Responsibility

This chapter explores the importance of moral responsibility in Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought, which in turn allows the reader to interpret his work within the wider compass of Christian humanism. While Niebuhr’s ethics never showcased the concept of responsibility in the way other thinkers did during his time, he nevertheless insisted that the moral capability of responsibility is basic to human dignity. Utilizing the distinction Max Weber made between two forms of ethics, the chapter suggests that moral responsibility constitutes the ‘form’, rather than the ‘norm’, of Niebuhr’s anthropological project. Niebuhr’s project can be seen as an attempt to retrieve the lost insights of the Reformation regarding sin and grace within the historical condition of modern life initiated by the Renaissance. This orientation in Niebuhr’s work bears some of the features of Christian humanism. The final section discusses how Niebuhr’s theological and ethical vision can contribute to Christian thinking in our time.

Moral Realism

Reinhold Niebuhr’s moral realism can be confusing, as he draws upon multiple categories that are often in tension in contemporary discussions of moral reality. This chapter lays out three frameworks Niebuhr used to discuss moral reality: naturalism, moral ideals, and divine nature and command. It argues that these frameworks are mutually supportive in Niebuhr’s thought and locates each in the context of contemporary discussions in moral philosophy. In relation to naturalism, Niebuhr’s thought is compared with the neo-Aristotelian thought of Philippa Foot and Rosalind Hursthouse. Concerning ideals, Niebuhr is put in dialogue with philosophers such as W. D. Ross, Martha Nussbaum, and Isaiah Berlin. Niebuhr’s treatment of divine command and nature is compared with the work of Robert M. Adams.

Feminism

This chapter examines three feminist responses to Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought and contemporary Christian Realism—conflict, integration, and conversation. The chapter emphasizes the need for future conversation between feminists, realists, and ethicists across a wide variety of fields with people living in the most vulnerable and precarious economic circumstances in the US and around the world. More attention and exploration of Christian concepts of sin and redemption relevant within the contemporary context are worthy of attention. Fostering more intentional conversation across established disciplinary boundaries and with the world’s most vulnerable people will chart a new course in Christian ethics and nurture a more authentic American moral conscience in light of the greatest moral and theological problems of the twenty-first century.

Abraham Heschel

The friendship between Abraham Joshua Heschel and Reinhold Niebuhr was both personal and intellectual. Neighbours on the Upper West Side of New York City, they walked together in Riverside park and shared personal concerns in private letters; Niebuhr asked Heschel to deliver the eulogy at his funeral. They were bound by shared religious sensibilities as well, including their love of the Hebrew Bible, the irony they saw in American history and in the writings of the Hebrew prophets, and in their commitment to social justice as a duty to God. Heschel arrived in the public sphere later, as a public intellectual with a prophetic voice, much as Niebuhr had been for many decades prior. Niebuhr’s affirmation of the affinities between his and Heschel’s theological scholarship pays tribute to an extraordinary friendship of Protestant and Jew.

John Courtney Murray

This chapter offers an insight on the intellectual relationship between Reinhold Niebuhr and John Courtney Murray, SJ. Newly discovered archival documents highlight their roles as consultants to the Basic Issues Program of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (CSDI), established in 1957. The activities of the programme were based on debates pertaining to topics including religious pluralism, civic unity, and natural law. Niebuhr and Murray had the opportunity to present their perspectives on the United States religious landscape and the issues raised by ecumenical and social relations between the Protestant majority and the Catholic minority. What emerges from their confrontation is not a search for conciliation, but rather a representation of Reinhold Niebuhr’s understanding of pre-conciliar Catholic theology and John Courtney Murray’s effort to contribute to the acknowledgement of Catholics within American history and society.

Christology

This chapter traces the development of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christology through the course of his writings, arguing that his later work showed a fuller engagement with Christology. It then situates his Christology within a five-fold dogmatics based on (1) the doctrine of the incarnation; (2) Jesus’ life and mission; (3) his betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion; (4) his resurrection and ascension; (5) his promised return. Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christology has received diverse evaluations. Although some of that diversity is noted, this chapter is not primarily interested in resolving the conflicting assessments. Instead, it aims to offer a comprehensive interpretation of his Christological thought as a whole.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Despite his sharp criticism of Niebuhr in With the Grain of the Universe, the author of this chapter has a high estimate of Niebuhr’s legacy and of the Jamesian pragmatism that characterizes Niebuhr’s work as a whole. Langdon Gilkey offers a valuable record of the impact of Niebuhr’s energy and imagination on his contemporaries. His insights are compelling and carefully formulated, but they are often separable from the theological framework in which he located them. The continuing power of his insights into sin as pride and sensuality, and his understanding of the relationships between democracy and justice should not obscure the comparative absence of God and the Church from his theology.

International Relations Theory

The study of international relations is dominated by the school of Realism, articulated in its classical form by Hans Morgenthau. It teaches that great powers are focused on enhancing their national interest defined in terms of power: military, political, and economic. Reinhold Niebuhr became known as the father of Christian Realism, adding his own biblical and Augustinian insights about human nature and its effects on the evil uses of power. Traditionally, both forms of Realism incorporated ethical judgement within their analysis. After Niebuhr’s death, Realism became neorealism, a value-free social science which eschews ethical judgement as any part of international relations study, as did the other major schools—except for the English School. This chapter argues that the English School represents the modern paradigm closest to Niebuhr’s perspective.

Racial Justice

Reinhold Niebuhr’s ideas invite us to confront problems of racial justice. Probing questions of method that consider whiteness and white supremacy in US-American life yields guidance for identifying how Christian ethics produces useful approaches to questions of racial justice. Examples from Reinhold Niebuhr’s twentieth-century Christian ethics commentaries on white dominance and his methodological assumptions spark an exploration of how related arguments in twenty-first century Christian ethics and theology analyses of white dominance can contribute. Besides method, concrete racist attitudes and practices in need of Christian ethics disruption are revealed in the politics of immigration seen in Niebuhr’s 1920s claims about German immigrant ethnic identity struggles and addressed by current Christian ethicists on twenty-first-century opposition to welcoming impoverished, migrant brown peoples into the United States.

Ecclesiology

This essay argues that Reinhold Niebuhr had a rich and theologically informed ecclesiology. The argument begins by briefly considering criticisms of Niebuhr’s ecclesiology before turning to a close reading of his writings on the American church. These writings are practical in nature and brief, which perhaps explains why they have received relatively little attention. In them, it becomes clear that Niebuhr embraced several doctrines associated with the Reformation churches, including a high view of the sacraments and the persistence of sin. For Niebuhr, grace and sin are central to the church’s identity as a communion of grace. Grace, he claims, has profound implications for the church in the United States. In a culture that emphasises merit, grace should give the church a critical task. Niebuhr’s vision of the church, then, is a sect-church, at once sacramental and critical. The essay concludes by sketching how Niebuhr’s ecclesiology relates to and informs contemporary American churches.