ISBN 1-56338-375-6Though the scope and scale of those more recent events differ from those at work in Niebuhr’s time, the power and potency of his thought still has much to say to our current context.
Arguably the most important American theologian of the 20th century, Niebuhr’s career evinced some significant shifts in his thinking from the liberalism of his days as a young pastor in urban Detroit to the reasoned skepticism and faithful realism of his tenure as a pragmatic theologian in New York City. Brown carefully traces these transitions in Niebuhr’s thought by recounting the times and events and conversations that shaped them.
Reading Brown’s book, one is confronted with hints of what William Sloane Coffin meant when he said that history more often follows the path of a pendulum than an arrow. The characters and the conflicts of our day are different, to be sure, but the abiding themes would suggest that we are still swinging back and forth on that same arc. In our current international context, one can find particular food for thought in Niebuhr’s reflections during World War II, as described in the fifth chapter, “Defending the West Against the Nazi Menace.” At a time when Western powers were allying themselves with Stalin’s Soviet Union, Niebuhr in 1943 noted Stalin’s admission that history had not conformed to the Communist dialectic, and then added prophetically,
Americans who imagine that they can establish a world order upon the basis of American conceptions of ‘free enterprise’ will be as certainly frustrated by the complexities of history as Communists, because of those same complexities, will be disappointed in their hope of world revolution. (p. 111)
His influence waned somewhat in the 1960s. The rebel young of those frenzied years, with their guileless confidence in the unalloyed goodness of spontaneous impulses and in the instant solubility of complex problems, had not feeling for Niebuhr. Nor did the yuppies of the 1970s and 1980s, with their compliant confidence in American superiority and our God-appointed destiny to decide the world’s future. But Niebuhr’s warnings against utopianism, messianism, self-deception and vainglory strike a chord today. We really cannot play the role of God to history. We must strive day by day as best we can to attain decency and clarity and proximate justice in an ambiguous world. (p. ix)
