Word: niebuhrs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Today, midway in a bloodier, more dangerous century, there is widespread skepticism about "the steady gain of man." Most notable spokesman for this view among U.S. Protestants is Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. In his newest book, Faith and History (Scribner: $3.50), Professor Niebuhr struggles with his own tortuous prose to present his pertinent views on what kind of progress, if any, man can hope...
...Unanticipated Disaster." The Classical Greek and Oriental idea of the progress of man, says Author Niebuhr, was that there was no such thing. Like the endless cycles of nature, the projects and enterprises of men and nations were thought to flourish and die again & again in an eternal circle of recurrences. Man's only hope, Plato taught, was to free his spirit from imprisonment in the living death of the bodily world. When the Biblical-Christian conception of history replaced this classical view, says Niebuhr, "the dynamism of Western culture was made possible." Christian teaching viewed and still views...
...remedy, according to Niebuhr: let mankind return to the Christian concept that history is a drama "of God's contest with all men, who are all inclined to defy God because they all tend to make their own life into the center of history's meaning...
...Luther Error. Theologian Niebuhr says that Historian Arnold Toynbee's monumental effort to discover the pattern of history "belongs to one of the most impressive intellectual ventures of our age." But he does not hold with Toynbee's daring hypothesis that religion may be advancing onward & upward with the rise & fall of civilizations (TIME, April...
What can save a civilization from perishing? Does the Christian Gospel of Redemption apply to nations as well as individuals? Here Niebuhr wades into a cut & thrust theological controversy, armed with a two-edged blade of paradox. Human society, he concedes, is maintained by push-and-shove competition and balance of power; the very instruments of social justice tend automatically to become unjust. But, he says, such teachers as Martin Luther are in error, when they "exclude the possibility of redemption and a new life in man's social existence, and confine redemption to individual life." The structures...