586 - Reinhold Niebuhr and the Evening News

Reinhold Niebuhr and the Evening News
By Randall K. Bush

Reinhold Niebuhr is remembered as a Christian pragmatist and modern prophet, as someone willing to wrestle with the socio-political realities of his day while firmly believing that prophetic Christianity exposes the relativity of all human ideals. Given the changing complexities of the world, a voice like Niebuhr's would be most welcome today-one able to speak with discernment about the state of affairs around us. It would be futile to pull Niebuhr's words out of context and apply them indiscriminately to contemporary issues, but his insights remain valid, transcending the context in which they were first spoken. Some words can be repeated; some lessons and applications can be drawn for today's society from Niebuhr's thought from more than a generation ago.

I

Niebuhr's rhetorical method has been described as "dialectical, one that utilized paradoxes and opposing extremes in delineating human reality. This approach, uncovering truths through dialogical argument, has been around since the ancient Greeks. Speakers facing off on opposite sides of an issue may never reach total accord, yet their rhetorical process is of value because it allows for the airing of contradictory viewpoints.

Theologians have also used dialectical language to describe the mortal condition, such as the Reformers' definition of humanity as "simul justus et peccator. " Niebuhr's appropriation of the dialectical method arose from his deep faith and his pastoral attempts to communicate the gospel, given the complex character of life in the twentieth century. He experienced the trauma of the Depression and the new direction of American politics shaped during the Roosevelt years; he recognized the expansionist threat of Nazism and the insidious utopianism of communist ideologies. For Niebuhr, serving as a pastor in those days meant proclaiming how the Christian faith can be active in the world while maintaining a point of reference above and beyond the world.

Although he professed to be a "tamed cynic," Niebuhr invariably started the dialogue with a negation: The meaning of history is not found in history itself, and even the best structures of society are tainted by sin and human self-interest.¹ To balance his equation,

Randall K. Bush is the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Racine, Wisconsin.

¹ Edward J. Carnell, The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960), p. 108; Jack L. Stotts, "Reinhold Niebuhr and Self-Interest," Insights (Fall 1992), p. 16.

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though, Niebuhr also insisted that Jesus Christ supplies history with its meaning and provides the ideal of sacrificial love, the goal for all human structures to approximate. Only by recognizing the depth of sin in human nature are we freed to appreciate the heights of divine grace offered in Christ to all people.²

Niebuhr's method takes seriously the complex (and even oppositional) character of life in community. But critics have complained that it tends toward generalities and misrepresentations. In truth, Niebuhr himself spent little time in a state of dialectical balance, usually opting for one side or another of a particular issue,³ and he felt little compulsion to move beyond dialectical tensions and to draft a new blueprint for American society. But to expect more is to demand too much. Against the voices of unqualified idealism, Niebuhr spoke of the pervasiveness of sin; hearing the anxious cries of a world at war, Niebuhr affirmed the hope of Christian faith, which exists "beyond tragedy." Those are achievements not to be belittled or quickly forgotten.

As we strive to be discerning in today's world, social categories and ideologies are much harder to define. The Berlin Wall has fallen. Marxism has been largely discredited and disowned. The experiences of Korea, Vietnam, and Watergate have all but silenced any remaining voices of American utopianism. When confronted with the complexity of modern life, we struggle even to name the signs of our times, much less to discern their message.

Too often the ideologies on which Niebuhr focused conveniently coincided with national borders or geographic areas, such as equating Marxism with the Soviet Union and fascism with Germany. While his method may still be valid for us, we would need to alter the terms today. For example, in place of the politically specific categories of communism versus capitalism, Niebuhr today would perhaps speak about the broader tension between fundamentalism and isolationism. Recent events have brought these two categories to prominence; they have religious overtones and ramifications for all levels of human community, and they challenge contemporary understandings of biblical faith and Christian ethics-a recipe for a response from Niebuhr's prophetic pen.

Consider fundamentalism-the striving for purity of belief based on precise, unquestioned fundamentals, coupled with a willingness to do whatever it takes to insure that those basic tenets are protected from the challenges of secular society. Fundamentalists have been making their presence felt around the world: in American Protestant circles, within the Gush Emunim movement of Judaism, in the Muslim Brotherhood of Islam, and elsewhere. Their method is to scandalize,

² Harold R. Landon, editor, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Prophetic Voice in Our Time, (Greenwich: Seabury Press, 1962), p. 13.
³ Charles Kegley and Robert Bretall, editors, Reinhold Niebuhr:His Religious, Social, and Political Thought, (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1961), p. 47.

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to prod the undecided and lukewarm into action and religious commitment. Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby identified Randall Terry's anti-abortion efforts with "Operation Rescue" and the Ayatollah Khomeini's "fatwa" calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie as specific examples of fundamentalist behavior.⁴

But the larger goal of these groups is to establish clear boundaries between themselves and outsiders, the elect versus the reprobate, and then to gain the power necessary to preserve those boundaries and, thus, their identity as a distinct and peculiar people. In this way, fundamentalists resemble adherents of isolationism, who, although defining themselves according to secular definitions, also strive for ethnic purity and self-preservation at the expense of competing peoples or groups. Since the framing of the Monroe doctrine, which established the oceans off our nation's shores as protective moats and demarcation zones for our sphere of influence, Americans have favored isolationism. Now, some commentators contend that the growing influence of the United Nations and the interconnected nature of the global economy are making isolationist views obsolete. A closer examination of recent events, however, reveals just the opposite.

