308 - Faith on Earth: An Inquiry into the Structure of Human Faith

Faith on Earth: An Inquiry into the Structure of Human Faith
By H. Richard Niebuhr
Edited by Richard R. Niebuhr
New Haven, Yale University Press, 1989. 123 pp. $17.95.

The appearance of a new book by a major theologian twenty-seven years after his death is bound to occasion considerable interest. In an age lacking acknowledged theological "greats," the opportunity to hear fresh words from the mouth of one of the legendary giants of an earlier generation is especially welcome. Richard R. Niebuhr has assembled this slim and surprisingly focussed volume from several of his father's hitherto unpublished manuscripts dating from the 1950s. The titles of the book and its chapters, as well as the overall arrangement of topics, derive from the elder Niebuhr's own intentions. The only obvious indication of its fragmentary nature is the abruptness with which it ends, though all the main topics appear to have been covered. The editor has supplied a brief preface, a table of manuscripts, and a judicious sprinkling of editorial footnotes.

A reader who picked up Faith on Earth hoping either for major new insights into H. Richard Niebuhr's thought or for an important contribution to current theological discussion would be disappointed. The book nevertheless serves a useful purpose both in understanding Niebuhr's theology and in helping today's theologians come to terms with an important strand of their intellectual heritage.

Though Niebuhr's views on faith are well represented in works published during his lifetime, this posthumous volume presents those views for the first time in a sustained and compact form. Both in topic and in scope this book invites comparison with Paul Tillich's little classic, Dynamics of Faith, a similarly accessible synthesis. These theological contemporaries-so different in philosophical taste and temperament, yet so similar in theological outcome-both begin with faith as a universal human experience, indeed as the definitively human experience, before exploring its distinctively Christian modulation. The difference between them emerges all the more clearly against this common background. Whereas Tillich's "ultimate concern" identifies an experience located first of all in the subjectivity of individuals (however important it may be that they also belong to social and political groups), Niebuhr's conception of faith is social and relational from the outset. For Tillich, faith, like many key concepts, is polar in structure, uniting a subjective "passion for the infinite" with its objective referent,

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whether "god… God," or the "God beyond God." Niebuhr's concept of faith, on the other hand, is essentially triadic, comprising a covenant between at least two "selves" in relation to "the third element, the cause, " which is the correlate in Niebuhr's schema to the objective pole of Tillich's "ultimate concern." This "great triadic interaction of self, companions and cause" describes the human condition in such a way as to make faith-in the sense of trust, loyalty, fiducia-the key to human life and the root of the human dilemma. "There is no escape from life in faith," Niebuhr writes, "and no escape from an existence in which all trust and faithfulness is malformed by distrust and treason."

Niebuhr's insistence on "the social nature of our knowing and believing" gives him an advantage over Tillich and other existentializing theologians of his day, and it also gives his theology its most contemporary ring. His conviction that "experience is unformed and inchoate as purely private experience" is all the more remarkable coming from a time before theologians were reading the later Wittgenstein and quoting Clifford Geertz. We can only imagine how different the theological response to Niebuhr might have been had he written in the communitarian age "after virtue."

If Faith on Earth demonstrates the substantial strengths of the kind of theology of culture exemplified by Niebuhr, it also manifests the limitations of the theological tradition to which he belonged. Hans Frei once characterized Niebuhr's theological method as "relational objectivity." Frei's commentary, in his twin contributions to the 1957 collection Faith and Ethics, is still unsurpassed in its analysis both of Niebuhr's thought and of the nineteenth-century tradition from which he came. Frei shows how Niebuhr's method emerges out of a tension in his thought between the nineteenth-century conviction that knowledge of God and self, revelation and theology, are given together and the "objectivism" of dialectical theology. Faith on Earth offers further evidence that Niebuhr, however much he may have learned from Barth, remained fundamentally within the older liberal tradition, the hallmark of which is the effort to construct a foundation in the analysis of human nature and culture upon which the edifice of Christian theology can be erected. (The frequent application of the misleading term "neoorthodox" to Niebuhr has only confused the issue. He could more accurately be termed a "chastened liberal.")

From the vantage point of present theological discussion, Faith on Earth appears to hover on the threshold between two visions of theology. In its underlying methodology and its analysis of faith as an essential constituent of human experience, it exemplifies the power and the perils of the prevalent academic tradition in Protestant theology since Schleiermacher. But in its insistence-against much of that same tradition that faith is "not something which exists in a person" but rather "an interpersonal relation," this book sounds more like an adumbration of themes heard more recently from Wayne Proudfoot, Alasdair MacIntyre,

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or George Lindbeck-thinkers who understand religion not as the expression but as the mother of experience. According to this vision, theology offers not a religious description of the world but a grammar of Christian speech and action. H. Richard Niebuhr's acknowledgment of the social nature of faith and theology before the idea became fashionable testifies to the importance of the insight and helps to explain why he has been one of the great theological teachers of our century.

Garrett Green
Connecticut College
New London, Connecticut