Justified True Belief

(●) The Detroit pastor with no doctorate who persuaded a confident century that the Christian doctrine of sin was the one piece of the faith the evidence kept confirming. + When Time magazine turned twenty-five in March 1948, it put a theologian on the cover. That was not sentiment. For roughly twenty years in the middle of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr was the one Christian thinker that American editors, diplomats, union organizers and seminary students all felt obliged to have read, and the arguments he started about power, justice and self-deception are still running. He belongs on a Christian apologetics site for one reason above the rest, and it takes a moment to set up. The churches and seminaries he grew up inside belonged to a movement usually called liberal Protestantism: not liberal in the sense of a voting habit, but a confident nineteenth-century way of holding the faith that treated Christianity as essentially the ethical teaching of Jesus, kept the moral demands, set the harder-to-swallow doctrines gently aside, and expected education, reform and goodwill to carry the world steadily upward. Sin was one of the doctrines that got set aside. It sounded gloomy, primitive, an embarrassment a decent modern person had outgrown. Niebuhr then spent forty years pointing out that it was also the piece of Christian teaching an ordinary newspaper reader could check for himself, and the checking was not hard. Nations that believed in their own innocence turned out to do the cruellest things. Reformers who could see everyone’s self-interest except their own wrecked what they touched. He was not asking anyone to take the doctrine on authority; he was asking them to look out the window. One fact about him surprises people who assume a famous theologian must be a career academic. Niebuhr never earned a doctorate. Union Theological Seminary hired him in 1928 with a master’s degree from Yale and thirteen years in a working-class parish behind him, and he taught there until he retired in 1960.

(●) 1892 AD: Born in a Missouri parsonage where the preaching, the arguments and the family prayers were all in German. + Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr was born on 21 June 1892 in Wright City, Missouri, a farm town on the road west out of St. Louis. His father Gustav had come over from Germany as a teenager and become a pastor in the German Evangelical Synod of North America, a small immigrant denomination that kept its worship, its hymns and much of its arguing in the old language. His mother, Lydia Hosto, was a missionary’s daughter who ran the parish alongside her husband in everything but title. It was a house that produced theologians the way some houses produce doctors. Reinhold’s younger brother, H. Richard Niebuhr, became one of the finest theological minds in America and later wrote Christ and Culture; their sister Hulda taught Christian education in Chicago. Reinhold, for his part, decided early that he wanted his father’s job, and the path to it ran through the denomination’s own schools. He went to Elmhurst College and then Eden Theological Seminary, where the classroom language was still substantially German, and then out of that world altogether to Yale Divinity School, where he took a bachelor of divinity in 1914 and a master’s in 1915 and felt, by his own account, like a provincial among the sons of the East. One thing interrupted that education, and it was the kind of thing that tends to age a young man quickly. His father died suddenly in April 1913, while Reinhold was still a student, so he went home and filled the pulpit himself through the summer. He was twenty.

(●) 1915 AD: Sent at twenty-three to a small Detroit church, he watched an industry make cars faster than it made men. + Bethel Evangelical Church had sixty-five members when Niebuhr arrived in 1915. It had close to seven hundred when he left thirteen years later, and the city around it had gone from a provincial town to the workshop of the automobile age. He kept a diary through those years and published it in 1929 as Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, and the book is still the best way to watch a young minister’s theology being taken apart by his own parish. In 1925 he went through one of the big plants. The foundry is what stayed with him. "The heat was terrific. The men seemed weary. Here manual labor is a drudgery and toil is slavery," he wrote that evening, and then turned the knife on himself and his colleagues: "Beside the brutal facts of modern industrial life, how futile are all our homiletical spoutings!" Two years later he found a way to put a number on the same feeling. Henry Ford had shut the plants for most of a year to retool for the Model A, and afterwards gave interviews about the hundred million dollars the new car had cost him. Niebuhr did some arithmetic of his own and reckoned the changeover had cost Ford’s workers at least fifty million in lost wages, with families losing homes and children pulled out of school to help. "But no one asks about the toll in human lives," he wrote. He was not yet the theologian of original sin. He was, at this stage, a minister of the Social Gospel, the great reforming movement in American Protestantism that read the teaching of Jesus as a program for society rather than only for the individual heart, and that expected Christian love, patiently applied to housing and wages and hours, to remake industrial life from the inside. It is a generous thing to believe, and Niebuhr believed it. What Detroit taught him was harder than disappointment. The men who owned the plants were not wicked, and the men who preached at them were not effective, and somewhere between those two facts a piece of his account of how good people produce bad societies was missing.

