92 $6661, 63-00204
Landon _
92 N666L 63-OO2O^ $2* CO
Landon 9 Hax^oXd R ed*
Keinhold Hiebulir: a pi?ophe1:ic
voice in our time* Seabur^y
P2?* ft 1962.
KANSAS CITY MO PUBLIC LIBRARY
MAI DEC
Reinhold Niebuhr,
A PROPHETIC VOICE
IN OUR TIME
Essays in Tribute by
PAUL TILLICH
JOHN C. BENNETT
HANS J. MORGENTHAU
HAROLD R. LANDON, Editor
GREENWICH CONNECTICUT 1962
1962 by The Seabury Press, Incorporated
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-18023
Printed in the United States of America
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Charles Scribnex's Sons for permis-
sion to qoote from the published works of Reinhold Niebohr.
FOREWORD
This book is a compilation of the major papers, with the
discussion that followed them, given at the Colloquium in
honor of Reinhold Niebuhr on October 20, 1961, at the
Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, New York City.
It was my pleasure to open the Colloquium and to wel-
come the distinguished guests in the remarks that follow.
It is our purpose in this Colloquium to honor one of the
great contributors to the thinking of our time. There is not
a person in this room who has not been influenced directly
or indirectly by Reinhold Niebuhr. Even the man in the
street, the ordinary citizen, has been affected by the social
and ethical thinking which has grown out of his deep, yet
pragmatic piety.
He has been a teacher's teacher in every field of our
national life. That he has not always been popular was
inevitable. His scorn of secularism is matched by his
criticism of the pseudo-liberal sentimentalities of our cul-
ture. He has always insisted on the Christian and realistic
view which recognizes both the nobility and the misery of
man. He made a whole generation of religions, political,
CITY (MO.) PUBLIC LiBRM?? 5
6300204
FOREWORD
and economic thinkers relearn the English language. In
reminding us that the word radical has to do with the
fundamental and essential nature of men and things, he
has forced us to think clearly about any realistic definition
of human dignity. In his thinking neither Marx nor Mrs.
Grundy has come out very well.
His profound sense of history led him to see man in his
real setting and to know God as one who acts in this
history. This has sharpened our whole awareness of what
Niebuhr himself describes as the incredibilities of history.
We ought also to remember that he himself is one of the
splendid incredibilities of our time. It is no small man who
could define American conservatism as nothing more than
a decadent liberalism, and still end up as the trusted
mentor of some of this country's greatest thinkers and
leaders in religion, politics, and economics.
But this stimulating, and occasionally irritating mind
has a context, and that context is the monumental, gentle,
and patient human being which is its visible sacrament. It
is as much as because of what he is, as because of what he
thinks, that I am privileged to welcome so considerable a
number of our country's distinguished leaders to this Col-
loquium as the guests of our Cathedral Church.
H. W, B. DONTSGAN
e
CONTENTS
Foreword by the Rt Rev. Horace W. B. Donegan, D.D.,
Bishop of New York 5
Editor's Introduction 11
Sin and Grace in the Theology of Reiohold Niebuhr
BY PAUL ULLICH 27
Discussion 42
Reinhold Niebuhr's Contribution to Christian
Social Ethics
BY JOHN C. BENNETT 55
Discussion 80
The Influence of Reinhold Niebuhr in American
Political Life and Thought
BY HANS J. MORGENTHAU 97
Discussion 110
The Response of Reinhold Niebuhr 117
Notes 125
Reinhold Niebuhr:
A PROPHETIC VOICE IN OUR TIME
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
It is difficult today to convey something of the intellectual
ferment and excitement of Union Seminary in the 1930^
when Reinhold Niebuhr was at his prime, and Paul Tillich
had just come. It was a moment of fulfilled time, a kairos,
when suddenly the light of revelation seemed to dawn
upon us, and we began to discard the vapid and senti-
mental illusions that passed for Christianity, and to see
something of the depth and profundity of the Christian
faith.
It was certainly a time when the winds of doctrine
blew hard across Morningside Heights, and Reinhold
Niebuhr was at the vortex of that maelstrom of ideas that
kept the Seminary in turmoil. The whole spectrum of
theological and political opinion was to be seen amongst
the faculty and student body. Dr. Tillich has reminded us
in this Colloquium that if anyone was en kairo, it was
Reinhold Niebuhr in the mid-so's.
The inward revolution in thought was matched by the
outward pace of events: the anxiety of the Depression was
upon us; the Roosevelt administration, in the process of
shoring up the shaking foundations of our society, brought
11
HAROLD R. LANDON
a new dimension into American politics; the Nazi tyranny
was menacing; the evil of Communism was beginning to
show through its Utopian mask; and the threat of war
became more and more imminent, until finally we were
engulfed in it What a time to live and preach! Reinhold
Niebuhr of all men was up to it. By the power of his great
mind and out of the depth of his spirit came a vision of the
Christian faith that held in its grasp the whole plane of
history and saw both the judgment and mercy of God at
work in the catastrophic events of our time.
Edinburgh was having its first air raid when Reinhold
Niebuhr was concluding the first series of the Gifford
Lectures. So absorbed was he in the exposition of The
Nature and Destiny of Man, that he did not realize till
afterwards that his listeners were receiving outward cor-
roboration, in the screaming sirens, of man's tragic destiny.
But Reinhold Niebuhr was expounding a faith that is
Beyond Tragedy, as we see in the remarkable book of
sermons by that name, many of which were delivered in
Union Seminary Chapel, and which for depth of insight
into the social disorder, for keen analysis of the abyss in
human nature, for profound apprehension of the greatness
of God's mercy which is the only final answer to the human
predicament, are unexcelled. He wrote in the Preface:
It is the thesis of these essays that the Christian view of history
passes through the sense of the tragic to a hope and an assur-
ance which is ^beyond tragedy'. The cross, which stands at the
center of the Christian worldview, reveals both the seriousness
of human sin and the purpose and power of God to overcome
it Christianity's view of history is tragic in so far as it recog-
nizes evil as an inevitable concomitant of even the highest
spiritual enterprises. It is beyond tragedy in so far as it does
EDITOR S INTRODUCTION
not regard evil as inherent in existence itself, but as finally
under the dominion of a good God. 1
Here is the authentic Christian faith in the classic
style. These sermons anticipate theological insights which
followed much kter. For example, the remarkable sermon,
"As Deceivers, yet True/' is a profound answer to the so-
called problem of "demythologization," long before it was
called by that name. He says:
For what is true in the Christian religion can be expressed only
in symbols which contain a certain degree of provisional and
superficial deception. . , .
We are, therefore deceivers, yet true, when we insist that
the Christ who died on the cross will come again in power and
glory, that he will judge the quick and the dead and will estab-
lish his Kingdom. We do not believe that the human enterprise
will have a tragic conclusion; but the ground of our hope lies
not in human capacity but in divine power and mercy, in the
character of the ultimate reality, which carries the human
enterprise. 2
These sermons reveal what is the central intent of Nie-
buhr's thought and life: he points to the depth of sin in
human nature in order that man may be led to the heights
of grace. Niebuhr's thought might well be summed up in
these words: "Only the infinite pity of God is equal to the
infinite pathos of human life.** He exposed the universal
corruption of sin in human nature, not because he was a
pessimist or a cynic, but in order that man's final trust
should not be in any human achievement, but only in the
greatness and goodness of God.
This is tke underlying theme of Niebuhr's teaching and
preaching. It is what makes him a prophetic voice in our
time. "Yet so great," he has written, "is the power of
13
HAROLD R. LANDON
human pride that again and again, even within terms of
the Christian faith, man places his essential trust not in
the ultimate character of God but in some achievement of
the human spirit." 3
There are two things that characterize Reinhold Nie-
buhr above everything else. The one is to be found in the
inscription which appeared in one of his early books dedi-
cated to his father who, he said, taught him "that the
critical faculty can be united with a reverent spirit."
Around these two foci intelligence and reverence moves
the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr. His mind explored vast
reaches of history in search, of moral and ethical patterns,
and he was able to open up vistas of meaning in wide
areas of man's experience hitherto unexplored. "His metier,"
in the words of his colleague Paul Scherer, "is to work not
with miniatures but with murals . . . with the spread of
some vast engagements on many fronts, with the impact
of worlds, with the panorama of a civilization, with maps
of centuries and continents in high relief ," 4 To follow the
convolutions of his thought through a jungle of ideas with-
out losing the way was often an exhausting exercise. His
biographer, June Bingham, in her book Courage to Change,
says that he is "forever at war with oversimplification."
Reinhold Niebuh/s primary vocation, it should never be
forgotten, has been to preach the gospel in such a way as
to make it credible to modern men. He found meaning and
coherence in all that his mind explored. He brought new
areas of knowledge in anthropology, psychology, sociol-
ogy, and history into the context of Christian thought This
is the first basic element in his life and thought.
The second is to be seen in this incident which took
14
EDITOR S INTRODUCTION
place at the time of the Gifford Lectures. It may be an
apocryphal story, but it is none the less true and illustrates
the primary motive of his thought. An elderly devout
woman was reported to have said after hearing his lec-
tures on the mysteries of sin and grace, "I dirma ken a
word ye say, but I think you make God very great." This
is the impression he leaves! His intellectual explorations
were always at the service and under the direction of his
deep faith.
Reinhold Niebuhr is not only a thinker, but a man of
affairs. His advice and counsel has been constantly sought
in the highest political circles at home and abroad. In
some ways the most remarkable contribution of his life is
his last published book, The Structure of Nations and
Empires. Here he examines the whole sweep of human
history to show how the configurations of power in nations
and empires seek justice and promote injustice at the same
time and make history a continuous battleground in the
struggle for power. There are, of course, theological over-
tones in it. In some ways it simply spells out in terms of
the collective life of man what is the basic theme of The
Nature and Destiny of Mtfttr-the universal corruption of
human nature which is the taint of sin. The drama of his-
tory corroborates the theme clearly stated in one of the
Thirty-nine Articles of the Book of Common Prayer: "It
is the fault and comrption of tie Nature of every man . . .
whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness
and is of his own nature inclined to evil . . . and this infec-
tion of nature doth remain, yea in them that are regen-
erated** 5 The following passage froia The Structure of
Nations and Empires illustrates this:
HAKOLD K. LANDON
History is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity
are curiously intermingled. Man's freedom constantly creates
the most curious and unexpected and unpredictable emergences
and emergencies in history. . . . But without an empirical in-
quiry into the relation between the contingent and the perma-
nent forces of community, each generation is tempted to exalt
some particular instrument of justice, which has succeeded in
a given instance, as the absolutely essential instrument of jus-
tice; or to attribute injustice to some particular institution or
policy which has been the particular cause of particular evils,
but is falsely understood if interpreted as the final cause of all
social evil.
Our best hope of a tolerable political harmony and of an
inner peace rests upon our ability to observe the limits of
human freedom, even while we responsibly exploit its creative
possibilities. 6
For breadth of mind and grasp of history, this book is
comparable to Toynbee's Study of History. It is an attempt
at a philosophy of history from a Christian point of view.
This brings us to the "continuing dialogue" with his
great friend and colleague, Paul Tillich. When Hitler re-
moved Paul Tillich from his professorship (Tillich says
he had the honor to be the first Christian professor so to be
removed), he did American theology an incalculable serv-
ice, for thus began one of the most interesting collabora-
tions in the history of Christian thought We felt at that
time that these men both spoke the same theological lan-
guage (even when they did not use the same terms) and
moreover had a deep kinship in the hidden recesses of
the spirit, which it has taken these three decades fully to
spell out
The impact of these two men in American theology
has been so great that the focus of attention in theology
16
EDITOR S INTRODUCnON
is now divided between Europe and America. Seldom
have two men who are so creative in thought had the
opportunity for such an intimate dialectic over the course
of so many years. It has been an intensely fruitful ex-
change, and we are fortunate that so much of it has been
made public.
One of the interesting things which this Colloquium
reveals is that Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr are
closer to each other than to their critics, and what is sur-
prising is not so much their differences as their similarities.
