| Reinhold Niebuhr | |
|---|---|
| Born | Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr June 21, 1892 Wright City, Missouri |
| Died | June 1, 1971 (aged 78) Stockbridge, Massachusetts |
| Education | Elmhurst College, Eden Theological Seminary, Yale Divinity School |
| Occupation | Theologian, professor at Union Theological Seminary (1930-1960), magazine editor (1941-1966) |
| Years active | 1915-1966 |
| Known for | Christian Realism |
| Religion | Protestant |
| Spouse | Ursula Keppel-Compton Niebuhr |
| Notes
1964 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient
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Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr (pronounced /ˈraɪnhoʊld ˈniːbʊər/; June 21, 1892 – June 1, 1971) was an American theologian and commentator on public affairs. Starting as a leftist minister in the 1920s indebted to theological liberalism, he shifted to the new Neo-Orthodox theology in the 1930s, explaining how the sin of pride created evil in the world. He attacked utopianism as ineffectual for dealing with reality, writing in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944):
His realism deepened after 1945 and led him to support United States' efforts to confront Soviet communism around the world. A powerful speaker, he was one of the most influential religious leaders of the 1940s and 1950s in American public affairs. Niebuhr battled with the religious liberals over what he called their naïve views of sin and the optimism of the Social Gospel, and battled with the religious conservatives over what he viewed as their naïve view of Scripture and their narrow definition of "true religion."
His long-term impact involves relating the Christian faith to "realism" in foreign affairs, rather than idealism, and his contribution to modern "just war" thinking. Niebuhr's perspective influenced many liberals, who came to support a "realist" foreign policy.[1] Such recent leaders of American foreign policy as Jimmy Carter, Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama have acknowledged Niebuhr's importance to them.[2]
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Niebuhr was born in Wright City, Missouri, the son of German immigrants Gustav Niebuhr and his wife Lydia. His father was a German Evangelical pastor; his denomination was the American branch of the established Prussian Church Union in Germany. It is now part of the United Church of Christ. The family spoke German at home. His brother H. Richard Niebuhr became a famous historian of religion, and his sister Hulda Niebuhr became a divinity professor in Chicago.
Reinhold Niebuhr attended Elmhurst College in Illinois and graduated in 1910.[3] He studied at Eden Theological Seminary in Webster Groves, Missouri. Niebuhr attended Yale Divinity School, where he earned a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1914 and a Master of Arts degree the following year. He always regretted not taking a doctorate. Niebuhr said that Yale gave him intellectual liberation from the localism of his German-American upbringing[4]
In 1931 Niebuhr married Ursula Keppel-Compton. She was an educated and religious woman who later became chairman of the Religion Department at Barnard College (the women's college of Columbia University). They had two children.
In 1915, Niebuhr was ordained a pastor. The German Evangelical mission board sent him to serve at Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit, Michigan. The congregation numbered sixty-five on his arrival and grew to nearly 700 by the time he left in 1928. The increase reflected his ability to reach people outside the German American community and among the growing population attracted to jobs in the booming automobile industry. In the early 1900s Detroit became the fourth-largest city in the country, attracting many Jewish and Catholic immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, as well as black and white migrants from the rural South. They competed for jobs and limited housing, and the city's rapid changes and rise in social tensions contributed to the growth in numbers of the Ku Klux Klan, which reached its peak in 1925.[5]
As America entered the World War in 1917, Niebuhr was the unknown pastor of a small German-speaking congregation in Detroit (it stopped using German in 1919). All German American culture in the United States and nearby Canada was under attack for suspicion of having dual loyalties. Niebuhr repeatedly stressed the need to be loyal to America, and won an audience in national magazines for his appeals to the German Americans to be patriotic.[6] Theologically, however, he went beyond the issue of national loyalty as he endeavored to fashion a realistic ethical perspective of patriotism and pacifism. He endeavored to work out a realistic approach to the moral danger posed by aggressive powers which many idealists and pacifists failed to recognize. During the war he also served his denomination as Executive Secretary of the War Welfare Commission while maintaining his pastorate in Detroit. A pacifist at heart, he saw compromise as a necessity and was willing to support war in order to find peace — compromising for the sake of righteousness.[7]
After seminary he preached the Social Gospel, then started attacking what he considered the brutalization and insecurity of Ford workers.[8] Niebuhr had moved to the left and was troubled by the demoralizing effects of industrialism on workers. He became an outspoken critic of Henry Ford and allowed union organizers to use his pulpit to expound their message of workers' rights. Niebuhr attacked poor conditions created by the assembly lines and erratic employment practices.[9]
Because of his opinion about factory work, Niebuhr rejected liberal optimism. He wrote in his diary:
