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105 Away from Nineteenth-Century Religion In the history of theological thought in the twentieth-century Reinhold Niebuhr holds an assured place. Although he is still insufficiently recognized in Continental Europe1 —perhaps because his writings are so largely “practical” and are directed so prominently to the problems facing Christians in Anglo-Saxon democracies—he is nonetheless a figure of international importance whose teachings often have a surprising relevance to the most recent debates in contemporary theology.2 Certainly, his appearance on the theological scene was a decisive one. In the 1930s his revolutionary vision made an extraordinary impression on Christian thinking in America .3 To many he seemed to open the way into a new Promised Land.4 British interest in his teaching was already awakened in this decade5 and was stirred still further by his 1939 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh.6 The first book to be devoted exclusively to his teachings was by a British author.7 By the early 1940s, Niebuhr’s name stood high in estimation both within and beyond his homeland. No thinker brings his thought to maturity in a vacuum, and Niebuhr least of all. In Part 1 I have concentrated on estimating his anthropology, as that doctrine is expounded in his writings. Now I take a wider view, seeking to examine his teachings in the light of the intellectual and cultural movements during his lifetime,and seeking also to describe his impact on his age. For the developed Niebuhrian anthropology that appears in the Gifford Lectures was the product of much action and reaction. If we are to understand the shape of Niebuhr’s thinking,we must look at the general picture of Chapter Eight 106 Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian Anthropology in Its Context Protestant beliefs with which he was concerned from his earliest days; and, in particular, we must consider the climate of opinion within the Protestant churches that he did so much to change. While this may seem to stray far from the specific matter of his anthropology, it really does not.Throughout his career, he has always maintained that an inadequate idea of humanity is at the root of those “heresies” that mislead Christians and non-Christians alike,resulting in the worship of idols instead of the true God.All his battles have been fought, in the last resort, in order to establish a sound Christian anthropology.The progress of his theological writings makes this plain. Niebuhr’s chief reaction to the current Christian teaching in the Protestant churches during the 1920s and 1930s might well be summed up in the slogan “Away from Nineteenth-Century Religion!” He has indicated this often, though never better than in a paragraph of his “Intellectual Autobiography ” in the Living Library volume. My early writings were all characterized by a critical attitude toward the “liberal” world view, whether expressed in secular or in Christian terms. There was, as a matter of fact, little difference between the secular and Christian versions of the optimism of the nineteenth-century culture. For years I commuted, as it were, between ecclesiastical and academic communities. I found each with a sense of superiority over the other either because it possessed, or had discarded, the Christian faith. But this contest was ironic because the viewpoints of the two communities were strikingly similar, and both were obviously irrelevant to the ultimate realities, whether in terms of mankind’s collective behavior or in terms of individual man’s ultimate problems.8 Niebuhr thus looked around him and saw the dominance of a blind trust in progress in both society and nineteenth-century religion, either in a “secular ” or in a “Christian” form. He judged it necessary to attack this religion fiercely and without qualification as the precondition of putting something more adequate in its place. He began his attack in his first book. The opening sentence of Does Civilization Need Religion? states roundly,“Religion is not in a robust state of health in modern civilization.”9 A few pages later we read, “If religion contains indispensable resources for the life of man, its revival waits only upon the elimination of those maladjustments which have hindered it from making its resources available for the citizen of the modern era.”10 The desired elimination was not to come soon,however,or to be a painless process. Niebuhr found that the maladjustments which were so apparent to him were barely, if at all, evident to those whom he sought to convince. And so...

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