A Theology of Limits

Reinhold Niebuhr once remarked to his friend and first biographer June Bingham: “bad religion can be worse than no religion . . . [because] even good religion can become a source of hidden pride, of what we might call original sin.” Secularists have understandably been uncomfortable with the concept of original sin; though in the early Cold War many made an exception when Niebuhr spoke about it. But then Niebuhr wasn’t interested in theology, per se, so he didn’t condemn unbelievers; he was much more interested in attacking true-believers, whether their dogmatism was liberalism, communism, or some form of Christianity.

Not surprisingly, then, Niebuhr’s thought has consistently attracted attention from intellectuals who shared his antipathy toward ideological pride. Two books that work in that vein are John Patrick Diggins’ Why Niebuhr Now? and Charles Lemert’s Why Niebuhr Matters. If both book titles sound like they are trying to affirm Niebuhr’s lasting relevancy, they are. But one wonders why? Niebuhr has never really left the scene.

Since his heyday in the late 1940s and 1950s, when a magazine as popular as Time put him on its cover (in 1948), Niebuhr has quite simply loomed larger than any single American religious intellectual since Jonathan Edwards. The reasons for his status are simple: he dealt head-on with the giant questions of his time—from economic inequality to nuclear war—and wrestled with America’s attitude of exception when facing great problems. Niebuhr counseled time and again that, however much Americans might want to change history or make history, they were still subject to the whims and will of history. “We cannot simply have our way, not even when we believe our way to have the ‘happiness of mankind’ as its promise.”¹

The religious historian Martin Marty declared Niebuhr “a prophet to America-in-praxis,” for within Niebuhr two strands of American intellectual thought came together: the tradition of religious intellectuals to interpret the “nation’s religious experience, practice, and behavior in the light of some sort of transcendent reference” and the ability to use “specifically theological materials in order to make sense of the American experience.”²

Yet, as both Diggins and Lemert suggest, Niebuhr’s legacy is anything but settled. In 1952, when Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History first appeared in print, conservative intellectual Peter Viereck predicted in a review in the New York Times that, while Niebuhr would probably be regarded as his era’s most influential social thinker, he would earn this distinction “not because of his deserts but despite them.” Another reviewer hinted that Irony would provoke resistance from both secular and religious readers who wanted to hear something about the momentous role of their nation but not about how ironic that moment was. That same year, Robert Fitch, a professor of Christian ethics at the Pacific School of Religion, noted that Niebuhr’s prophetic critique would be far less palatable because it was so clearly a religious text and, as such, had put off Anthony West of the New Yorker who disliked Niebuhr’s use of original sin. Fitch quipped that “surely this is what must happen when the irony of the ‘civilized’ man is confronted by the irony of the Christian man.”³

Just a few years later, in a profile entitled “The Irony of Reinhold Niebuhr,” journalist William Lee Miller captured the paradox of Niebuhr’s prophecy: “Niebuhr may find himself the victim of his own greatness,” Miller concluded, “admired but misunderstood, praised but not followed.” As evidence, Miller pointed to Niebuhr’s appearance on the cover of Time and in profiles for Life. “Certainly,” Miller offered, “the admiration of the Luce enterprises has its ironical aspects. Time and Life themselves provide excellent examples of much that Mr. Niebuhr criticizes.”⁴

Such fate was confirmed over the last few years...