The historian Ronald H. Stone thinks that Niebuhr never talked to the assembly line workers (many of his parishioners were skilled craftsmen) but projected feelings onto them after discussions with Rev. Samuel Marquis.[11] As some studies of assembly line workers have shown, the work may have been dull, but workers had complex motivations and could find ways to make meaning of their experiences; many boasted about their jobs and tried hard to place their sons on the assembly line. Ford tried and failed to control work habits. After extensive sociological studies in which workers were interviewed, management concluded that the workers were more interested in controlling their home lives than their work lives. The Ford solution was welfare capitalism, paying relatively high wages with added benefits, such as vacations and retirement, that reduced turnover and appealed primarily to family men.[12]
Niebuhr's criticism of Ford and capitalism resonated with progressives and helped make him nationally prominent.[9] His serious commitment to Marxism developed not in Detroit but after he moved to New York in 1928.[13]
In 1923, Niebuhr visited Europe to meet with intellectuals and theologians. The conditions he saw in Germany under the French occupation of part of Germany dismayed him. They reinforced the pacifist views he had adopted after World War I.
Niebuhr captured his personal experiences in Detroit in his book Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic. He continued to write and publish throughout his career, and also served as editor of the magazine Christianity and Crisis from 1941 through 1966.
In 1928, Niebuhr left Detroit to become Professor of Practical Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He spent the rest of his career there, until retirement in 1960. While teaching theology at Union Theological Seminary, Niebuhr influenced many generations of students, including German minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church.
Niebuhr was among the group of 51 prominent Americans who formed the International Relief Association (IRA) that is today known as the International Rescue Committee (IRC).[14] The committee mission was to assist Germans suffering from the policies of the Hitler regime.[15]
In the 1930s Niebuhr was often seen as an intellectual opponent of John Dewey. Both men were professional polemicists and their ideas often clashed despite the fact that both men held sway over the same realms of liberal intellectual schools of thought. Niebuhr was a strong proponent of the "Jerusalem" religious tradition as a corrective to the secular "Athens" tradition insisted upon by Dewey.[16] In the book Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) a still intellectually young Niebuhr heavily criticized Dewey's philosophy. Two years later, in a review of Dewey's book A Common Faith (1934), Niebuhr was surprisingly calm and respectful towards Dewey's "religious footnote" on his then large body of educational and pragmatic philosophy.[17]
In 1939 Niebuhr explained his theological odyssey:[18]
| “ | ....About midway in my ministry which extends roughly from the peace of Versailles [1919] to the peace of Munich [1938], measured in terms of Western history, I underwent a fairly complete conversion of thought which involved rejection of almost all the liberal theological ideals and ideas with which I ventured forth in 1915. I wrote a book [Does Civilization need Religion?], my first, in 1927 which...contains almost all the theological windmills against which today I tilt my sword. These windmills must have tumbled shortly thereafter for every succeeding volume expresses a more and more explicit revolt against what is usually known as liberal culture. | ” |
In the 1930s Niebuhr worked out many of his ideas about sin and grace, love and justice, faith and reason, realism and idealism, and the irony and tragedy of history, which established his leadership of the neo-orthodox movement in theology. Influenced strongly by Karl Barth and other dialectical theologians of Europe, he began to emphasize the Bible as a human record of divine self-revelation; it offered for Niebuhr a critical but redemptive reorientation of the understanding of man's nature and destiny.[19]
Niebuhr couched his ideas in Christ-centered principles such as the Great Commandment and the doctrine of original sin. His major contribution was his view of sin as a social event — as pride — with selfish self-centeredness as the root of evil. The sin of pride was apparent not just in criminals, but more dangerously in people who felt good about their deeds — rather like Henry Ford (whom he did not mention by name). The human tendency to corrupt the good was the great insight he saw manifested in governments, business, democracies, utopian societies, and churches. This position is laid out profoundly in one of his most influential books, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932). He was a debunker of hypocrisy and pretense and made the avoidance of self-righteous illusions the center of his thoughts. Niebuhr argued that to approach religion as the individualistic attempt to fulfill biblical commandments in a moralistic sense is not only an impossibility but also a demonstration of man's original sin, which Niebuhr interpreted as self-love. Through self-love man becomes focused on his own goodness and leaps to the false conclusion — one which he calls the "Promethean illusion" — that he can achieve goodness on his own. Thus man mistakes his partial ability to transcend himself for the ability to prove his absolute authority over his own life and world. Constantly frustrated by natural limitations, man develops a lust for power which destroys him and his whole world. History is the record of these crises and judgments which man brings on himself; it is also proof that God does not allow man to overstep his possibilities. In radical contrast to the Promethean illusion, God reveals himself in history, especially personified in Jesus Christ, as sacrificial love which overcomes the human temptation to self-deification and makes possible constructive human history.[20][21]
The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.
