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Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography
By Richard W. Fox
New York, Pantheon Books, 1985. 340 pp. $19.95.

The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses
Edited by Robert McAfee Brown
New Haven, Yale University Press, 1986. 264 pp. $19.95.

Whether premeditated, by chance, or by providence, these two Niebuhr volumes admirably complement each other. In fact, they are interdependent, the one giving historical, the other theological background. For a new generation that knows not Reinhold Niebuhr, these two books are indispensable as introduction to the greatest American theologian of modern times.

Fox takes seriously Niebuhr's demurral about being a theologian and treats his subject mostly from the socio-political side of his career, of which there is ample material for a big biography. Brown dismisses Niebuhr's self-deprecating comment and proceeds to demonstrate with a careful and perceptive collection of essays that Niebuhr was indeed a theologian. Both books raise disturbing questions for today about historical research and theological methodology.

Fox, who did not know Niebuhr personally but was a student of Brown who did, gives us just about everything a historian could unearth by consulting correspondence, interviewing associates, and reading reams of reviews, articles, and critiques, as well as the dozen volumes in the Niebuhr corpus. At the end of his book, Notes, Bibliography, and Index comprise 41 pages, evidence enough of five years of diligent and extensive research.

Fox is clearly uneasy when dealing with theological ideas, and his main emphasis details Niebuhr's social and political involvement, with copious comments (many critical) from those who did not share Niebuhr's biblical-Christian premises. The human side of the person presumably is disclosed for us when we learn of Niebuhr's domineering parents, his disappointment with his education (Elmhurst College, Eden Theological Seminary, Yale Divinity School-none of which at the time was known for academic excellence), his inferiority feelings in the midst of secular intellectuals, his compulsive preaching schedule and outside lecture engagements, his often neglected home life, and his always pressing writing deadlines.

Most of Niebuhr's books, Fox tells us, were written under pressure of

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time and were usually not marked by sufficient research or reflection. Niebuhr was a generalist who delighted in ranging over the whole landscape of the Bible and church history. This was the secret of his reputation as a "prophetic preacher," and Fox the historian (now at Reed College) finds this side of his subject elusive.

Fox is primarily interested in writing what he calls "intellectual history," and at this he is very good indeed. Niebuhr's development from stage to stage in his career is carefully documented with reference to his articles, sermons, speeches, and books. The impression that emerges is of a person with enormous energy who drove himself relentlessly, and, like his explosive pulpit voice and mannerisms, commanded attention by the sheer power of his personality.

But Fox has difficulties when it comes to evaluating the man and his work. From the kinds of negative critiques against Niebuhr's many socio-political causes and the equally restrained reviews of his books, one might almost think that Reinhold Niebuhr was a tragic failure of his own time, with little to teach us today. In a final curious comment, Fox writes that "our intellectual gurus today are secular writers, academic popularizers, therapeutic counselors, psychological sages. We no longer generate theological celebrities." And while that may appear as a left-handed compliment, Fox also notes that while theologians may continue to discuss his ideas, they are "cut off from the historians and social scientists who analyze his political thought."

It is at this point that Brown's fine collection of Niebuhr's essays, with his own perceptive introduction, are needed not only as supplement to Fox but as corrective. Brown takes Niebuhr seriously as a theologian and understands his social-political positions as issuing from his view of the classic Christian tradition. Brown himself stands in that tradition, and while he can be critical of it, he sees it, as did Niebuhr, as both source and norm.

Brown's emphasis is "given to the theological rather than the political essays," and he knows from his own experience and observation that "Niebuhr exercised a decisive impact on the theology of his contemporaries." Perhaps Fox misses this obvious point because he failed, for some reason, to consult the archives of religious and denominational journals and magazines. He could also have discovered from Scribner's the sales figures for Niebuhr's books, or interviewed dozens of teachers now alive who for two decades used Niebuhr's books as texts in seminaries and colleges.

