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Radical Monotheism and Western Culture
By H. Richard Niebuhr
New York, Harper & Brothers, 1960. $2.75.

The main body of this book consists of six chapters representing three lectures delivered in 1957 at the University of Nebraska as the Montgomery Lectures on Contemporary Civilization. The supplementary essays are articles of the author's hand on the same theme as the university lectures. These articles had appeared in scholarly journals some years before.

Dr. Niebuhr wants to give account of some of the major issues of contemporary Western culture in terms of modern theology. His main theme is that "our whole culture is involved in a conflict of faiths." He does not mean a conflict between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, or Christianity and any other religion. What he has in mind are not religions, but faiths. One party in the conflict is called by Dr. Niebuhr "radical monotheism," the others are either polytheism or henotheism. Niebuhr does not mean here primitive religions, but those phenomena, such as communism, fascism, racism, and nationalism, which are usually called pseudo-religions. He offers a more accurate characterization by labeling them "polytheism and henotheism in their modern, nonmythological guise."

A major portion of the book is taken up by a very interesting analysis of these modern pseudo-religions with the help of this new terminology. This analysis, however, is preceded by the presentation of a theology in the frame of which the new terminology has to be understood. In this review we will concentrate upon this theological framework.

Niebuhr starts with the assertion that human beings are fundamentally moved by vague feelings, such as the sense of the holy. These feelings, however, are so entirely diffuse that they need to be formed and directed. It is the function of faith to bring to the original vague feelings an articulate organization. The major point to keep in mind is the fact that this articulation can happen in three different ways. Polytheism offers many objects of devotion, so that the believer's loyalties are divided between various causes. Monotheism claims that there is only one value-center. Henotheism is in between polytheism and monotheism, in that it also calls for loyalty to one cause, but this one is only one of many causes which possess the same rank. The one cause is better or higher than the

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other causes, but the reality and the claim of the others are not denied. Monotheism, especially radical monotheism, proclaims that only one value-center may be recognized. This is the One beyond the many, also called the principle of being itself, or the principle of value. These expressions mean that God is so high that he is even beyond being, beyond value.

A next step is taken with the help of the term incarnation. Niebuhr does not have in mind God's incarnation in Jesus Christ, but the incarnation of radical faith into human history, in Israel and also in Jesus Christ. He makes his meaning clear by telling us that he does not want to say that the faith of radical monotheism has been incarnate in Greece. In the great classical philosophies there was undoubtedly a movement towards monotheism, but this was expressed only on the level of thought. In Israel, however, the radical faith was expressed in all cultural activities, for example, in community life. But even here this faith was not expressed entirely unambiguously. Jesus Christ represents the incarnation of radical faith to an even greater extent than Israel. We should notice the greatness of his confidence and loyalty, and his interpretation of the historic moment.

Another decisive element in Niebuhr's theology is his discussion of the proper name of God. He quotes here the well known historian of medieval philosophy, Etienne Gilson, who interpreted Exodus 3: 14 (I AM WHO AM) to mean, the proper name of God is Being.

In the following discussion of this theology I will omit some crucial theological issues, not because they are not important, but because they are so obvious. What is going to happen to Christian theology if one means by incarnation not an act of God, but something which occurs to faith? What can a Christian do with faith, if it is detached from Jesus Christ and becomes an agency which gives form to an otherwise formless sense of the holy? This looks more like Aristotelianism than like Christian theology.

There are, however, some more interesting things to be noticed in this theology. It is a combination of Thomistic, Tillichian, and positivistic elements.

The Thomistic nature of this theology cannot be shown in its fullness in this short review. We have to be satisfied with a remark about the reference to Gilson. In another book of Gilson that is quoted by Niebuhr, Gilson treats Ex. 3: 14 in a curious way. He claims that modern scholars do not agree upon the meaning of the name of God given in this text. Gilson then proposes to forget about Biblical scholarship, and to listen to the tradition. This authority relieves us from all doubt. The meaning of the text is: God's proper name is Being! This sleight of hand

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occurs in an exposition of Aquinas' theology, which, of course, is centered in the thesis that God's proper name is Being.

Thomism is presented to us in this book in the modern, Tillichian form. See the term Being itself, the notion of "beyond" in "beyond being" and "beyond value," and the concept of radical faith, which is strongly akin to "ultimate concern." Above all, Niebuhr shares with Tillich the profound concern about interpreting modern political, pseudo-religious phenomena with the help of theological terms.

It remains to be seen, however, whether this interpretation can be made under the guidance of terms such as theism, henotheism, polytheism, etc. These terms have been created in the age of the Enlightenment: "pantheism" by Toland, "theism" by Cudworth. Only one of this series has been formed at a later period, "henotheism" by Max Müller in 1860. I do not know of a good discussion of the way of theologizing characterized by these terms, but I think that we may safely say that the men of the Enlightenment were thinking of religions as "systems for explaining the world," and that they wanted to find a principle by which they might explain those explanations. They took this principle of ordering to be the number of deities used in the explanation of the world: many deities (polytheism), one god (monotheism), no god (atheism), etc. Another principle of ordering referred to the nature of the deity, and thus we distinguish between deism and theism. Now if we want to place Christianity in this order, we have to say that it is a theistic and not a deistic, a monotheistic and not a polytheistic system of world explanation, and we can be even more specific, and claim that Christianity has to be classified as ethical monotheism or radical monotheism.

I am very suspicious of this entire procedure. Christianity is not one out of many sets of explanatory principles; it is not the highest of a whole set of principles or systems (this very notion of "highest" betrays a henotheistic bias). Furthermore, I do not believe that any religion can be considered as a set of explanations. Such a view does not tell us anything about these religions, but only about a typical positivistic misunderstanding of religion on the side of the scholar!