In Dr. Tillich's remarkable reply to Dr. John MacKay
(which is the last question and answer in the discussion
following Dr. Tillich's lecture) we see the essential agree-
ment at the very heart of their theology. Reinhold Nie-
buhr's section in The Nature and Destiny of Man entitled
"Grace as Power in, and Mercy Towards, Man" is a perma-
nent contribution to theological writing. Nowhere is more
clearly set forth the ambiguity of sin and grace in the
human personality. It is Reinhold Niebuhr's central con-
cern to show the universality of sin in human nature which
corrupts man's highest achievements, even at the pinnacle
of grace. Dr. Tillich's answer to Dr. MacKay shows how
completely they are in agreement on this point.
Indeed, one could say that no concern has been more
in evidence in Reinhold Niebuhr than to point again and
again in all his profound analyses of the human situation
to the Protestant Principle which Paul Tillich has formu-
lated thus:
The central principle of Protestantism is the doctrine of justi-
fication by grace alone, whkii means that no individual and no
human group can claim a divine dignity for its moral adhieve-
17
HABOLD R. LAKDON
mentSj for its sacramental power, for its sanctity, for its doc-
trine. Protestantism requires that they be challenged by the
prophetic protest, which gives God alone sanctity and denies
every claim of human pride. This protest against itself on the
experience of God's majesty, constitutes the Protestant Prin-
ciple. 7
When Paul Tillich says in the course of his answer to
Dn MacKay: "I don't know how far Niebuhr was also
influenced on this point by the Barthian school; even the
Divine Spirit, who in Christian tradition is that which is
working in us, cannot be experienced so that we can say
1 have it/ We can only say 1 believe that I believe/ *I have
faith that I have faith/ as you can never say directly, *I
have faith/ or *I have the Spirit/ Now here we are at a
point where the dialectics almost never come down to
earth, and if I understand you rightly, then you have
expressed at this moment a criticism which: is against my
own theological structure, but from which I don't know
the way out, in view of the realism about the human
predicament which I share with Niebuhr." This is so like
Reinhold Niebuhr!
On this point Reinhold Niebuhr quotes Paul Tillich in
The Nature and Destiny of Man in that chapter which
deals with the paradox of "Having and Not Having the
Truth/' The quotation is to the effect that we must submit
the idea of justification by faith to the experience of justi-
fication by faith. When a man does this he discovers in all
humility that the truth is that we do not possess the
truth. Here Niebuhr and Tillich are so dose in their think-
ing that they can both quote from each other.
In one of his sermons, Tillich speaks of that matchless
painting of John the Baptist by Matthias Griinewald in
18
EDITOR S INTRODUCTION
which the painter shows John pointing with his finger to
Jesus Christ. "There his whole being is in the finger with
which he points to the cross. This is the greatest symbol
of which I know for the true authority of the Church and
the Bible. They should not point to themselves but to the
reality which breaks again and again through the estab-
lished forms of their authority and through the heart and
form of our personal experience/' 8
This is exactly what Reinliold Niebuhr always at-
tempted to do: his seeming preoccupation with the uni-
versal taint of sin in all man's achievements was but the
other side of his pointing to him in whom there was no sin.
This is the central motive of his life and his thought; to
point to the sinfulness of man only that thus man may be
ready to receive the Divine Redeemer, Here is a charac-
teristic passage in which this is revealed:
There is no conceivable society in which the pride of the com-
munity and the arrogance of its oligarchs must not be resisted.
It is possible to offer this resistance at times in the name of
some minority interest. But the final resistance must come from
the community which knows and worships a God to whom all
nations are subject. Sometimes the testimony of the prophet
of this God speaks in a common voice with the criticism of
political minorities; it may on occasion be very necessary that
the two types of defiance be joined. Yet they are never one and
the same thing. The Christian Church must be and remain a
fellowship of Christians, and Christ is the judge of the self-unll
and self-righteousness of every social group.
Reinhold Niebuhr is criticised for not braving a more
explicit ecclesiology. The reason for this is dear: it was
not his vocation as a prophet who spoke both for and
against the Church. Reinhold Niebufar saw so clearly the
19
HAROLD R. LANDON
sinfulness of the redeemed man, that he was wary of any
theological formulation which allowed room for human
pride to creep in the back door, even if that back door be
the Church. "Moral contrition is the human foundation of
the Church, but God's grace is its completion." 9 Few men
have written more incisively about the Church than does
Niebuhr in this passage:
The Church is that place in human society where men are dis-
turbed by the word of the eternal God which stands as a judg-
ment upon human aspirations. But it is also the place where
the word of mercy, reconciliation and consolation is heard . . .
Here human incompleteness is transcended though not abol-
ished. Here human sin is overcome by the divine mercy, though
man remains a sinner. No church can lift man out of the partial
and finite history in which all human Me stands. Every inter-
pretation of the church which promises an 'efficient grace' by
which man ceases to be man and enters prematurely into the
kingdom of God is a snare and a delusion. The Church is not
the kingdom of God. The Church is the place in human society
where the kingdom of God impinges upon all human enter-
prises through the divine word, and where the grace of God is
made available to those who have accepted his judgment 10
It is true of both Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich
that they have often spoken to those groups in our society
and culture which Paul Tillich calls the latent church. For
Paul Tillich writes, 'There is a church latent in all history
and culture. This insight is deadly for all ecclesiastical
and theological arrogance," 11 It may be true that there is
a certain lack in Reinhold Niebuhr in his doctrine of the
Church., and yet no one in our generation has served the
Church more faithfully, made its doctrine more relevant,
its theology more understandable, its message more avail-
able, its ethic more challenging, its life more authentic and
20
EDITORS ESrraODUCTlON
real, and recalled the Church more nearly to herself than
Reinhold Niebuhr.
While no one insists more strongly on the pervasive-
ness of sin and its universal manifestation in the whole of
man's history, culture, and personality than Reinhold
Niebuhr, he remains unwilling to accept the ontological
terms of Paul Tillich to describe sin. This is perhaps a
logical inconsistency in his thought, for if sin is a universal
fact, it is natural that man should seek some explanation
of what Paul Tillich calls "the transition from essence to
existence universally/' And if Reinhold Niebuhr is willing
to say (as Paul Tillich quotes him in this Colloquium)
that we should no longer use such words as original sin
but should replace them by terms something like universal
estrangement then a movement of thought in the direc-
tion of ontology would seem to be inevitable. When Tillich
uses such a phrase as "sin is a fact before it is an act/*
Reinhold Niebuhr is afraid that man's sense of responsi-
bility for this act may be lost in his acceptance of it as a
fact. Yet there is healing in the mere recognition of the
fact that sin is man's universal destiny, and when Paul
Tillich writes, "Salvation is healing from the cosmic dis-
ease that prevents love/* there is somehow the beginning
of grace in the mere acceptance of this as a fact
Perhaps it should be recognized that both Reinhold
Niebuhr and Paul Tillich are right at this point, and that
the witness of both is needed as the necessary corrective
of the one to the other. For if one accepts the analysis of
the existential situation as seen by Niebuhr and Tillich,
it is inevitable to try and relate this to the nature of ulti-
mate reality as TiBidi does in his ontological descriptions;
HAROLD R. LAJSfBON
but having done so, the danger which Reinhold Niebuhr
sees of depersonalizing the Christian message and robbing
man of his sense of personal responsibility for sin becomes
real, and his warning relevant. At this point they axe both
in agreement and disagreement; and the mixture of agree-
ment and disagreement is important and should be main-
tained.
Reinhold Niebuhr is criticized in this Colloquium for
"lack of vision/' This criticism, however, is based on a
misunderstanding of the vocation of Reinhold Niebuhr.
He never felt it was his responsibility as a teacher of
Christian Ethics and as a prophetic voice to give any kind
of blueprint for society. He preferred to maintain the ten-
sion of what he called the "impossible possibility" of the
absolute love command of the Gospel, even though man's
social life or group behavior demands some more prac-
ticable guides. His real vision, strangely enough, is that of
the community of grace, the Church, where man receives
the word that both judges and redeems, the place, to use
Dr. Tillich's language, where man "accepts that he is ac-
cepted though unacceptable/* It is fascinating that Nie-
buhr should say of the contemporary existentialists, as
quoted by Dr. Tillich, "What they cannot accept is that
they are accepted, namely, forgiveness and grace. 3 * His
vision of the community of grace which is the Church is
not fully spelled out in a doctrine of the Church. For Rein-
hold Niebuhr the Church is not the kingdom of God, even
though he might perhaps be willing to say that the Church
is a sacrament of the kingdom.
On the basis of three years experience of teaching at a
theological school in East Africa, I can say that nothing is
22
EDITORS INTRODUCTION
more needed in the Church in Africa, and I believe in the
so called uncommitted nations of the world, as the pro-
phetic vision and understanding of Reinhold Niebuhr. The
explosions which are blowing the white man out of so
much of Africa and Asia are nothing but the reaction of
the so called primitive people to the arrogance and will-to-
power of the representatives of Western culture, an arro-
gance which is compounded of the pride not only of the
white man but also of the Christian man. Here we see the
profound truth of a characteristic statement by Reinhold
Niebuhr: "There is an element of positive evil in the most
virtuous life." We have to remember that some of the
worst racist policies and practices are the product of those
who are avowedly Christian. It is this message of the pro-
found truth of Christian faith which will enable Reinhold
Niebuhr to be heard on this and the other side of not only
the Iron Curtain, but the Color Curtain, or whatever
separates man from his true humanity. He has established
the relevance of the Christian message for the problems
of our age and of every age.
In the closing chapters of Moral Man and Immoral
Society Niebuhr has a vision and writes thus;
Yet there is beauty in our tragedy. We are, at least, rid of some
of our illusions. We can no longer buy the highest satisfaction
of the individual life at the expense of social injustice. We can-
not build our individual ladders to heaven and leave the total
human enterprise unredeemed of its successes and corruptions.
In the task of that redemption, the most effective agents will be
men who have substituted some new illusions for the aban-
doned ones. The most important of these illusions is that the
collective life of masteid cast achieve perfect justice. It is a
very valuable illusion for the moioeat, for justice cannot be
23
HAROLD R. LANDON
approximated if the hope of its perfect realization does not
generate a sublime madness in the soul. Nothing but such
madness will do battle with malignant powers and spiritual
wickedness in high places. The illusion is dangerous because it
encourages terrible fanaticism. It must, therefore, be brought
under the control of reason. One can only hope that reason will
not destroy it before its work is done. 12
Here surely is sublime vision in which again we see the
highest critical faculty under the control of a deeply
reverent spirit.
Reinhold Niebuhr was for more than thirty years a
teacher, and part of the rich legacy he left behind is a
whole generation of students who remember him above
all as a human being so free of pretence, so honest in soul,
so humble in mind, so reverent in spirit* His sister, Hulda
Niebuhr, has a book of stories for children with the title,
Greatness Passing By. The participants in the Reinhold
Niebuhr Colloquium, as well as countless men and women
who knew Reinhold Niebuhr, apply to him the words of
John Drinkwater's poem, "Those who worship greatness
passing by, themselves are great" Those of us who knew
and loved Reinhold Niebuhr knew a great human being
who changed the climate of theology and who spoke with
the power of a prophet in our time. He has given us his
own fine statement of the test of true prophecy:
All of us will always have something of the false prophet in us,
wherefore we ought to speak humbly. We will mistake our own
dreams for the word of God. Sometimes sloth will tempt us to
make a superficial analysis of the moral and social facts with
which we are dealing; sometimes pride will tempt us to speak
as i we had already attained or were already made perfect;
EDITOR S INTRODUCTION
sometimes cowardice will tempt us to make concessions to the
immense, blind and stubborn self-righteousness with which
every culture, every nation and every individual wards off the
word of God.
Thus the Church can disturb the security of sinners, only
if it is not itself too secure in its belief that it has the word of
God. The prophet himself stands under the judgment which
he preaches. If he does not know that, he is a false prophet 13
HAEOLD R. LANDON
PAUL TILLICH:
Sin and Grace in the Theology
ofReinhold Niebuhr
PAUL TILLICH:
Mr. Chairman and Friends; I must really say "Friends."