During the 1930s, Niebuhr was a prominent leader of the militant faction of the Socialist Party of America, although he dismayed die-hard Marxists by calling their beliefs a religion and a thin one at that.[23] In 1941, he cofounded the Union for Democratic Action, a group with a strongly militarily interventionist, internationalist foreign policy and a pro-union, liberal domestic policy, and was the group's sole president until its transformation into the Americans for Democratic Action in 1947.[24]
Within the framework of Christian Realism, Niebuhr became a supporter of American action in World War II, anti-communism, and the development of nuclear weapons. However, he opposed the Vietnam War.[25][26]
At the outbreak of World War II, the pacifist component of his liberalism was challenged. Niebuhr began to distance himself from the pacifism of his more liberal colleagues and became a staunch advocate for the war. Niebuhr soon left the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a peace-oriented group of theologians and ministers, and became one of their harshest critics. This departure from his peers evolved into a movement known as Christian Realism. Niebuhr is widely considered to have been its primary advocate.[27]
Niebuhr supported the Allies during World War II and argued for the engagement of the United States in the war. As a writer popular in both the secular and the religious arena and a professor at the Union Theological Seminary, he was very influential both in the United States and abroad. While many clergy proclaimed themselves pacifists because of their World War I experiences, Niebuhr declared a victory by Germany and Japan would threaten Christianity. He renounced his socialist connections and beliefs and resigned from the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation. He based his arguments on the Protestant beliefs that sin is part of the world, that justice must take precedence over love, and that pacifism is a symbolic portrayal of absolute love but cannot prevent sin. Although his opponents did not portray him favorably, Niebuhr's exchanges with them on the issue helped him mature intellectually.[28]
Niebuhr debated Charles Clayton Morrison, editor of The Christian Century magazine about America's entry into World War II. Morrison and his pacifistic followers maintained that America's role should be strictly neutral and part of a negotiated peace only, while Niebuhr claimed himself to be a realist, who opposed the use of political power to attain moral ends. Morrison and his followers strongly supported the movement to outlaw war that began after World War I and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928. The pact was severely challenged by the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and in 1932, with his publication of Moral Man and Immoral Society, Niebuhr broke ranks with The Christian Century and supported interventionism and power politics, culminating in his support of the reelection of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 and the publication of his own magazine, Christianity and Crisis.[29] In 1945, however, Niebuhr charged that use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was "morally indefensible."
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,[30] explained his impact:
Niebuhr's defense of Roosevelt made him popular among liberals, as historian Morton White noted with a touch of irony:
After Joseph Stalin signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Adolf Hitler in August 1939, Niebuhr severed his past ties with any fellow-traveler organization having any known Communist leanings. In 1947, Niebuhr helped found the liberal Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). His ideas influenced George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and other realists during the Cold War on the need to contain Communist expansion.