This should be emphasized: there is a very strong positivistic element in Dr. Niebuhr's book. In his discussion of non-Christian religions and of modern pseudo-religions one remark always turns up: what these "religions" actually amount to is worship of the group, the society to which one belongs. The modern world is therefore full of religions: nationalisms, racism, all kind of totalitarianisms. In each case a racial group, a class, or a nation is elevated to the rank of deity.

This viewpoint cannot be denounced strongly enough. The author describes God as Being itself, and places himself therewith in the line of

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Parmenides, Plato, Thomas, etc. But what right do we have to declare that the people of ancient and primitive religions did not worship something like Being? This assumption discloses a very unscholarly attitude. A minimum of scholarship requires that we should ask what the believers themselves say about their belief. Their answer is quite clear. They believed in a Cosmic Order, which comprehended nature, history and man, an Order which comprised life and death but also transcended them; which comprised light and darkness, good and bad, male and female, but also transcended them; an Order out of which came man's laws, customs and moral commands, but which itself transcended human legality, human rationality, human morality; an Order of imperishable, absolute, eternal Life; an Order of Being. To say that all this is just glorification of one's group is not a scholarly statement but a value-judgment, and, for that matter, a positivistic value-judgment.

Perhaps we should call Dr. Niebuhr's theology a semi-positivism. For he does not say: the Parmenidean belief in Being is only a projection of his thinking upon the universe. Neither does he make similar reductions in the case of Christianity. But the recognition of the "semi" nature of Niebuhr's positivism does not imply a moderation of our critique. On the contrary, this "semi" element indicates a basic arbitrariness, a profound confusion in this entire approach. Why do so many Christian scholars take for granted that Parmenides refers to Sein, and that the profound religions of pre-Homeric Greece, of Babylon, and of the Zend-Avesta refer merely to Seiendes? I want to suggest that the belief in a Cosmic Order of Reason and Goodness in classical Greek philosophy is a derivate of the older belief in a supra-rational and supra-moral Cosmic Order of the ancient religions. Perhaps I am going too far if I claim that when we compare the two cosmos beliefs, the philosophical one is " sicklied over with the pale cast of thought." In short, there is no reason whatsoever to say that only Parmenides and Plato, and not the men of the ancient religions, believed in Being.

Furthermore, with some hesitation I want to say that in my opinion we should not deny some of the modern pseudo-religions a similar status. For instance, when Marx in the Manifesto accuses the bourgeoisie of its crimes, he evokes (unintentionally) before our eyes the picture of a cosmic court. All of history is called upon to notice and to condemn the cruel crimes of the middle class of nineteenth century civilization. The laws which are trespassed are not just human laws of a specific country, or of a particular period of history; they are eternal laws of cosmic stature. Then you will not expect a former Dutchman to be favorable to the Nazis, but I must say that we do not understand them if we do not see that the power of their frenzy was rooted in the worship of Being, a Being

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which disclosed itself not in reason, but in the Aryan race, in blood and soil. Both Communism and Nazism did not and do not refer to Seiendes but to Sein.

Now some of you will undoubtedly say: but are not Nazism and Communism ugly and repulsive? Certainly, they are! But we should not forget that all religions are repulsive and ugly. Think of that horrible Shiva with all those arms. Think of Osiris, being mutilated; think of Chronos eating his own children, think of all those gods of death. Think of Samuel ordering the murder of Agag, think of a religion making a doubtful character like David its man of God. Think of the suffering Servant, who did not have any shape or comeliness. Think of the "senseless" quarrels about homo-ousios, think of the repulsive persecutions, hatreds, wars. One is safe against these horrors only if one rises to the clear, lucid atmosphere of the Enlightenment, and reduces the terrifying religions to systems of explanation. Here everything is rationally clear and morally justifiable, but I am afraid that one does not understand any religion by this postivistic reduction, neither the primitive religions, nor Christianity, nor the pseudo-religions of our age.

The most interesting problem about Dr. Niebuhr's book is that he is not only deeply involved in Positivism, but that at the same time he is a metaphysician (theologizing in the manner of Plato, Thomas, Tillich). This combination of Positivism and metaphysics is a paradox, for these two are supposed to be deadly enemies. Positivism declares metaphysics to be meaningless, and metaphysicians are wont to see in Positivism their natural enemy. We can characterize metaphysics as worship of Being, and Positivism as Blindness for Being. With this term I do not mean a refusal to see Being at all, but rather an unwillingness to admit that men of other convictions (in this case those of ancient religions and pseudo-religions) were moved by what they considered to be Being. How can one combine worship of Being and blindness for Being?

The answer lies in the recognition of the fact that this combination is not new in Dr. Niebuhr's theology, but can be found already in Plato himself. The positivism of Plato and Aristotle is disclosed in the force with which they denounce the old mythical religion. Here we meet the reductionist process. The old religions were not actually religions (say the classical philosophers) but naive proclamations of the eternal, unchangeable verities which form the core of Platonic theology. In olden times the priests clothed these truths in the garments of unlikely and undignified stories about the gods. The scandal of these ugly and repulsive tales has to be eliminated, so that the respectable essence remains.

No one should be surprised to see Plato and Aristotle called positivists. These men were, just as much as their opponents, the Sophists, children

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of the enlightenment; that is to say, they stood off from the tradition, and began to evaluate it with the help of moral and rational standards. In other words, it is not only Niebuhr who is not able to see that primitive religion refers to Being. All Greek intellectuals of the classic period (probably with the exception of the tragedians) suffered from blindness for Being; not only the Sophists who did not worship anything at all, but also the Platonists who replaced the old by a new Being. Positivistic Thomism begins, not with Niebuhr, but with Plato.

Willem F. Zuurdeeg
McCormick Theological Seminary
Chicago 14, Illinois