(●) 1928 AD: He moved to Union Theological Seminary and began taking apart the optimism he had been taught. + Union, in New York, took him on to teach the philosophy of religion, and in 1930 gave him the chair in applied Christianity he would hold for the next thirty years. His lecture room filled up fast, which surprised nobody who had seen him work: he was a big, balding, physical speaker who talked without notes and argued out loud with his own audience. The rest of his life arranged itself quickly in those same few years. In 1931 he married Ursula Keppel-Compton, an English theology graduate studying at Union, who became a theologian and teacher in her own right, and they had two children, Christopher and Elisabeth. He also joined the Socialist Party, stood for the New York state senate in 1930 and for Congress in 1932, and lost both times by margins that made the campaigns purely educational. Then, in 1932, came Moral Man and Immoral Society, and the polite world of liberal Protestantism stopped being polite. The book argued that the reformers had the wrong model of the problem. Individuals can be talked out of their selfishness; groups cannot; so a politics built on preaching goodwill to nations and classes is a politics that will lose, and lose to people who never expected it to work in the first place. That was aimed squarely at the Social Gospel he had preached in Detroit, and at Walter Rauschenbusch, the theologian who had led it. The sharpest reply came from his own brother, and it came over a war on the other side of the world. In September 1931 Japanese troops had begun the seizure of Manchuria, the vast region across China’s northeast, and American Christians spent the following spring arguing about what, if anything, their country should do. H. Richard Niebuhr made his case in The Christian Century under the title "the grace of doing nothing": the argument was not that inaction is comfortable but that it can be faithful, a way of leaving judgment and repair in God’s hands rather than presuming to run history oneself. Reinhold answered a week later under the title "Must We Do Nothing?" Richard’s charge in that exchange was the one that would follow his brother for the rest of his life, and it is worth stating plainly, because it is the serious objection to everything Reinhold went on to write: a faith kept so busy calculating consequences had begun to trust human management more than it trusted God. Richard had the last word in the next issue, calling the exchange "the fraternal war between my brother and me," and neither brother won it.

(●) 1939 AD: He delivered the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh as a new war began outside the hall, having already broken with the pacifists at home. + The Gifford Lectures were founded in 1885 by the will of a Scottish judge, Adam Gifford, who left money to each of the four ancient Scottish universities for its own perpetual series on what can be known of God by looking at the world rather than by opening a Bible. They are the most prestigious invitation in the English-speaking theological world, and an American with no doctorate was an unlikely choice for them. Niebuhr gave the first series in the spring of 1939 and the second that autumn, by which time Britain was at war and Edinburgh was under blackout. The lectures became The Nature and Destiny of Man, published in two volumes in 1941 and 1943, and they remain his one sustained work of theology: a full account of what a human being is, why every human being is anxious, and what that anxiety does. He arrived in Edinburgh having already broken publicly with Christian pacifism, the conviction that a follower of Jesus may never take up force, not for a cause however just and not even to defend someone else. Niebuhr had held that conviction, and in 1934 he resigned from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the pacifist body he had belonged to for years, because he had come to think that refusing to use force is not the same thing as refusing to be responsible for what force does. The man who will not fight still lives in a world where fighting decides things. As Europe fell, he pressed that point hard enough to lose friends, and in 1941 he founded the journal Christianity and Crisis largely in order to keep pressing it, arguing in its pages that American Christians who stayed out of the war against Hitler on the grounds of clean hands were not thereby innocent, only absent. The argument cost him, as he knew it would. Many of the people who had cheered Moral Man and Immoral Society for its radicalism now heard a preacher blessing the bombers, and some of them never forgave him.

