is not merely due to the limits of a primitive imagination. It corresponds to a perennial desire in the human heart to eat one’s cake and have it, too; to subordinate the finite self to something greater than it but not so great that the self may not participate in the exaltation of the finite value (The Self & the Dramas of History, 63).
This helps human beings avoid the embarrassment of self-exaltation and yet exalt themselves at the same time. This is the power of nationalism and participation in a group, political movement, class, or race.
Human pride is one of the most powerful forces in human life. Society enables us to indulge our pride in a way that is more plausible than the exaltation of the individual. Consequently, Niebuhr warns against any false hope of eliminating this perennial force in human life: “A combination of unselfishness and vicarious selfishness in the individual thus gives a tremendous force to national egoism, which neither religious nor rational idealism can ever completely check” (Moral Man & Immoral Society, 94).
Application of Immorality of Society to Social Action
So, in light of the idolatrous pull of group devotion, is there any hope? Yes, there is. First, we should avoid sentimentality. We should not act as if groups will simply embrace love sweet love and act in the right way. They will act according to their baser instincts.
This does not mean that there can be no progress. Humans do also have an altruistic bent. This is where Niebuhr’s famous dictum comes in, ““Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary” (The Children of Light & the Children of Darkness, 123).
Allow me to flesh this out a little bit. When dealing with large groups, it’s unlikely that calm, reasoned discourse will carry the day. This is probably not even true in most relationships between individuals. How much less large groups or nations? So, what’s the alternative? One is to permit only one voice. This is authoritarianism. The other possibility is the raucous pitting of power against power in free expression and alignment of interest against interest. This is the most realistic option for moving society forward. According to Niebuhr,
The health and justice of the community is preserved, not so much by the discriminate judgment of the whole community as by the effect of free criticism in moderating the pretensions of every group and by the weight of competing power in balancing power which might become inordinate and oppressive (The Self & the Dramas of History, 198).
Niebuhr says that America is a good example. Consider how America erected its safety net. “We have however reached moderately satisfactory practical solutions of these problems, not by disinterested intelligence but by the balance of interested wisdom” (ibid., 200). This is true of most political problems. This is the way things work in a fallen world.
Conclusion to Niebuhr’s View of Sin
Niebuhr believed that humans were created good but had fallen into sin. The reason human beings could fall was because of anxiety. They could see their own weakness and attempt to make themselves more important than they are by exalting the self in its power, knowledge, morals, and religion. Thus, pride is the problem behind the problem in human life. People do not admit this is the basic problem because they deceive themselves and seek allies in their deception. The human group is one potent way of exalting the self but also being altruistic. Consequently, nationalism or group pride is a particularly dangerous form of sinful pride. This calls for both compassion and blame, compassion because it is tragic and blame because it is willful.
If we are going to seek a solution to the problem behind the problems of human life, then we need to look for something more potent than human tools. We need the transcendent God to confront our pride. This means that we need to find the solution to life’s anxieties in God Himself and humble ourselves before God’s infinite majesty and so receive His grace that will enable us to fulfill our destiny as creatures made in God’s image.
2.1. God’s Confrontation with Human Sinfulness
Human pride is the source of human injustice, idolatry, self-loathing (ironically!), and addiction. How do we break out of the chains of human pride? The answer is that we need divine intervention. The first part of this intervention is that God confronts human pride with His own perfection and holiness. The second is that God provides a solution to man’s sin. But man needs an awareness of sin in order to be able to see his need for a solution.
We find this confrontation of human sin in the biblical revelation. Reinhold Niebuhr explains, “Prophetic religion had its very inception in a conflict with national self-deification” (The Self & the Dramas of History, 214). What is astonishing about the prophets is that they do not spare anyone (even themselves!) in their denunciation of sin. According to Niebuhr, this demonstrates that it the actual “word of the Lord.” Thus, the way to distinguish the true “word of the Lord” is that it “punctures all human vanities” (ibid., 86).
Niebuhr compares the prophets to the Greek philosophers and finds a radical difference:
Rationalists of all ages of Western history have regarded the rigorous monotheism of the Hebraic prophets as inferior to this philosophical monism. But they did not observe that the God of the prophets convicted all particular forces in history, including the “elect” nation and its “rulers” and “princes,” of violating the divine command of justice while the Greek philosophers were complacent about the social realities of the Greek city-state and lived under the illusion that the rulers were the instruments of justice because they possessed a higher measure of mind (ibid., 83).
The philosophers mistakenly believed that rationality was the source of virtue. This blinded them to the injustices inherent in their own city-states. This is not a mistake you find in the prophets.
Christianity has continued the legacy of this prophetic religion. As in the days of the prophets, this causes an offense:
It offends the pride of perennial man by convicting him of a lack of virtue on which he relies for his self-respect. And it offends the pride of modern many by convicting his rational faculty of inadequacy both in guaranteeing his virtue and in making sense out of the strange drama of his existence (ibid, 227).
Niebuhr concedes that this has not always been done consistently. Christianity joins in this prophetic denunciation of all “human vanities,” but “[t]this does not, of course, prevent many forms of historic Christianity from playing the part of the court chaplain to the pride of the nations” (ibid., 216).
The Reformation attempted to bring this awareness of sinfulness to the fore. The Reformation emphasized a recognition of human sinfulness, even in the redeemed. Niebuhr says, “It was the historical locus where the Christian conscience became most fully aware of the persistence of sin in the life of the redeemed” (The Nature and Destiny of Man, 2.184). This understanding is matched with the understanding that salvation would have to come from outside of humans and their communities. “The Reformation understands that therefore we are ‘justified by faith’ and ‘saved in hope’; that we must look forward to a completion of life which is not in our power and even beyond our comprehension” (ibid., 2.149).
The fact of human sinfulness means the certainty of God’s judgment. The main question of history ultimately becomes, how can it be anything other than judgment? How does history come to its fulfillment? How can there be a history at all? Niebuhr says, “The problem of the meaning of history according to prophetism is how history can be anything more than judgment, which is to say, whether the promise of history can be fulfilled at all” (ibid., 2.27). This does not mean that we would have understood this problem without the solution (the Gospel of Christ). “There are ultimate problems of life which cannot be fully stated until the answer to them is known. Without the answer to them, men will not allow themselves to contemplate the full depth of the problem, lest they be driven to despair” (2.75). In the cross, which is the solution to the problem, the real ultimate question of sinful human existence becomes apparent: how can man escape the judgment of God?
There is a secondary problem. Even though all human beings stand under the judgment of God, this does not mean that all are equally evil. The fact that all nations are under the judgment of God “still leaves the problem of the relative good and evil of any short span of history unsolved, and more particularly the seeming triumph of the relatively evil over the relatively good” (2.31). This is the question raised in the book of Habakkuk so poignantly.
In either case, what is needed is a clear recognition of the problem. This is the intervention God provides. Prophetic religion confronts the sin of man and so opens up the possibility of a real solution. However, the sin and failure of man must be recognized first.
The problem of the individual and the community cannot be solved at all if the height is not achieved where the sovereign source and end of both individual and communal existence are discerned, and where the limits are set against the idolatrous self-worship of both individuals and communities” (The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, 85).
