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143 The “Christian Interpretation” of the Human Situation The strength of Niebuhr’s appeal to the wisdom and abiding relevance of the great theologians of Christian orthodoxy lay very largely in his emphasis on realism.In a sense,the return to an appreciation of the classic theologians was part of the revolt against the nineteenth century. And that revolt was brought about partly by using the critical tools forged in the nineteenth century—in particular, the tool of scientific historical criticism. Ritschl (and Harnack after him) had considered himself to be interpreting Luther for the modern age.But the researches of twentieth-century historians such as Karl Holl made it impossible to believe that the nineteenth century had been able to grasp the mind and motives of the historical Luther.1 This was only one instance among many where the outlook of the recent past—the “modern mind”—was made to seem shallow beside the newly appreciated insights of the “classic”eras of Christian thought.2 Niebuhr himself did not write as a historian, but as a twentieth-century man educated through the study of history to revere the giants of the past, and so to achieve a realistic vision. Those who were imprisoned in the merely contemporary and its passing problems were incapable of true realism, whereas those who would look deeply into the human situation in its unchanging aspects must be the heirs of all the ages.3 If twentieth-century historical research appeared to have broken through the limitations of nineteenth-century prejudice and provincialism, it appeared also to have prepared the way for new estimates to be made of the recent past.Because the nineteenth century was seen as a falling-away from Chapter Eleven Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian Anthropology in Its Context 144 an authentically Christian understanding of humanity and the world into a false optimism, those who, in that climate of conformity, had been dissenters were now honoured as prophets of a new order.Even anti-Christian thinkers, such as Marx and Nietzsche, were preferred to less controversial “great” Victorians, while the agonized faith of a Kierkegaard or a Dostoevsky spoke to the twentieth-century condition. Niebuhr helped to familiarize his generation with the continuity between the “pessimistic” European thinkers and the existential theologies of St. Augustine and Pascal.4 Perhaps the sense of being liberated from the compulsory modernity of liberalism so as to be able to rejoin the long tradition of Christian thinking was the greatest blessing that Niebuhr’s writings brought his readers. For liberal theology, with all its claims to have saved Christianity from obscurantism and given it currency in the world, had been narrowing in its ultimate effects. It had been dogmatic in its insistence on renouncing dogma. And it had made the “modern mind” into a censor with absolute power. The excitement caused by Niebuhr’s teaching in the 1930s was, at least in part, the result of the rediscovery of a lost heritage. In Reflections on the End of an Era Niebuhr had suggested that the vital core of Christianity was contained within (though it was not identical with) orthodox theology, and in his subsequent books he stressed more and more the value of individual orthodox theologians, finally presenting in his Gifford Lectures a panorama of Christian thought (in its practical dimension) down the ages.5 Having appealed to the central tradition of Christian orthodoxy, other theologians would probably have gone on to distinguish between different strands in that tradition and to declare their theological allegiance in relation to individual Christian thinkers. With his strong inclination toward large generalizations, however, Niebuhr concentrated on isolating the genius of “vital” Christianity in order to discover what was distinctive in the Christian message. In the Ethics he followed the classification of religions adopted by Nathan Söderblom and John Oman. What Söderblom had called “religions and culture” and “religions of revelation,” and Oman had called “mystic” and “apocalyptic” religions, he termed “mystical” and “mythical.”6 In the first volume of the Gifford Lectures the same general position was set out in his account of the Christian view of humanity.7 And virtually the same analysis continued to reappear in later volumes. Thus, in Faith and History the characteristics of Christianity as a “high” religion were introduced early and contrasted with other attempts to give meaning to history, attempts that were inadequate because they neglected the “symbols ” of Christian faith.8 Biblical faith was again contrasted with mystical [3.141...

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