(●) 1944 AD: He gave democracy a doctrine of sin, and people who ran governments started reading a theologian. + In 1944, with the war not yet won, Niebuhr published a short book on why democracy deserves defending, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. Its foreword contains the one sentence of his that almost everyone has met: man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, and man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. Notice what that does to the usual case for a free society. Democracy, on this account, is not the political expression of human goodness at all. It is the arrangement you build when you assume that whoever ends up in the corner office will be tempted, and you put the locks on the doors accordingly. That argument travelled well beyond the seminaries, and it travelled because it was useful to people who had to make decisions. By the early 1950s Niebuhr was being read by men with no particular interest in theology: the diplomat George Kennan, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the political scientist Hans Morgenthau, who was Jewish and not a believer and called him the greatest living political philosopher in America. What they were taking from him is worth naming, because his whole later reputation hangs on it. They were taking his realism: the habit of starting political thinking from what people and nations actually do when they want something, rather than from what they say about themselves in their founding documents. The philosopher Morton White coined a mildly cutting name for the type, "atheists for Niebuhr," meaning the secular intellectuals who wanted the realism about power without the God it came from. The Irony of American History (1952) was written straight at them, and at their country, arguing that a nation convinced of its own innocence is the most dangerous kind of nation there is. He kept the parish habits underneath all of it. He preached most Sundays somewhere, usually in college chapels, and much of what looks like political theory in his books began as a sermon.

(●) 1952 AD: A run of small strokes in February ended the travelling life, and he wrote seven more books from inside the limits it left him. + In February 1952 Niebuhr suffered a series of small strokes. He was hospitalized for weeks, left partially paralyzed on his left side, and went through a long depression afterwards. He was fifty-nine, and he would spend the remaining nineteen years of his life in varying degrees of disability, which for a man whose working method was to stand up in front of a room and argue was a particular kind of loss. The work did not stop, though it slowed and shortened. He wrote or co-wrote seven more books between 1953 and 1969, The Self and the Dramas of History (1955), The Structure of Nations and Empires (1959) and Man’s Nature and His Communities (1965) among them; he taught at Union until he retired in 1960; and he kept up a correspondence and an essay habit that would have exhausted a well man. In 1964 he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Still, the limits showed, and they showed most painfully in 1965, when Martin Luther King Jr. asked him to come to Selma and march. He could not walk that far. He sent a telegram instead.

(●) 1971 AD: He died at Stockbridge, and the argument he started went on without him. + Reinhold Niebuhr died on 1 June 1971 at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he and Ursula had long kept a summer house. He was seventy-eight. His reputation dipped almost immediately, as reputations do, and then came back. The books stayed in print, and the sentences kept being quoted by people standing on opposite sides of every argument he had cared about, which is either a sign that he was deep or a sign that he was useful, and probably both. Ursula Niebuhr, who outlived him by twenty-five years, edited a volume of his prayers and sermons under the title Justice and Mercy and later published their letters. There is one last irony, and he would have enjoyed it. The line of his that reached further than all the books put together may not be his at all, and the question is still open. The Serenity Prayer, asking God for grace to accept what cannot be changed, courage to change what should be changed, and wisdom to tell the one from the other, was attributed to him from 1937 onward, went to war in a 1944 prayer book for the armed forces, and was adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous, which carried it to millions of people who never heard his name. Niebuhr said he had written it, and his family always maintained it. The quotation researcher Fred Shapiro, after years of digging, now credits the wording to Winnifred Wygal, a student of Niebuhr’s who recorded a version of it in the early 1930s.

What He Taught

(T1) Every person is anxious, because we are free enough to imagine anything and small enough to secure nothing. + Think of an ordinary person lying awake at two in the morning. The job, the test results, the child who has stopped answering messages. Nothing has happened yet. That is exactly the trouble: the mind can run forward into a hundred futures it cannot control, and that is what keeps the eyes open. Niebuhr built his whole account of sin on that ordinary experience, and he explained it with two plain terms. A human being is finite, which simply means limited: one body, one lifetime, one small position in a very large world. A human being is also free, which for Niebuhr meant able to stand outside itself and take a look, to imagine its own death, to picture the whole sweep of history and its own smallness inside it. Neither of those on its own would trouble anyone much. An animal is limited and does not know it; God is unlimited and has nothing to fear. Put the two together in one creature, though, and you get anxiety, not as a disorder that some people have and others do not, but as the standing human condition. Now, anxiety is not yet sin, and he was careful about that, because a great deal follows from it. Anxiety is the precondition, the soil the thing grows in. Sin is what we do to get out of it, and he said the escape runs in two directions. One is pride, which tries to end the insecurity by making the self bigger than it is: the man who must be right, the nation that must be the exception to the rules it writes for others, the serpent’s offer in the garden, "you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:5). The other is sensuality, which tries to end the same insecurity by making the self smaller and losing it in appetite: the drink, the distraction, the thing you reach for so that you do not have to sit alone with yourself for an hour. Classical Christian teaching, he was quick to point out, had been saying this all along in a different key. It called unbelief the root of sin, and unbelief is exactly what is going on here, because the cure for anxiety would be trusting God with the things you cannot secure yourself, and that trust is precisely what we do not have.

