An Interpretation of Christian Ethics

Reinhold Niebuhr

Description

Reinhold Niebuhr's An Interpretation of Christian Ethics is both an introduction to the discipline and a presentation of the author’s distinctive approach. That approach focuses on a realistic (rather than moralistic) understanding of the challenges facing human individuals and institutions, and a call for justice—imperfect though it might be—as what love looks like in a fallen world. The book’s most distinctive aspect is the author’s insistence that perfect love and justice are unattainable in this world, yet they remain our most important goals.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Theology
• Philosophie et théologie
• Reinhold Niebuhr

Informations

• Publié par: Presbyterian Publishing Corporation
• Date de parution: 09 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781646982233
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright © 1935; renewed 1963 by Reinhold Niebuhr
Foreword copyright © Westminster John Knox Press
Published in the Reinhold Niebuhr Library in 2021
by Westminster John Knox Press
Louisville, Kentucky
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Cover design by Allison Taylor
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
ISBN: 9780664266325 (pbk.)
ISBN: 9781646982233 (ebook)
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Contents
Foreword by David P. Gushee
I. An Independent Christian Ethic
II. The Ethic of Jesus
III. The Christian Conception of Sin
IV. The Relevance of an Impossible Ethical Ideal
V. The Law of Love in Politics and Economics (Criticism of Christian Orthodoxy)
VI. The Law of Love in Politics and Economics (Criticism of Christian Liberalism)
VII. Love as a Possibility for the Individual
VIII. Love as Forgiveness
Index
Foreword
DAVID P. GUSHEE
It is always bracing to return to the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the towering figures in the history of Christian ethics and the subject of continued and deserved attention one hundred years after his career began.
I first encountered this book while studying with Glen Stassen as an MDiv candidate at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the mid-1980s. Stassen had a love/hate relationship with Reinhold Niebuhr. As a social ethicist of German descent who came along just one generation after Niebuhr and who studied at Union Seminary in New York late in Niebuhr’s career, Stassen took Niebuhr—actually, both Niebuhrs, Reinhold and his brother H. Richard—very seriously.
But Stassen read Reinhold Niebuhr quite critically—especially this work. Stassen’s central critique was that in a book purporting to offer a Christian ethic, Niebuhr utterly failed to take as practicable the moral teachings of Jesus. Niebuhr treated Jesus as offering high ideals, impossible aspirations, a love ethic not suitable for application in the real world. This was Niebuhr’s cardinal sin, from Stassen’s perspective, because it contributed yet one more influential voice to the longstanding Christian strategy of evading Jesus while claiming to stand with Jesus.
I reopened Interpretation of Christian Ethics with the expectation that this evasion of Jesus would be the main thing that I would find. But my fresh reading of the book takes me in some other directions, at least at first.
This book began its life as the Rauschenbusch Memorial Lectures of 1934 at the Colgate Rochester Divinity School. That is just fascinating, because in many standard accounts of the development of Christian ethics, Niebuhr, in his Christian realism, is treated as the intellectual slayer of Rauschenbusch’s liberal Social Gospel version of ethics. The careful reader of this book will notice that Niebuhr only mentions Rauschenbusch once after the preface, reserving his scathing criticisms of Social Gospelers to apply to other thinkers, including two who preceded him in the Rauschenbusch lectures at Colgate Rochester.
Indeed, Niebuhr explicitly situates himself within Rauschenbusch’s lineage of “social Christianity.” He hopes that his book is “an extension and an application to our own day of both the social realism and the loyalty to the Christian faith which characterized the thought and life of one [Rauschenbusch] who was not only the real founder of social Christianity in this country but also its most brilliant and generally satisfying exponent to the present day.” (1935 Harper & Brothers edition, preface)
Niebuhr thus places himself within the tradition of “social Christianity.” At various points he contrasts this kind of faith with what he calls “Orthodox Christianity.” The more common language today would be to say that Niebuhr situates himself on the liberal or modernist side of the fundamentalist-modernist debate that so dominated the early part of the twentieth century. Besides being liberal on such matters as evolution and biblical criticism, the liberal/modernist side was also characterized by its deep concern about modern social problems and support for progressive reforms to address these problems. Social Christianity was one common term for this new version of liberal Protestantism that devoted so very much attention to issues such as urbanization, labor rights, progressive taxation, and the unjust power of oligarchical corporations.