I rarely have had such an assembly of friends which I
found in the first (and now almost 30) years that I am
in this country. And now all of them are here.
I consider it a great honor and at the same time a great
joy to participate in this meeting. When I thought about
the possibilities for such a speech, it proved to be an im-
possible task if it had to be done in the way of an ordinary
speech, So I decided not to give an ordinary speech, and
not to tell you what you all know much better: namely,
Reinhold Niebuhr's theology, and especially his doctrine
of sin, guilt, and grace. But I decided to ask you to par-
ticipate with me in our personal encounter personal in
the sense of an exchange of thoughts about these and
related subjects which is now, indeed, going on for almost
30 years.
I look back in this moment to a telephone call which
came to ine in my preliminary place of exile in July, 1933,
at the Baltic Sea, and on the other side of the telephone
was ReinhoH Nfebdbr, of whom I only knew the name
because his brother had Just translated my book The Re-
PAUL T1LLICH
ligicws Situation. And he asked me to come to America,
because lie had read in the newspapers that I was de-
prived of my position. And then, after much hesitation, I
came in November of the same year.
I was received in Union. All of the Union professors
had given a little of their old furniture in the apartment
which now the doctor has by far the largest I always
had the feeling that I was in the apartment of the Bishop
of New York and not of a little professor. In any case, I
do not forget this. I want to mention that the first human
being who greeted us in Union Seminary was Mrs. Nie-
buhr.
Then I remember our walks along Riverside Drive in
the two years in which Reinie worked on his magnum
opus, The Nature and Destiny of Man, and we talked
about many of the problems which then came in such a
wonderful way into this great book. We two at that time
were characterized as the intruders of neo-orthodoxy into
the beautiful life of American liberal theology, and I still
find in some provincial little magazines that I am charac-
terized in memory of these years as neo-orthodox.
In any case, we worked together, we talked together,
we lived nearly together. But we also developed inde-
pendently of each other, and slowly the different charac-
teristics became clearer and sharper. His background was
a social-ethical passion from the very beginning of his
ministerial work in a parish. My development, on the basis
of the German background and German classical philoso-
phy, went in another direction, more in the individual,
psychological, and metaphysical, or ontological direction.
This different basic interest, this fundamental difference
30
SIN AND GRACE
in the structure of our being, came out also in those con-
troversies winch we had in public: my criticism of his
book and his criticism of my book Systematic Theology.
Our conversation developed, as a good conversation
should, in a mixture of agreement and disagreement. Since
the subject I am to speak about is that point in which
there is the most agreement and disagreement, the con-
cept of sin, I want to concentrate mostly on this. Grace
is a concept in which I do not see much to discuss between
him and me; but about sin and guilt we had conversations
which have lasted now many years.
And now back to our common start in and after the
First World War. What had grasped both of us was the
human situation seen in the light of the political and social
catastrophes which we in central Europe experienced
directly, and certainly existentially, as one says today. But
he, with his ability of empathetic participation in far
removed historical events, was with us at that time, al-
though we did not know him and we did not know that
he was with us. Our problem at that time was to find the
way between the Social Democratic utopianism on the
one hand, which was unaware of the human situation of
man's existential estrangement and the ecclesiastical, the
Lutheran transcendentalism, on the other hand, which
was aware, certainly, of the human situation, but did not
believe that this situation allows any transformation. And
between these two poles we stood when we came out of
the First World War: between the movement for social
justice represented by the Social Democratic Party and
the movement in the merely vertical direction represented
by the Lutheran
PAUL TELLICH
In this country the situation was different. There was
the social gospel theology. There was the effect the 18th
century still had on this country in the beginning of the
20th century (much more than it did in Germany). There
was the problem of liberal thinking with respect to the
human predicament. Both problems were very near to
each other; and so it was possible that Richard Niebuhr,
when he read my book The Religious Situation, which
appeared about 1926, translated it, and this was the fore-
runner of my friendship also with Reinhold Niebuhr. Our
work in Germany, our Religious Socialist movement, was
at that time a limited success. Later on it became, espe-
cially in present-day Germany, and also in other countries,
indirectly a success. But at that time it was very much
hidden, very small, and then removed by Hitler immedi-
ately. But what happened here is in some way a real suc-
cess story (if you want to use this disagreeable word)
namely, the way in which this one man, Reinhold Nie-
buhr, was able to change the pacifist mood, the liberal
theological attitude, the so-called scientific theology, and
introduce something entirely new for the situation as he
found it. This occurred almost suddenly. It was about ten
years after the same thing had happened in Germany.
With the death of Haraack and Troeltsch, suddenly the
theology which up to this time had ruled many German
faculties lost any actual influence. It simply disappeared
under the tremendous impact of the Baxthian theology,
or it went into the underground. When I remember what
happened here, it was similarly astonishing. When I
came, everybody asked only one question whatever was
discussed theologically namely the question, "What do
SIN AND GRACE
you think about pacifism?" When I gave a lecture on the
Trinity, or on the Biblical studies in the Fourth Gospel,
immediately when the discussion started a student got up
and asked, "What do you think about pacifism?" Of course
I was hesitating on this point, because I never was and
even now am not a pacifist. This disappeared after Reinie
had made his tremendous attack. This question went into
the background and it was replaced by the problem of
the human predicament. Now I cannot evaluate this. I
believe it was absolutely necessary, and I tried to support
him as much as I could in my lectures and early writings;
but he was the man who changed the climate in an almost
sudden way.
Then we both tried to systematize our thought, to or-
ganize it, and the difference of methods came out. He is
basically a Biblicist, not in the bad sense, but in the sense
that all his writings continuously refer to the Biblical
foundations of the Christian faith, and especially of the
doctrine of man. He has a rather low evaluation of the
non-Biblical literature, especially if this literature has the
bad luck to have been written by a philosopher from Plato
on. He has a special method of dealing with representa-
tives of Western philosophy, a method which one perhaps
could call the critical-comparing method. He quotes a
passage of Paul, and then in opposition to it a passage
of Plato, or of Spinoza, or even worse, of Hegel; and then
he says: "Now here you have the Biblical truth and there
you have the philosophical error" When I read the first
volume, The Nature and Destiny of Man, in which the
problem of sin is mostly discussed, I was surprised to find
so often this word error; and I think if Niebuhr would
33
PAUL TELLICH
ask himself now whether it is justified in the light of his
evaluation of the human predicament, in which the Bibli-
cal theologian also happens to be, to call philosophical
opinions simply and directly and unambiguously error. I
believe he would say, "Yes, this was an error!" Now (since
I compare myself) let me say what I think we should do
with the writings of philosophers and other men of the
past, I would here reintroduce the concept Kairos, the
right time, which is a very difficult one and has been
criticized, especially in view of the historical events after
the early 20's of this century. If we deal with sayings of
the classical philosophers from Socrates till the present
I would go a little bit farther back to my beloved Par-
menides we should first of all show that they have written
en kairo, that their writings cannot simply be taken out
of the total historical situation in which they were created.
The dialectics of history itself partly refuted them, partly
preserved them. This is dialectical thinking; this is not
thinking in the method of critical-comparison between
what is true and what is error.
Here you see one very interesting point in which I
understood why I never was satisfied with Niebuhr's treat-
ment of philosophers. They were not seen en kairo; they
were seen only ex contrario, i.e., out of the opposite. Now,
of course, this has consequences. A week ago we had a
wonderful talk in Cambridge for one to two hours, and
he said to me quite spontaneously, "I have accepted your
point of view in this respect. We cannot use any longer
the language of the tradition if we want to communicate
anything to the people of our time." As an example, he
34
SIN AND GRACE
gave me his use of the words sin, and especially original
sin, in his book. For me this was a confirmation of my very
desperate, difficult, and often failing attempt to use
another language than the traditional, especially (and
here I agree fully with him) with respect to these words.
The words original sin shouldn't be used at all. He ac-
ceptedif I understood him rightly something like uni-
versal estrangement instead of the term original or heredi-
tary sin. But this is an expression of something in him
about which I will speak later on. In his age and bodily
weakness, he is still able to translate his own earlier
language, or at least, is trying to do it. This is one point.
A second point was his attitude toward Existentialism.
You know that his books start with a description of the
easy conscience of modern man. He described this in all
the different ways; and now he has seen that the under-
ground of this seemingly easy conscience which for a
long time and always in some places was a very uneasy
conscience has come into the foreground and become
visible in the whole Existentialist literature. He says: "I
know this now; we cannot speak so easily any longer of
an easy conscience. One thing is lacking in all this litera-
ture. They are unwilling to accept not so much my de-
scriptions of the human predicament if only these terrible
words are removed that they are accepted, to accept
forgiveness and grace, and the possibility of transforma-
tion." This I heard from him far the first time last week
when he said: "The difficulty at present is not so much to
bring modern man to the acknowledgmaQt of Hs estrange-
ment and predicament, but it is much mora to bring hmi
35
PAUL TILLICH
to the in-$pite-of in the message of Justification." I can
only say that I believe that this is a very profound and
true affirmation.
The only question I would have here is: Isn't there
also in these men let us think not of a bad philosopher,
but of a good novelist on the human predicament, namely,
Kafka isn't there also in his description of man's predica-
ment common grace, a hidden grace, effective? Why is it
possible that in the last ten years Kafka has become the
saint of all the colleges and universities where I had the
privilege to speak? Because he has the grace to show these
students, who perhaps had that easy conscience of which
Niebuhr speaks so often, that they have no justification
for such an easy conscience. As Luther always said, the
beginning of grace is the hell of repentance, of aware-
ness of what one is. So I would say in these men there is
the beginning of grace. But I don't know whether Niebuhr
would go as far as that
Then I come to the most controversial point between
us: namely, his rejection of all kinds of ontology (if ap-
plied to Christianity of course). I don't want to speak
about this in general terms, but in terms of his doctrine
of sin. What is so interesting is that which I find so often
in all anti-philosophical theologians: in the moment in
which they start speaking and using abstract terms, they
immediately become ontologists against their own will.
I prefer to be an ontologist with my will, because then
you can avoid things*
Even here something happened in our talk which was
very interesting. Often I have bothered him with his
word, "Sin is not necessary but inevitable." Now this is
36
SIX AND GRACE
logical nonsense, and that is just what he told me! "But,"
he said, "this logical nonsense we have to take." Here I
agree with him, only I wouldn't call it logical nonsense.
I would say that it is the right description of the polarity
of freedom and destiny in which we all find ourselves, and
which even support each other as polarities always do.
We cannot be free without destiny; we cannot have des-
tiny without freedom. If you bring this conflict down to
necessity and contingency, then, of course, it is logical
nonsense. Necessity and contingency are terms which be-
long to natural science. If we come to a description of
the human situation, as we are aware of it in ourselves,
then we must describe it in this double way. So I would,
and did very often, accept his term inevitable. Then it is
necessary to say, "This is not an escape from ontology,
but what is behind it is good ontology: namely, the unity
of universal destiny combined with personal freedom and
responsibility/* And that is what he really wants, to avoid
implying that sin is something essential. And here again
I was astonished. How often he uses this word essential
which I remember from my school education is a very old
classical word of ontology, or as it was formerly called,
metaphysics. How impossible it is to escape ontology if
you try to make any Christian doctrine understandable at
afll Here is his realism, which gives him the Augustinian
and Protestant position of inevitability, and his moral seri-
ousness which makes him emphasize responsibility. But
he still did not like my phrase, transition from essence
to existence urm>&rsaHy. I do not like it either, and forbid
ray students afl die time to use it m their sennom. But
nevertheless, I think as an analytic ferai, it is quite ade-
37
PAUL TELLJCH
quate to the situation and not different from what Nie-
buhr means.
There are other particular problems in which ontology
breaks through in him. Here again something came out in
our speech a week ago. He derives sin basically from
pride. There is no word in all his writings and preaching
which is more often used than the word pride. Since the
appearance of his book I have always said: the word
pride is a particular moral category, while hubris, the
Greek for self-elevation, what he really wants to say, is
an ontological category and refers to the whole of man,
To my surprise, even without talking about this problem,
he spontaneously told me, "This is the other point in
which you were right. I should not have called it pride,
because this is a particular moral category, and we have
to understand it in a much more universal way." But this
means that the moment he uses a term like self-elevation.,
or the Greek word hubris in its original meaning, we are
in the midst of ontology; and it is really great to realize
how open he is in this respect.