(Q) "In short, man, being both free and bound, both limited and limitless, is anxious. Anxiety is the inevitable concomitant of the paradox of freedom and finiteness in which man is involved. Anxiety is the internal precondition of sin." + Source: Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Volume I: Human Nature, chapter 7 ("Man as Sinner"), section on temptation and sin, pages 194 to 195 in the London edition of 1941 (Nisbet). "Concomitant" is an old word for something that always travels alongside something else, the way a shadow travels with a body, so the sentence is saying that wherever you find a creature both free and limited you will find anxiety with it. The sentence comes in the middle of the Gifford Lectures, where Niebuhr is working out what a human being is before he says anything about what a human being does. He credits the insight to the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, whose analysis of anxiety and sin he calls the profoundest in Christian thought (T1).

(T2) Groups are more selfish than the people who make them up. + Here is the observation that made him famous, and the odd thing about it is that most people have already made it themselves without ever giving it a name. A man who would not cheat his neighbour out of a dollar will vote without blinking for a tariff that ruins a farmer he will never meet. A committee of perfectly decent employees will sign off, on a Tuesday afternoon, on a decision that not one of them would have made alone. Somewhere in the few feet between the individual conscience and the group decision, a restraint drops out. Niebuhr had a name for what is left once it drops out. He called it collective egoism, the selfishness of a group, which is not simply the sum of its members’ selfishness but something with a life and an appetite of its own. Think about why that should be. A group cannot feel shame the way a person can, because it has no face to lose and no soul to examine at two in the morning. Its loyalties reward the members who defend it hardest. And the man who speaks for it can be perfectly ruthless on its behalf in the afternoon and go home and be kind to his children in the evening, without ever noticing a contradiction. This is why Niebuhr thought moral suasion, the strategy of changing behaviour by appealing to conscience and persuading people to be better, was such a weak tool once you left the level of the individual. You can shame a person. You cannot shame a nation. The consequence he drew from that was unwelcome then and is unwelcome now. If groups do not yield to persuasion, then justice between them will always involve pressure of some kind: strikes, votes, sanctions, laws with teeth in them, and sometimes force. Christians who want clean hands, he said, will have to face the fact that the alternative to using power responsibly is not the absence of power but somebody else’s use of it. He was willing to concede ground on the wording, and later admitted that his title had overstated the case, since individuals are nothing like as moral as the phrase "moral man" suggests. He kept the argument anyway.

(Q) "In every human group there is less reason to guide and to check impulse, less capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to comprehend the needs of others and therefore more unrestrained egoism than the individuals, who compose the group, reveal in their personal relationships." + Source: Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, Introduction, page xi (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932). "Self-transcendence" is his term for the mind’s ability to step back and look at itself from the outside, the thing you do when you catch yourself in a bad mood and know it is a bad mood. A crowd cannot do that, and the sentence is an inventory of what a crowd therefore lacks. It stands in the opening pages, before the argument proper has started, which tells you how much weight he expected it to carry. In the same introduction he grants that the book’s title states the distinction "too unqualifiedly" (T2).

