Word: sins
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...evil hit me in the face. . . . Human progress is possible, but so unlikely. People don't know how to conceive it." Wrote Pessimist Joad shortly after the end of the war: "I see now that evil is endemic in man, and that the Christian doctrine of original sin expresses a deep and essential insight, into human nature...
...Original Sin. This grand but somewhat anxious survey of man's fate Dr. Niebuhr clinches with a doctrine of original sin in which he leans heavily upon an insight of Kierkegaard's: "Sin presupposes sin." That is, sin need not inevitably arise from man's anxiety if sin were not already in the world. Niebuhr finds the agent of this prehistoric sin in the Devil, a fallen angel who "fell because [like man] he sought to lift himself above his measure, and who in turn insinuates temptation into human life." Thus, "the sin of each individual...
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...
...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...
...through the process of history. You grow into it." The feelings of his fellow theologians are more mixed. Some criticize his failure to think and act in terms of the church or to generate ideas that would help to counteract modern irreligion and immorality. Others find his ideas of sin too grandiose, too remote from the common tares of mankind. Some feel that he could do with more human warmth and less intellectual incandescence...