Word: niebuhrs
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...Albert Einstein, Sir Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin, Historian Arnold Toynbee, Philosophers John Dewey and Bertrand Russell; Psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, Artist Pablo Picasso, Writers Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, Andre Gide, Jean-Paul Scrtre and William Faulkner; Theologians Jacques Maritain, Karl Barth, Martin Buber, Albert Schweitzer and Reinhold Niebuhr; and, as a "moral symbol of the Western democratic creed, whom the whole world recognizes," Eleanor Roosevelt...
...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...
...Niebuhr finds still further possibility of Christian redemption on an international level. The most powerful groups within nations and the most powerful nations in the world can, he thinks, behave enough like individuals to earn themselves rebirth. This can happen when their power and pride are challenged by new social forces. Then they "face the alternative of dying because they try too desperately to live, or of achieving new life by dying to self." When the latter occurs, he claims, it establishes "the validity of the Christian doctrine of life through death for the collective, as well...
...Final Virtue. Professor Niebuhr is careful to remind his readers that the redemption which takes place within history is necessarily limited. God's final judgment can only happen outside history altogether-at the end of the world. "Thus mystery stands at the end, as well as at the beginning of the whole pilgrimage of man. But the clue to the mystery is the Agape of Christ...