God’s confrontation with human sinfulness, however unpleasant, opens up the way to new possibilities and new solutions to the problems of the individual and the community.
2.2. God’s Grace in Human History
Human beings claim a righteousness for themselves over against others that does not fit reality. They exalt themselves and are excessively devoted to themselves, but they hide this fact from others and from themselves. Consequently, it is necessary for God to confront human sin. When God does so, people discover, as Kierkegaard put it, “Before God all men are in the wrong” (The Self & the Dramas of History, 65).
The major problem of history is not how to solve this or that problem. Rather, it is how history can become anything other than a final condemnation of all humanity. Niebuhr explains, “The problem of the meaning of history according to prophetism is how history can be anything more than judgment, which is to say, whether the promise of history can be fulfilled at all” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.27).
Even though this is the major issue of history, Niebuhr says that the ultimate problem does not become totally clear until the ultimate solution is provided. As Niebuhr says:
There are ultimate problems of life which cannot be fully stated until the answer to them is known. Without the answer to them, men will not allow themselves to contemplate the full depth of the problem, lest they be driven to despair (ibid., 2.75).
It is too hard for humanity to face the intensity of judgment without the relief that the solution provides.
In light of this, it is not surprising that the Greeks found the cross “foolishness” and the Jews found it to be “weakness.” Each of them saw the problem of humanity in a partial way, as all humans do. The solution that God provides considers humanity’s total problem and provides a total solution:
The truth which is revealed in the Cross is not a truth which could have been anticipated in human culture and it is not the culmination of human wisdom. The true Christ is not expected. All human wisdom seeks to complete itself from the basis of its partial perspective (ibid., 2.62).
The sending of the true Christ and His atoning death on the cross represent a solution above human expectations: the wisdom of God and the power of God.
In a way, then, it was inevitable that when the true Christ actually appeared, he would disappoint. Niebuhr writes:
He is a stumblingblock because, though expected, he proves not to be the kind of a Messiah who was expected. In fact one can assert dogmatically that the true Christ must be a stumblingblock in the sense that he must disappoint, as well as fulfill, expectations. He must disappoint some expectations because Messianic expectations invariably contain egoistic elements which could not be fulfilled without falsifying the meaning of history (ibid., 2.16).
Jesus came and confronted the “egoistic elements” in the Jews’ Messianic expectation. However, we must recognize that even after Jesus has come, there continue to be such elements in the actual appropriation of the Christian faith. This is true because of the “tendency to find a premature security, a premature righteousness and a superficial meaning in law, is a recurring tendency in all life and culture” (ibid., 2.41).
In spite of the human tendency to seek self-justification, even in a religion of grace (by boasting in one’s own appropriation or understanding of grace, among other reasons), the cross stands as the disclosure of the full meaning of reality. In it, both the mercy of God and the judgment of God are fully affirmed. “The mercy of God represents the ultimate freedom of God above His own law; but not the freedom to abrogate the law” (ibid., 56). Thus, the love of God is affirmed without the annihilation of justice:
The new Biblical faith of Christianity enters into history with the affirmation that the drama of Christ’s life is in fact a final revelation, in which this problem is clarified by the assurance that God takes the demand of His justice upon Himself through Christ’s suffering love and therefore “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself” (The Self & the Dramas of History, 65–66).
And so, the ultimate problem of human beings is solved in the coming of the Christ and His death on the cross.
This does not mean that there is nothing else to be done. What Christ has done in history must be appropriated in history by each individual.
Christ as “power” and as “grace” can be mediated to the individual only if the truth of the Atonement is appropriated inwardly. In that case the alternate moods of despair and false hope are overcome and the individual is actually freed to live a life of serenity and creativity (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.57–58).
The result of this appropriation is “power” and “grace” or sanctification and justification, as we shall see in subsequent sections. For now, let us note that this element of grace enables human beings to become their true selves and fulfill their destiny as creatures of God resting in Him and devoted to the service of human beings.
This element of “grace” may be defined as the “gift” of security, without which the self is incapable of becoming free of preoccupation with its own security so that it might relate to others and achieve true fulfillment of the self (Man’s Nature & His Communities, 108).
God’s grace comes to humans to restore them to their original purpose. This is the work of God’s grace in history, confronting human pride and then healing it by grace through the cross of Christ to enable human beings to become what they were intended to be.
2.3. The Necessary Human Response to God’s Grace
Reinhold Niebuhr believed that God’s grace was the solution to human pride. In the cross, God has shown the awful consequences of human sin, shattered all delusions of human righteousness, and provided a means for mercy that does not abrogate the righteous demands of the law.
So, what now? This act of God demands a human response. It calls for human humility and faith, out of which flow a renewed love for God and other human beings.
Humility Before God
Since human beings are mired in pride at the expense of their fellow human beings, the self in this situation must be broken and shattered. This is the idea of being crucified with Christ. “The self is shattered whenever it is confronted by the power and the holiness of God and becomes genuinely conscious of the real source and centre of all life” (The Self & the Dramas of History, 109). This means that human beings move from seeing themselves as the center of the universe to acknowledging God as the center of the universe.
Jesus said that He had not come to call the righteous but the sinners just as a doctor does not come to heal the healthy but the sick. This shows Jesus’ ironic preference for the “sick.” Niebuhr believed that this perspective was crucial to understanding biblical religion. “The sick are preferred to the healthy, as the sinners are preferred to the righteous, because their lack of health prompts them to an humility which is the prerequisite of every spiritual achievement” (The Irony of American History, 161). Thus, the first lesson of religion should be humility before a transcendent God. In Christianity, this is centered in the message of the cross of Christ. To accept this message is to acknowledge one’s own sinfulness before God.
This has very practical consequences. In war, it is easy to demonize the opponent, but, according to Niebuhr, this humility allows us to be in the battle and above it. He describes what it means:
To be above the battle means that we understand how imperfect the cause is which we defend, that we contritely acknowledge the sins of our own nations, that we recognize the common humanity which binds us to even the most terrible foes, and that we know also of our common need of grace and forgiveness.
This is a powerful perspective that it is useful for almost all interactions in human life but particularly when struggle and fighting are necessary or inescapable.
Faith
Faith is the acceptance of the gift of acceptance, forgiveness, and security. It is not enough that Christ has accomplished the atonement on the cross. Niebuhr says, “Christ as ‘power’ and as ‘grace’ can be mediated to the individual only if the truth of the Atonement is appropriated inwardly” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.57). We must accept the gift and be reconciled to God.
This faith enables us to stand above the anxieties of life without ignoring them. This is not a flight from the world but the attainment of serenity in it: “But all such strategies cannot finally overcome the fragmentary character of human existence. The final wisdom of life requires, not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it” (The Irony of American History, 63). It is only when we accept the security and acceptance God offers that we can move forward in life: “The freedom from anxiety which he enjoins is a possibility only if perfect trust in divine security has been achieved” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 1.183).