Another point: in his book The Self and the Dramas of
History, he says: "Here is something which is beyond any
ontology, namely the self." But to define ontology in this
connection he uses Aristotle's definition of man as ra-
tional structure. But he defines reason in a much narrower
way than Aristotle or classical theology. It is what I call
the "calculating" reason, or the "technical" reason. It is
not the logos type of reason. And, of course, if you do this,
then this is much too little. But when we use the word
self, we use an ontological category, and a very funda-
mental ontological category of highest importance:
38
SIX AND GRACE
namely, the ontological fact that man is the only com-
pletely centered being, and alone has a completely cen-
tered self. So here again, in order to say something with
which we can for the most part perhaps agree, he uses
ontology and cannot escape it.
Then I come to the problem of the relation of sin to
nature. Now you know, perhaps, that Niebuhr and I often
walked through nature. It was mostly Riverside Park, but
anyhow there are some very beautiful trees; and while he
developed his future big book, I sometimes was deviated
by a tree, or the river, or clouds behind it, and suddenly
I noticed he didn't care for this at all. When I told him
that I cared for this, he called me a German Romanticist.
Now this very nice controversy has much deeper philo-
sophical implications. It has the implication that the rela-
tionship of nature and sin is seen by him. in a way which
makes nature simply innocent. This makes it impossible
to understand why nature in man is certainly not innocent,
and how nature in man can be saved, if nature universally
cannot be saved. This whole vision, which we have in
many of the specially Deutero-Paulinian writings but also
in his genuine writings, this vision of the belongingness of
nature and man, is something which I missed in our dis-
cussions. So he said, against all mythology, that one
should not use animal symbols, like wolf or others, for
aggressive human instincts. But I think the myth is right
in doing it, because we are all this also; all levels of reality
are in us, and if the whole of these levels does not stand
under tibe problem of grace, I do not see how you can
isolate man. In tibe social respect, he never does it There
he sees what tike power structure is, and be never makes
39
PAUL TTT.TJCH
this distinction. In individual life lie has still I have the
feeling a remnant of liberal Pelagianism in that he sepa-
rates man so strongly from nature.
Very interesting are his statements about man and the
natural necessity of death. Here he is a better ontologist
than Paul, and he knows this and turns against Paul with
respect to the relationship of sin and death. Paul is am-
biguous at this point, but in any case there are words in
which it seems as if Paul derives death from sin; and Nie-
buhr again in a deep ontological insight knows that
death belongs to finitude, and that the conquest of death
is given to man only as a particular gift on the basis of his
relationship to God. Therefore I am very glad that at this
point he denies the superstitious idea that man's spiritu-
ality changes the ontological structure of nature.
But there are other elements: for instance, the unity
of body and soul, which as a good Old Testament scholar
he always emphasizes, rejecting the pseudo-Platonic
(Plato was much better than this ) idea of the immortality
of the soul. But in any case, here again we must ask the
question, What does this mean if you don't speak of the
immortality of the soul? What does eternal life then
mean? And this is not so easy in view of the fact that we
are dying.
Then something which surprised me: the doctrine of
the Fall with the transhuinan elements in it. Here he be-
comes completely cosmological that means also a special
form of ontology.
Here he goes into angelology. (That's too difficult for
me, not only the idea but also the word. Much easier for
me is the idea and the word satwialagy.) And it's very
SIN ANT GBACE
interesting that he also says that man is not the cause of
sin. Here other more embracing structures are effective,
but not in such a way that they force man. Niebuhr always
keeps responsibility, but he has this vision; and, therefore
I don't understand rightly why he criticizes Kant's doc-
trine of the perversion of the will in the transcendence.
This is what Kant really wanted to say: the transcendent
fall. It is not a literalistic myth, but something which
shows the universality in which all beings are.
Now this is enough; I was only asked to give a few
ideas about the basic attitude of Reinie. I basically agree
with his description of human predicament. I do not agree
with special points of theological formulations with re-
spect to the doctrine of man. But it was a great experience,
and decisive for my own development, to have this ever
on-going talk with him as a friend.
Here I admire something, and want to close with this:
the mixture of a definite structure with admirable flexi-
bility in a man of his age, his character, and his creativity.
He has at the same time a clear profile and a remaining
openness. Few better things can be said of a man of his
achievement, his work, and his age. My only hope is that
these living dialectics will go on for a long time.
41
DISCUSSION:
Question (Dr. John Hutchison): Professor Tillich, to
press you a little further on your own use of the word
ontological, particularly in relation to Niebuhr's argument
on that point, I have a feeling that he has rejected the
word as you have used it sometimes, when he has felt
that it has been a particular kind of ontology namely,
Neo-Platonic. The word ontology covers a lot of different
kinds of metaphysics and ontologies, and perhaps in his
attacks upon you he has been concentrating on what he
has thought to be your preoccupation with a particular
ontology.
Professor TiUich: I am not so sure about that. We have
discussed that point, for instance, in the transition from
essence to existence, where he uses the word essence and
in other places existence and predicament. I don't see that
he criticizes me here (Charles Hartshorne 1 always does)
from the point of view that I am too static, as against his
philosophy of becoming which he has from Whitehead.
It's not this kind of difference. I haven't found in his writ-
ing any philosopher who does not fall into the errors
which he reflates. That seems to me to speak more for the
SIN AN1> GRACE
general rejection of this land of language. Of course, if it
were simply Parmenidean against Heraclitean, then we
could easily come to terms, because he wouldn't go as far
as Whitehead and Hartshorne to speak of the developing
God. But the difference is more than this. He has the
feeling and, I think, believes that ontology deperson-
alizes the whole Christian message. Of course, it would
do so if the living symbols were abolished by abstract
terminology. But what theologians have done, if they
used philosophical concepts, was not to replace the sym-
bols but to interpret them, to make the symbols clear to
those categories of our understanding with which we are
able to grasp the meaning of symbols, and of this he is
afraid, of course.
Question (Professor WiJhelm Pauck): Isn't the opposition
to ontology, on the part of a man like Niebuhr, more an
opposition to the system, to the tendency on the part of
the metaphysician to want to say something about every-
thing, so that the whole universe, the whole cosmos is
somehow penetrated by this reason, or whatever it is that
the ontologist or the metaphysician uses to explain the
mysteries of life? And the opposition of Niebuhr is against
the pretension, the presumptuousness, the hubris, the
pride of the system in the ontologist and the metaphysi-
cian, and not so much to their language. Therefore, Nie-
buhr can use metaphysical, ontological terms even from
different lands of philosophical and metaphysical systems.
But that he does use this language and these terms does
not imply that he is an ontologist, therefore, or must be-
come an OBtologist under the compulsion to develop a
43
PAUL TTTJ.TCH
system, i.e., to say something coherent about everything,
from God who is all in all to himself.
Professor TiUich: Now I have the feeling that Niebuhr has
not one tenth of the passion against the system which you
revealed in the way in which you spoke of it. In his mag-
num opus (The Nature and Destiny of Man) he speaks
about many things. Although he has not three volumes of
systematic theology as I hope to have, he has two volumes
as I also have at present.
Question (Professor Richard Kroner): I am also a little
bewildered when you always talk about ontology. You
know when you came, you told me that I should never
forget the Bible and the Biblical God. Then I was the
philosopher and you were the theologian. [Professor Til-
lick: We turned around.] I am a little bewildered that the
word ontology was not used by philosophers after Kant.
Kant was supposed to have killed forever the very pos-
sibility of ontology. Kant was using epistemology, ethics,
and philosophy of religion and philosophy of history in
pkce of ontology. In any case, philosophy was concerned
with subject and not with being as such. Why do you now
use the word ontology so much? Are you influenced by
Heidegger perhaps? Heidegger had a special reason for
reintroducing being into philosophy. I have the feeling
that you use the word ontology as almost equivalent to
the word philosophy, or the word metaphysics, or to any
branch of philosophy in contrast with theology. Niebuhr
is right when he defends the ethical or moral meaning of
sin against you. You make it too much cosmologic, but I
wouldn't enter into this.
44
SIN ANB GRACE
Professor Tillich: First of all, your suspicion is justified. I
think Heidegger has indeed reintroduced the term on-
tology as a fundamental part of philosophy, not identical
with all philosophy but only with the fundamental part;
and I was very glad for this, because the word meta-
physics cannot be used in this country. Metaphysics means
looking at the clouds: meta above the physical world.
This has nothing to do with the real meaning of the word
metaphysics, but this is the popular understanding or mis-
understanding of the word metaphysics., even in high aca-
demic circles. For this reason of communication I avoid
the word metaphysics. Perhaps one day this is no longer
necessary; but for the time being I am very glad that
many people who wouldn't dare to use the word meta-
physics any more, because that would bring them into this
trans-nebular realm, use the word ontology. They know
that simply means an analysis of the structure and charac-
ter of being being-as-such, and not special realms of
being. That is indeed what I mean, and in this I confess
I am much nearer to my Catholic friends and critics of my
theology (like Father Weigel and others) than to those
Protestants who come out of the Ritschlian school.
Question (Professor Jacob Taubes): The remarks of Pro-
fessor Pauck and Professor Kroner remind me of George
Bernard Shaw's saying: the news about the death of
ontology is greatly exaggerated. You know tihat that was
once the case when the news passed around that he died.
He wrote a letter to The Times saying "It's greatly exag-
gerated." And I think I am forced to take sides here with
Professor TiHidbL Obviously, if we say anything, fen: ex-
45
PAUL TILLICH
ample, that the se]f is X or Y, we are making a statement
about the self as a being and, therefore, you have the
ontological question. Surely and that's the point at which
I would like to ask for clarification I think that Professor
Tillich and Heidegger would be the first ones to acknowl-
edge it to speak about being in relation to the self de-
mands different categories than in speaking about nature.
The ancient ontology, the ontology of the classics, is meta-
physics, I would like to ask, and this is a question to you,
Professor Tillich, whether modern ontology, starting al-
ready from Kant on is not in a sense meta-historical if we
may use the word meta-history in the same way as the
ancients used the term metaphysics after Aristotle.
Professor Tillich: Yes, I would accept this suggestion very
gladly. But I would say that as the Greeks had their pre-
Augustinian interpretation of history in spite of their
metaphysics, so we cannot have meta-history without also
having metaphysics.
Question (Professor Henry Nelson Wieman): I may not
understand you, Professor Tillich, but in the way that I
do understand you, you identify God with being. Being
cannot be characterized; to characterize it in any way it
becomes a kind of being. Therefore, when God is charac-
terized in any way, he becomes a symbol of being-itself;
being-itself is unknowable because it can have no charac-
ter whatsoever and, therefore, God is not knowable except
in the form of a symbol which represents the unknowable.
Am I rigjit?
Professor Tillich: Yes, but you are not right when you say,
as so many people said in criticism, that I identify God
46
SIN AND GRACE
with being. I say that the first question of every child,
and of every undistorted philosopher who still has the
metaphysical quality of the naive child, every such human
being asks when he hears about God and starts to think,
"Is God?" What does it mean when we say that God is?
To this question I answer: You can never say that he is a
being. If you ask this question you must say with respect
to the problem of being, he is being-itself. He is esse qua
esse. Here I am in the scholastic tradition. That is the first
thing. But this is not the whole thing and, therefore, the
word identification is a word invented not by you but by
others for polemical reasons. What I really say about God,
first, is that he is life; and the word life has much more
weight in the description than the word being. And then
I say he is spirit. And then I say he is related, and so on.
This traditional classical statement that the question of
the being of God must be answered by the formula that
he is not a being but being-itself, the power of being in
all being this simple thing was a shock for the nominalis-
tic tradition in which most universities and theological
schools find themselves. For this reason this question
played such a role. But we shouldn't go to my thinking,
but to Niebuhr's.
Question (Dr. John Hutchison): What happened to sin?
