Reinhold Niebuhr

Theologian

  • Born: June 21, 1892
  • Birthplace: Wright City, Missouri
  • Died: June 1, 1971
  • Place of death: Stockbridge, Massachusetts

American theologian

Niebuhr, the leading American formulator of neoorthodox theology, used the political and social arenas to place the Christian faith in the center of the cultural and political world of his day.

Areas of achievement Religion and theology, social reform

Early Life

Reinhold Niebuhr (RIN-hohld NEE-bur) was the fourth child of Lydia Niebuhr and Gustav Niebuhr. Lydia was the daughter of an Evangelical Synod missionary, and Gustav was a young minister for the denomination. Reinhold later said that his father was the first formative religious influence on his life, combining a vital personal piety with a complete freedom in his theological training. This combination reflected the stance of the German-originated Evangelical Synod with its “liberal” de-emphasis of doctrine and its stress on heartfelt religion. Although he never exerted pressure, Gustav began early to talk to his son about the ministry, and by the time he was ten Reinhold had made the decision to be a preacher.

In 1902, the Niebuhr family moved to Lincoln, Illinois, where Gustav became pastor of St. John’s Church. It was there that Reinhold experienced an incident that he was later to recount as a great influence on his thinking about the nature and destiny of humankind. During a recession, a local grocer for whom Reinhold worked, Adam Denger, had extended considerable credit to a number of unemployed miners. Embarrassed by his generosity and unable to pay him back, many of them moved away without even saying good-bye. Despite Denger’s belief that God would protect him if he did what was right, he went bankrupt, and his young assistant, Reinhold, grew up to preach against sentimentality and reliance on special providence.

Niebuhr attended Elmhurst College in Elmhurst, Illinois, and Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, both Evangelical Synod schools, but he found himself uninterested in any specific academic discipline. While Niebuhr was at Eden in April, 1913, his father, Gustav, died after suffering from diabetes. Niebuhr went on to Yale Divinity School and received his M.A. in 1915, but rather than continue his graduate studies, he chose to accept a parish of the Evangelical Synod.

Life’s Work

The board of the Evangelical Synod chose for Niebuhr a newly organized parish in Detroit, Michigan, the location of the Ford Motor Company. That institution came to have a powerful impact on the thinking and actions of Niebuhr, taking on symbolic proportions and illustrating the tyranny of power.

Niebuhr experienced the problems common to all young ministers, many of which are told in his delightful Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (1929), a kind of diary of his years as parish minister. This book marked the beginning of a transition in Niebuhr’s thought that eventually led to a rejection of all the liberal theological ideals with which he had ventured forth in 1915.

He said that the theological convictions he later came to hold began to dawn on him in Detroit

because the simple little moral homilies which were preached in that as in other cities, by myself and others, seemed completely irrelevant to the brutal facts of life in a great industrial center. Whether irrelevant or not they were certainly futile. They did not change human actions or attitudes in any problem of collective behavior by a hair’s breadth.

The problems of collective behavior to which he refers were the extreme working conditions and financial insecurity of the mass of industrial workers, especially employees of the Ford Motor Company, contrasted with the complacency and satisfaction of the middle and upper classes. People from all these groups were found among the membership of Niebuhr’s church. He began to agonize about the validity and practicability of the optimistic liberal ideals that he was preaching each week.

Niebuhr’s sermons began to contain more and more references to social and political issues, and he became more involved in social activity, speaking on behalf of the industrial workers in Detroit and other cities and lobbying for the formation of labor unions. Although he was not directly involved in World War I, the tragedy of that conflict led him to join and ultimately to become the head of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation. He was also instrumental in organizing the Fellowship of Socialist Christians in the late 1920’s.

In 1928, Henry Sloane Coffin, then president of Union Theological Seminary, offered Niebuhr a teaching post at Union. Although he considered himself inadequately prepared for teaching, particularly theology, he accepted Coffin’s offer to teach “just what you think,” with his subject area labeled “Applied Christianity.” The thin, eagle-eyed, balding minister soon became one of the most sought-after professors on the Union campus as he brought his experiences with political and religious figures to the campus. He continued to preach, traveling every weekend to colleges and universities around the country, and he continued to take part in an ever-increasing number of religious and secular organizations, besides his full-time teaching.

In 1931, Niebuhr married Ursula Keppel-Compton, daughter of a doctor and niece of an Anglican bishop, who was a student at Union. Ursula shared her husband’s political interests and became a great help and collaborator with him in his work. He later acknowledged that his wife was the more diligent student of biblical literature (she taught courses in biblical literature at Barnard College) and that she was responsible for many of his viewpoints.

Niebuhr’s theology compelled him to become involved in an extraordinary range of activities. He was a pioneer in the movement for racial justice, strongly supporting the Tenant Farmers’ Union and the Conference of Southern Churchmen. He was involved in the work of a cooperative farm in Mississippi, an effort to enable the sharecroppers in the South to improve their conditions. He participated in the World Conference on Church, Community, and State in Oxford in 1937. Later, he worked on the United States Federal Council of Churches. After World War II, he was a key member of the World Council of Churches Commission on a Just and Durable Peace. He made hundreds of transatlantic trips, and his influence became strong in other countries, especially in Britain, where he had many ties.

Just before a worship service during the summer of 1934, Niebuhr casually jotted down a short prayer and used it in the worship. The prayer was, “O God, give us serenity to accept what cannot be changed, courage to change what should be changed, and wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.” After the service Niebuhr gave the notes to Chandler Robins, dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and the “serenity prayer” gradually made its way into the religious folklore of America.