Love
God does not demand that we love perfectly in order to be accepted. Acceptance and justification is a free gift (as we shall see more clearly in the next post). Love flows out of faith and justification. Why is this the case? “Without freedom from anxiety man is so enmeshed in the vicious circle of egocentricity, so concerned about himself, that he cannot release himself for the adventure of love” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.272). Anxiety makes us focus on ourselves in a way that blocks any care for others. The good news about Jesus offers us a security that enables us to set aside our anxieties and move forward. “This element of ‘grace’ may be defined as the ‘gift’ of security, without which the self is incapable of becoming free of preoccupation with its own security so that it might relate to others and achieve true fulfillment of the self” (Man’s Nature & His Communities, 108).
Niebuhr’s way of thinking about human destiny is rooted in a recognition that service to our communities and love beyond self and our immediate connections requires a faith that clears our head of anxieties in a way that can release us to love. When faith is present, “the alternate moods of despair and false hope are overcome and the individual is actually freed to live a life of serenity and creativity” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.58). This is the gift of faith, it opens up the whole world to a glorious adventure of love that enables us to find ourselves by giving up ourselves for the service of the world. However, we must first address the root: anxiety born of unbelief. “Without freedom from anxiety man is so enmeshed in the vicious circle of egocentricity, so concerned about himself, that he cannot release himself for the adventure of love” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.272).
Conclusion on the Necesssary Human Response to God’s Grace
The goal of grace is to re-engage humanity in the life of the human community in service to the glory of God and benefit of all humanity. To do this, the human pride that seeks to make ourselves or our nations the centers of the universe must be shattered. This requires a humble acceptance of God’s verdict and a reception of His offer of security, love, and forgiveness. This acceptance frees us from the burden of anxiety that releases us for the adventure of love.
In the next section, we will look at this same event from God’s perspective. God offers power and grace, sanctification and justification, as the solution to human pride and misery.
2.4. God’s Gifts of Grace: Justification & Sanctification
The goal of grace is to re-engage humanity in service to the glory of God and the life of the human community. To do this, the human pride that seeks to make ourselves or our nations the center of the universe must be shattered. This requires a humble acceptance of God’s verdict and our sinfulness and a reception of His offer of security, love, and forgiveness. This acceptance frees us from the burden of anxiety and so releases us for the adventure of love.
Here we consider this same event from God’s perspective. God offers power and grace, sanctification and justification, as the solution to human pride and misery. From God’s standpoint, the gifts given to faith are justification and sanctification. This is grace shown to man and power working in man. It is forgiveness and transformation, a new status and a new character. God forgives, and He transforms. For Niebuhr, it is important to see that God does both, and that these are two distinct gifts.
Justification
When someone believes in Christ, they achieve a perfect righteousness. However, this righteousness is not theirs internally. It is only theirs by imputation. “The Christ who is apprehended by faith, i.e., to whom the soul is obedient in principle, ‘imputes’ his righteousness to it. It is not an actual possession except ‘by faith’” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.103). “Impute” means to consider, to think, to reckon. God counts the righteousness of Christ as ours, so that God sees us as if we had never sinned nor been a sinner, indeed, as if we had accomplished what Christ Himself did.
Of course, this idea of full forgiveness for the sake of Christ has been offensive to “moralistic interpreters of Christian faith” (ibid., 2.104). However, this doctrine really holds together the key elements of the Christian faith:
The Pauline doctrine really contains the whole Christian conception of God’s relation to human history. It recognizes the sinful corruption in human life on every level of goodness. It knows that the pride of sin is greatest when men claim to have conquered sin completely. (“Not of works lest any man should boast.”) It proclaims no sentimentalized version of the divine mercy (ibid.).
It holds together the holiness of God and the sinfulness of men while opening a door to divine mercy that is full and free.
This solution is precisely what is needed for the healing of human beings and communities. We look outside ourselves for salvation. “The Reformation understands that therefore we are ‘justified by faith’ and ‘saved in hope’; that we must look forward to a completion of life which is not in our power and even beyond our comprehension” (ibid., 149). This is precisely what is needed for the healing of communities, a perspective in which “the sovereign source and end of both individual and communal existence are discerned, and where the limits are set against the idolatrous self-worship of both individuals and communities” (The Children of Darkness and the Children of Light, 85).
From the standpoint of the individual, it gives the precise thing needed in order to free us from anxiety and open us up to the adventure of love: security and acceptance. “This element of ‘grace’ may be defined as the ‘gift’ of security, without which the self is incapable of becoming free of preoccupation with its own security so that it might relate to others and achieve true fulfillment of the self” (Man’s Nature & His Communities, 108). In justification, we have a firm ground on which to stand. It enables us to receive acceptance and trust in God’s security so that we might be freed to live a life of serenity, creativity, and love.
Sanctification
It is important to note, however, that this virtue of love is not merely a psychological effect of justification. It is a gift of God. It is God’s power working in human beings. This is sanctification.
Niebuhr fixed on the term “crucified with Christ” in order to explain what sanctification is. He thought it appropriate because our pride needed to be “killed” rather than just modified. He says, “The self in this [sinful] state of preoccupation with itself must be ‘broken’ and ‘shattered’ or, in the Pauline phrase, ‘crucified.’ It cannot be saved merely by being enlightened” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2. 109). It is so important to note that without this shattering, the self “merely uses its wider perspective to bring more lives and interests under the dominion of its will-to-power” (ibid.). Instead, the self needs to be shattered. This means, “The self is shattered whenever it is confronted by the power and holiness of God and becomes genuinely conscious of the real source and centre of all life” (ibid.).
Even though the self is “crucified” in its prideful condition, this does not mean the complete elimination of the self. Paul says, “I am crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” This indicates, as Niebuhr says, that there is a new life that “is a power not our own” and “power beyond the self” (ibid., 115). It is God working in us.
That does not mean that our individuality is destroyed: “I live.” This reality “marks the contrast between Christian conceptions of fulfillment and mystic doctrines of salvation in which the final goal is the destruction of the self” (ibid., 2.112). The fact that the new life is the power of God but yet also the work of man is hard to understand. Niebuhr turned to Phil. 2:12–13 as a way of explaining this. It says , work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure. Niebuhr comments, “This statement of the relation of divine grace to human freedom and responsibility does more justice to the complex facts involved than either purely deterministic or purely moralistic interpretations of conversion” (ibid., 2.117).
This sanctifying work, then, also leads us to new responsibility. It means, “self-love has been destroyed in principle in your life. See to it now that the new principle of devotion to God in Christ is actualized in your life” (ibid., 2.102). We lean into the work of God in our lives.
Conclusion on God’s Gifts of Grace
When God encounters man, God humbles him so that he might see his need for grace. When humans accept this evaluation of their condition, they are in a place to receive God’s gifts. God’s gifts are justification and sanctification, a new status and a new life. These create real and new possibilities for human existence. However, man’s apprehension of the former and experience of the other is always incomplete in this life. There is a new life, but it is always lacking something in this life. We turn to this important insight from Niebuhr in the next section.
2.5. Errors in Regard to Sanctification
Error 1: Claiming or Promising Moral Perfection
God’s grace brings forgiveness and acceptance for human beings through the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ. It also shatters their sinful delusions and puts them on a new course of life. This new course of life is characterized by serenity, creativity, and love.
There are several serious mistakes that we can make in regard to this transformation that have significant repercussions for how we engage in the world, according to Reinhold Niebuhr. The errors are to claim moral perfection, to deny relative moral differences, and to deny moral progress. Put positively, this transformation will always have something lacking. This imperfection does not negate all moral differences. This imperfection does not negate the possibility of real progress. We shall consider each of these in the next three articles.
