Word: niebuhrs
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...Niebuhrs are the Trapp family of theology. Reinhold is professor of ethics and theology at Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary; his younger brother, H. (for Helmut) Richard, is professor of theology and Christian ethics at Yale University Divinity School; and H. Richard's son, Richard R. (for Reinhold), is associate professor of theology at Harvard Divinity School. In last week's Christian Century, Niebuhr No. 2, H. Richard, analyzes the nature of his own faith and how it has changed...
Deification of the Scriptures. Like many another Protestant of his generation, 65-year-old Theologian Niebuhr reacted against the liberalism which ignored church tradition and turned back instead to giants of the past-Jonathan Edwards. Pascal, Luther, Calvin, Thomas Aquinas and Augustine. And while he considered the reform of culture one of Christianity's great responsibilities (to which Brother Reinhold was especially called), the reform of the church itself was his own special vocation. "As a convinced Protestant (not an anti-Catholic) who saw the sovereignty of God usurped by the spirit of capitalism and of nationalism, I felt...
...that trend may have gone too far, and recently Theologian Niebuhr has turned his Protestant protest against "the deification of the Scriptures and of the church." Followers of Karl Barth (TIME, March 7) and some other leading Protestants, Niebuhr feels, "have substituted for the religion-centered faith of the 19th century a church-centered faith, as though the historical and visible church were the representative of God on earth, as though the Bible were the only word that God is speaking...
Pregnant Words & Symbolic Deeds. Western man, Niebuhr feels, is lost and disillusioned-not only about himself but about the things in which he once put his trust, such as nation and technology, in which the underdeveloped nations and the Russians are trusting today. "In the West the most sensitive, if not yet most, men are living in a great religious void; their half-gods are gone and the gods have not yet arrived." This, thinks Theologian Niebuhr, is true of men both in and out of seminaries and churches. The answer: a set of new religious symbols that are truly...
...more biblical or more liturgical. I look for a resymbolization of the message and the life of faith in the One God. Our old phrases are worn out; they have become cliches." Mere retranslation of traditional terms-"Word of God." "redemption." "justification," "grace," "eternal life"-is not possible, says Niebuhr, without "the actualities" which people in another age knew intimately when they used these terms. What is needed is a "resymbolization in pregnant words and in symbolic deeds, like the new words of the Reformation and the Puritan movement and the Great Awakening, like the symbolic deeds of the Franciscans...