Word: faithful
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...science, politics, social reform, education. Man is essentially good, says 20th Century liberalism, because he is rational, and his rationality is (if the speaker happens to be a liberal Protestant) divine, or (if he happens to be religiously unattached) at least benign. Thus the reason-defying paradoxes of Christian faith are happily bypassed...
...Logic of Paradox. Orthodox Protestantism by & large subscribes to a body of beliefs among which are: that man is by nature inevitably evil, partaking of the original sin of Adam; that salvation is by faith alone, that good works are meritorious but not essential; that grace is God's gratuitous benevolence; that the Atonement is the redeeming power of Christ's incarnation, suffering and death; that the end of history will be the Last Judgment...
Niebuhr's overarching theme is the paradox of faith-in St. Paul's words: "The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." But Christian faith is a paradox which is the sum of paradoxes. Its passion mounts, like a surge of music, insubstantial and sustaining, between two great cries of the spirit-the paradoxic sadness of "Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief," and the paradoxic triumph of Tertullian's "Credo quia impossibile" (I believe because it is impossible...
...Anxiety," says Reinhold Niebuhr, "is the internal precondition of sin"-the inevitable spiritual state of man, in the paradox of his freedom and his finiteness. Anxiety is not sin because there is always the ideal possibility that faith might purge anxiety of the tendency toward sin. The ideal possibility is that faith in God's love would overcome all immediate insecurities of nature and history. Hence Christian orthodoxy has consistently defined unbelief as the root of sin. Anxiety is the state of temptation-that anxiety which Kierkegaard called "the dizziness of freedom...
...destiny which man senses to be divine,.is the tissue of history. It explains why man's history, even at its highest moments, is not a success story. It yawns, like a bottomless crater, across the broad and easy avenue of optimism. It would be intolerable without faith, without hope, without love...