Word: niebuhrs
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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...
Significantly, the editorial chairman who penned these words was himself listed as an ardent pacifist in the '20s. He is Union Seminary's famed theologian, highbrowed, sharp-eyed Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, and behind him are a group of potent church sponsors disturbed by a belief that every existing interdenominational paper is strongly pacifist in tone and no longer reflects the sentiment of most ministers...
...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...
Pioneer interventionists among churchmen have been the group led by Union Theological Seminary's Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr and Dr. Henry Pitney Van Dusen. Last week Dr. Niebuhr & friends renewed their pleas, this time for immediate ("not a day can be spared") moral and material aid for the Allies. Publication of their statement, with 27 signatures of bishops, preachers, educators, garnered 63 more signers, among them six bishops...