Word: niebuhrs
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There comes a season when a church man must take inventory of his life and thought, keeping what still seems valid to him and casting the chaff to the wind. For Reinhold Niebuhr, 73, the inventory spans half a century of ministry, including 32 years as a professor of Christian ethics at Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary and authorship of 20 volumes on theology and political philosophy. In a thin book called Man's Nature and His Communities (Scribner; $3.95), Niebuhr makes his summing-up. The volume is partly a confession of past errors, partly an ex planation...
Ford Motors as Baal. The errors that Niebuhr confesses in this book of "my old age" are mostly errors of social and political philosophy. He was never a Communist sympathizer. He was always critical of an ideology that promised to build Utopia by destroying human freedom. Nevertheless, he was strongly influenced by Marx, and believed in the capacity of socialism to realize more fully than any other political system the Christian ideals of social justice and equality...
...against the depredations of those who called for Commitment. But Mr. Lasch is far more interested in the failings of the '40's and '50's, and perhaps it is here that he is most illuminating. He notes that the post-Marxist "realist" school of political analysis, fathered by Niebuhr on Kennan, Morgenthau, Charles Osgood, Louis Halle, and John F. Kennedy, has based most of its concept of America's world role on the European situation, where the possibility of imperialism is understandably slight. Btu in the undeveloped world? Mr. Lasch hints that the old Marxist analysis of world politics...
...cops and courts get tougher. Admittedly, fear of dire punishment is often an effective deterrent. So, for that matter, is torture. But the reformers argue that the hope of an orderly society lies in making "equal and exact justice" more equal and more exact. As Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr has observed, "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary...
...where individuals deal with one another as objects. For many Christian thinkers, Buber's personalism was a vital corrective to the existentialist stress on man, and the roster of those who acknowledge their debt to his thinking reads like the honor role of 20th century theology: Tillich, Niebuhr, Maritain, Berdiaev, Barth...