So Niebuhr believes he is doing social Christianity, just like Rauschenbusch. But he is committed to drawing a distinction between himself and some of its exponents. The precise nature of the difference is signaled, I think, by two key phrases in his preface: “application to our own day” and “social realism.”
The heyday of social Christianity was basically 1890 to 1914, which turned out to be an ephemeral moment of high optimism in modern Western culture. It was before : before an entire generation of young men from “Christian” Europe was literally shredded to death during World War I; before the Communist revolution in Russia; before the stock market crash and the global Great Depression; before the rise of fascism in Italy and Hitler in Germany… before the even greater horrors that happened after this book was written but that Niebuhr seemed to anticipate.
Christian ethics is the most contextual of the theological disciplines. The context in which social Christianity was born became utterly transformed a generation later, and Reinhold Niebuhr was the most acute, and astute, barometer of the change.
If Niebuhr is still doing social Christianity, as he says here that he is, he is doing it in an utterly changed context. This new context included the loss of confidence in the wisdom and virtue of supposedly Christian Europe; the weakening or collapse of democracy in many lands; the rise of extremist political parties on the left and right in Europe, with some parallel developments in US politics; the failure of stock markets, governments, and other forces to regulate global capitalism without an economic collapse; and perhaps most importantly the violent self-immolation of the most “advanced” civilizations in the world through technologies that were only going to become more destructive.
If social Christianity circa 1900 were a landscape painting, it would depict a sunny sky over a clean and happy city. A 1934 Niebuhr landscape, by contrast, would offer darkened skies over a gritty urban hellscape.
Perhaps no other author better captures the fearfulness of this precise moment, the sense of deepening crisis, the uncertainty about whether the entire proud civilization of the West will survive at all. Its possible sources of destruction are too many to name—it might be another world war, or all-out class warfare, or race warfare (an area where conflicts were growing), or simply the tyrannical crushing of the human being under the wheel of fascism or communism. Niebuhr writes with a spirit of sad omniscience about the moral collapse of the once-proud Christian West. It is perhaps this spirit that is most unforgettable about his writings from this time.
Niebuhr’s “Christian realism” is a response to this dark context, and at the same time it is his main critique of what survived of the social Christianity tradition. Niebuhr saw his liberal Protestant peers, both in churches and in academia, as holding onto a naiveté about society that was utterly belied by the evidence available before everyone’s eyes. They refused to see what was happening and were offering old answers utterly unfit for new problems.
They, those naive liberals, were still arguing that more education would persuade people to do the right thing, for example, in relation to labor-capitalist relations. But only power, such as union organizing, would make capitalists give up ground in relation to their own workers.
They still trusted that appeals to Western statesmen to live up to their purported Christian commitments would bring them to their senses, lacking the realism to recognize that the forces affecting political decisions were well beyond the reach of moral appeal.
They still thought that treaties outlawing war or setting up international courts would somehow actually end war or resolve international disputes or that simply calling for peace in the name of Jesus would prevent the occurrence of another world war.
They still thought that appeals to precedent, fairness, treaties, or civilized opinion would move leaders like Hitler or Stalin to moderate their behavior, not understanding that something much darker and more malevolent was at work in men such as these.
Niebuhr’s basic move was to say that power rather than moral appeal was the relevant force in disputes between classes, groups, or nations. It is not sweet reason but union organizing, not moral suasion but strictly enforced new laws, not fair-minded negotiations but countervailing military strength, that bring greater rights for workers, more livable urban dwellings, and protections to nations whose neighbors have aggressive intentions.
Reinhold Niebuhr was to 1930s Christian theology what Winston Churchill was to 1930s British politics—the voice of hard-edged realism against every kind of soft-headed sentimentalism. On this score, Niebuhr and Churchill proved to be right.
This was Niebuhr’s “social realism.” But what then remains