The first error is perfectionism. This is the view that we can attain some sort of final perfection in this life. Instead, Niebuhr asserts that moral transformation will always have something lacking. There is no perfection in this life, and the delusion that there is can lead to serious error. This is one of Niebuhr’s most important insights. In some ways, it is simple and obvious, yet he applies this simple truth in a way that illuminates many issues. Consider the following.
Democracy versus tyranny. In his book, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, Niebuhr says there are children of light and children of darkness (secondary moral distinction). However, he warned that the children of light could make two mistakes: “It must be understood that the children of light are foolish not merely because they underestimate the power of self-interest among the children of darkness. They underestimate this power among themselves” (11). Excessive self-interest also taints the political life of the “children of light,” the free, democratic nations.
Church authority. The church made this error repeatedly by giving to some human creed or authority figure a finality and completeness that it does not deserve.
It is always dangerous to establish any unchallenged human authority because human pretensions tend to grow when they are not subject to challenge. . . . The establishment of papal supremacy was not possible without violating one of the cardinal tenets of Biblical faith which asserted that “in God’s sight is no man living justified,” and thus implied the ambiguity of all human virtues (The Self & the Dramas of History, 102–103).
Niebuhr mentions here the example of papal infallibility, but every denomination is subject to these same temptations.
Claiming an unambiguous high ground. When people are in conflict, they want to claim the high ground. They cloak their self-interest in moral terms. This becomes a new occasion for conflict. Niebuhr says:
. . . the pretensions of perfection were new causes of sin and conflict in the world. . . . [This is aggravated by the] universal inclination of men to find some ground of either reason or faith, of piety or intellectual attainment, which will assure them of an unambiguous “righteousness” and of the opportunity to hold their fellow men, who do not share this ground, in moral contempt (ibid., 107).
We are always looking for some clear and unambiguous way to compare ourselves to others and hold them “in moral contempt.” Whenever we are in conflict, this is amplified, and this amplifies the conflict.
Government needs checks and balances. Since there is not incorruptible power, power needs checks and balances. Democracy is helpful because it puts a check on man’s power. “[D]emocracy is necessary because man’s reason is corrupt, that is, corrupted by his interests. Therefore it is not possible to trust anyone with unchecked power or to allow any position in the community to remain unchecked” (ibid., 119). Niebuhr says that is clearly the insight of the founding fathers of America, and it is not appreciated in the way it should be.
Imagining freedom from universal taint. There is a tendency in idealists especially to imagine that they are free from universal taint. This produces a reaction in the egotism of others who see clearly the taint of such a person but not their own (ibid., 135). This is generally true of particular times in history as well. People see the faults of the past clearly but not their own. “The inability of any age, culture or philosophy to comprehend the finiteness of its perspectives and the limit of its powers always produces a presumptuous claim of finality” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.167).
Progress is possible, but greater evil is always a possibility as well. Niebuhr notes that the Renaissance era saw the possibilities of progress. This was eventually adopted as the “credo” of the modern era (pre-World Wars). What the Renaissance “did not recognize [is] that history is filled with endless possibilities of good and evil” (ibid., 2.156). And, because there is always something lacking in the progress that is made, “There is no point in historical social achievement where one may rest with an easy conscience” (Moral Man & Immoral Society, 192).
Marxism is a romantic illusion. Marxism is based on the idea that with abundance, people will live in harmony with one another. Niebuhr says:
The hope that there will ever be an ideal society, in which everyone take without restraint from the common social process ‘according to his need,’ completely disregards the limitations of human nature. Man will always be imaginative enough to enlarge his needs beyond minimum requirements and selfish enough to feel the pressure of his needs more than the needs of others (ibid., 196).
He goes on to say, “The expectation of changing human nature by the destruction of economic privilege to such a degree that no one will make selfish use of power, must probably be placed in the category of romantic illusions” (ibid., 164).
Spiritual progress may lead to spiritual pride. Christian history has demonstrated over and over again that religion can become a source of pride. “The sad experience of Christian history shows how human pride and spiritual arrogance rise to new heights precisely at the point where the claims of sanctity are made without due qualification” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.123). And so, again and again, “‘publicans and sinners’ have had to rescue and important aspect of truth about life” whenever saints have forgotten that “sainthood is corrupted whenever holiness is claimed as a simple possession” (ibid.).
In sum, in church, state, family, and everywhere else, we must be cautious about claiming a finality that is impossible in this world. We must recognize that there is always a taint to our righteousness and an imperfection in our highest achievements. There is potential for great good as well as great evil. As Niebuhr says, “It is a good thing to seek for the Kingdom of God on earth; but it is very dubious to claim to have found it” (ibid., 2.178).
Sanctification Error 2: Denying Relative Moral Differences
The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said that the central problem of history is how history can be anything other than judgment (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.27). The reason is that all are under sin and therefore necessarily merit God’s condemnation. The answer to the question of judgment is God’s grace through the gift of Christ on the cross. In order to receive this gift, human beings need “humility which is the prerequisite of every spiritual achievement” (The Irony of American History, 161).
A significant problem arises at this point. If everyone is under the judgment of God, then is there any moral difference between one person and another? If, for examples, tyrannies as well as democracies are equally under judgment, then how do we work against tyranny? If all are under sin, the racist as well as the victim, then how do we work for a more just set of affairs and racial equality?
Niebuhr admits that this is not easy. “It is no easy task to do justice to the distinctions of good and evil in history and to the possibilities and obligations of realizing the good in history; and also to subordinate all these relative judgments and achievements to the final truth about life and history which is proclaimed in the gospel” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.198). Niebuhr also admits that those who have advocated most clearly for the truth of the Gospel of justification by faith alone have not always done a good job of distinguishing our ultimate position before God and the relative moral difference of various situations. Indeed Niebuhr suggests that the Reformation, while correct in its basic truths, “failed to relate the ultimate answer of grace to the problem of guilt to all the immediate and intermediate problems and answers of life” (ibid., 2.204).
The course of modern history, according to Niebuhr, has done two things. It has demonstrated the truth of the Reformation’s insistence on the sinfulness of man and challenged its obscurantism in dealing with subordinate moral issues (ibid., 2.205).
Let’s give an example from history. The Reformation is right to assert that abolitionist, slave-owner, and slave are all under sin before God’s throne and stand in need of grace before the foot of the cross. However, that did not mean that there was no moral difference. Slaves should be liberated, and we should work for their liberation, even though we won’t be able to do it perfectly, without sin, or without the taint of our own self-interest.
Now, someone may ask, how would self-interest be involved in liberating slaves? Niebuhr provides an interesting example of how this might work out in his analysis of civil rights. The impetus for advances in the Civil Rights era was partially due to the polemical use communists were making of it and thus the need for the West to survive in a dangerous conflict. “In each case,” says Niebuhr, “national frustration of a less powerful nation may prompt the change of internal or external policy to make the hegemonous nation a better or purer exemplar of a common faith or system of values.” Thus, he encourages us not to think too narrowly of how collectives operate in terms of their self-interest: “This dialectic between the values of a culture and the self-regard of the hegemonous nations reveals that the national interest cannot be simply defined. All the elements of prestige, power, and force must be accounted for” (Man’s Nature & His Communitis, 78–79).
