Word: niebuhr
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...finiteness, he pretends that he is not limited. Sensing his transcendence, man "assumes that he can gradually transcend [his finiteness] until his mind becomes identical with universal mind. All his intellectual and cultural pursuits . . . become infected with the sin of pride.. . . The religious dimension of sin," says Dr. Niebuhr, "is man's rebellion against God. . . . The moral and social dimension of sin is injustice...
...revealed in each achievement. In all his anxious acts man faces the temptation of illimitable possibility. "There is therefore no limit of achievement in any sphere of activity in which human history can rest with equanimity." History cannot pause. Its evil and its good are inextricably interwoven. Says Niebuhr: the creative and the destructive elements in anxiety are so mixed that to purge even moral achievement of sin is not so easy as moralists imagine...
Original Sin. This grand but somewhat anxious survey of man's fate Dr. Niebuhr clinches with a doctrine of original sin in which he leans heavily upon an insight of Kierkegaard's: "Sin presupposes sin." That is, sin need not inevitably arise from man's anxiety if sin were not already in the world. Niebuhr finds the agent of this prehistoric sin in the Devil, a fallen angel who "fell because [like man] he sought to lift himself above his measure, and who in turn insinuates temptation into human life." Thus, "the sin of each individual...
...Theologian. The intricate architecture of his thought explains why even Roman Catholic theologians respect Dr. Niebuhr. Both Catholics and Protestants may disagree with this or that aspect of his doctrine, or bypass or reject it as a whole. Few care to challenge...
Clearly it is not a faith for the tender-minded. It is a faith for a Lenten age. Even those who fail to follow all the sinuosities of his reasoning must sense that, whatever else he has done or left undone, Niebuhr has restored to Protestantism a Christian virility. For, in the name of courage, which men have always rightly esteemed in one another as the indispensable virtue, he summons Protestants to seek truth...