Word: niebuhr
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...religious book-of-the-year was published last week, and it puts sin right back in the spotlight. Its author: Union Seminary's Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, high priest of Protestantism's young intellectuals. Its title: The Nature and Destiny of Man: Volume I (Scribner; $2.75). Its significance: that America's most influential theologian is reversing the optimistic and rationalistic trend of Christian liberalism to lead his legions back to an almost medieval emphasis on the basic sinfulness...
...book is doubly interesting because 15 years ago Dr. Niebuhr was himself an outstanding exponent of the liberal credo he now seeks to discredit as opportunism, calling it "a religious accommodation to the prejudices of bourgeois culture." "I confess," he wrote in The Christian Century, "that between Versailles and Munich I underwent a conversion which involved rejection of almost all the liberal theological ideals and ideas with which I first ventured forth. My first book contains almost all the windmills against which today I tilt." In the light of history, especially from 1920 to 1940, he finds liberal optimism about...
...describes as "the first full dress exposition of my philosophy." The man in the pew is not likely to read it, but he will hear about it from the pulpit for years to come. Whether he will be moved by what he hears is another question, for Dr. Niebuhr belligerently repudiates liberalism's "pathetic eagerness" to justify itself to the modern mind. He foresees the unpopularity of his dogma, concedes that little short of world catastrophe can make Babbitt think of himself as a sinner or worry about the problem...
...Niebuhr's "conversion" is a sign of the times. In the easy '20s sin was becoming an archaism, like the devil's tail and angels with six wings. Calvin Coolidge's preacher was against it, but liberal clergymen were accepting the Platonic conception of sin as ignorance, echoing the words of Socrates that no man knowingly does that which is wrong. The doctrine of progressive evolution had helped explain away the existence of evil in a God-made world; humanity seemed to be getting better and better; and righteousness was somehow just around the corner...
...Editor Niebuhr and his colleagues hope to change the minds of many more churchmen with Christianity and Crisis. Said he of his group's aims last week: "We think it dangerous to allow religious sensitivity to obscure the fact that Nazi tyranny intends to annihilate the Jewish race, to subject the nations of Europe to the dominion of a 'master' race, to extirpate the Christian religion, to annul the liberties and legal standards which are the priceless heritage of ages of Christian and humanistic culture. . . . We believe that the Christian faith can and must make...