Man's Faith

Hawk-faced Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the most respected of U.S. theologians, is a strenuous man. When he lectures, his arms jab and flail the air; when he talks to friends he often changes his seat or walks about puffing cigarets; he is not content to pour out ideas about God & man; he wants to make them work in the imperfect world of political action.* Yet his reiterated text is man's powerlessness to act for his own salvation.

Human solutions can never be real solutions, says Theologian Niebuhr; the best they can do is substitute new problems for old.

Last week Reinhold Niebuhr spoke informally about the general state of Christendom at the beginning of, its 1,947th year. Said he:

"Religious people of all kinds are saying, 'We must have absolute loyalties, and apply them absolutely in particular historical situations.' But it can't be done absolutely--only approximately.

"If you give to any specific historical good an absolute loyalty, sooner or later it's bound to become demonic. The application of the absolute principles of the Christian faith must always be contingent ; a certain degree of moral relativism is necessary to avoid false absolutes.

"In Europe the reaction against the extreme relativism of the recent past is in danger of going too far. One wing of the Confessional Church is searching the Bible--largely the Old Testament--to find transcendent standards to guide them in their new community consciousness. This is all right as long as they see their standards in terms of ultimates--in terms of the Law of Love, which is above all natural law.

"But as transcendent principles become more & more attached to specific applications, there is risk of developing into a wooden Biblicism, as Puritanism did. For instance, on my visit to the Continent this fall I was both amused and dismayed to hear a young Dutch theologian make the most elaborate use of the book of Deuteronomy in order to justify the political line which he was taking."

The Barth Line. "The other wing of the Confessional Church is continuing in the traditional direction of continental Lutheranism--maintaining that Christianity is a religion of redemption and has nothing to do with political problems. Karl Barth seems inclined to take this line, claiming that if Christians try to make faith an instrument of the defense of a culture--against Communism, for instance--they will lose their faith and be left with merely a culture defending itself.

"This is certainly true, if faith is reduced to nothing but the instrument of a culture, because faith must include recognition of the possible death of any culture. On the other hand, we can't have faith indifferent to the fate of a culture.

"When Barth once said that one can teach the Gospel in a well-regulated robber band, Bishop Wurm [a leader of the Christian opposition to the Nazis] had what seems to me the perfect reply. He said: 'I preached the Gospel in a well-regulated robber band and I can tell you this: robber bands are not as well-regulated as they claim to be, and the price of doing it is very high.' "

An American Protestantism. On the state of religion in the U.S., Reinhold Niebuhr sees growing grounds for optimism in a new surge of religious interest among college students and faculty members. "Both," says he, "have a new sense of spiritual crisis. Students used to come largely from Fundamentalist home backgrounds, and therefore would react violently against all religion at college. Now most of them come from completely secular homes, and, with nothing in religion to react against, many of them are re-examining the Christian answer. There seems to be developing among students a new sense of the importance of Biblical symbols and also a sense of their non-literalness. In this sense there is developing--I hate the term 'neo-orthodoxy'--there is developing an American Protestantism."

* Left-of-center Dr. Niebuhr is staff contributor to the Nation, chairman of the militantly liberal Union for Democratic Action, a pressure group of intellectuals and union leaders, which maintains a Washington lobby, publishes a bi-weekly commentary called Congressional Newsletter.

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