In his last cover story for Time magazine (March 1948), Whittaker Chambers said of Niebuhr:
In the 1950s his position became so anticommunist that he believed Senator Joseph McCarthy was a force of evil not so much for disrespecting civil liberties as for being ineffective in rooting out Communists and their sympathizers.[34] In 1953 he thought the Rosenbergs should be executed, stating "Traitors are never ordinary criminals and the Rosenbergs are quite obviously fiercely loyal Communists.... Stealing atomic secrets is an unprecedented crime".[34]
His views developed during his pastoral tenure in Detroit, which had become a place of immigration, migration, competition and development as a major industrial city. During the 1920s, Niebuhr spoke out against the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in Detroit, which had recruited many members threatened by the rapid social changes. The Klan proposed positions that were anti-black, anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic. Niebuhr's preaching against the Klan, especially in relation to the 1925 mayoral election, gained him national attention.[35]
Anti-Catholicism surged in Detroit in the 1920s in reaction to the rise in the number of Catholic immigrants from eastern and southern Europe since the early 20th century. It was exacerbated by the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, which recruited many members in Detroit. Niebuhr defended pluralism by attacking the Klan. During the Detroit mayoral election of 1925, Niebuhr's sermon, "We fair-minded Protestants cannot deny," was published on the front pages of both the Detroit Times and the Free Press. This sermon urged people to vote against mayoral candidate Charles Bowles, who was being openly endorsed by the Klan. The Catholic incumbent, John W. Smith, won by a narrow 30,000 votes. Niebuhr preached against the Klan and helped to influence its decline in political power in Detroit.[36] Niebuhr preached:
| “ | that it was Protestantism that gave birth to the Ku Klux Klan, one of the worst specific social phenomena which the religious pride and prejudice of peoples has ever developed.... I do not deny that all religions are periodically corrupted by bigotry. But I hit Protestant bigotry the hardest at this time because it happens to be our sin and there is no use repenting for other people's sins. Let us repent of our own. .... We are admonished in Scripture to judge men by their fruits, not by their roots; and their fruits are their character, their deeds and accomplishments.[37] | ” |
Niebuhr's thought on racial justice developed slowly after he abandoned socialism. Niebuhr attributed the injustices of society to human pride and self love and believed that this innate propensity for evil could not be controlled by humanity. But, he believed that a representative democracy could improve society's ills. Like Edmund Burke, Niebuhr endorsed natural evolution over imposed change and emphasized experience over theory. Niebuhr's Burkean ideology, however, often conflicted with his liberal principles, particularly regarding his perspective on racial justice. Though vehemently opposed to racial inequality, Niebuhr adopted a conservative position on segregation.[38]
While after World War II most liberals endorsed integration, Niebuhr focused on achieving equal opportunity. He warned against imposing changes that could result in violence. The violence that followed peaceful demonstrations in the 1960s forced Niebuhr to reverse his position against imposed equality; witnessing the problems of the Northern ghettos later caused him to doubt that equality was attainable.[38]
In the "Letter from Birmingham Jail" Martin Luther King wrote, "Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals." King valued Niebuhr's social and ethical ideals. King attributed his own non-violent posture more to the influence of Niebuhr and Paul Tillich than to the example of Gandhi.[39] On the other hand, Niebuhr was friendly to the white South, was not an active supporter of the civil rights movement and refused to sign petitions when asked by King.[40]
As a young pastor in Detroit, he favored conversion of Jews to Christianity, scolding evangelical Christians who were anti-Semitic or ignoring them. He spoke out against "the unchristlike attitude of Christians" and what he described as his fellow Christians' "Jewish bigotry." [41] His 1933 article in the Christian Century was an attempt to sound the alarm within the Christian community over Hitler's "cultural annihilation of the Jews."[41] Eventually his theology evolved to the point where he was the first prominent Christian theologian to argue it was inappropriate for Christians to seek to convert Jews to their faith.[42]
As a preacher, writer, leader, and adviser to political figures, Niebuhr supported Zionism and the development of Israel. His solution to anti-Semitism was a combination of a Jewish homeland, greater tolerance, and assimilation in other countries. As early as 1942, he advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Palestine and their resettlement in other Arabic countries. His position may have related to his religious conviction that life on earth is imperfect, and his concern about German anti-Semitism.[43]
In 1952, Niebuhr published The Irony of American History, in which he interpreted the meaning of the United States' past. Niebuhr questioned whether a humane, "ironical" interpretation of American history was credible on its own merits, or only in the context of a Christian view of history. Niebuhr's concept of irony referred to situations in which "the consequences of an act are diametrically opposed to the original intention," and "the fundamental cause of the disparity lies in the actor himself, and his original purpose." His reading of American history based on this notion, though from the Christian perspective, is so rooted in historical events that readers who do not share his religious views can be led to the same conclusion. Niebuhr's great foe was idealism. American idealism, he believed, comes in two forms: the idealism of the antiwar non-interventionists, who are embarrassed by power; and the idealism of pro-war imperialists, who disguise power as virtue. He said the non-interventionists, without mentioning Harry Emerson Fosdick by name, seek to preserve the purity of their souls, either by denouncing military actions or by demanding that every action taken be unequivocally virtuous. They exaggerate the sins committed by their own country, excuse the malevolence of its enemies and, as later polemicists have put it, inevitably blame America first. Niebuhr argued this approach was a pious way to refuse to face real problems.[44]
The earliest known version of the prayer, from 1937, has been found in a Christian student newsletter ("The Intercollegian and Far Horizons"), which claimed to reprint the prayer from an earlier edition of the newsletter, and attributes the prayer to Niebuhr in this form:
"Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other."