Lowering the Berlin Wall meant an abandonment of the old categories of political rhetoric and ideology, which had artificially separated people and nations for most of this century. Cold War facades collapsed like outdated movie sets, leaving people standing in the rubble wondering where to go. The former Soviet bloc, freed from its unnatural chains of unity, emerged as the diverse entity it truly is, with each distinct people hoping at last to achieve its unique national identity. Czechoslovakia has become two nations. Yugoslavia has been reconfigured into numerous distinct lands through a process of ethnic cleansing and fratricide that has horrified all onlookers.

For America, these changes have caused muted celebrations at best. As the needs of emergent democracies become known to us, our response has been an echo of the pre-World War II insistence on "America First." No modern Marshall Plan or American largesse, please; keep the money at home and look after our own interests first.

Dialectical reasoning would emphasize that the tension between individual freedom, on the one hand, and communal and international responsibility, on the other, can never be totally avoided or resolved. In a sermon, Niebuhr contended,

"[T]he primary error in Christian other-worldliness has been its too consistent individualism. There is usually no suggestion of a "city of God" in them. The vision of life's fulfillment has been primarily a vision of individual completion beyond the frustrations of human communities. It has not been a vision of the fulfillment of the communal process."⁵

⁴ Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby, The Glory and The Power, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), pp. 25-26.
⁵ Reinhold Niebuhr, Discerning the Signs of the Times, (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1946), p. 89.

589 - Reinhold Niebuhr and the Evening News

A particular problem of American Protestantism, Niebuhr thought, was its inappropriate individualism in an age of collectivism and social interdependence.

Fulfillment in history has to be both communal and individual. The city of God in Revelation 21 is not simply where right-living, right-believing converts abide for eternity. Rather, the new Jerusalem displays how the intended order of God's kingdom is embodied in communal form. Christian fundamentalist strategy relies heavily on premillennialist threats of God's judgment falling upon all outside their fold. The isolationist approach relies on similar reasoning, emphasizing how a group's rights and perceived needs take precedence over claims by other groups or nations. Both fundamentalists and isolationists are willing to fight to preserve their peculiar heritage, if necessary; both may claim divine or historical justifications for their opinions and actions; both would redefine redemption and the kingdom of God according to their own terms.

For Niebuhr, the prophetic voice of faith challenges all such human institutions and ideologies with the unceasing demands of the divine absolute upon our mortal relativity, the perfect upon the imperfect. As Christians, we are never given the luxury of either absolutizing our faith, as if the mystery of God's judgment and mercy could be captured in a listing of sectarian fundamentals, or of privatizing our faith, willfully choosing to isolate ourselves from the vagaries of history and the complexities of human society. For "we are all involved in the virtues, the vices, the guilt and the promises of our generation. In a sense it is true that we cannot be saved unless we are all saved.⁶

II

This discussion of human nature and community lends itself to the broader topic of justice. Niebuhr believed justice is a product of a community's social mind, provided through the instruments of a community's organization of power and balance of power.⁷ Niebuhr later qualified this by stressing that this goal of justice can never be fully realized, since no form of government is able to overcome completely the twin perils of tyranny and anarchy. Therefore, the equilibrium in all power structures must be dynamic, conforming to the changing societal needs around it, while constantly striving to achieve (or at least approximate) the demands of an ideal justice.⁸

This advice has been lost on contemporary leaders. Somehow the romanticism of Rousseau has reemerged in our political vocabulary, the belief in an innate "general will" motivating a renewed expectation of world democracy and justice. Recall the rhetoric of Operation Desert Storm, heralding the emergence of true international cooperation

⁶ Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Crisis in American Protestantism," Christian Century, (December 4, 1963), p. 1498.
⁷ Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. II, (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), pp. 249, 268.
⁸ Kegley and Bretall, p. 146.

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in regard to global crises. The announced new world order failed to materialize; military leadership and peacekeeping initiatives have remained largely under the control of the United States, with almost no workable structure emerging for realistic power-sharing and non-partisan international cooperation.

In his attempt to flesh out the nature of just power structures, Niebuhr stressed that all schemes of justice stand under the ideal of sacrificial love and should be guided by the regulative principle of equality. With blunt language, Niebuhr wrote,

"If the question is raised to what degree the neighbor has a right to support his life through the privileges and opportunities of the common life, no satisfactory, rational answer can be given to it, short of one implying equalitarian principles: He has just as much right as you yourself."⁹

In a sermon, he couched the same thought in a more pastoral manner:

"The real problem is not how much or how little we possess, but the number of things, or advantages and security for our family, that we have over against what our brother has."¹⁰

If the issue is equality and justice, then Niebuhr's dialectical method is particularly appropriate, pointing out what is really at stake. For example, in a recent poll respondents indicated their belief that there will be more environmental disasters (59%), more disease (53%), and more poverty (61%) in the twenty-first century; yet of those same people, sixty-two percent expressed "hope for the future."¹¹ Progress, growth, and guaranteed levels of affluence are phrases we often cling to as promised birthrights. Yet voices from Malthus to modern-day environmentalists have warned that the earth will not support unlimited economic expansion, particularly along the current lines of wastefulness and exploitation. Our glances into the future may be bifocal, recognizing increased problems while also believing in a brighter day dawning, but at some point we must accept the incompatibility of our perceptions.