(T3) The decent are dangerous in politics, because they do not credit the power of self-interest, least of all their own. + In 1944, with the death camps still running, Niebuhr went looking for a way to say this and borrowed a phrase from one of the stranger things Jesus ever said. A dishonest manager, about to be fired, cooks the books to make friends who will take him in afterwards, and the parable ends with what sounds like a compliment: "The master commended the dishonest manager for his shrewdness. For the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light" (Luke 16:8). Niebuhr took those two parties, the sons of this world and the sons of light, and made them the cast of a whole book. The children of darkness, in his telling, are the cynics: the people who acknowledge no law above their own interest. They are evil. They are also, in a narrow and dangerous way, wise, because a man who has stopped pretending about his own self-interest understands exactly what self-interest can do, and he can therefore see it coming in everybody else. The children of light are the decent ones, the people who really do believe there is a law above the self and mean to obey it. They are virtuous, and they are usually fools, for the simple reason that they do not credit the power of self-will, and are blindest to it where it sits closest, in themselves. His charge against the democratic world of the 1930s follows from that, and it is worth getting right, because it is not the charge people expect. He was not saying those nations had been wicked. He was saying they had been sentimental. They had underestimated the Nazi fury because they could not quite believe that anyone meant it, and they had spoken warmly about an international conscience while each of them quietly looked after its own. What he wanted in place of that was not cynicism, which he thought was its own disease and a worse one. He wanted a harder kind of hope: people who hold on to the higher law and simultaneously stop being surprised by what human beings, themselves included, will do to get their way.

(Q) "The children of darkness are evil because they know no law beyond the self. They are wise, though evil, because they understand the power of self-interest. The children of light are virtuous because they have some conception of a higher law than their own will. They are usually foolish because they do not know the power of self-will." + Source: Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense, chapter 1, pages 10 to 11 (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944). The four sentences sit on the first pages of the book and set up everything after them: two groups, each right about the half of the truth the other one misses. Niebuhr quotes the verse behind the title in the King James wording, "the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light" (T3).

(T4) The love Jesus commanded is an impossible possibility: it judges every arrangement and is embodied in none. + Read the Sermon on the Mount slowly, with a pen, as though you meant to do what it says, and something awkward happens. "But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44), and a few verses later, "You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48). Nobody does this. Nobody has ever run a country on it, or a company, or for that matter a difficult family Christmas. And yet nobody who reads it honestly comes away wanting to say that it is wrong, or that a lower standard would have been better. Niebuhr gave that awkwardness a name and made it the hinge of his ethics. The law of love, he said, is an impossible possibility. It is impossible in the plain sense that no person and no society ever actually arrives at it, and that the ones who announce they have arrived are generally the furthest away. It is possible in the sense that it keeps breaking into history in particular moments anyway, in the forgiveness nobody owed and the sacrifice nobody required, and in the further sense that it goes on standing over every real arrangement as the measure by which that arrangement is found wanting. Holding both halves together let him refuse two tidier positions, one on each side of him. On one side, the liberal Protestants of his youth had turned the Sermon on the Mount into a practical program, a set of achievable policies that enough hard work and goodwill would deliver, which makes the gospel into a project and guarantees disillusionment when the project stalls. On the other side stood a strand of Lutheran teaching, often called the doctrine of the two kingdoms, which holds that God governs the church through the gospel and the world through law and government, each with its own proper rules. Some who taught it walled the Sermon off from public life altogether, keeping its demands for the private heart while politics ran on its own terms, and Niebuhr’s objection was that this leaves the powerful unjudged. He wanted the commandment left exactly where it stands: unachievable, unrepealed, and aimed at everybody, including the people whose hands are dirtiest and most necessary.

(Q) "The Kingdom of God is always at hand in the sense that impossibilities are really possible, and lead to new actualities in given moments of history. Nevertheless every actuality of history reveals itself, after the event, as only an approximation of the ideal; and the Kingdom of God is therefore not here. It is in fact always coming but never here." + Source: Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, chapter 2 ("The Ethic of Jesus"), page 68 in the London edition of 1936 (Student Christian Movement Press). There is a small irony in where this was said. The book came out of the Rauschenbusch Lectures, an endowed series named for the Social Gospel theologian whose program Niebuhr had spent the previous decade dismantling. The passage is his answer to the obvious question, which is what good an ideal does if it is never reached, and a few lines later he describes the task of Christian ethics as making workable compromises in the world while still "preserving the indictment upon all human life of the impossible possibility, the law of love" (T4).