In spite of the ambiguity of our moral efforts, we must still move forward to seek to achieve greater justice. Niebuhr suggests that to fail to do so would be like the man who wanted to make sure he did not lose his talent and so buried it in the ground. In other words, we can’t achieve absolute justice, so we’ll bury our “talent” in the ground (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.190).
At the same time, we must never engage in these battles for justice without a sense of humility. This is the call that Niebuhr made to engage in the battle but in some sense to be above it:
To be above the battle means that we understand how imperfect the cause is which we defend, that we contritely acknowledge the sins of our own nations, that we recognize the common humanity which binds us to even the most terrible foes, and that we know also of our common need of grace and forgiveness.
Christian engagement with the world (and with the individual) requires both humility and the ability to work for an imperfect progress in justice.
Sanctification Error 3: Denying the Possibility of Significant Progress
Our ability to imagine things getting better leads us to hope for a complete resolution of problems. Reinhold Niebuhr argues that this is an illusion. There will always be something lacking in this life. However, Niebuhr strongly emphasizes that this does not negate the possibility of progress. We may not be able to make things perfect, but we can make them better.
The political realists, Niebuhr explains, are right to note the inherent self-interest in human beings and the real challenges to progress. Entrenched interests will always defend the status quo. Niebuhr says, “To the end of history the peace of the world, as Augustine observed, must be gained by strife.” However, that does not mean that we should give up on peace. “It will therefore not be a perfect peace. But it can be more perfect than it is” (Moral Man and Immoral Society, 256).
Those in control of the state tend to make this error again and again. The result is that they believe the only possibility is coercion. The result is problematic:
If the state usually errs in throttling freedom, its error is in using an undue measure of coercion, in applying it prematurely before efforts to achieve solidarity by a mutual accommodation of interests have been exhausted, and in exploiting the resultant social solidarity for morally unapproved ends (ibid., 175).
Societies must not reject the possibility of progress in any particular issue too quickly. The result will be the unjust use of coercion. As one example, Niebuhr said that the race problem was an “intractable” one. It was one where societies would simply get stuck and where progress would stall. What society needed was creativity to get out of the rut: “A democratic society must, in other words, seek proximate solutions for this problem in indeterminate creative ventures” (The Children of Light & the Children of Darkness, 144).
People have often thought of Niebuhr as a pessimist because he saw the real weaknesses of many attempts at progress and because he knew that human pride and excessive self-interest would taint every human endeavor. However, he believed that the biblical view of love or agape was a resource that could challenge us to move to greater heights and actually get us there. The agape of the Kingdom of God, he says, is “a resource for infinite developments towards a more perfect brotherhood in history” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.85). He goes on to say:
There is no limit to either the sanctification of individual life, or social perfection in collective life, or to the discovery of truth in cultural life; except of course the one limit, that there will be some corruption, as well as deficiency, of virtue and truth on the new level of achievements (ibid., 2.156).
So, we should not look at any particular problem, no matter how difficult, and think that no progress can be made.
The importance of believing in the possibility of progress is great for social action and social life. If we do not believe that progress is possible, then we will give up on trying to make things better. This is a devastating error because it simply cedes life to all current injustices. So, this error must be overturned because “[w]e cannot build our individual ladders to heaven and leave the total human enterprise unredeemed of its excesses and corruptions” (Moral Man & Immoral Society, 277).
John C. Bennett captured Niebuhr’s perspective well in an essay on Niebuhr’s theology,
One of his favorite texts in the New Testament is Paul’s words about being ‘perplexed, but not driven to despair’ (2 Cor. 4:8). Those words state well Niebuhr’s own feelings after he has been helped by the Gospel to take action in spite of the conflicts of conscience which usually accompany social decisions (Cited in Robert Bretall and Charles W. Kegley, eds., Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought [New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1956], 51).
Perplexed, but not in despair.
At the end of his book, The Children of Light & The Children of Darkness, Niebuhr acknowledges that people sometimes have illusory hopes. However, it’s always good to remember, “If hopes are dupes, fears may be liars” (176). It is a great error to reject the possibility of progress in our individual or collective life.
2.6. Means of Societal Transformation
First Means: Political Action
Even the best societies contain elements of injustice in their arrangements. Many societies contain extreme injustices. How can we make a society a more just and wholesome community? In other words, how we do attain corporate sanctification? While recognizing that this is a work of grace, we also understand that there are means. The first of these means is use the wise use of power in the political. The second means is education and reason. The third means is religion and morals. We shall discuss the first means here: political action or coercion.
People hate politics. Individual corruption has a compounded effect in the broader society, says Reinhold Niebuhr (which is the point of the title of his book, Moral Man and Immoral Society). So, change often becomes more about coercion than moral reasoning, since moral reasoning becomes increasingly difficult with the increased size of the community. However, we have an obligation, says Niebuhr, to get involved with society, even though it is difficult. He says, “We cannot build our individual ladders to heaven and leave the total human enterprise unredeemed of its excesses and corruptions” (Moral Man and Immoral Society, 277).
The Challenge of Political Action
The challenge of political action is great not only because society resists change out of fear, the challenge is great because the use of political coercion often tends to make things worse. Niebuhr writes:
The question which confronts society is, how it can eliminate social injustice by methods which offer some fair opportunity of abolishing what is evil in our present society, without destroying what is worth preserving in it, and without running the risk of substituting new abuses and injustices in the place of those abolished (ibid., 167).
Changing things can make things worse, and it often produces a backlash. Political fights seem to go round and round with no end in sight.
Because of this, it’s important to reject idealistic claims for political action. For example, Niebuhr says of Marxism, “The expectation of changing human nature by the destruction of economic privilege to such a degree that no one will make selfish use of power, must probably be placed in the category of romantic illusions” (ibid., 164). However, he also admits that without idealism of some sort, it may be difficult to get people to be engaged at all: “The inertia of society is so stubborn that no one will move against it, if he cannot believe that it can be more easily overcome than is actually the case” (ibid., 221). So, motivating people to act without idealistic illusions is a big challenge.
In light of the fact that political change can often produce results that are less just than those replaced, Niebuhr urges caution. The results of the experiment of the Soviet Union illustrate the danger of compounding economic and political power. If anything is socialized, it should be done with caution and incrementally. As he says, “Since there are no forms of the socialization of property which do not contain some peril of compounding economic and political power, a wise community will walk warily and test the effect of each new adventure before further adventures” (The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, 115). This caution can apply to all sorts of political endeavors.
The Use of Violence
Violence cannot be rejected absolutely in political action. Niebuhr notes that even non-violent coercion has a destructive power, so we can’t condemn it absolutely. Condemnation of violence and calls for moderation and cooperation are often ways of defending the status quo. The moralist places an undue burden upon advancing groups. By clothing the current coercion in a veneer of morality, they wrongly raise the bar of morality for those who would seek change. “A too uncritical glorification of co-operation and mutuality therefore results in the acceptance of traditional injustices and the preference of the subtler types of coercion to the more overt types” (Moral Man and Immoral Society, 233). Those who claim to reject violence may not reject coercion by more subtle methods.