While Fox correctly interprets Niebuhr's efforts, whether politically or theologically, as mainly "apologetic" in the sense of defending the faith, this needs Brown's further refinement, explaining Niebuhr's methodology as "dialectical." Fox sees Niebuhr's apologetic as "a skillful balancing act" or "a pattern of paradoxes and a sequence of ironies." But Brown sees this on a deeper level as "involving the simultaneous affirmation of what initially seem to be contrary propositions." Niebuhr's numerous verbal aphorisms, cast in dialectic mold, are

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well known to all Niebuhr readers. A few may be cited:

God give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed; Give us courage to change what should be changed; Give us wisdom to distinguish one from the other. (Fox gives a full account of this so-called "serenity prayer," the universal invocation adopted by AA.)

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing that is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness. (Fox notes that The Irony of American History, from which the quotation comes, while praised by many was regarded by others as gloomy, and Niebuhr was "vilified" by some and described as "obscurantist and defeatist.")

The children of darkness are evil because they know no law beyond the self. They are wise, though evil, because they understand the power of self-interest. The children of light are virtuous because they have some conception of a higher law than their own will. They are usually foolish because they do not know the power of self-will. (Niebuhr's interpretation of Luke 16:8, which became the title of his book, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness.)

The obvious fact is that man is a child of nature, subject to its vicissitudes…. The other less obvious fact is that man is a spirit who stands outside of nature. (This became the thesis of Niebuhr's major work, The Nature and Destiny of Man.)

There are dozens of similar dialectical aphorisms in Niebuhr's sermons and articles. It would be a mistake to see these as mere verbal tricks. They were, as Brown insists, embedded in the biblical view of the world and human nature. That is why Niebuhr's "apologetic" argues that the Judeo-Christian tradition "makes more sense out of more facts."

Who was the real Reinhold Niebuhr? In a concluding bibliographical note where Fox gives guarded acknowledgment to previous discussions of Niebuhr's religious ideas, he asserts that "his theology cannot be fully understood if it is abstracted from his experience." And in his introduction, Fox hints that his purpose in writing the biography is "a quest for the historical Reinhold."

But it remains for us to ask how much historical research is needed to reveal the real person, and whether, after all the data, the figure stubbornly refuses to materialize. It remained for a contemporary Jewish prophet to speak the last word. At Niebuhr's memorial service, on June 4, 1971, in Stockbridge, Mass., the late Abraham Heschel said of his friend and neighbor: "He appeared among us like a sublime figure out of the Hebrew Bible…. 'You are the fairest of the sons of men, grace is poured upon your lips, therefore God has blessed you for ever.' "

The concluding essay in Brown's miscellany, not previously published, bears the title "A View of Life from the Sidelines." It is an autobiographical

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piece written by Niebuhr after his debilitating stroke in 1952, and it epitomizes in many ways what Brown calls Niebuhr's "dialectical" signature.

If we recognize that the human self is not to be equated with its mind, though the logical and analytic faculties of the mind are an instrument of its freedom over nature and history, and if we know that the self is intimately related to its body but cannot be equated with its physical functions, we then are confronted with the final mystery of its capacity of transcendence over nature, history, and even its own self; and we will rightly identify the mystery of selfhood with the mystery of its indeterminate freedom…. While mortal, it has the capacity to relate itself to the "things that abide." St. Paul enumerates these abiding things as "faith, hope, and love."

Those who knew Reinhold Niebuhr will always cherish their memories of him as an incisive interpreter of the Christian faith applied to life. His academic, professional title at Union Seminary, after all, was Professor of Applied Christianity. Fox has restored as much of his life as we are ever likely to get. And if it borders on the banal to write that "Niebuhr was bounded by his times," Fox is surely right in thinking that. Niebuhr's protest against "self-interest in politics," and we may add in. much else, is a message still needed for today.

Whether we can say the same for Niebuhr's dialectical methodology may seem less promising. Brown's exposition and the essays included in his volume may make us nostalgic for Niebuhr's kind of apologetic theology. But defending the faith in any form is not today high on theology's priority list. Perhaps it will be for a new generation, standing on Reinhold Niebuhr's shoulders, to see more clearly into the future.

Hugh T. Kerr

Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey