How do we engage in our polarized national life? There seems to be so much bitterness and so little progress. It can divide families, friends, and communities. How do we as Christians engage well in this division?
American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) believed that Christianity was about more than just the individual and the life to come. He believed that the Christian view of man could give us a perspective that would enable us to understand the challenges of the modern world and hope that they could be changed. I believe that Niebuhr had a lot of wisdom on how to engage in American society (and any society), and his insights are just as relevant as when he wrote them over the course of middle decades of the 20th century. Here are 15 quotes that illustrate the wisdom of Niebuhr in applying the Christian faith to modern society: 5 on the problem, 5 on the solution, and 5 on the hope we can have to make things better.
1. “Actually the history of religious fanaticism proves that it is fairly easy to claim identity between the absolute and the contingent value, and thus to claim divine validity for a ‘Christian’ civilization despite all of its moral ambiguities, and to use the Christian faith as a weapon against the foe in all kinds of historic encounters” (The Self & the Dramas of History, 149).
2. “The ultimate sin is the religious sin of making the self-deification implied in moral pride explicit. This is done when our partial standards and relative attainments are explicitly related to the unconditioned good, and claim divine sanction. For this reason religion is not simply as is generally supposed an inherently virtuous human quest for God” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 200).
3. The rise of science in Western culture “gave modern culture a special animus against ‘dogma.’ But unfortunately it was not prepared to deal with the hidden dogmas in prescriptions of science itself” (The Self & the Dramas of History, 114). “In short, reason may be as obedient a servant of particular interests as religion” (ibid., 153).
4. “Once the effort to gain significance beyond himself has succeeded, man fights for his social eminence and increased significance with the same fervor and with the same sense of justification, with which he fights for his life” (Moral Man & Immoral Society, 42).
5. “A combination of unselfishness and vicarious selfishness in the individual thus gives a tremendous force to national egoism, which neither religious nor rational idealism can ever completely check” (Moral Man & Immoral Society, 94).
The Solution
6. “The health and justice of the community is preserved, not so much by the discriminate judgment of the whole community as by the effect of free criticism in moderating the pretensions of every group and by the weight of competing power in balancing power which might become inordinate and oppressive” (The Self & the Dramas of History, 198).
7. Great point on how we grow: “By the responsibilities which men have to their family and community and to many common enterprises, they are drawn out of themselves to become their true selves” (The Children of Light & The Children of Darkness, 56).
8. Engaging in Conflict: “There is, in short, even in a conflict with a foe with whom we have little in common the possibility and necessity of living in a dimension of meaning in which the urgencies of the struggle are subordinated to a sense of awe before the vastness of the historical drama in which we are jointly involved; to a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom and power available to us for the resolution of its perplexities; to a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy’s demonry and our vanities; and to a sense of gratitude for the divine mercies which are promised to those who humble themselves” (The Irony of American History, 174).
9. “‘If ye love them that love you, what reward have ye?’ declared Jesus; and in the logic of those words the whole genius of Christian religion is revealed. The transcendent perspective of religion makes all men our brothers and nullifies the divisions, by which nature, climate, geography, and the accidents of history divide the human family” (Moral Man & Immoral Society, 71).
Coercion is necessary in politics but requires a very wise use: “. . . not by an effort to abolish coercion in the life of collective man, but by reducing it to a minimum, by counselling the use of such types of coercion as are most compatible with the moral and rational factors in human society and by discriminating between the purposes and ends for which coercion is used” (Moral Man & Immoral Society, 234).
Hope
11. On the possibility of attaining happiness. “Happiness is desired by all men; and moments of it are probably attained by most men. Only moments of it can be attained because happiness is the inner concomitant of neat harmonies of body, spirit, and society; and these neat harmonies are bound to be infrequent. There is no simple harmony between our ambitions and achievements because all ambitions tend to outrun achievements.” He goes on 63 to say, “But all such strategies cannot finally overcome the fragmentary character of human existence. The final wisdom of life requires, not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.” Application to America: “The irony of America’s quest for happiness lies in the fact that she succeeded more obviously than any other nation in making life ‘comfortable,’ only finally to run into larger incongruities by which it escaped the smaller ones” (The Irony of American History, 63).
12. On democracy: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary” (The Children of Light & the Children of Darkness, xiii).
13. “To the end of history the peace of the world, as Augustine observed, must be gained by strife. It will therefore not be a perfect peace. But it can be more perfect than it is. If the mind and the spirit of man does not attempt the impossible, if it does not seek to conquer or to eliminate nature but tries only to make the forces of nature the servants of the human spirit and the instruments of the moral ideal, a progressively higher justice and more stable peace can be achieved” (Moral Man & Immoral Society, 256).
14. “The fulfillments of meaning in history will be the more untainted in fact, if purity is not prematurely claimed for them. All historical activities stand under this paradox.” (The Nature & Destiny of Man 2, 213).
15. “If hopes are dupes, fears may be liars” (The Self & the Dramas of History, 176).
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