At the same time, those who hold the instruments of violence often engage in it too quickly and with undue caution. Niebuhr warns:
If the state usually errs in throttling freedom, its error is in using an undue measure of coercion, in applying it prematurely before efforts to achieve solidarity by a mutual accommodation of interests have been exhausted, and in exploiting the resultant social solidarity for morally unapproved ends (ibid., 175).
Violence must be used with great care and deliberation. “If violence can be justified at all, its terror must have the tempo of a surgeon’s skill and healing must follow quickly upon its wounds” (ibid., 220).
Instead of reacting with violence, Niebuhr urges a careful and thoughtful use of all forms of coercion:
Conflict and coercion are manifestly such dangerous instruments. They are so fruitful of the very evils from which society must be saved than an intelligent society will not countenance their indiscriminate use. . . . Moral reason must learn how to make coercion its ally without running the risk of a Pyrrhic victory in which the ally exploits and negates the triumph (ibid., 238).
It takes great wisdom to engage in politics with its variety of dangerous instruments. In this endeavor, a biblical perspective can provide much help.
The Contribution of a Biblical Perspective to Political Action
The Bible teaches the moderation not the limitation of violence in a fallen world. Niebuhr explains that we can wisely engage in politics
. . . not by an effort to abolish coercion in the life of collective man, but by reducing it to a minimum, by counselling the use of such types of coercion as are most compatible with the moral and rational factors in human society and by discriminating between the purposes and ends for which coercion is used (ibid., 234).
It is the way coercion is used and not its rejection that is the chief biblical contribution.
This means a careful selection of the means used for political action. Charles Brown summarizes Niebuhr’s perspective commenting on the manner of dealing with racial injustice. “As for racial and other oppressed minorities within a nation, Niebuhr recommended resistance through boycotts or strikes or civil disobedience—nonviolent methods which reduce animosities and prevent the other side from posing as champions of peace and order” (Niebuhr and His Age: Reinhold Niebuhr’s Prophetic Role and Legacy, 48). Niebuhr explained that “the more the egoistic element can be purged from resentment, the purer a vehicle of justice it becomes” (Moral Man & Immoral Society, 250). He gave as an example the Indian activist Gandhi. Niebuhr said that British resentment at the attack on “law and order” did not have the strong force it could have because of the way that Gandhi proceeded.
In addition to the means selected, the attitude in which political action is engaged can enable a person to engage in politics in a less harmful way. So, Niebuhr counsels the development of a “non-violent temper”:
In every social conflict each party is so obsessed with the wrongs which the other party commits against it, that it is unable to see its own wrongdoing. A non-violent temper reduces these animosities to a minimum and therefore preserves a certain objectivity in analyzing the issues of the disputes (ibid., 248).
In addition, Niebuhr counseled that we should seek to be “in the battle and above it.” We should be able to step outside of the conflict and see the bigger picture and gain fresh perspectives. He says:
There is, in short, even in a conflict with a foe with whom we have little in common the possibility and necessity of living in a dimension of meaning in which the urgencies of the struggle are subordinated to a sense of awe before the vastness of the historical drama in which we are jointly involved; to a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom and power available to us for the resolution of its perplexities; to a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy’s demonry and our vanities; and to a sense of gratitude for the divine mercies which are promised to those who humble themselves (The Irony of American History, 174).
Caution & Hope for Political Action
In spite of the difficulty of politics, political action can produce societal transformation. Niebuhr recognized the challenges of political action, but he also believed that there was hope. “To the end of history the peace of the world, as Augustine observed, must be gained by strife. It will therefore not be a perfect peace. But it can be more perfect than it is” (Moral Man & Immoral Society, 256). History has demonstrated that there can be more just adjustments of the various interests in society (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.249). However, it will never be perfect, “A harmony achieved through justice is therefore only an approximation of brotherhood. It is the best possible harmony within the conditions created by human egoism” (ibid., 2.252).
Consequently, it is best to recognize the real possibility of progress with a constant eye to the dangers in each new settlement. “Whatever may be the source of our insights into the problems of the political order, it is important both to recognize the higher possibilities of justice in every historic situation, and to know that the twin perils of tyranny and anarchy can never be completely overcome in any political achievement” (ibid., 2.284). Furthermore, politics will demand something of us. Always seek to keep your spiritual ideals, but recognize that power will necessitate that you sacrifice a degree of moral purity for political effectiveness (Moral Man & Immoral Society, 244).
Conclusion on Political Action
Political action is an important means of societal sanctification. However, it is a particularly dangerous one. Every society and every individual involved in it should continually step outside of the intensity of political conflict and examine themselves. They must not let the passions of the battle overwhelm them. In seeking to be involved and yet self-conscious about one’s involvement, the biblical faith is an indispensable resource.
Means 2: Reason & Education
How do we move forward toward a more just society? By using our brains. In building a better society, one of the most important tools at our disposal is reason, an ability to analyze our situation and think through better alternatives.
In his book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, Reinhold Niebuhr provides an analysis of the use of reason in public life. He explains that rationality helps us understand the right goals, the proper means to obtain them, and the inconsistencies in our current systems. It also can give us the sympathy that enables us to understand the condition of others.
Rationality is rooted in our ability to transcend ourselves. Niebuhr says, “the capacity for rational self-transcendence opens up constantly new and higher points of vantage for judging our finite perspectives in the light of a more inclusive truth” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.214). We don’t have to accept our current situation or knowledge. We can keep moving beyond it. This allows us to envision different options for society.
Reason and justice are closely connected. We have to look beyond our own situation and think about what other people’s interests are. The more people that are involved, the more we need a “rational estimate of conflicting needs and interests” (ibid., 2.248).
The Limits of Reason
Niebuhr believed that reason was helpful in building a society. However, he spent much more time warning against its misuse than singing its praises. He was concerned that people would think that reason was the source of virtue rather than an aid to it. Niebuhr believed “[i]n short, [that] reason may be as obedient a servant of particular interests as religion” (The Self & the Dramas of History, 153). Rationality was a useful but rarely neutral arbiter.
Reason becomes a tool of self-interest because pride, anxiety, and self-interest are more forceful in our mental processes than we tend to believe. This is true for the expert as well as the layman. Denial of this tendency has led modern people “to overestimate the impartiality of reason in general and the reason of experts in particular. . . . [T]he expert is quite capable of giving any previously determined tendency both rational justification and efficient detailed application” (Moral Man & Immoral Society, 214).
The Renaissance appreciated the value of reason in political life. However, when reason is made the tool of self-interest, it “offers no antidote for the implicitly religious fanaticism generated in ostensibly secular political and social movements” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.232). Because of its confidence in reason, it is incapable of critiquing the “ideological taint” in reason.
The Reformation was better equipped to see the ideological taint in all knowledge because of its belief in the depravity of man. However, it did not achieve any greater humility or a more contrite spirit in the area of intellectual controversy (ibid, 2.220). It is only in thinkers like Roger Williams that we begin to see a more humble and tolerant approach without religious indifference (ibid., 2.233).
According to Niebuhr, it was really only thinkers like Marx and Freud that unmasked the self-interest in rationality.