Is that an ontological category in the terms with which
you have now characterized ontology? Can you handle sin
as an ontological category?
Professor TilMch: Yes, now I will tell you what my teacher
Martin Kahler said. He defines sin as wiesen wieder-
nichtkeit which means "contradiction to essence." And I
47
PAUL XTU.TCH
am convinced that this went deep into my unconscious,
and that out of this much of this idea came. In this sense
I would say, "Yes." But when we come to the question,
What is the essence which we contradict? then this es-
sence is amongst others the polarity of freedom and des-
tiny, including therefore responsibility and tragedy, and
so on.
Question (Professor Daniel Williams): Is there not, Dr.
Tillich, another facet of the difference between your
method and Niebuhr's? It seems to me it is not the ques-
tion of system, not even the question about reason, but a
strong tendency on his part to rely on a kind of intuition,
or insight, or immediate appropriation of revelation as
something given, which breaks through all ordinary cate-
gories; whereas in your view revelation is something more
general, more open to rational reflection in ontological
terms. I'm thinking about the influence on Dr. Niebuhr
of Unamuno, which he records in those early dialogues,
and the paradoxical, the super-rational character of revela-
tion. What I should like to ask you is: How far do you
agree with this? Is ontology possible without revelation?
Does ontological reflection itself depend upon a kind of
revelation? It seems to me that one kind of answer puts
you much farther from Niebuhr, and another land of an-
swer would put you much closer if you both depend on
something transrational, something given, in order to ar-
rive at ontological truth at all.
Professor Tillich: If I understood you rightly, then I be-
lieve that I could say with Niebuhr that revelatory experi-
ences underlie all cultures and religions. I would probably
48
SIN AND GHACE
say this. But after having said this, I would say, Let's try
to describe phenomenologically such revelatory experi-
ences. How do they look? Here I would go much farther
than he does, and than Earth does. I think I told you about
a talk I had last July with Karl Earth in Basle. After his
daughter-in-law heard my lectures in Chicago she said:
"Now I understand what the difference is between Earth
and you. You start from below, namely, from the human
situation and go up; and he starts from above, he starts
with the Trinity immediately in the first volume, and then
goes down as much as possible." I was very much im-
pressed by this description because I felt there was a basic
truth in it. When I told this to Karl Earth, he was equally
struck. He was absolutely excited about it and said, "Yes,
I start from above, I have a vision as if a light came from
above, and there I start/' Has is probably the meaning of
your question, or at least part of it. Now I don't deny
Earth's way of beginning as a possibility. I think it*s un-
sound theology, but certainly its religiously possible.
When we start from the human situation and first ask
the question, then I have always said, "The answer can
never be derived from the question just because of man's
existential situation.'* We must also have the experience
which I call revelatory in a universal sense. I believe that
all culture and religion is based on such revelatory experi-
ences. And if you ask about ontology, then I believe it
was the revelatory experiences, which are beautifully de-
scribed, for instance, in Walter Otto's (not Rudolph
Otto's) description erf the gods of Greece and the coming
of Dionysius, out of which Greek culture came. Here you
see how revelatory experience grasped in an ecstatic way
49
PAUL TILLICH
a nation, and out of this, the great Greek philosophy
could develop. In this sense I would say there is first a
revelatory experience, The ontological analysis and de-
scription of it is something which is based on revelatory
experience. Such categories as being and becoming, as in
Parmenides and Heraclitus, or as the idea, the essence, the
intuition of the soul of the pure essences all these have a
very particular background in the revelatory experiences
of the Greeks. Here we come to the concept of reason,
and I would say there is a real conflict here between
Niebuhr and myself. He devaluates reason and I still stick
to the classical concept of reason as logos in the universal
sense.
Question (Professor Liston Pope): Professor Tillich, I once
went with Richard Niebuhr to hear Reinhold Niebuhr
speak. I suppose I should not quote Richard in his absence.
But I am sure he has said this to Reinhold many times. I
turned to him and said, "What did you think of the lec-
ture?'' And he said, "I don't see how Reinie talks so much
about sin without talking more about grace/' You didn't
say very much today about Niebuhr's view of grace. Do
you think he has developed that side of his theology ade-
quately, or do you think he will be remembered primarily
as a critic and analyst of sin?
Professor Tittich: I feel that the impact he has made on the
whole situation did not come from his doctrine of grace,
which is the Protestant doctrine of Justification with some
elements of Catholic substantial thinking. I think we need
this absolutely in Protestantism. For this reason I agree
SIX AND GRACE
with him, but I don't think that this side of him you see
he also spoke about everything in spite of Bill Pauck.
When somebody says, Why don't you talk more about and
so and so? then I often said, "I did." But that doesn't help.
The impact which one makes is usually determined not
only by what one does, but also the situation in which the
listeners are; and the situation in this country was such
that whatever he would have said about grace would not
have made the tremendous impact which his analysis of
the human situation has made. And, therefore, I believe
that we must simply accept and this is also a criticism
of the system. Here I agree with you that the system helps
us only has helped me always to discover the relation-
ships of ideas. But the system as it is finally elaborated has
a limited effect. Those elements in the system which have
been written with the lif eblood of the author, but not with
the logical consistency with which he draws the lines from
one thought to the other, have the greatest effect. I could
show this in all great systems, which always as you
rightly say speak about everything. They have to do so
in order to show the consistency of their thinking. If they
don't do it, the students come and say, You said something
inconsistent; and then the systematician is completely lost.
Therefore, this must be done. But when it is done, the im-
pactand I am so glad that you ask this question is con-
ditioned by the kairos. This is as much valid of Niebuhr
as of any of those philosophers of the past who had their
impact not with the whole of their system but with that
which was en kairo. And if somebody was en kairo then
it was Niebuhr in the thirties of this century.
51
PAUL THJLICH
Question (Dr. John MacKay): I wanted to express what for
me has been the chief concern and problem in Niebuhr's
thought. It is ontological in character and it appears to me
to be the problem which contemporary theology tends to
avoid. I refer to the question of what St. Paul might call
"the new man in Christ/' The question I would raise is,
does the Christian man or the "new man" constitute a
unique ontological reality? I might say that way back in
the early thirties I used to discuss this with Earth as he was
when he came to Bonn and I came to know him first. I feel
that he has tended to change in his conception and to at-
tach more reality to Christian experience and the ontologi-
cal reality of "the new man in Christ." I would ask you, sir,
whether you feel that Niebuhr considers that there is an
ontological reality in the "new man" in the classical, Bib-
lical, Christian sense that crosses the boundaries of Roman
Catholicism, Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy, and
what your own view is of that ontological reality as differ-
ing from those who are involved simply in the human
situation?
Professor Tittich: It's very difficult to combine the concept
of new being to which you, as I understand you, John,
refer in connection with the two concepts essential and
existential being. The new being is new insofar as it can-
not be derived from the two others; their disruptedness,
the conflict between essence and existence puts the ques-
tion, but the answer cannot be derived from them. You
can only say that the new being is the ultimate possibility
of creaturely being, but a possibility which is only a pos-
sibility if the eternal new being, which is also the old
52
SIN AND GRACE
being, implies both essence and existence and transcends
them, and appears in time and space. I think, in this point,
I would completely agree with Niebuhr. But there is some
other thing and here I really don t know. When I read, for
instance, his interpretation of the Paulinian word, yet not
I y but Christ liveth in me (Gal. 2:20), in The Nature and
Destiny of Man (II, 4), he shows there with great dialect-
ical skill the highly dialectical situation. And he does that
in all his sermons. I know that many people have criticized
his sermons just for this reason that he never comes down
to the new being, But in the moment in which it is out-
spoken, then already the question mark of the Protestant
Principle is put behind it. And I must confess that some-
thing like this has also happened to me. In this respect, we
are in the same boat. Here he is equally influenced by
Luther's continuous paradoxical statement about simul
Justus, simul peccator. So that people who want to come
for a moment at least to rest in a quieting Christian experi-
enceeven for a moment immediately feel the thorn of
his sermon, or his interpretation, in their spirit (which he
calls flesh), namely, a spirit which wants to rest. I would
never dare to criticize him on this point, but here I would
say, Where do I get more help? Where can we find this
kind of restful acceptance as the Biblical men and the
Reformers often expressed it, even Luther sometimes, but
only in ecstatic moments Where can we find this when
we have this radical dialectics of ego and non-ego, but in
Christ? I don't know how far Niebuhr was also influenced
on this point by the saying of the Barthian school: Even
the Divine Spirit, who in Christian tradition is that which
is us working in us, cannot be experienced so that we can
53
PAUL TTT.T.TCH
say, "I have It" We can only say, "I believe that I believe.
I have the faith that I have faith/' But we can never say
directly, "I have faith/' or "I have the Spirit/' Now here
we are on a point where the dialectics almost never come
down to earth. And if I understand you rightly, then you
have expressed in this moment a criticism which is against
my own theological structure, but out of which I don't
know the way, in view of the realism about the human
predicament which I share with Niebuhr.
54
JOHN C. BENNETT:
Reinhold Niebuhr's Contribution
to Christian Social Ethics
JOHN C. BENNETT:
Reiiibold Niebuhr's significance as a thinker is the greater
because he has done so much more than think. Not only
has he been ceaselessly active in public affairs, but also he
has always been available to people of all kinds. For
decades he has been in his office at Union Seminary, un-
protected by anyone, and ready to talk with the people
who came to his open door, a steady procession of stu-
dents, statesmen, churchmen, professors, and cranks. Dur-
ing the thirties and the forties he must have founded or
joined at least a hundred organizations. Some of these
were political organizations such as the Liberal Party in
New York and Americans for Democratic Action, Some
were journals. He was the founder of The World Tomor-
row. He has been the Editor of Christianity and Crisis., and
of Radical Religion., which changed its name to Christian-
ity cmd Society. Many of his organizations were created to
defend groups or individuals needing defenders labor
groups until they acquired means of self-defense, Negroes,
sharecroppers, Jews, Germans who were victims of uncon-
ditional surrender.
We cannot understand his thought unless we realize
57
JOHN C. BENNETT
this openness to the world, this activity based upon his
sense of justice and ids amazing generosity. Paul Tillich
has described himself as living on the boundary of con-
trasting worlds and interests, and in this respect he and
Reinhold Niebuhr have much in common. Perhaps one dif-
ference is that Niebuhr has been more polemical across
some of these boundaries and has not absorbed so many
elements into his system of thought. And yet Niebuhr,
after excoriating the illusions of many a liberal rationalist,
will be found the next day sitting with these victims of
illusion on a committee drafting a political manifesto or
planning to rescue someone, perhaps some poor Utopian,
from Jail.
Reinhold Niebuhr is catalogued as a theologian more
than anything else and he has done more than any other
American to change the climate of theology. He likes to
say that he is not a theologian, meaning that he is not the
land of academic specialist whom he often admires and
even at times envies, and yet I think we can say that he
is the kind of theologian who gives the academic specialist
something to write about. Theology would indeed be a
dreary occupation if it became the study of academic
specialists by academic specialists. The great theologians
have often been makers of history even in their own time.
It may be a symbol of what I am saying that while he
never wrote a Ph.D. thesis, there are few living persons
about whom so many Ph.D. theses are written. Another
remarkable aspect of Niebuhr *s role among scholars is
that he has been a formative influence on a diverse group
of scholars and practitioners in the field of intermtional
58
CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ETHICS
relations, and yet lie has never been a specialist here. His
many writings on this subject, except for one book written
a few years ago, have been articles and editorials. One
subject of interest to the academic specialists in inter-
national relations is the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr on
the thought in their field.
There is another whole dimension of his activity and
influence his preaching and his work as a Christian apol-
ogist, if you will accept this word in its best sense. His
preaching in colleges and universities for four decades
has been one of the factors in his very pervasive influence.
Students and professors who usually stayed away from
chapel would flock to hear him. Also in this he and Paul
Tillich have had the same experience. There are those who
say that his sermons are all on one subject, the relation of
sin and grace. But there is always something unique and
unforgettable in each sermon, in his use of the text and its
Biblical context. There are always new illustrations of sin,
and sin is always combined in a different way with the
finiteness, the tragedy, the irony, and also the goodness
and the greatness of our existence; and as the years have
passed, there has been more about grace. Theologians on
the European continent have argued for many years as to
whether or not tibere can be an apologetic for Christianity.
