• Born: 21 June 1892
• Birthplace: Wright City, Missouri
• Died: 1 June 1971
• Best Known As: Christian intellectual who wrote Moral Man and Immoral Society

Name at birth: Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr

During his lifetime, Reinhold Niebuhr was the best-known Christian intellectual in the United States. Ordained as a minister in the German Evangelical Synod of North America in 1913, Neibuhr pastored a middle-class congregation in Detroit for 13 years. In 1928 he began a career-long association with New York's Union Theological Seminary, serving as professor of Christian ethics (1928-60) and dean (1950-60). Niebuhr neither created nor defended a particular belief system as much as he worked to apply Christian morals to contemporary political and social problems. His theological stance has been described as "Christian realism," and most of his work was devoted to reconciling the concept of perfect love with a world in constant violent conflict. A prolific writer and a popular, engaging lecturer, Niebuhr became a national celebrity and influenced Martin Luther King, Jr. and policy makers in the administration of President John Kennedy. His books include Does Civilization Need Religion? (1927), The Nature and Destiny of Man (2 volumes, 1941-43) and Faith and History (1949). He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.

Niebuhr is credited with authoring what has been called the Serenity Prayer, a form of which is used by Alcoholics Anonymous. One version of it goes like this:

God give me the serenity to accept things which cannot be changed; give me courage to change things which must be changed; and the wisdom to distinguish one from the other.

His brother, Helmut Richard Niebuhr, was also a well-known theologian and clergyman... In his early years Reinhold Niebuhr was an active socialist, but he advocated early intervention against Adolf Hitler in World War II, and by the end of the war had moved away from socialism to condemn totalitarian communism.

The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) was a major figure in the "Neo-Orthodox" movement in Protestant theology, which reoriented the entire thrust of theological and biblical studies from the 1920s on.

Reinhold Niebuhr was born in Wright City, Mo., on June 21, 1892, the son of an immigrant German Evangelical and Reformed minister who served as pastor to German-American communities in small towns. Early deciding to enter the ministry, Niebuhr studied at Elmhurst College and Eden Theological Seminary and then spent 2 years at Yale Divinity School. After receiving his master of arts degree from Yale in 1915, he left the academic world to take his first and only pastorate - a small mission church in Detroit, where he remained until 1928.

At the time Niebuhr arrived there, the automobile industry was just beginning its rapid expansion, and Detroit was developing into one of America's major cities. Many of the employees of the Ford Motor Company lived in his parish. He had the opportunity to observe at firsthand the impact of industrial society upon the factory workers. As Niebuhr said much later, "The resulting facts determined my development more than any books I may have read." He watched the dehumanizing effects of assembly line speedups and irregular job opportunities upon workers unprotected by legal or associational powers. By the end of the 1920s he was questioning seriously the basic assumptions of liberal Protestantism and the Social Gospel, on which he had been nurtured. In public he urged churchmen to examine critically the capitalist social order, and he pressed for greater realism concerning the pervasiveness and subtlety of human pride or sin. His first book, Does Civilization Need Religion? (1927), reflected these attitudes.

In 1928 Niebuhr moved to New York City to join the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, where he remained until his retirement in 1960. He reached New York just as the Depression began and found all about him confirmation of his ideas concerning the severe strictures of capitalism. For a time he became a Socialist, influenced strongly by the Marxist critique of a floundering capitalist society; but at the same time his theological perspective was becoming more conservative, and he was reaching back to recover and reassert the classic formulas of Christian doctrine.

Niebuhr was not a systematic theologian. He was pragmatic, stressing a dialectical, problematic approach in his intellectual inquiries. In a series of important books published during the 1930s and early 1940s, his mature reflections on the relationship of the Christian faith to the industrial, technological world gradually unfolded. Moral Man in an Immoral Society (1932) was a full-scale attack upon liberal Protestantism, especially its lack of understanding of the nature and use of power in modern society. In Interpretation of Christian Ethics (1935) he replaced his largely critical and destructive polemics against liberalism with an attempt at a constructive restatement of the relation of ethics to politics. In Beyond Tragedy (1937), a series of essays that originally had been sermons, Niebuhr reasserted the centrality of human sinfulness in explaining and understanding the human predicament and offered Christ's crucifixion as the most profound means of transcending that human condition. He also stressed the importance of myth as a method for making comprehensible to modern man the biblical world view, which he now so vigorously espoused.