(T5) Justice is what love becomes when it has to work through power. + Picture a house with four children and one bathroom. Love is what the parent actually wants in that house: each child noticing the others and gladly giving way. What the parent actually writes is a schedule, and tapes it to the door. Now, the schedule is not love. It is also not the opposite of love, and a parent who tore it down in the name of love would simply be handing the bathroom to the biggest child. The schedule is what love has to turn into when there are real competing claims and nobody in the house is a saint before breakfast. Niebuhr thought whole societies work the same way, and he built his politics on it. Justice, in his account, is love’s approximation under the conditions of power: rules, contracts, checks, unions, votes and courts, all of them rough machinery for keeping one person’s will, or one group’s, from swallowing another’s. The term he leaned on hardest is balance of power, which means nothing more complicated than an arrangement in which no party is left strong enough to take what it wants unopposed. A balance of power is not brotherhood, and he never pretended otherwise. It is the nearest thing to brotherhood that a society of anxious people can be relied upon to produce, and the idealist who despises it because it falls short of love generally ends up handing the field to whoever is least troubled by scruples. This is also why he thought democracy needed a doctrine of sin rather than a doctrine of progress. Follow the two simpler views out and you can see why neither one gets you a free society. If people were basically good, then any competent ruler would do and the checks would be a waste of everyone’s time. If people were simply wicked, then only a strong hand could hold the thing together at all. Both halves of the truth about human beings have to be held at once, and a free society, on this reading, is what you build when you actually believe both of them.

(Q) "Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." + Source: Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, Foreword, page xi (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944). Everyone quotes the two clauses; the sentence just after them is the one that does the real work. In every non-democratic theory, Niebuhr points out, some ruler is trusted with unchecked power for the sake of order, on the grounds that ordinary people cannot be trusted with their own affairs. The pessimism is genuine. It is simply never applied, as it should be, to the ruler (T5).

(Q) "Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love." + Source: Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, chapter 3 ("Happiness, Prosperity and Virtue"), closing paragraphs (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952). The passage runs one step further than the three sentences above, and the last step is the one people tend to remember. No virtuous act, he says, ever looks as virtuous to a friend or to an enemy as it looks to us, and therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness. That is about as close as Niebuhr ever came to putting his whole case into four sentences, and it is worth stopping to notice what the case turns out to be when he puts it that way. A man famous for talking about power ends by talking about being saved.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) He made the doctrine of sin sayable again, and people who shared none of his theology took it from him. + The word "sin" had become close to unusable in educated American religion by the 1920s. It sounded too gloomy, too primitive, too obviously a hangover from a harsher age, and a minister who used it in a university town could watch the congregation brace. What Niebuhr did was change where the argument took place. He stopped defending the doctrine from the pulpit and started testing it against the newspaper, and on that ground the doctrine kept winning. Every generation of reformers had assumed that better education and better arrangements would gradually drain the self-interest out of human affairs. Every generation had then watched the self-interest walk back in wearing the reform’s own clothes. Because he argued in that way, using evidence anybody could check, he ended up being read by people who had no intention whatever of becoming Christians. Hans Morgenthau, who paid him the compliment of calling him America’s greatest living political philosopher, was one of the founders of the realist school of international relations, the study of how states behave in terms of interest and power rather than in terms of their stated ideals, and he held no faith of his own. The diplomat George Kennan and the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. both took his anthropology into their own work. The word there is the theological one, not the study of tribes and bones: a thinker’s anthropology is simply his account of what a human being is and what a human being is likely to do. Morton White’s phrase "atheists for Niebuhr" was a joke about a real phenomenon, and the phenomenon outlived him. In 2007 a United States senator named Barack Obama, asked by a journalist whether he had read Niebuhr, called him one of his favourite philosophers and summarized him accurately on the spot. Niebuhr himself was ambivalent about all of it. He had not set out to supply a foreign policy establishment with a theory of human nature, and being found useful by people who dismissed the doctrine’s source was never quite the compliment it looked like.

(†) Martin Luther King Jr. carried his account of groups into the streets of Birmingham. + King read Niebuhr as a graduate student and wrote about him, and the encounter did something quite specific to his thinking rather than merely impressing him. King had been drawn to a pacifism that expected the conscience of the segregationist South to be reached by appeal, one decent man at a time. Niebuhr’s argument about groups (T2) convinced him that an appeal to conscience on its own would never move an entrenched group, and that pressure of some kind would be required. What King did with that conclusion is the interesting part, and it is not what a reader of Niebuhr might predict. Instead of abandoning nonviolence as too weak for the job, he rebuilt it into a form of pressure: a way of confronting power that deliberately refused to become the thing it was confronting. King said as much in print, and named his source while he was at it. Writing from a cell in Birmingham in April 1963, in the open letter that answered the white clergymen who had asked him to be patient, he put it this way: "Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals." The traffic ran both ways between the two men. Niebuhr defended King publicly, including at the point when King was being attacked from every direction for opposing the war in Vietnam, and it was Niebuhr’s stroke-damaged body rather than any disagreement between them that kept him out of the march at Selma in 1965.