But while they have argued, Reinhold Niebuhr has acted
as an apologist by showing the relevance of the Christian
revelation for tibe hard problems of our history. He has
convinced many of oar contemporaries that the Christian
diagnosis of the human sitnatfoii is essentially true and
he has drawn some erf these into tie circle of those who
59
JOHN C. BENNETT
feel claimed by the Christian Gospel But always he has
been able to present both aspects of the Christian faith
in such a way as to make them more meaningful to our
contemporaries who are fearful of obscurantism and false
piety.
I shall say something now about Niebuhr's method of
thinking. There are few pkces where Niebuhr avows any
method. Paul Tillich once said: "Niebuhr does not ask,
*How can I know?* He starts knowing." So it is with his
method of thought; we have to watch it as he starts think-
ing. There is a living dialectic in his thought which seems
to grow naturally out of polemics. He is often much clearer
in showing what is wrong with many positions than he is
in giving content to his own position; or rather, we often
have to infer this content from his criticisms of those who
are in conflict with each other. His books often have this
structure of polemics around the compass. He shows what
is wrong with Catholicism, Calvinism, Lutheranism, Prot-
estant sectarianism, theological liberalism, Marxism, secu-
lar rationalism, and so forth. There is often a shift of
emphasis here from decade to decade depending on what
kind of error is the greatest threat to his truth. His early
polemics against liberal optimism, against doctrines of
progress, were quite successful. With the help of Hitler
and Stalin and many events he won his battles against
these positions.
In the course of his polemics he gave aid and comfort
to what is often called "Neo-orthodoxy," and now he finds
this very repellent and often he sounds more like a liberal
again. I think it should be said that at no point did he ever
have any kind of theological authoritarianism in him. Only
60
CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ETHICS
those who had no real understanding of him bracketed
him with orthodox} 7 , Biblicism, irrationalism. He has always
been critical of rationalistic schemes of meaning, but this
has been in the interests of a broad empiricism by which
he kept himself open to the realities neglected by such
schemes. Perhaps one source of confusion is that he has
been a master in presenting rhetorical or homiletical para-
doxes which have been ways of underlining a point. This
is quite different from a reckless positing of paradoxes as
descriptive of reality. He does accept a few such paradoxes
that continually reappear in Christian history and that
still remain after decades of his own critical thought as
inescapable for his own mind. But this kind of paradox,
such as is to be seen in the relations of grace and freedom,
is not projected by an irrationalist tendency in his thought
but is accepted because of his openness to the complexities
of experience. I do not say that he may not have been
carried away at times by his own rhetorical paradoxes, but
usually it is other people who are confused by them and
attribute to him an excessive use of paradox in the sub-
stance of his thought.
I shall now deal briefly with two aspects of this thought
which can give us understanding of his contribution to
Christian ethics and to the presuppositions and goals and
criteria for social policy within the nation, Niebuhr is
basically a theologian who sees the implications of his
theology for Christian ethics, but he has never addressed
himself primarily to the Church as Church. He has
always emphasized the need for the Church to think
and speak about the great issues ccmfamttag society, and
I doctbt if we can make a ve&y dear distinction between
61
JOHN C. BENNETT
the substance of what he says explicitly as a theologian
and churchman, and what he says when he speaks to the
public. But this is a problem raised by Niebuhr's thought
that does need careful examination. The two subjects that
I shall discuss are the following: (1) his doctrine of man
and its implications for ethics; (2) his way of uniting
absolute ethical perspectives with pragmatic methods.
The Doctrine of Man
It was Niebuhr's rediscovery of neglected elements in
the classical Christian understanding of man that made
the most decisive impression on the contemporary mind
both in the Church and in the world. Often it almost
seems that he is blamed for the origin of sin because he
rediscovered some dimensions of it. Journalistically, he has
been widely presented as the great pessimist, as the one
who has deflated man in the interests of an orthodox doc-
trine of original sin.
His thought has been in continuous movement even
in this area of doctrine that is so central to it. It was first
expressed in terms of his polemics against rationalistic
optimism, liberal idealism, and all forms of what he calls
utopianism. But as his thought matured during the thirties
when he was writing his greatest book, The Nature and
Destiny of Man, his doctrine of man could be seen in the
context of a total theology of man in relation to the judg-
men and to the grace of God. Always in his more mature
writings sin is seen as the other side of man's greatness and
of man's promise. Sin is the corruption of freedom which is
itself a mark of man's greatness. Man's self-transcendence
62
CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ETHICS
which is the mark of the image of God in him Is also the
source of man's capacity for prideful imperialisms, for the
endlessly destructive evils which cause his greatest dreams
and achievements to turn sour. Niebuhr is never weary of
saying that it is the pretentious idealism or utopianism in
human movements which often makes them most intoler-
able.
Niebuhr is more vivid, more precise, and more elab-
orate in his setting forth of the sin of man than he is in
what he has to say about redemption. And yet always one
can see that the antidote for sin is for man to see himself
as he is, without illusions, in his finiteness under God,
before whom alone his finiteness can be recognized. And
the ultimate anxieties which drive men to express ever
more destructively their sinful self-centeredness and pride
can only be overcome as they see themselves by faith
under the forgiveness of God. This forgiveness is revealed
most fully on the cross of Christ, but God who is revealed
in Christ is known in his saving work apart from Christ.
Indeed, we may say that Niebuhr and this is another
point in common between him and Tillich is a theologian
who greatly stresses common grace, grace that is mediated
apart from a conscious relationship with Christ. He is an
enemy of the theological or ecclesiastical monopolist, but
for him the ultimate criterion of all revelations and media-
tions of God is Christ. His attitude toward the conversion
of the Jews, which has been much publicized, illustrates
this position.
I can give some idea of the range and complexity of
Niebdhr's doctrine of man if I put before you dirae state-
ments about it
63
JOHN C. BENNETT
1. The first is that man's sinful pride and egocentricity
is to be found on every level of personal development, of
social or cultural advance, of religious pretension. This is
probably Niebuhr's major warning to Church and culture,
to those who are guardians of a status quo of which they
are proud, and to those who engage in revolution to estab-
lish a new order. There is no spot where we are not vulner-
able to the temptation to abuse power or to organize the
good in our achievements in terms of a limited interest.
Indeed, the higher the advance the more subtle but often
the more destructive the sin. He turns this criticism against
the history of the Church, and I think there is no passage
in all of his writings that reveals more clearly his main
concern on the negative side than this passage: "The sad
experiences of Christian history show how human pride
and spiritual arrogance rise to new heights precisely at the
point where the claims of sanctity are made without due
qualification/' 1
I have often quoted that passage, but I never until this
lecture added this comment: please note that the claims
of sanctity may have some status if there are "due quali-
fications."
2. The second statement is that Niebuhr is in no sense
a dogmatic pessimist or fatalist. He retains a higher and
more hopeful view of man's possibilities in part because
he has not sought to buttress this view with illusions which
history easily refutes. One of his favorite phrases is "in-
determinate possibilities." A sentence that expresses this
side of his thought is the following: "There are no limits
to be set in history for the achievement of more universal
64
CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ETHICS
brotherhood, for the development of more perfect and
more inclusive human relations." 2 He will be quick to point
out ways in which societies project particular schemes of
hope that do transcend limits, but this is chiefly because
there are inherent in them either pretensions which gen-
erate their own poisons or a lack of prudence in relation
to the conditions of human life which cannot be trans-
cended if they are not recognized or astutely beguiled, as
he often says. This statement should not suggest to anyone
unlimited cumulative progress. There will always be temp-
tations and threats on the new levels of advance and
always the danger of retrogression, but what is involved
here is a guard against the kind of dogmatic pessimism
that refuses to deal with particular problems with a hope-
ful openness.
3. The third statement is that Niebuhr warns against
a perverse complacency that sometimes develops when
Christians become impressed by the sinful limitations
upon all human achievement Paul must have encountered
it when he exclaimed: '"What then? Are we to sin because
we are not under law but under grace? By no meansl"
Niebuhr echoes Paul when he writes: "Thus the saints are
tempted to continue to sin that grace may abound, while
the sinners toil and sweat to make human relations a little
more tolerable and slightly more just." 3 This appreciation
of the "sinners/ 7 of persons who have no traditional piety
to cushion their cc*nsciences but who are moved by a
passion for justice and do the best they can, is a persistent
thane in Niebuh/s writings and conversation. The pious
of the liberal sort who mix tibeir piety with idealistic illu-
65
JOHN C. BENNETT
sions, and the pious of the orthodox sort who allow the
gospel of forgiveness to make them prematurely com-
placent about what they cannot do because of sin, come
in equally for condemnation. One of the sharpest of his
comments of this sort is his criticism of Brunner's illus-
tration of the judge who, because of his faith in justifica-
tion by faith, is sustained religiously when he pronounces
a sentence which, while according to the law, is in his own
mind unjust because the law is unjust. I do not think that
Niebuhr is quite fair to Brunner's use of the illustration
but his condemnation of it reveals much about his own
thought. He writes: "Fortunately there have always been
judges who have never heard of this doctrine of justifica-
tion by faith and who have, therefore, been prompted by a
sensitive conscience to apply the law as justly as pos-
sible." 4 I doubt if one could find a better illustration of
Niebuhr's openness to those who are outside the Christian
circle and of his contempt for all the false uses of the
cushions of piety.
Those three statements which I have just presented
about the same general question: "What are the limits of
moral achievement because of man's sin?" are given to
illustrate a method of thinking, Each statement qualifies
the others. It would be impossible to draw from them any-
thing like a precise calculus concerning what is possible*
Rather we have powerful warnings against three different
errors, and the one to be emphasized at any given time
depends upon which error is most tempting. The warning
that has had the most influence, that has given Niebuhr
his distinctive place in modem Christian thought and
66
CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ETHICS
political theory, is the warning against the illusions of the
idealist and the Utopian; the soft idealist or Utopian who
believes that the cruel realities of history can be trans-
formed by loving persuasion, and the hard idealist or
Utopian who by force will impose his ideals upon the world
and mercilessly sacrifice concrete people for a future goal.
Perhaps the most important consequence of Niebuh/s
doctrine of man for social ethics and for policy is his in-
sistence in all areas on the balancing of power. In all situa-
tions power must be kept in check, and this cannot be
done merely by legal structures; it depends upon an equi-
librium of social forces. This should not be static and it
need not involve overt violence. Also, the healthier the
society the more the nations, classes, or other social forces
that balance each other will all participate in common
loyalties or common interests which prevent the conflict
between them from becoming absolute. He has great ap-
preciation for the traditions and habits of mutual respect
which have developed in some cultures, especially in the
British culture. In the relations between nations the com-
mon loyalties and interests are minimal, but he has con-
tinually expressed the hope that the common interest in
survival may still be a bond even between the United
States and the Soviet Union.
His rejection of pacifism is essentially a form of this
emphasis upon the need of raising up effective power to
counter any center of power that threatens to be tyran-
nical. In the IQSO'S he came to accept moral responsibility
for the military resistance against National Socialism. Sin-
ful and fallible nations had to be the instruments of this
resistance, and yet this did not for him annul their clafrn
67
JOHN C. BENNETT
to moral support. Christian responsibility for justice for
tie neighbor threatened by a power as evil as that of the
Nazis involved participation in the use of national power.
Pacifists who believed that they escaped the guilt of his-
tory were in his mind misguided because they contributed
indirectly to the triumph of oppressive forces. It was his
Christian realism about man that caused him to insist on
the necessity of accepting the reality of power and of find-
ing ways of using power that would serve justice. Always
he has sought to prevent conflicts of power from becoming
brutal and violent. But he has refused to absolutize non-
violent forms of resistance as universally to be preferred.