Justice is blindfolded for reasons of impartiality and not in order to allow present inequalities and excesses to continue unimpeded. Justice is approximated when members of society make the commitments and sacrifices necessary to insure for all the minimum necessities of life.¹² Yet this definition needs the prophetic voice of Christianity to provide balance and focus. With Christianity's insistence on the all-pervasiveness of sin and the impossibility of perfection in the human realm, it counters any secular belief that individuals may find redemption in the

⁹ Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935), p. 108.
¹⁰ Reinhold Niebuhr, Justice and Mercy, (San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers, 1974), p. 66.
¹¹ Time, (Fall 1992) Special Issue, p. 13.
¹² Robert Bellah, et al, The Good Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), pp. 243, 245.

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process of history itself. And with its dialectical uplifting of the ideals of equality and sacrificial love, Christianity also calls us to a communal striving for the highest possible level of international justice.

III

In various writings, Niebuhr repeatedly mentioned one historical figure as having best surmounted the paradoxes inherent in existence: Abraham Lincoln. In his efforts to preserve the Union, Lincoln is credited by Niebuhr with always appreciating the religious dimension inherent in the drama of history, while remaining able to resist the temptation that comes to all political leaders: to identify providence with their own causes.¹³ Niebuhr often challenged those who insisted God was fighting on their side with Lincoln's remark that perhaps we should be asking the question of whether we were on the Lord's side.¹⁴

Niebuhr's use of Lincoln as a model is particularly appropriate today, for just as Lincoln's leadership helped heal the wounds caused by the severing of the American Union into the North and South, perhaps Lincoln can also serve as a guide in confronting the current, global divisions that exist between nations in the "North" and "South." As was mentioned, part of the problem of applying Niebuhr's dialectical method to the realities of today's world is that the naming of current ideologies and overarching categories seems almost impossible. In Lincoln's day, the tension was between Northern abolitionists and Confederate slave owners; just as in Niebuhr's day, leaders confronted the clash between democracy and fascism, communism and capitalism. The battle lines in those dialectical skirmishes were easily drawn, and, although all political systems and human structures are tainted with self-interest and pride, thereby preventing any issue from seeming too "black and white," the "dark grays" and "light grays" in Niebuhr's world were still easy to distinguish.

But consider the sheer diversity of our world today, the richness of images and complexity of issues making headlines in our daily newspapers. Contemporary names and places fill our vocabulary with poignant imagery: Soweto, Tienanmen Square, Mogadishu, Nelson Mandela, Corazon Aquino and People Power, Vaclav Havel and the Velvet Revolution, Archbishop Oscar Romero, the Jesuit priests murdered in El Salvador, Native American activist Leonard Peltier, Nobel Peace Prize laureates Aung San Suu Kyi and Rigoberta Menchu-a modern encyclopedia of leaders, crises, triumphs, and defeats that challenges any attempt to define the world according to outdated categories and sociopolitical labels.

What is absent from Niebuhr's writings is a balanced awareness of Third World issues, a willingness to define civilization by any standard other than European, Western models. Discerning the signs of today's

¹³ Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Religion of Abraham Lincoln," Christian Century, (February 10, 1965), p. 173.
¹⁴ Justice and Mercy, p. 16.

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times requires a breadth of vision and global sensitivity unheard of during Niebuhr's generation a few decades ago. The causes of this paradigm shift are many: advances in mass media technology, computer-assisted interconnectedness in the global financial economy, newly heard voices for Third World nations speaking out in the international political arena.

What is needed now is an awareness, similar to what Niebuhr attributed to Lincoln, of the religious dimension inherent in all history, involving the modesty not to identify providence with the cause to which we are committed and the humility not to equate any position of national prominence with moral superiority. Given the nature of existing global power structures and the persistent inability of nations to initiate any policy that goes beyond national self-interest, it seems unlikely that such demands of justice and love can be embodied on the level of collective society. But as the example of Lincoln verifies, such "impossible possibilities" can be embodied in individuals and through their example, vision, and leadership, such ideals can be approached on the national level.

Toward that end, Reinhold Niebuhr's wisdom and discernment are still appropriate today. He challenges us never to lose heart or lower our eyes from the goals Christ has set before us:

Without the ultrarational hopes and passions of religion no society will ever have the courage to conquer despair and attempt the impossible; for the vision of a just society is an impossible one, which can only be approximated by those who do not regard it as impossible.¹⁵

¹⁵ Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932), p. 81.