All of Niebuhr's previous work was knitted together in more comprehensive and systematic form with the publication of the Gifford Lectures, which he delivered in Scotland in 1939, under the title The Nature and Destiny of Man (2 vols., 1941, 1943). This work was his principal intellectual achievement. Nearly all of his subsequent books sought to expand upon selected aspects of this richly varied material. The central concern of the work was an inquiry into the nature of selfhood. Niebuhr demonstrated that his vision of human existence was, at its core, ambiguous. Man was "both free and bound, both limited and limitless." Moreover, it was the Christian faith, above all other world views, that perceived most clearly this ambiguity and proposed means to cope with, and perhaps even to overcome, the anxiety that was inevitably a product of that ambiguity.

Niebuhr persistently tried to relate his religious insights to the concrete political and social problems of the contemporary world. He involved himself actively in politics, once as a Socialist candidate for local office, later as one of the founders of Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal study group within the Democratic party. He preached often on college campuses throughout the nation, involved himself in the ecumenical movements of national and international church bodies, and produced an endless stream of articles for popular journals, both religious and secular. He also continued to publish more serious studies in theology and politics. Two especially important analyses of democracy, Children of Light and Children of Darkness (1944) and The Irony of American History (1952), appeared at a time when the Western democracies were facing fundamental ideological and spiritual challenges.

The flirtation with Marxism and support of pacifism characteristic of Niebuhr in the early 1930s gave way to disenchantment with communism and a willingness to support "realistically" the use of force in international politics as the world was engulfed in World War II. Urging the participation of the United States in the power politics of the postwar period, Niebuhr became a major influence on the thinking of high-ranking academicians and government officials. (Consistently enough, the massive extension of American power into Southeast Asia provoked criticism from Niebuhr comparable to that directed against the Communists in the immediate post-World War II period.)

His health seriously impaired by a stroke in 1952, Niebuhr was forced to limit his activities. He died in Stock-bridge, Mass., on June 1, 1971. He was one of the major spokesmen for Protestant theology in the 20th century.

Further Reading

An important statement by Niebuhr concerning his intellectual and personal development is included among a series of illuminating essays by many scholars edited by Charles Kegley and Robert Bretall, Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought (1956). An engaging, perceptive biographical study is June Bingham, Courage to Change (1961). Ronald H. Stone, Reinhold Niebuhr: Prophet to Politician (1972), emphasizes his political philosophy. A useful, brief pamphlet that analyzes the salient points in Niebuhr's system of ideas is Nathan Scott, Reinhold Niebuhr (1963).

Additional Sources

Bingham, June, Courage to change: an introduction to the life and thought of Reinhold Niebuhr, Lanham: University Press of America, 1993.

Brown, Charles C. (Charles Calvin), Niebuhr and his age: Reinhold Niebuhr's prophetic role in the twentieth century, Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992.

Clark, Henry B. (Henry Balsley), Serenity, courage, and wisdom: the enduring legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr, Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 1994.

Fox, Richard Wightman, Reinhold Niebuhr: a biography, New York: Pantheon Books, 1985; San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, 1985.

Stone, Ronald H., Professor Reinhold Niebuhr: a mentor to the twentieth century, Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992.

For more information on Reinhold Niebuhr, visit Britannica.com.

(1892-1971), professor of Christian social ethics. For four decades, Niebuhr taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. His teaching drew upon themes of the Bible and the history of political philosophy to illumine the moral issues of contemporary society.

From his student days at Yale in 1915 to his death, he wrote on international relations and U.S. foreign policy. His writing and political activism led Hans Morgenthau, himself a distinguished philosopher of international relations, to call Niebuhr "the greatest living political philosopher of America."

Niebuhr's roots were in the Evangelical Synod, a small German-speaking denomination in which his father was a minister. His mother, who would assist Reinhold in his parish work, was the daughter of an Evangelical Synod pastor. Born in Wright City, Missouri, Niebuhr graduated from Elmhurst College, Eden Theological Seminary, and Yale University. He helped lead his small midwestern denomination into a merger with the Reformed church to create the Evangelical and Reformed church, which then merged with the Congregational church to create the United Church of Christ.

