Word: paradoxity
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Future historians of 20th Century totalitarianism will puzzle over this paradox: the most effective anti-Nazi novel (On the Marble Cliffs) published in Germany during Hitler's reign was written by a prominent Nazi writer...
...paradox of man's freedom and finiteness is common to all great religions. But the Christian approach to the problem is unique, for it asserts that the crux of the problem is not man's finiteness-the qualities that make him one with the brute creation-but man's sin. It is not from the paradox that Christianity seeks to redeem man; it is from, the sin that arises from the paradox. It is man who seeks to redeem himself from the paradox. His efforts are the stuff of history. Hence history, despite man's goals...
There are other perils-a dissolving perspective of paradox. Man's knowledge is limited, but not completely limited, since he has some sense of the limits-and, to that degree, transcends them. And, as he transcends them, he seeks to understand his immediate situation in terms of a total situation-i.e., God's will. But man is unable to understand the total situation except in the finite terms of his immediate situation. "The realization of the relativity of his knowledge subjects him to the peril of skepticism. The abyss of meaninglessness yawns on the brink...
This original sin, infecting the paradox in which man asserts his freedom against his finiteness, and complicating with a fatality of evil a destiny which man senses to be divine,.is the tissue of history. It explains why man's history, even at its highest moments, is not a success story. It yawns, like a bottomless crater, across the broad and easy avenue of optimism. It would be intolerable without faith, without hope, without love...
...elaborator of somber paradoxes is something of a paradox himself. Hawk-nosed and saturnine, Reinhold Niebuhr is, nevertheless, a cheerful and gracious (though conversationally explosive) man. An intellectual's intellectual, he nevertheless lectures and preaches with the angular arm-swinging of a revivalist. An orthodox Protestant, he is one of the busiest of leftist working politicians-a member of the Liberal party. For his gloomy view of man and history does not inhibit hL belief that man should act for what he holds to be the highest good (always bearing in mind that sin will dog his action...