This ideological taint in the operation of the rational faculty, which refutes all consistent idealistic political theories that derive their optimism from confidence in a developing reason, was not analyzed until the nineteenth century, when both Freud and Marx elaborated their theories of rationalization and ideology (Man’s Nature & His Communities, 37).
Now that we are much more aware of the “ideological taint” of the “rational faculty,” we can establish it on a better foundation that preserves reason and critiques it at the same time. The Christian faith provides the resources to give us humility in our intellectual endeavors and also encourage them. A clear elucidation of this connection is one of Niebuhr’s greatest contributions.
Conclusion on Reason and Education
Christians are able to make use of reason to improve society. What they need is a confident humility in the intellectual realm that is aware of reason’s potential and its limits. What we need to do is, in the words of Paul Tillich, to submit “the doctrine of justification by faith to the experience of justification by faith” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.226). This perspective empowers a humble use of reason that can provide perspectives that enable us to improve individuals and society.
Means 3: Religion
Politics and reason are means that we can use to change society for the better. However, there is another means that lifts us up far beyond society and returns us back to it better equipped to participate in its amelioration, namely, religion. Religion helps us engage with society in a way that provides strength and humility. However, religion can also be a tool of pride, so we have to be cautious. Let’s look at how Reinhold Niebuhr described how religion can be a means of corporate sanctification along with the cautions that he gave against its misuse.
How Religion Transforms Society
Religion is about the transcendent. Contact with the transcendent can give us humility. Instead of viewing ourselves as being at the center of the universe, we see ourselves as one important but small part of it. It causes us to be ashamed of our self-centered thinking. When we see ourselves and others in proper perspective, we are less inclined to put the finger on the scale for ourselves and more inclined to a just treatment of all people.
This humility before the divine can also give us a more measured view of the different perspectives of other people. It provides a groundwork for political pluralism. True political pluralism allows for a diversity of perspectives rather than silencing anyone or asking them to embrace relativism. Each person can state their own perspective with humility.
In social life, it’s easy to see only the conflict. We also have to be able to step outside of it and see the bigger picture. Religion is particularly well-suited to accomplish this end. Niebuhr writes:
There is, in short, even in a conflict with a foe with whom we have little in common the possibility and necessity of living in a dimension of meaning in which the urgencies of the struggle are subordinated to a sense of awe before the vastness of the historical drama in which we are jointly involved; to a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom and power available to us for the resolution of its perplexities; to a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy’s demonry and our vanities; and to a sense of gratitude for the divine mercies which are promised to those who humble themselves (The Irony of American History, 174).
As we encounter the divine and are humbled before it, we get a different perspective on politics that can help mitigate its cruelties and frustrations.
In addition to humility before the transcendent, religion also helps us see human beings as having a common place before the transcendent. This can provide a sense of “brotherhood” that transcends ethnic, political, and national boundaries. Niebuhr says:
“If ye love them that love you, what reward have ye?” declared Jesus; and in the logic of those words the whole genius of Christian religion is revealed. The transcendent perspective of religion makes all men our brothers and nullifies the divisions, by which nature, climate, geography, and the accidents of history divide the human family (Moral Man & Immoral Society, 71).
Religion creates a sense of commonality with all people. This sense of brotherhood also helps us transcend the bitterness of societal conflict.
So, religion has much to offer. Unfortunately, religion, like reason and politics, can also be abused.
Cautions on the Use of Religion
Unfortunately, we also know from the “long history of religious self-righteousness” that religion is no unalloyed good (Man’s Nature & His Communities, 111). We also know that even the worst sorts of vice can be given a religious aura. Religion induces humility, but there is no guarantee, for “human vice and error may thus be clothed by religion in garments of divine magnificence and given the prestige of the absolute” (Moral Man & Immoral Society, 52). The reason is that “human pride is more powerful than any instruments of which it avails itself” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.128).
The problem with the emphasis on the absolute is that the religious person easily identifies himself with the absolute unconditionally. Because he claims transcendent truth, it is easy to cloth all his actions and thoughts with the authority of the transcendent. Niebuhr puts it this way:
The ultimate sin is the religious sin of making the self-deification implied in moral pride explicit. This is done when our partial standards and relative attainments are explicitly related to the unconditioned good, and claim divine sanction. For this reason religion is not simply as is generally supposed an inherently virtuous human quest for God (ibid., 1.200).
It’s much easier to identify our “relative attainments” with the absolute than we tend to think. So, we have to be cautious and humble in our engagement with religion.
Niebuhr suggests that one thing that has aggravated this danger in religion is the tendency to define sin as sensuality rather than pride. As a result, the root of sin can fly under the radar in a religious community. Here is what often happens:
The pride of a bishop, the pretensions of a theologian, the will-to-power of a pious business man, and the spiritual arrogance of the church itself are not mere incidental defects, not merely “venial” sins. They represent the basic drive of self-love, operating upon whatever new level grace has pitched the new life (ibid., 2.200).
That’s why religious communities need to be so cautious. Our pride can easily identify anything good as absolute. This can blind us to our own defects and cause us to justify all sorts of evils in the name of religion.
Conclusion on Religion
Reinhold Niebuhr suggests that we do not need to let society wallow in injustice or stagnation. It can be better. We have means at our disposal: politics, reason, and religion. All of these tools are good, but our pride can easily make them tools of injustice rather than means of corporate sanctification or transformation. So, we have to use these tools cautiously and with humility.
The question is, do we have reason to hope that these tools will be successful or even helpful in making a better world? I will conclude my discussion of wisdom from Niebuhr with a discussion of society’s prospects in the next section.
2.7. Hope for Society
As we seek to transform society, what hope can we have that it will succeed? Reinhold Niebuhr explains that there is reason for optimism as well as caution as we consider progress in society. Ultimately, the Christian faith gives us hope that our labors are not in vain and will be fulfilled to a real degree within history and ultimately beyond history.
The first problem in our labor for the good of the community is our own death. Niebuhr indicates that we tend to fear our own death inordinately because of our pride. He says, “the ending of our life would not threaten us if we had not falsely made ourselves the center of life’s meaning” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.293). The biblical faith challenges even the way we may grieve at death.
However, the biblical faith not only challenges, it also comforts. The individual has hope. “The hope of the resurrection affirms that ultimately finiteness will be emancipated from anxiety and the self will know itself as it is known” (ibid., 2.312). It is hard to know exactly what this entails, and we should show “restraint” in seeking to explain it. But, “it is equally important not to confuse such restraint with uncertainty about the validity of the hope that ‘when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is’” (ibid., 2.298). The hope for the individual is real.
It is important to note that the Christian hope is not merely that our souls will continue to exist after death. It is a hope of the resurrection of the body. This contains an important truth. “Against utopianism the Christian faith insists that the final consummation of history lies beyond the conditions of the temporal process. Against other-worldliness it asserts that the consummation fulfills rather than negates, the historical process” (ibid., 2.291). The resurrection affirms the importance of this world and its continuity with the next.