The theological and ethical foundation of this em-
phasis on the balance of power is well presented in the
following passage:
Justification by faith in the realm of justice means that we will
not regard the pressures and counterpressures, the tensions, the
overt and covert conflicts by which justice is achieved and
maintained as normative in the absolute sense; but neither will
we ease our conscience by seeking to escape from involvement
in them. We will know that we cannot purge ourselves of the
sin and guilt in which we are involved by the moral ambigu-
ities of politics without also disavowing responsibility for the
creative possibilities of justice.
His interpretation of the case for democracy is closely
related to this emphasis upon the need of balancing power
in the nation. He says: "It is the highest achievement of
democratic societies that they embody the principle of
resistance to government within the principle of govern-
ment itself." 6 The lawful use of political power by various
groups within the nation and the check upon their use of
it, the preservation of openness and pluralism with all of
68
CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ETHICS
the civil liberties that enable those who are injured to pro-
testthese ways and structures of democracy can best be
defended in terms of his doctrine of man. It is most im-
portant to see how both the positive and the negative
poles of this doctrine are involved. Dogmatic pessimists or
cynics have no case for democracy. They are likely to put
all their emphasis upon the preservation of order and to
fear change as likely to be for the worse, and especially
to fear the extension of power to the people as a whole
whom they distrust. Niebuhr often refers to Martin Luther
and Thomas Hobbes in this connection and sees their
pessimism as related to their support of despotism. One
of the most famous sentences that Niebuhr ever wrote is
the one in which he emphasizes the two sides of democ-
racy: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy pos-
sible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy
necessary." 7 Those words give us very well die political
consequence of Niebuhr's doctrine of man.
The Normative and the Pragmatic
The second major theme that I shall discuss is the rela-
tionship between the Christian norm, general social values,
and pragmatic calculation in Niebuhr's thought.
It is sometimes said that Niebuhr's thought is so prag-
matic that it moves along realistically with the trends of
history without sufficient control by permanent ethical
norms. Exposure to what Niebuhr says about one subject,
especially in a journalistic context, can easily lead to that
impression but I think that it is quite inaccurate. The
pragmatism in Niebuh/s thought coraes from his fear of
69
JOHN C. BENNETT
allowing any particular value or principle or law from
becoming absolute in itself and yielding a series of con-
sequences for unforeseen situations by means of a system
of casuistry. Instead he emphasizes love as the only abso-
lute, and then relates love to concrete situations by means
of several values which need to be kept in balance dynam-
ically. The exact nature of this balance will change with
the circumstances. He is not a very systematic writer, and
there are often shades of difference when he returns from
time to time to the same subject.
There has been a tendency in his thought from his
earliest writings to describe love as the pinnacle of ethics
which is so pure that it is hard to see how it can be related
to anything else. Out of this preoccupation with pure sac-
rificial love which is revealed in the Cross of Christ there
has developed the formula of love as an "impossible pos-
sibility." There is a strong perfectionist impulse in Nie-
buhr 7 s thought which calls for a conscious check to keep
him from becoming irrelevant. His fierce arguments against
pacifism often seem to be arguments against a position
which on its perfectionist side tempts him. In terms of
social ethics and politics he is always uncompromising, but
religiously he settles for a compromise when he welcomes
the testimony of the Mennonite type of pacifism, which
has no political illusions and yet remains a corrective for
the spirit of those involved in the ambiguities of history.
He relates this pure love to the mutual love which is
possible among us by saying that such love "can only be
initiated by a type of disinterestedness which dispenses
with historical justification.'' 8 Mutual love is not a matter of
egocentric calculation on both sides; btit if it is love at aH,
7 o
CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ETHICS
the impulse of agape is in it, and each will sacrifice for
the other, and neither will withhold love as a bargaining
point if it is not reciprocated. He says: "The grace of
sacrificial love prevents mutual love from degenerating
into a mere calculation of mutual advantages." 9
The relation of love to justice is a theme that brings
us close to the heart of his ethics. Justice is one extension
of mutual love. As he puts it:
Systems and principles of justice are the servants and instru-
ments of the spirit of brotherhood in so far as they extend the
sense of obligation towards the other, (a) from an immediately
felt obligation, prompted by obvious need, to a continued obli-
gation expressed in fixed principles of mutual support; (b)
from a simple relation of the self and one 'other to the com-
plex relations of the self and the 'others'; and (c) finally from
the obligations which the community defines from its more
impartial perspective. 10
Indeed, the perfect love that he often describes as belong-
ing to a pinnacle that transcends all of these considera-
tions of justice would, I believe, in the light of Niebuhr's
thought as a whole be less perfect than a love that relates
itself to the problems and structures of justice. There is at
this point in Niebuhr's thought both a problem of terminol-
ogy and, more deeply, a meeting of two impulses that
never at any level are clearly related to each other the
impulse guided by a pure heedless agape and the impulse
guided by a loving sense of responsibility for the effect
of what we do upon all men.
Niebuh/s central position can be seen by the way in
which he contrasts his thought with other views of the
relationship of love and justice. He repudiates the tend-
ency which he finds in Luther to separate the two realms
7*
JOHN C. BENNETT
in which love and justice are realized. There is such a
Lutheran separation, and there are passages in Luther
which support it; but Niebuhr is attacked by many inter-
preters of Luther, not least by his colleague Wilhelm
Pauck, for attributing this to Luther in a one-sided way.
But as far as I can see, there is much that is slippery here.
Niebuhr emphasizes an interaction between the two realms
which one would scarcely learn from Luther, even though
defenders of Luther may be right in saying that this is
possible for Luther. If I may intervene in the debate about
Luther, it seems to me that Niebuhr is clearly right at one
point: Luther was not interested in the development of
checks upon political power in the interests of justice. He
had no more illusions than Niebuhr about princes, whom
he expected to be either fools or knaves, but he could use
them against the Pope, and he feared anarchy created by
the peasants more than he feared injustice imposed by the
prince, Niebuhr attacks Brunner who separates love and
justice more clearly than Luther, though even dais is a
slippery matter, for when I asked Brunner about it, he
volunteered the formula: "J ust i ce is institutionalized love/'
That may go too far the other way.
Niebuhr rejects the idea that love can take the place
of justice, if those who love only become more loving. No,
there must be structures of justice to enable people to
defend themselves against the loving who are so sure that
they know best what is good for others. There are none so
good that they can be entrusted with unchecked power
over others, for there are too many illusions in any paternal-
istic love and also too much unacknowledged self-interest.
Niebuhr is an expert on the forms of self-interest within
72
CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ETHICS
the communities which are informed by loveespecially
family and church and the best academic communities.
Justice for Niebuhr is governed by the idea of equality.
Not that he projects rationalistic schemes that make no
distinctions between the needs and contributions and func-
tions of people. Equality in that sense has no place in his
thought. But equality for him is a principle of criticism
that shows up the ideological taint, the corruption by the
self-interest of the powerful, in all actual structures of
justice. Perhaps the best illustration of this is his criticism
of all forms of male domination in church and society.
This criticism does not imply that there are no differences
of role between men and women, but it does indicate that
the kinds of inequality between men and women that
exist come from the imperialism of men in the world and
in the church, not least of priests in the church.
The transforming of the structures of justice so that
they do embody greater equality comes both from love
and from the struggles of the victims of injustice. I do
not need to repeat what I have said about balancing of
power here; my interest at the moment is to stress the
point that love does seek to raise the structures of justice
in the interests of the weak and the exploited.
The Role of Natural Law
I began this phase of the discussion with a reference
to the problem of moral norms in relation to pragmatic
ways of thinking about policy. I want to say something
here about the much debated question of the role of
"natural law." Niebdb" lias a perpetual battle on two
73
JOHN C. BENNETT
frontson the one side against Catholic stereotypes of
natural law, and on the other side against the moral rela-
tivists., especially when they are Protestant theologians.
His arguments with the Catholics have been carried on for
many decades down to his latest article about the encycli-
cal of John XXIIL He sees the Catholic system of natural
law as much distorted by a tendency to absolutize the
institutions of the Middle Ages and by what is for him an
outrageous development of particular laws apart from love
in such areas as sex and medicine. Niebuhr does not write
many pages on this subject in these days without mention-
ing Catholic teaching about birth control as an example
of the wrong use of natural kw. On the other hand, he
finds a great deal of wisdom in the teachings of the Cath-
olic Church on many social and economic questions which
he contrasts with the nineteenth-century ideology of the
dominant Protestant individualism. He does not reject the
belief that there is a moral wisdom that does not depend
wholly on revelation. He continually emphasizes what
Christians have in common with secularists who have a
passion for justice and who combine dedication to the
public welfare with great astuteness concerning policy.
When Niebuhr thinks about Karl Earth's strictures
against natural law, he reacts with equal sharpness: "Karl
Earth's belief that the moral life of man would possess no
valid principles of guidance, if the Ten Commandments
had not introduced such principles by revelation, is as
absurd as it is unscriptural." 11 There is more to Barth than
this, for Earth curiously enough shares Niebuh/s open-
ness to those outside the Church and the circle of revela-
tion. Yet that sentence does show clearly that Niebuhr has
74
CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ETHICS
no patience with complete moral relativism whether or
not it is found in a theological garment. There is great
scope for relativism so far as concrete decisions are con-
cerned, but those who make these decisions should be
moved by love for the neighbor and what they decide to
do should be seen under the ultimate judgment of love.
More than that: love is related to the concrete decision
by means of the order and the justice and the freedom
that are good for the neighbor, for all neighbors. The rela-
tivism of the concrete decision is really the effect of relat-
ing to each other these permanent criteria and of relating
all of them to the contingent and quite unpredictable cir-
cumstances which call for action. This is quite different
from a deductive casuistry that knows most of the answers
in advance, even about a code for air-raid shelters, and it
is quite different from an absolute moral idealism that
seeks to impose a law of nonviolence or the claims of
democratic forms upon all situations; but it is not an
unguided relativism or a pragmatism without norms.
One of the most significant developments in Niebuhr's
thought from the 1930*5 to the 1950*5, closely related to the
pragmatic method of much of his thought, was his move-
ment away from a dogmatic socialism which was con-
trolled to a considerable extent by the Marxist conception
of history. This dogmatic socialism caused him to be almost
contemptuous of the New Deal reforms until the late
thirties, His confidence in socialism as a total structure
dissolved very gradually. There was a basis for this in his
doctrine of man, which prepared htm to see tibe dangerous
illusions in Marxist expectations, both in tibe context of
communism and in tie context of tibe democratic socialism
75
JOHN C. BENNETT
that continued to guide his thought about economic life
into the 1940*5. The clarification of his doctrine of man at
this point, the shock from Stalinism, the later attraction
of the New Deal revolution and all that it symbolized, and
preoccupation with international political problems all
of these factors were present in his movement away from
socialism as a system. The time came when he began to
speak of Burke with more respect than of Marx. Yet Amer-
ican conservatives should not take comfort from this.
There is no more effective critic of American conservatism
based upon individualism and the primacy of the business
man. One of his favorite adjectives is "stupid," and there
is continuity from his days in Detroit until now in his use
of this adjective to describe the representatives of this
American conservative ideology, I doubt if his place in
the American political spectrum has changed in two dec-
ades. He finds more wisdom in British conservatism than
in American conservatism, but he will always be more
open than any who think of themselves as conservatives
to the claims of justice for the people who are neglected
or exploited wherever they may be.
It would be satisfying to me to conclude this address
with words of eulogy for Reinhold Niebuhr, but I can
surely take that for granted. It is more fitting, in view of
the continuous movement in his thought, to mention
briefly several unsolved problems which his thought poses
for us and for him.
Perhaps the deepest problem is what is to be said to a
generation that has never shared the optimistic illusions
76
CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ETHICS
over which Niebuhr won so many victories. In the distinc-
tive theological dimension of this problem, Niebuhr has
recognized that his thought should make more room than
is evident in his major books for the possibilities of real
change as a gift of grace in the Christian life; for some-
thing more than his old formula, "change in principle but
not in fact," suggests. He has discarded that formula. I
am thinking of more than this theological dimension within
the Church when I say that the very success of Niebuhr's
polemics leaves a need for hope and morale for people
more tempted by despair than by false optimism.