The most popular version, whose authorship is unknown, reads:
"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can change, And wisdom to know the difference."
The longest version has these additional lines:
"Living one day at a time; Enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will; That I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him Forever in the next. Amen."[45]
The prayer is frequently used by Alcoholics Anonymous, which uses it in a slightly different form. An Alcoholics Anonymous website reports: "What is undisputed is the claim of authorship by the theologian Dr. Rheinhold [sic] Niebuhr, who recounted to interviewers on several occasions that he had written the prayer as a 'tag line' to a sermon he had delivered on Practical Christianity. Yet even Dr. Niebuhr added at least a touch of doubt to his claim when he told one interviewer, 'Of course, it may have been spooking around for years, even centuries, but I don't think so. I honestly do believe that I wrote it myself.'"[46]
His claim to authorship was supported in detail by his daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, in The Serenity Prayer (2003), where she said that her father first wrote it in 1943. In 2008, Yale Book of Quotations editor Fred R. Shapiro cast doubt on Niebuhr's claim of authorship. He demonstrated that the prayer was in circulation by 1936 but not attributed to Niebuhr until 1942.[47] However, he acknowledged the possibility that Niebuhr introduced the prayer by the mid-1930s in an unpublished or private setting.[47] Sifton, in a response published with Shapiro's article, argues that the prayer must have come from one of the tradition's most gifted practitioners, which she believes could only be her father.[48] In 2009, Duke University librarian Stephen Goranson unearthed the copy of the prayer from 1937 (above). In response to this finding, Shapiro conceded that "The new evidence does not prove that Reinhold Niebuhr wrote [the prayer], but it does significantly improve the likelihood that he was the originator." [49]
The tragedy of man is that he can conceive self perfection but cannot achieve it.
Niebuhr exerted a significant influence upon mainline Protestant clergy in the years immediately following World War II, much of it in concord with the neo-orthodox and the related movements. That influence began to wane and then precipitously drop toward the end of his life.
Historian Arthur Schlesinger described the legacy of Niebuhr as being contested between American liberals and conservatives, both of whom wanted to claim him.[50] Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave credit to Niebuhr's influence. Foreign-policy conservatives point to Niebuhr's support of the containment doctrine during the Cold War as an instance of moral realism; progressives cite his later opposition to the Vietnam War.[51]
In more recent years, Niebuhr has enjoyed something of a renaissance in contemporary thought, although usually not in liberal Protestant theological circles. Both major-party candidates in the 2008 presidential election cited Niebuhr as an influence: Senator John McCain, in his work Hard Call, "celebrated Niebuhr as a paragon of clarity about the costs of a good war."[52] President Barack Obama said that Niebuhr was his "favorite philosopher"[53] and "favorite theologian".[54] Slate magazine columnist Fred Kaplan characterized Obama's 2009 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech a "faithful reflection" of Niebuhr.[55]
Kenneth Waltz's seminal work on international relations theory, Man, the State, and War, includes many references to Niebuhr's thought. Waltz emphasizes Niebuhr's contributions to political realism, especially "the impossibility of human perfection."[56] Andrew Bacevich's book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism refers to Niebuhr 13 times.[57] Bacevich emphasises Niebuhr's humility and his belief that Americans were in danger of becoming enamored of US power.
Niebuhr was often described as a charismatic speaker. The journalist Aiden Whitman wrote of his speaking style: "He possessed a deep voice and large blue eyes. He used his arms as though he were an orchestra conductor. Occasionally one hand would strike out, with a pointed finger at the end, to accent a trenchant sentence. He talked rapidly and (because he disliked to wear spectacles for his far-sightedness) without notes; yet he was adroit at building logical climaxes and in communicating a sense of passionate involvement in what he was saying."[22]