Reinhald Niebuhr: A Christian realist for the reality-based community.

http://www.killingthebuddha.com/dogma/readingniebuhr.htm

Reading Niebuhr Instead

A Christian realist for the reality-based community.

by Scott Korb

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Yet for all his love of country, Niebuhr never learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. What he did love was that Americans, as a nation, really worried about the bomb. We knew our power, and understood that we were free, and suddenly capable, to exercise it -- but never without guilt. The irony of our history was based in knowing our real culpability in becoming a world power, in recognizing that we were far less innocent than our theories of democracy, free-market capitalism, militarism, and evangelicalism assumed. “Success in world politics,” Niebuhr contended, “necessitates a disavowal of the pretentious elements in our original dream, and a recognition of the values and virtues which enter into history in unpredictable ways.” In 1952, America was this political success story.

On the other hand, the “monstrous evil” of communism, America’s great foe, was inflexible and, like a religion, was concerned with ultimate ends, apocalypse and paradise. Playing the messianic role in history, communism risked identifying its own utopian interests with the “final purposes of the God of history.” Such were the frustrations America was to deal with for the duration of the Cold War. The enemy had the audacity to claim divine purpose. America, said Niebuhr, knew better.

There is no question that The Irony of American History is dated, but its datedness is, indeed, Irony’s great value. Now suddenly Niebuhr’s Missouri -- among many other places comprising 2.5 million square miles of America -- has issued what the Bush administration calls a “mandate,” one that rewards and lauds as American virtue the very inflexibility and messianic pretensions that seemed so frustrating in our “idealistic” enemy for over forty years. American fundamentalist evangelicals have given up on Niebuhr. Our place in the drama of history now threatens to be without the awe, modesty, contrition, and gratitude that Niebuhr identified in his Christian realism. And he worried that this might happen, that Americans might lose their faith, and America its ironic place in history. “For if we should perish,” he concluded, “the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.”

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Scott Korb is a contributing editor to Killing the Buddha. He last wrote for KtB about Christian basketball in Brooklyn.

(The site Killing the Buddha has some interesting and some weird articles. It's worth a look.)