Because of his strenuous schedule in connection with World War II activities, Niebuhr was near nervous collapse at the end of each school year from 1938 to 1940. Contrary to his doctor’s orders, he kept up the pace. His neoorthodox theology, which he called Christian Realism, led him to conclude that because of humankind’s freedom to sin, true sacrificial love could never triumph in history. Nevertheless, it was his belief that this sacrificial love was ultimately right and true, and that this love might be approximated in history to divert or stop the abuse of power.

In February, 1952, Niebuhr suffered several small strokes. He was hospitalized for several weeks, being partially paralyzed on his left side. At last his rigorous schedule was curtailed; he was unable to do any work at all. He spent much of the rest of his nineteen years disabled or partially so. Niebuhr continued his writing and made what appearances he could. He officially retired from teaching in 1960, becoming Professor Emeritus at Union and Research Associate at Columbia University’s Institute for War and Peace Studies. He died June 1, 1971, one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.

Significance

From the naïve liberalism of 1915 Niebuhr moved toward what he called Christian Realism. The events in which he had become involved forced him to recognize not only the effects of power in society, like that of Ford Motor Company over its thousands of helpless workers, but they also made him painfully aware of the corruption that had been imposed on the Christian norm. When confronted with the brutal realities of the industrialized city of Detroit, he came to realize the inadequacy of liberal thought with its naïve belief in the ultimate goodness of humankind to deal with evil in society. He began first to express his opposition to liberal viewpoints in terms of Marxist politics, but came to the conclusion that Marxism had essentially all the same illusions, again maintaining the ultimate goodness of human beings once capitalism was destroyed. Gradually he articulated his search for an alternative to liberal and orthodox theologies and ethical views. In Beyond Tragedy (1937), he focused on the symbol of the Cross of Christ as pivotal in understanding the human situation. While on the surface it appeared that evil had triumphed over the sacrificial love of Jesus, from the eschatological, or “beyond history,” vantage point available to Christians, the Cross transcends tragedy.

Perhaps Niebuhr’s clearest statement of Christian Realism is found in The Nature and Destiny of Man (1949). There he explains the paradox of selfless love, a divine attribute, coming into human society. While the inherent evil of human society prevents the triumph of love in this world, it could triumph in the end. Niebuhr’s emphasis is not on a future vindication, although that is essential for his thought. Rather, he focuses on the acting out of sacrificial love by humans. While that love can never be fully embodied in any human motive or action, it was the ultimate standard. Niebuhr saw the possibility of divine love having an impact on history only in a life that ends tragically, the ultimate example being that of Jesus Christ. He threw himself into the exercise of divine love, trying to rectify social and political evils, and in many ways he ended his own life tragically in that pursuit. Theologically there was no preexisting group that fully agreed with him; his ideas were too orthodox for the liberals and too liberal for the orthodox.

Bibliography

Fox, Richard Wightman. Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. An extremely well-written biography, reading at times like a good novel yet thorough and critical. Makes extensive use of unpublished materials; meticulously documented throughout. An excellent historical treatment of Niebuhr, though not as strong on theology.

Gilkey, Langdon. On Niebuhr: A Theological Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Gilkey, a theologian, examines Niebuhr’s theology, demonstrating how it was the genesis for his ideas about politics and ethics.

Halliwell, Martin. The Constant Dialogue: Reinhold Niebuhr and American Intellectual Culture. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. Focuses on the tensions between Niebuhr’s political role as a radical social critic and his conservative beliefs in a neoorthodox Christianity.

Kegley, Charles W., and Robert W. Bretall, eds. Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social and Political Thought. Reprint. New York: Macmillan, 1984. An indispensable collection of essays that critically interpret all phases of Niebuhr’s work. Also contains an important intellectual autobiography by Niebuhr himself. Particularly significant for American studies is Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Role in American Political Thought and Life.”

Patterson, Bob E. Reinhold Niebuhr. Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1977. Part of Word’s “Makers of the Modern Theological Mind” series, this concise and well-written biography gives a positive interpretation of Niebuhr’s thought from a moderate Evangelical viewpoint.

Patterson, Eric, ed. The Christian Realists: Reassessing the Contributions of Niebuhr and His Contemporaries. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2003. Investigates the ideas of Niebuhr, John Foster Dulles, Herbert Butterfield, and others who advocated a realistic and Christian solution to social and political problems.

Robertson, D. B. Reinhold Niebuhr’s Works: A Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. Rev. ed. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1983. A complete listing of Niebuhr’s published works, including both books and articles. Also contains a full listing of books about Niebuhr, as well as a large number of articles and dissertations.

Sifton, Elisabeth. The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War. New York: Norton, 2003. Sifton, who is Niebuhr’s daughter, maintains that her father’s serenity prayer is grossly misinterpreted and attempts to offer the proper interpretation by placing the prayer within the context of her father’s life, work, and development as a theologian.

Stone, Ronald H. Reinhold Niebuhr: Prophet to Politicians. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1972. Carefully traces and analyzes the stages of Niebuhr’s political ethics. Well organized and documented, although tedious at points. Perhaps the best treatment of the development of Niebuhr’s theology of Christian Realism as it both shaped and was shaped by his political thought and activities.

1941-1970: March, 1941-January, 1943: Niebuhr Extols a Theory of Christian Realism; 1952: Tillich Examines Modern Anxiety in The Courage to Be.