Word: niebuhrs
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Some of these thorny trails of thought are explored in Christianity and the Existentialists, a new book published by Scribner ($3.75) and edited by Carl Michalson, professor of systematic theology at Drew University. Its eight chapters include studies of Kierkegaard by Theologian H. (for Helmut) Richard Niebuhr,* Spain's Miguel de Unamuno by President John A. Mackay of Princeton Theological Seminary, Nicholas Berdyaev by Matthew Spinka, professor of church history at the Hartford Seminary Foundation, Gabriel Marcel by Professor J. V. Langmead Casserley of the General Theological Seminary, Martin Heidegger by Erich Dinkler of Yale Divinity School...
...spite of all its talk, is a philosophy of action; words by themselves do not count. "One who murmurs in his beer, 'I wish I were dead,' " writes Michalson, "would only be really existing if he were at that moment quaffing poison." Kierkegaard, says Yale's Niebuhr, was much like his hero Socrates, "whose wisdom consisted in the knowledge of his ignorance, whose imperative was 'know thyself,' whose philosophy of life was 'reduplicated in his living and his dying, who was a comic and tragic figure, who was the father of philosophers...
...confused with Union Theological Seminary's Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, his elder brother...
...their forewords, Roman Catholic George N. Shuster calls the book "a sort of hymn," and Protestant Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr says: "It is ... one of the most rewarding ironies of history that only a very great evil can prompt such martyrdom as these pages . . . illumine . . . While there is a problem for the German nation about the guilt of having allowed the Nazi tyranny to come to power among them, it is fortunately true that the German people were also responsible for the lives and deeds of heroism and martyrdom in which the horrible evil was resisted...
Meanwhile, other men of ideas found other banners to rally around. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr condemned the liberal reformers for having ignored the fact of original sin, and declared that man's destiny is to "seek after an impossible victory and to adjust himself to an inevitable defeat." In his The Public Philosophy, Journalist Walter Lippmann denounced the "Jacobin heresy" of the modern democracies, which insists that the New Man will be born out of his emancipation from authority. What is needed, said Lippmann, is a return to the idea of natural law, for with the disappearance of this public...