Second, I think that the movement of his thought away
from economic problems because of his preoccupation
with political problems leaves almost an empty space
which needs to be filled by thinkers who share his basic
outlook, This is true especially in the many new countries
where social and economic revolution for the sake of jus-
tice is a primary concern.
Third, there is always the danger that those who take
from Niebuhr's thought only his political realism will de-
velop an ethic that is little more than a reflection of the
exigencies of Western strategy in the cold war. There are
in Niebuhr's theology correctives for this tendency as well
as for idealistic illusions, and these need to be heard. He
has not directed his polemics very strongly against the
illusions of political realism but there are pointers toward
them in his many brief discussions of what he calls "the
nuclear dilemma." He has lost his earlier Churchiflian
confidence in the security provided by the balance of
terror. Recently he has said: "Ultimately, the ever-accel-
77
JOHN C. BENNETT
crated pace of the arms race must lead to disaster, even if
neither side consciously desires the ultimate war." 12 He
has at various times said that if we ever use the nuclear
weapons, "we will annihilate ourselves not only physically
but morally." In a published conversation he shows his
sense of the depths of the nuclear dilemma beyond those
that are usually discussed. He said: "If the bomb were
ever used, I would hope it would kill me, because the
moral situation would be something that I could not con-
template." Notice how different that is from the common
idea that one would rather die than face the miseries of
the situation. And yet Niebuhr went on to say: "At the
same time you cannot disavow its use absolutely prema-
turely without bowing yourself out of responsibility for the
whole generation," 13 In a discussion of the possibility of
initiating the nuclear stage of a war over Berlin, Niebuhr
says that the speculations about the consequences of a nu-
clear catastrophe have omitted a consideration of "the
moral consequences of initiating the dread conflict." He
asks: "Could a civilization loaded with this monstrous guilt
have enough moral health to survive?" 14
Niebuhr has helped us to grasp the religious dimen-
sion of this nuclear dilemma as it comes to us as a mat-
ter of fate. One of his favorite texts from St. Paul ex-
presses this ultimate dimension of faith: "If we live, we
live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so
then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the
Lord's." (Rom. 14:8) The question remains: how far will
there be an area of moral freedom as we confront this
dilemma in the next decade? What ethical thinking should
78
CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ETHICS
guide the political choice between military strategies?
This is an area in which Reinhold Niebuhr s thought is
needed because his realism remains under the criticism of
love and he has the habit of recognizing new illusions as
well as old.
79
DISCUSSION;
Question (Henry Smith Leiper): A very minor question.
I tried to remember anything that Niebuhr ever wrote
that I happened to read that reflected this horror of initi-
ating the use of the bomb in the face of the fact that we
did it. All the world knows that and we seem to forget it.
Professor Bennett: He signed the Calhoun report which
renounced that. This is one of the problems of fate that
we have today that this was done. It happened then with-
out much discussion because nobody knew about it.
Question (Professor Wilhelm Pauck): Tve often wondered
about Niebuhr's ecclesiology, churchmanship, not in the
practical sense you've made several remarks about it
but more in the theological sense. He's never denied his
origins in the Evangelical Synod. He's a minister of the
Evangelical Reformed Church, now the United Church,
but he has never emphasized it. [Professor Bennett: He and
Paul Tillich are in the same church now*] Yes, in the same
church, and Tillich is more or less in the same boat in this
respect Professor Tillich has an articulate ecclesiology.
80
CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ETHICS
Professor Bennett: Of course, how is it related to concrete
churches? You have to argue that.
Professor Pauck: But now Niebuhr speaks as a Christian, a
very pragmatic Christian, and as a Protestant. But what
his relation to the institutions of Protestantism, the ecclesi-
astical structure and the ecclesiastical procedures, is
doesn't become plain, although he attacks, as you have
said, ecclesiastical monopolists and all the pretensions of
churchmen and priests, and is always out for the hypo-
crites of all sorts. But what his own sense of the church
is is barely intimated, or am I wrong there?
Professor Bennett: I think that's right. But he does have,
of course, a great liturgical sense, I suppose his liturgical
writings will be published sometime and this will give a
somewhat different picture of Niebuhr. He thinks of the
Church as the community of grace; as the bearer of the
revelation in a very real sense. But the moment he thinks
of the Church as a corporate body that makes claims for
itself, then he is on another tack. He doesn't want that
very much. He never makes claims for the Church as a
corporate body. But I think he does think of the Church
as a community in which the Word is preached, and which
does actually mediate grace to people. But his fear of
ecclesiastical doctrines is a good deal like his fear of doc-
trines of sanctification. He is always talking about the
Catholic heresies whenever the Church is emphasized very
much as a matter of claim. Wouldn't that be true?
Professor Pauck: Yes, I fbmk you are rigjht It's a strangely
spiritual conception of the Church.
81
JOHN C. BENNETT
Professor Bennett; Yes, but its activity is not of that sort
at all.
Professor Pauck: Yes, but there is a certain conflict there.
Professor Bennett: Yes, I think this is true. Most of the
critics of Niebuhr, whenever they write criticism, gener-
ally say he doesn't have a doctrine of the Church. That's
usually what they say.
Question (Professor Taubes): I would like you to help me
on a point that always baffles me in reading Niebuhr. The
disillusionment with Utopia I got from a man who I think
equals Niebuhr in strength Max Weber. He made a dif-
ferentiation between ethics of conscience and ethics of re-
sponsibility and worked it out in a way that I think can
stand up to any of the other critics of Utopianism. So far
so right. Then I came to America and began to read Nie-
buhr, and saw it was the same path of Max Weber, except
for one difference. He calls this Christian realism. Now
Max Weber never dreamt to consider that Christian, be-
cause he could get it equally out of Machiavelli or the
ancients. You don't need a Christian dispensation to find
that out. It baffles me that Niebuhr makes so great a thing
of that. If this would be all that we learn from him, I think
it would be a lesson not at all necessary to divide the ages
between B.C. and A.D.
Professor Bennett: I think there are two things I would say
about that. One is that much of the content of this realism
is a matter of common sense, or hard experience, and can
be seen from many points of view; but in the case of Chris-
tian realism, particularly in the understanding of the depth
CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ETHICS
of the person, there seems to me to be a more penetrating
understanding of the person's selfhood in relation to this.
Niebuhr finds this much more in Paul than anywhere else.
But secondly, this Christian realism is never cynicism,
never Machiavellianism. It's never purely a negative ap-
proach. It's always seen in relationship to the image of
God in man, and the very source of the problem is man's
self-transcendence and freedom which are marks of the
image of God. So it is keeping together the dignity of man
and the sin of man that makes Niebuhr quite different
from any of the secular realists. Wouldn't you think that's
true?
Professor Taubes; In the consequences it didn't quite come
out.
Professor Bennett: Well, sometimes in the consequences it
doesn't. You get people who learn only the negative side
of the realism because fiat's the more obvious the diag-
nosis. That's quite true. Niebuhr used to say often that the
Harvard orthodoxy was to accept the Christian analysis
of the human situation without the Gospel.
Professor Taubes: That's sometibing I sometimes feel in
him too.
Professor Bennett: Well, that's only because you see him
in certain contexts.
Question (Dr. Hutchison): Might it not be argued that
Niebuhr's social ethic is a corollary of assumptions which
he's never taken the time folly to state, but which are
essentially Christian and traditionally so. Wliat he has
JOHN C. BENNETT
spent his life doing is to draw out certain pertinent corol-
laries.
Professor Bennett: I think that's true, yes. Yes, he has
never had a systematic methodology at all.
Professor Taubes: I understand that, but it struck me that
in his critique of Utopianism he succeeded marvelously
with the help of Hitler and Stalin. It may be that there is
a sort of Utopianism in Christianity which is worthwhile
preserving in spite of all this criticism.
Professor Bennett: In a certain way he does preserve this
as a source of criticism, but he's embarrassed about it,
because he still has this perfectionism in his own basic
attitude. But actually, isn't one of the reasons Niebuhr gets
somewhat caricatured, that it is this negative realism
which people can fasten on journalistically and gets
pkyed up in Time magazine, and everybody reads and
understands what it is about; whereas the other things
involved aren't easily seen.
Question (Dr. Moran Weston): Professor Bennett, would
you say that Niebuhr has any picture of society now that
is either feasible or acceptable?
Professor Bennett: He certainly doesn't have any final pic-
ture of society. I think society for him always involves
dealing with proximate problems, trying to improve situa-
tions a little bit with this balancing of forces and also with
the Christian grace too. He doesn't plan much about the
Christian grace I agree with comments there but he pre-
supposes it to some extent. You get his recent article about
the new nations which have trouble getting democratic
CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ETHICS
societies and democratic structures, and he almost resigns
himself to this. They will not be democracies. They will
not represent any kind of pattern that we would want to
universalize. But he hopes they will not be just tyrannies;
that there will be some openness in them.
Dr. Weston: What will help man to avoid the intiative in
the use of the atomic bomb for example?
Professor Bennett: Well, I think his present thinking is
just as Doctor Tillich said the other night over the tele-
visionthat if at some point in the immediate Berlin situa-
tion we were in danger of defeat, he would not prevent
defeat by initiating a nuclear exchange, which would be
an indefinite thing in its effect an unlimited thing. It's
different from Hiroshima: because of the fact that we had
a monopoly, we did it, and that was the endl This would
be endless might be. I wouldn't want to stress this too
much because he hasn't developed this. This is just a hint
he has thrown out, because he is as much puzzled as any-
one else is. And he would be the first to say that a person
making policy is not going to announce this.
Professor Bennett (with reference to the untaped com-
ment of Father John LaFarge): Father LaFarge was say-
ing that there is no dynamism in fbfs piece-by-piece ap-
proach, just fixing up things a little bit here, pushing a
little bit there, preserving the best balance that you can,
and I think that*s quite true. And this is one of the places
where I suppose his thought would have to be supple-
mented. There would have to be something more than
that actually some vision of something more than that.
But at the same time, the policy makers would liave to
85
JOHN C, BENNETT
take this pretty seriously as the way things are. Wouldn't
they?
Father LaFarge: We need a vision!
Professor 'Bennett: We need a vision. Well, you know the
last paragraph in Moral Man and Immoral Society, which
was published about 1932; the last paragraph emphasizes
the need of dreams and visions here. He says he hopes
that these will not be corrupted too soon; and then he
lived a little while and he came to think these visions get
corrupted too soon, and he put them aside. But now it isn't
only that, but it's his prudence. If you have a vision that
turns out to be irrelevant youTI do the wrong things too.
It's not only a matter of the corruption of the vision, but
it may not be quite relevant
Question (Unidentified): Has Niebuhr withdrawn those
definitions of an open society that he used to give us?
Professor Bennett: Oh, I imagine not. I think that open
society would be the best dream, but then that's still rather
negative not negative exactly, but lacking positive con-
tent.
Question (Dr. Heimann): IVe been wondering for quite
awhile, and I should say increasingly so, particularly after
coming back from Europe, that it never occurs to him,
and I am afraid I have to say it never occurs to any of us,
to say anything that people behind the Iron Curtain can
use. The social-political views that we develop and discuss
among us are for people in a free society. And that is the
reason his influence the farther you go East is less and less.
Our mutual friend Charlie West has drawn this compari-
86
CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ETHICS
son between Earth and him. He says Earth is a preacher
in the church, and Niebuhr is a Christian in the world.
The Christian in the world has quite a hard time; the
preacher in the church has a very good time if there is
nothing else but the church to cling to, as there is behind
the Iron Curtain. There is really nothing in his teachings
that could be used behind the Iron Curtain by the Chris-
tians there, be they Lutherans or Greek or whatever else.
This is a grave omission I may be wrong a grave failure.
Professor Bennett: It's historically conditioned, I think.
You remember that Charlie West in that book also says-
he loves Niebuhr and he is more formed by Niebuhr than
by anybody else that Niebuhr is from some standpoints
Hromadka in reverse to the people on the other side. He
is simply the man who stands for American policy and
Western strategy. I think he does transcend these. There-
fore, what you say is true. He doesn't have anything to say
to people that are living on the other side of the Iron
Curtain. Also he d
