Best of It: Reinhold Niebuhr - Prophet of Christian Realism (Part 1)

[Series Index]

Reinhold Niebuhr was premier among American intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century but today is rarely read in seminaries or elsewhere in academia. Critics like Stanley Hauerwas criticize him as a "chaplain to power." His "Christian Realism" is accused of promoting "an un-Christian defeatism, a willingness to compromise with evil, and a repudiation of the transforming power of God." (82) Stackhouse writes in Making the Best of It:

… Niebuhr's fundamental public claim for Christianity is that it does a better job – a more rationally satisfying, as well as more existentially satisfying, job – of explaining the world than does any other worldview, including the worldviews of Hobbes, Hume, Comte Marx, Freud, or anyone else. Far from being an escape from reality into narcotically soothing aspirations of comforting wish fulfillment, Christianity is the most realistic view of things on offer. (84)

Stackhouse puts Niebuhr's views into three themes: epistemology, human nature, and history. Under each theme, he makes statements that summarize Niebuhr's views (I've numbered these for ease of reference in discussion) and then offers commentary on each.

Epistemology

1. We properly draw on experience to tell us what we can know of the world. (84)

2. What we can find out that way, however, prompts us to realize that we cannot know it all, and mystery is an irreducible element in any adequate description of the world. (86)

Stackhouse quotes Niebuhr:

Religious toleration … requires that religious convictions be sincerely and devoutly held while yet the sinful and finite corruptions of these convictions be humbly acknowledged; and the actual fruits of other faiths be generously estimated. (87)

"Epistemic humility" is what Stackhouse is describing. In footnote 16, he writes:

…This epistemic humility grounding pluralistic tolerance upsets critics of both Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr. These critics assail the Niebuhrs for compromising the stark truth of the Gospel in order to covertly defend liberal democracy and its cultural and consumerist relativism. … (87)

Stackhouse will come to this issue later.

3. Christian theology provides the best conceptuality by which to articulate this reality: God created and sustains the world, and made us able to understand it. He then enables us to coordinate that understanding with the understanding he grants us of theology as well. (87)

4. God has provided information and insight that we never could have discovered on our own – thus we need God's revelation. (88)

Stackhouse quotes Niebuhr from Nature and Destiny:

Christian faith sees in the Cross of Christ the assurance that judgment is not the final word of God to man; but it does not regard the mercy of God as a forgiveness which wipes out the distinctions of good and evil in history and makes judgment meaningless. All the difficult Christian theological dogmas of Atonement and justification are efforts to explicate the ultimate mystery of divine wrath and mercy in its relation to man …

 

Christian faith regards the revelation in Christ as final because this ultimate problem solved by the assurance that God takes man's sin upon Himself and into Himself and that without this divine initiative and this divine sacrifice there could be no reconciliation and no easing of man's uneasy conscience. (89-90)

In footnote 23, Stackhouse writes:

… It is not clear to me how Hauerwas and others who criticize Niebuhr as anthropocentric – even as functionally atheistic (which I think is the implication of With the Grain of the Universe, in order to depict Hauerwas's heroes, especially Karl Barth, all the more brightly as true Christians) – would deal with such a passage. …(90)

He acknowledges that Niebuhr was not entirely orthodox, but he did hold that human quests to know God would be frustrated until the relationship with God is rectified. Quoting Langdon Gilkey

Despite its major concentration on an empirical look at human social behavior, on the real characteristics of political existence, and on the actual shape of the contours of history, Niebuhr's theology is … a 'God-centered' theology and not a humanistic or naturalistic one. As a consequence it cannot possibly be understood – as many have sought to do – as primarily brilliant social commentary with the pious icing, so to speak of theological or Biblical rhetoric. … (90)

5. To reveal truth in a way the properly balances various elements and communicates well across a variety of cultures, God has resorted to the genre of story, of myth – understood as a narrative and symbol set that articulate abiding truth ("this is the way things are and have been") but not, as Christian tradition has believed, historical truth ("this is the way things once happened"). (90)

Unlike many who talk about "myth" as a way to relate historical realities, Stackhouse points out that Niebuhr apparently saw no need for Biblical myths to have connection with actual historical realities. They are pictorial ways of illustrating our human predicament.

6. Christian Realism, therefore, is epistemologically realistic in terms of both metaphysics and morality. (93)

Human Nature

1. Human beings have a twofold nature: we are creatures, and thus human (of the humus, the earth) – finite in awareness, in ability, in mortality. But we are also created in the image of God, and thus enjoy transcendence – to get beyond ourselves to see ourselves, to get beyond the present circumstances to imagine and create a new situation, and to aspire to get beyond ourselves and this world to arrive at a more glorious destiny. (94)

2. Human beings have the ability to choose to a considerable extent what to believe, feel, and do. And yet we are also bound in our beliefs, feelings, and actions, not only by our intrinsic creaturely limitations but also by our sin. (95)

History

1. Human beings can look forward to a great destiny, by the grace of God. This world is not all there is, and there is a better world ahead. (96)

Stackhouse quotes Niebhur:

It is unwise for Christians to claim any knowledge of either the furniture of heaven or the temperature of hell; or to be too certain about any of the details of the Kingdom of God in which history is consummated. (96)

In keeping with Niebuhr's sense of Biblical myth, he also did not believe in the literal resurrection of the body.

2. Meanwhile, however, our duty is to approximate the goodness of that better world, in full and prudent realization of the limitations of this one. (98)

Two observations by Stackhouse:

Niebuhr thus strikes a balance between those who would abandon the world and those who still think we can solve whatever is wrong – or, at least, the Important People can, if they would just get busy. … Niebuhr strives to maintain a realism between cynicism and idealism. (98)

The world, affected by the Fall, is a place in which extraordinary measures are necessary event to approximate God's ideal in this situation – which is all we can accomplish. (99)

Stackhouse points out that Niebuhr thought biblical ideals and universal love were eschatological ideals, unattainable in the interim until he comes again. John Howard Yoder's Politics of Jesus is partly a response to this. Stackhouse suggests that these ideals might have been seen as more meaningful on the individual level versus the societal level in Niebuhr's mind, although in later life, he seemed more optimistic about communities and less so about individuals.

You now have the meat of it. What to make of it all? Tune in tomorrow.

[Previous] [Next]