Moving beyond the individual, the resurrection indicates that the physical world also has continuity with the world to come. The Christian idea of the resurrection means “that eternity will fulfill and not annul the richness and variety which the temporal process has elaborated” (ibid., 2.295). This is important because “[i]t gives the struggles in which men engaged to preserve civilizations, and to fulfill goodness in history, abiding significance and does not relegate them to a meaningless flux, of which there will be no echo in eternity” (ibid., 2.312). Our labor will not be in vain, and it will echo down through eternity.
While good things can happen in history that will receive their consummation in the resurrection, even the best situations in history will not be perfect. Recognizing this imperfection is one of the most important elements of achieving real good: “The fulfillments of meaning in history will be the more untainted in fact, if purity is not prematurely claimed for them. All historical activities stand under this paradox” (ibid., 2.213). We must not pretend that historical situations have a perfection they do not, and we must guard ourselves from illusions that that they will.
Beyond the taint of even the best achievements, we can also see that each new level of good provides new temptations for evil. Niebuhr says, “The New Testament symbol for this aspect of historical reality, this new peril of evil on every new level of the good, is the figure of the Antichrist” (ibid., 2.316). The fact that the Antichrist stands at the end of history indicates man’s failure to bring completion to history and the continual temptation to evil at every level of achievement.
God is not passive in the face of such evil. He stands over and above history in judgment. This judgment will culminate in the final judgement. In the fall of every nation, we can hear the voice of the prophets: “In that day, you will know that I am the Lord” (ibid., 2.306).
While frightening in some respects, the final judgment also gives comfort. It indicates that man’s struggle for the good has ultimate meaning. God’s evaluation means that on the ultimate level, man’s search for good is valid. There is real significance in the choices of individuals and societies. “The very rigour with which all judgments in history culminate in a final judgment is thus an expression of the meaningfulness of all historic conflicts between good and evil” (ibid., 2.293). He warns us, however, against identifying our own causes too closely with that “final” judgment. “Yet the necessity of a ‘final’ judgment upon all other judgments is derived from the ambiguity of these conflicts” (ibid.). This is the hope and the warning of the final judgment.
Conclusion to Hope for Societies
Niebuhr believed that real progress was possible in history. It was never without its ambiguity or without its temptation to evil. The facts of human existence and the biblical revelation fit together perfectly on these points. This did not mean, however, that there was no final hope. God would intervene to bring an end to this historical ambiguity and bring in the perfection that our hearts all long for. This is the great Christian hope.
________
- An understanding of sin and grace pointing to creative possibilities and inevitable corruptions in society.
- A recognition of love and justice as complements in human affairs.
- A dialectic of Christian faith and the disciplines of culture as sources of guidance and truth.
- An Emphasis on making discriminate judgments in support of good causes while eschewing self-righteousness in the struggle for them.
- A pragmatic pursuit of proximate rather than final solutions in politics.
- An acknowledgement of the limits of wisdom and virtue of any social group.
- An apprehension of mystery and meaning within and beyond the dramas of history.
- A sense of the importance of organism and artifact in democratic integrations of community.
- And a perception that human striving and divine providence are intertwined.
Note: this post is an adaptation of an article originally printed in the Mid-America Journal of Theology. Read the original article here.
[1] Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 1977), p. 33.
[2] Søren Kierkegaard and Alistair Hannay, translator, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin (New York: Liveright Publishing Company, 2014). See Hannay’s introduction to this book for an explanation of the relationship of The Concept of Anxiety to Kierkegaard’s other writings.
[3] Niebuhr uses this distinction throughout The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1964). See, for example, pp. 124–125, 150, 179–183.
[4] May, The Meaning of Anxiety, p. 38.
[5] Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, p. 51. Kierkegaard uses dizziness to explain anxiety: “Anxiety can be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason? It is just as much his own eye as the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. It is in this way that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom that emerges when spirit wants to posit the synthesis, and freedom now looks down into its own possibility and then grabs hold of finiteness to support itself. In this dizziness freedom subsides” (p. 75).
[6] Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny of Man, pp. 182–183.
[7] Kierkegaard writes, in The Concept of Anxiety: “Anxiety, then, means two things: the anxiety in which the individual posits sin through the qualitative leap, and the anxiety that comes in and enters with sin, and in that respect also enters quantitatively into the world every time an individual posits sin” (67). The difficulty of understanding this statement illustrates the problem of seeking to make use of Kierkegaard’s works. Gordon D. Marino writes, “The Concept of Anxiety is a maddeningly difficult book. . . . I must confess that there are many passages in The Concept of Anxiety, the meaning of which completely escapes me.” “Anxiety in The Concept of Anxiety” in Alistair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 308.
[8] Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 42–54.
[9] Ibid., 47.
[10] Ibid., pp. 57–62 and 139–154.
[11] Tillich seems to believe that this guilt is basic to our being as such (i.e., ontological not ethical). This could complicate the question of the relation of anxiety to the fall. However, in Kierkegaard and Niebuhr, it is clear that guilt is the result of “the fall,” which, even if not taken in an historical sense, does draw the distinction between man’s finiteness and sin. As Nieburh notes, “It is not the contradiction of finiteness and freedom from which Biblical religion seeks emancipation. It seeks redemption from sin; and the sin from which it seeks redemption is occasioned, though not caused, by this contradiction in which man stands. Sin is not caused by the contradiction because, according to Biblical faith, there is no absolute necessity that man should be betrayed into sin by the ambiguity of his position, as standing in and yet above nature. But it cannot be denied that this is the occasion for sin” (Nature and Destiny of Man, 179).
[12] Terry Cooper explains this option well: “While this anxiety is not in itself a bad thing, it is the precondition for sin. It sets us up for two options: (a) trust in God or (b) trust in self. The temptation, when we experience anxiety, is to deny our creatureliness and dependence on God” (Sin, Pride, & Self-Acceptance: The Problem of Identity in Theology & Psychology [Downers Grove, IL: InterVaristy Press, 2003] p. 36).
[13] Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny of Man, 125.
[14] Terry Cooper explains this option well: “While this anxiety is not in itself a bad thing, it is the precondition for sin. It sets us up for two options: (a) trust in God or (b) trust in self. The temptation, when we experience anxiety, is to deny our creatureliness and dependence on God” (Sin, Pride, & Self-Acceptance: The Problem of Identity in Theology & Psychology [Downers Grove, IL: InterVaristy Press, 2003] p. 36).
[15] Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1964), 125.
[16] Ibid., p. 189.
[17] Ibid., p. 192.
[18] Ibid., p. 194.
[19] Ibid., p. 195.
[20] Ibid., p. 194.
[21] Ibid., p. 185.
[22] Ibid., 199.
[23] Ibid., 200.
[24] Ibid., 201.
See photo source for 1.1 here
The photo in 1.2 by Rick Hatch on Unsplash
Note: the first picture in 1.3 is the “Ozymandias statue,” one of the statues that inspired Percy Bysshe Shelley to write “Ozymandias.” The poem itself captures well the sentiment of Niebuhr in this article, so I have included the powerful recitation of it by Bryan Cranston in the video above.
Photo source for 2.2: Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Photo source for 2.4: Photo by Bill Oxford on Unsplash
Photo source for 2.5: Photo by Hayley Catherine on Unsplash
Photo credits for 2.6: Photo by Matt Seymour on Unsplash
And: Photo by David Matos on Unsplash
And: Photo by Mickael Tournier on Unsplash