(†) The theologians who admired him most were also his sharpest critics, starting with his brother H. Richard. + Start with Karl Barth, because the two men were closer than the quarrel makes them sound. Barth was the Swiss theologian who had broken the confidence of liberal theology a generation earlier by insisting that God is not the best of humanity’s own ideals projected upward, but a living God who speaks to the world from outside it, and his instincts about human self-confidence were very close to Niebuhr’s. In 1948 he gave the opening address at the founding assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam, the gathering that first drew the Protestant and Anglican churches, together with some of the Orthodox, into a single permanent fellowship, with Rome staying outside it. The burden of the address was that the care of the world is God’s business and not the church’s, and that Christians should stop behaving as though history were theirs to manage. Niebuhr was in the hall, and he thought the address left the church with nothing whatever to say to men who had to decide about bombs and borders on Tuesday morning. Barth, for his part, thought Niebuhr had turned Christianity into a technique for running the world slightly better than the unbelievers run it. They argued about it in print for years afterwards and never settled it. The exchange is worth knowing precisely because neither man was being foolish: it is a fair map of the two ways a serious Christian can answer the question of how much of history is ours to carry. The same criticism had reached Reinhold sixteen years earlier, from inside the family, in the exchange with H. Richard Niebuhr over Manchuria: that his theology was drifting toward a faith in responsible human action, with God somewhere in the background holding the coats. Reinhold never fully answered that charge, and to his credit he never pretended to have. It outlived him as a working problem. Later Christian ethicists who worked in his debt, Paul Ramsey and John C. Bennett among them, spent much of their careers on the question of what his realism needed in order to stay Christian rather than merely shrewd.

(†) Where his own teaching falls short: the fall becomes a myth, and the resurrection a symbol. + An honest ledger has a second column, and in Niebuhr’s case the entries in it are written in his own hand rather than by hostile interpreters. He recovered the doctrine of sin, and he did it by detaching the doctrine from the events that Scripture attaches it to. He was not shy about this. He said so in print, and the cost shows up in three places. - The fall. The fall is the church’s name for the event in the third chapter of Genesis in which the first human beings disobey God and human nature is damaged from that point on. Insisting on it as an historical event Niebuhr called a "literalistic error," and he argued that Adam should be read as representative man, a portrait of every one of us, rather than as the first man in a particular garden. What he was protecting is worth understanding before it is criticized, because he was not simply being modern. He thought a chronological reading turned human perfection into a lost golden age somewhere behind us, safely in the past, when the whole point is that the standard stands over us right now. Fair enough. But Paul’s argument in Romans 5 runs from one man’s act through to one man’s obedience, from the first Adam to Christ, and an Adam who is only a symbol leaves that comparison standing on one leg. - The resurrection. Writing about how to read biblical language about the end of history, he said it was important to take such symbols "seriously but not literally," and he named the resurrection in the list. Here the cost is severe, because whatever else the apostles were preaching, they were not preaching a symbol. "This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses" (Acts 2:32) is a claim about something that happened on a particular morning, offered by men who said they had eaten and drunk with him after he rose (Acts 10:41), and Paul stakes the entire enterprise on it: "And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). - What is left thin. Sin, power and history fill his pages. The person of Christ, the church, and the sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper chief among them, the acts in which Christians have always held that God does something rather than merely teaches something, never get anything like the same attention. The result is a strange one. A reader can finish Niebuhr wholly convinced about human nature and still be unclear about what God has actually done. None of this cancels the achievement, and it should not be read as though it did. Niebuhr took a doctrine that educated people had thrown out as superstition, and he got them to pick it up again by the simple method of showing them their own century. He was right that the evidence is overwhelming, and right that the optimists could not account for it. The gospel he was defending, though, is not finally a diagnosis of the human condition, however accurate. It is news about an event. A defence of Christianity that keeps the diagnosis while loosening its grip on the event has given away the part that saves.