Abstract
This is a book that should make theological and spiritual history. No one’s thought or soul can be the same again who has listened to this man’s penetrating voice. He has the scholar’s sweep over the work of philosophers, political thinkers, Christian doctors, and pagan seers; and he has the prophet’s insight into the special predicament of man in our own day, showing that predicament as an acute variant of the perennial problem of man through the centuries. It makes the theologies of the past live, even those which are proved unsatisfactory; it redeems the pain of the modern soul from fatuity by linking it with the ceaseless striving of man, who never gives up the search for meaning in spite of awful setbacks. I have personally got from this book intellectual clarification, searchings and (I hope) purification of soul, and a chastened encouragement.
The clarification comes from Niebuhr’s use of the Biblical view of man as both a creaturely part of nature and history and also a spiritual being with a unique link with God among creatures. By this test he examines secular philosophies, revolutionary movements and types of Christian thought. With a remarkable sureness of touch he shows where they explain away one or other of these two axioms of Christian anthropology. This leads to a delineation of the predicament of modern man and his culture. The classical idea of man was a form of rationalism which regarded reason as the constitutive principle, raising him out of the limitations of the world process. This does justice to the fact that man transcends process, but it errs in making mind the essence of spirit, of which it is only one activity and not the central; and it errs in minimizing the finiteness of human life or treats it as a hindrance to be overcome. From the revival of this view modern man gets his arrogance. But there is a conflict between this view and another, which sees man as completely accounted for as part of the world. This naturalism also splits into two camps, one which apprehends nature rationally by science and another which treats man as essentially a drop in the stream of history or the life process. The uncertainty man feels in this unresolved confusion between idealism, naturalist rationalism and vitalist romanticism is marked by a dissipation of certainty about individuality and by an asserted certainty of the goodness of man, which contradicts the known facts of history and the Christian doctrine of sin. The book is, in fact, an extended essay in the connexion between loss of the self and loss of the sense of sin. No review can give a just impression of the competence with which Niebuhr handles the main lines of thought which have led to the modern predicament both in secular and Christian traditions, or to the way in which he shows how the main themes on the relation of vitality and form or eternity and time have led to loss of ‘the self’. Hellenistic Christianity, German idealism, Marxist dialectics, state or race absolutism, romantic primitivism, are all arraigned as aberrations from the central paradox of man expressed in the Christian affirmations that man is in the image of God, yet a creature and a rebel. So are also the chief ecclesiastical traditions on the subject …
In his searching treatment of the meaning of sin and of the easy conscience of modern man Niebuhr displays his dialectical powers to the full. Pride is the ultimate sin of the spiritual creature, a rebellion against his creaturely place. More insidious than pride of power and of knowledge which characterize political and intellectual movements is pride in moral and religious achievements or ideals. This pride can only be discovered by means of a religion of revelation ‘grounded in the faith that God speaks to man from beyond the highest pinnacle of the human spirit’. Collective egoism, such as that of demonic cults of nation or class, is ‘man’s last, and in some respects most pathetic, effort to deny the determinate and contingent character of his existence’. In contrast to pride, the sin of sensuality is a form of self-love which seeks to escape from the pain of selfhood by giving some natural satisfaction an infinite value …
There is a very fruitful development in Niebuhr’s thought indicated in this volume which goes beyond that displayed in his earlier publications. It is his insight into the paradoxical nature of the inevitability of, and at the same time human responsibility for, sin …
While Niebuhr’s exposition of the psychology of sin is most helpful, his assessment of the theological traditions concerning it is less conclusive. This volume closes with the question raised by the following situation. Catholic thought, being more concerned, as he thinks, with the problem of man’s finitude than with that of sin, fails to do justice to the stubborn force of corruption which infects every human scheme, such as that of Natural Law. Theological Protestantism, on the other hand, is obsessed with the incursion of sinfulness into the highest places of human achievement, but, after a short influence upon the world, has been displaced by the optimism of Renaissance origin which denies any fundamental contradiction in man. Both liberal geniality and Reformation pessimism, nevertheless, ‘explored complexities of human nature beyond the limits understood in the medieval synthesis’. Niebuhr promises in his second volume to discuss the slide from Reformation to liberal views and to see how the two opposed insights can be brought into fruitful interrelation …
If definiteness in the theology of the Anglican communion is to be commensurate with its sense of being a Church, nothing could be better than the imposition of an examination upon all teaching and preaching pastors in the subject matter of these Giffords.
Appointed Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford in 1949
Originally published in Theology 44 (263): 267–75 <https://doi.org/10.1177/0040571X4204426303>.