As a young pastor at Bethel Church in Detroit from 1915 to 1928, he was involved in the issues of racial conflict, economic justice, and international relations. The story of those early years is recorded in The Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (1929), which is still studied in seminaries. The chairmanship of the Mayor's Committee on Race after the 1925 race riots involved him in local politics, and his writing for the Christian Century won him a reputation as a critic of the Ford Motor Company's labor policies.

He joined the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in 1928 and served until retirement in 1960. As a democratic-socialist thinker and activist he joined with his friend Norman Thomas in reforming the Socialist party in which he served as vice chairman. His most famous book, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), reflects both his philosophy and his commitment to socialism. But in 1940 he supported Franklin D. Roosevelt for the presidency, later worked with Americans for Democratic Action, and was vice chairman of the Liberal party in New York.

His most important theological work, The Nature and Destiny of Man (two volumes, 1941, 1943), was written for the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, Scotland. It explores the themes of Christian anthropology and theology of history. In both cases he considers alternative philosophies and defends the theological understandings of the church on human nature and history. He stresses both the grandeur and the misery of the human condition and criticizes the facile optimism of liberal culture. These volumes established Niebuhr as a major theologian and as the founder of a school of social analysis called Christian realism. His founding of the journal Christianity and Crisis gave practical political expression to his theology. He used a neo-Augustinian perspective to ground social ethics and political action on new foundations for mainline American Protestantism.

His other books on the theology of history or Christian philosophy of history include Faith and History (1949), The Irony of American History (1952), The Self and the Dramas of History (1955), Pious and Secular America (1958), and The Structure of Nations and History (1959). Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., once said that "Reinhold Niebuhr was the greatest man I knew," and Hubert H. Humphrey as vice president spoke for many: "No preacher or teacher, at least in my time, has had a greater impact on the secular world. No American has made a greater contribution to political wisdom and moral responsibility."

Bibliography:

June Bingham, Courage to Change: An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr (1972); Charles Kegley, ed., Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought (1984).

Author:

Ronald H. Stone

See also Religion; Socialism.

(rīn'hōld nē'bʊr) , 1892–1971, American religious and social thinker, b. Wright City, Mo. A graduate of Yale Divinity School, he served (1915–28) as pastor of Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit, where he became deeply interested in social problems. In 1928 he began teaching at Union Theological Seminary, becoming professor of applied Christianity in 1930; he remained in this post until his retirement in 1960. In the early 1930s he shed his liberal Protestant hopes for the church's moral rule of society and became a political activist and a socialist. A prolific writer, he urged—notably in Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), Christianity and Power Politics (1940), and The Nature and Destiny of Man (2 vol., 1941–43)—clerical interest in social reforms as well as the beliefs that men are sinners, that society is ruled by self-interest, and that history is characterized by irony, not progress. After World War II, he dropped much of his social radicalism and preached “conservative realism.” In his later works, such as Faith and History (1949), Niebuhr argued for balances of interests and defended Christianity as the world view that best explains the heights and barbarisms of human behavior. In A Nation So Conceived (1963) he analyzed aspects of the American character. He also wrote Man's Nature and his Communities (1965), Faith and Politics (ed. by R. H. Stone 1968), and The Democratic Experience (with P. E. Sigmund, 1969).

Bibliography

See biographies by R. H. Stone (1972) and R. Fox (1987); studies by H. P. Odegard (1956, repr. 1972), J. Bingham (1961, repr. 1972), N. A. Scott, Jr., ed. (1975); bibliography by D. B. Robertson (1984).

(1892-1971)

1941

The Nature and Destiny of Man. The Missouri-born theologian provides his philosophical view of the supernatural characteristics of mankind. Niebuhr was a professor at Union Theological Seminary from 1928 to 1960.

1952

The Irony of History. The Protestant theologian's application of his ideas to history suggests that the United States had been established by "children of light" intent on creating a virtuous society, and he traces the implications of this intention for American culture and politics. The book raises a controversy by suggesting that American moral innocence ill-equipped the country for exercising authority in the world as a superpower.

Quotes:

"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."

"Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another."

"Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it."

"Family life is too intimate to be preserved by the spirit of justice. It can be sustained by a spirit of love which goes beyond justice."

"I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth."

"The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world."

See more famous quotes by Reinhold Niebuhr

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