“Retro Flashes” are Journey’s quick look-backs on the anniversaries of religious people, events, and landmarks in New York City’s religious history.
On March 8, 1948, Time magazine published a cover story on a New York City theologian. It is not often nowadays that we get a theologian on the cover of a general public magazine like Time. So, it is well that we shake our imaginations with a recollection of such a national event seventy years ago about New York City’s Reinhold Niebuhr.
The article was writer Whittaker Chamber’s last cover story for Time magazine. Chambers would soon enter into the fight to get rid of Communist spies within the United States government. He himself had spied for the Soviet Union, became disillusioned, and blew the whistle on his former confederates. He went on to write one of the great Christian testaments in American history: Witness. The book had several layers of meaning: his witness against the Communists; and his discovery of God. He became one of the more powerful influences on the New York conservative magazine National Review and its editor William F. Buckley, Jr.
Niebuhr was born in 1892 and died in 1971. As a pastor and then professor of social ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, Niebuhr was an authoritative voice on the defining events of the 20th century: World War II, the Great Depression, Civil Rights, the Cold War, and the debate over Vietnam. He was on the cover of Time magazine’s 25th-anniversary issue. Martin Luther King Jr. cited him in his letter from Birmingham City Jail.
But Niebuhr’s complex reasoning about the world, God, and human nature made him hard to classify politically. He identified for many years as a pacifist and then vigorously argued for American entry into World War II. He became a staunch Cold Warrior, but he opposed the war in Vietnam. “The exercise of power is necessary,” Niebuhr insisted, “and so is humility, because human nature is imperfect, sinful. That is to say, we are always prone to excess and mistakes, to doing real damage, even with our best intentions and actions.”
President Barack Obama has called Reinhold Niebuhr his favorite philosopher. David Brooks recalls an interview with Obama that was going nowhere until he asked, “’You ever read Reinhold Niebuhr?’ And we were talking about nothing related, and he said, ‘Yeah, I do.’ And so I said, ‘Well, what does he mean to you?’ And he proceeded to give a 20-minute summation of The Irony of American History in perfect paragraph form.”
Obama’s wariness of power politics fits what Niebuhr wrote in The Irony of American History: “If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would only be the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle, and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.”
Reinhold Niebuhr: Faith for a Lenten Age (excerpted)
It was Lent. On Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, a woman and a little girl were stopped by the traffic at a cross street. On the opposite curb stood a young man with an Ash Wednesday mark on his forehead. “Look,” said the little girl. “Mustn’t point,” said the woman. “But mother,” asked the little girl, “why has he got that black mark on his forehead?” “Hush,” said her mother. “It’s something they do in church, I think.”…
Modern man knows a great deal about the nature of the atom. But he knows almost nothing about the nature of God, almost never thinks about it, and is complacently unaware that there may be any reason to. …
Worthy Habit. This is scarcely strange, since among millions of Christians religion itself is little more than a worthy mental habit, socially manifested in church attendance often more sporadic and much less disturbing than regular visits to the dentist.
To the mass of untheological Christians, God has become, at best, a rather unfairly furtive presence, a lurking luminosity, a cozy thought. At worst, He is conversationally embarrassing. There is scarcely any danger that a member of the neighborhood church will, like Job, hear God speak out of the whirlwind (whirlwinds are dangerous), or that he will be moved to dash down the center aisle, crying, like Isaiah: “Howl, ye ships of Tarshish!” (note 3)
Under the bland influence of the idea of progress, man, supposing himself more & more to be the measure of all things, achieved a singularly easy conscience and an almost hermetically smug optimism. The idea that man is sinful and needs redemption was subtly changed into the idea that man is by nature good and hence capable of indefinite perfectibility. This perfectibility is being achieved through technology, science, politics, social reform, education. Man is essentially good, says 20th Century liberalism, because he is rational, and his rationality is (if the speaker happens to be a liberal Protestant) divine, or (if he happens to be religiously unattached) at least benign. Thus the reason-defying paradoxes of Christian faith are happily bypassed.
Catastrophic Paradoxes. And yet, as 20th Century civilization reaches a climax, its own paradoxes grow catastrophic. The incomparable technological achievement is more and more dedicated to the task of destruction. Man’s marvelous conquest of space has made total war a household experience and, over vast reaches of the world, the commonest of childhood memories. The more abundance increases, the more resentment becomes the characteristic new look on 20th Century faces. The more production multiplies, the more scarcities become endemic. The faster science gains on disease (which, ultimately, seems always to elude it), the more the human race dies at the hands of living men. Men have never been so educated, but wisdom, even as an idea, has conspicuously vanished from the world. …
That was the blind impasse of optimistic liberalism. At the open end of that impasse stood a forbidding and impressive figure. To Protestantism’s easy conscience and easy optimism that figure was saying, with every muscle of its being: No.
His name was Reinhold Niebuhr.
Against the easy conscience, Dr. Niebuhr asserted: man is by the nature of his creation sinful; at the height of man’s perfection there is always the possibility of evil. Against easy optimism, he asserted that life is inevitably tragic. Says Niebuhr: “Mankind is living in a Lenten age.” …
Notes:
- The doctrine that God is the sole cause of the world process, the world and man having no independent reality — TIME editor ↩
- The belief that every generation is directly under God’s judgment (as opposed to “teleological eschatology,” which puts the judgment at some future time) — TIME editor ↩
- King James Bible: Isaiah 23:1, http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Isaiah-23-1/ ↩
