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153 Conclusion Some theologians win respect and disciples because of the massive range of their teaching. Others make their mark through their ability to proclaim insistently and persuasively truths they believe to be both important and neglected. Niebuhr belongs with the latter. Declining to claim for himself the title of theologian, he has been called a prophet and a preacher; and his influence on his generation has been potent indeed. Preacher-theologians aim at relevance rather than consistency. It is not surprising to find that Niebuhr has constantly stressed the superiority of “biblical religion” to all other interpretations of life, and yet has reinterpreted the Bible and traditional Christian doctrine in order to ensure that these “make sense” in the present age. He has justified his free handling of the content of the Christian message by saying that those who expound the gospel for our day can be deceivers and yet true.This justification, however, raises the question of authority: what is the basis of truth that allows us to stand firm and know that a particular kind of deceit is for the sake of truth? Or we can state the matter another way: “What breed of creature is this of ours, that it can only deceive itself into knowledge?” By writing about the nature and destiny of humanity, Niebuhr has gone far toward answering this question.And since he has never attempted to give equal consideration to the nature and availability of truth, his doctrine of humanity remains the vital clue to his entire thought.Here we learn how he conceives of God and the world, of faith and knowledge, of sin and salvation, of Christ and the Spirit—in short, of all those topics that he neglects to treat systematically, excusing himself with the plea that he is not a theologian. Niebuhr’s inconsistencies lie chiefly on the surface of his thought.They show themselves in the difference between what he says about his theology and the actual shape that his theology takes, and in the difference between the traditional terminology that he uses so freely and the meaning Conclusion 154 he attaches to this terminology. Fundamentally, his teaching is remarkably consistent, having varied little over the years in its general character. It has grown in both complexity and self-consciousness, certainly, yet always in the direction of greater homogeneity, and never altering its direction. The “courage to change,” which he has exhibited so conspicuously, has been in relation to the practical application of his principles to the moving face of history, and not to the principles themselves. If he was once a Marxist and later a supporter of democracy, this was not because he changed his ultimate convictions, but rather because the same convictions led him at one stage to appreciate the possibilities latent in Marxism, and at another stage to condemn what it had become. He was never an uncritical “believer,”just as he never became a dedicated anti-Marxist.He watched for historical developments that would clarify (to use his favourite term) the human social and political situation. Exactly the same factors, mutatis mutandis, have been operative in his progress from his early liberalism to his mature “neo-liberalism,”misnamed “neo-orthodoxy,” except that his theological movement to the right has been more cautious than his political movement to the left. From the first, we can see his dissatisfaction with contemporary liberalism on account of its unrealistic optimism and its shallow moralism.“Biblical religion,”riding on the edge of pessimism and possessing a vision of transcendence, soon became for him a more dependable Marxism of the religious sphere.It challenged middle-class culture without having to depend on illusions, which the course of history would inevitably destroy. The years have passed, but Christianity still has the same validity in his eyes. It proclaims the words of eternal life, i.e., the truth about the universal human situation. The young Niebuhr spoke about religion being the recognition of life’s ultimates and of Christ symbolizing something at the heart of reality.This idealistic language was superseded by the terminology of Tillich’s belief-ful realism, where religion was taken to be the recognition of the dimension of depth in existence. Christianity was now seen as the bearer of the mythical symbols of transcendence. But Niebuhr resisted Tillich’s argument that a theologian must press on to an ontological analysis of religious categories , and here the inconsistency at the surface of his thinking was obvious; he claimed...

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