flying.farther

Prof. James H. Cone is on Bill Moyers’ Journal tonight at nine. Woo hoo. From looking at the website, I expect it to be about the man, his work in Black theology, and not so surprisingly to those of us at Union, discussion on R. Niebuhr. Give it a watch on the screen or the net - its always interesting to see the person at work behind the theology.

Edit:
Here is the video of the Cone interview by Moyers. While it does touch some on Cone himself, Black theology, and R. Niebuhr, the interview is largely a platform for Black theology to have a voice, specifically on the subject of lynching and the cross. Give it a look.

I’ve realized over my time in undergrad and here at Union that I’m not really a fan of “old Rinny,” as he is sometimes referred to around here. And if you spend much time on what I’ve written about Niebuhr on this blog, you could probably figure that out. Anyways, I found a nice little story about a meeting between Pannenberg and Niebuhr and which strikes at some major differences between Niebuhr and I - as if I could legitimately make a comparison like that. How about where I begin to disagree with Niebuhr? Lets just say I side with Pannenberg on this one.

Ethical thought based on the idea of the Kingdom of God is not new, of course. There is a superficial similarity in the “theology of the Kingdom’ that marked the American Social Gospel movement of a half century ago. The similarities are more verbal than substantive; nevertheless, this can result in confusion. An incident in March, 1967, illustrates the difficulty. Pannenberg desired to meet Reinhold Niebuhr, a man whose career is a legend also in Germany where he is the best known American theologian (Paul Tillich is considered a German Lutheran expatriate). Driving up to Niebuhr’s splendid little apartment overlooking the Hudson River, Pannenberg considered what subject would best be discussed with Niebuhr. The answer seemed obvious: the idea of the Kingdom in Christian theology. It was Niebuhr who had led the attack on the social gospel movement with its idea of extending the Kingdom of God in the social order. Apparently Niebuhr had heard of Pannenber’s work but had not read him. In any case, Pannenberg’s question, “Now, almost fifty years later, do you think the place of the Kingdom in Christian theology should be reconsidered?” met with an unambiguously negative response. “Social thought that begins with the Kingdom of God, or even emphasizes it very much, inevitably ends up with utopianism. We’ve been through this business of the Kingdom before.” Niebuhr asserted that Walter Rauschenbusch, who had such a passionate commitment about the Kingdom, was also incorrigibly naïve. “I am almost grateful for the act of the act of mercy that he died before seeing what the war [World War I] had done to the world. It would have broken his heart.” Regarding America’s war in Vietnam and other matters, there was solid agreement between Niebuhr and Pannenberg, but theologically the conversation was disappointing.

Quoted from Theology and the Kingdom of God, Wolfhart Pannenberg, 1969, pgs. 31-32. This quote, while included in the book, is a preface to the book written by Richard John Neuhaus and titled “Wolfhart Pannenberg: Profile of a Theologian.”

The last post, On Cornel West, Constantinianism and Adjusting Hauerwas, I had sent to a friend of mine, Adam, a few days ago. We developed an email conversation that I thought clarified well what we were both saying and would work as a continuation post. Also, I have redacted it some to get to the arguments, honest, we’re not that cold.

Adam:
Thanks for sending me this. I would very much like to read both West and Stout someday.

That said, Yoder and Haeurwas are my “dirty dogs,” as they say, and I have to get their backs when I see them criticized. Your critique claims that they need to move to a more “visible”, “radical”, and “public” struggle for justice. In order for you to assert this, however, you have to deal with the fact that their original arguments are made precisely in the context of these essentially Niebuhrian contentions. The Constantinian account of history may not be airtight (myself I think it’s just misnamed), but that does not offer you any ground for saying that they are not visible, radical, or public. You know as well as I do that for Yoder and Hauerwas, the Church simply being the Church is the most radical thing possible, period. And they, and I, would never cede to you that the church is not visible or public. It may not fit your definition of public and visible, but you need to engage with their redefinition (I’m sure you’ve done plenty of thinking on that, and just don’t represent it here). For them, to become visible and public in the sense that (I think) you are hoping for means an inevitably doomed attempt to seek to express Christian truth in a narrative (democracy/liberalism/human rights/etc.) that simply does not have the structural capacity to bear it.

Hoping this conversation can be taken up at the Horse Brass,
Adam

David:
Don’t get me wrong, I like Hauerwas and Yoder. However, I do know - because Hauerwas literally told me so - that “Dorrien’s critique in Soul in Society was excellent” (which does seem similar to West’s critique in this book). He also said that he didn’t speak up much and wouldn’t speak up anymore on race and gender because he didn’t want to co-opt the voice. I’ve also heard it said that Hauerwas thinks Cone has made it very difficult, if not impossible for white people to speak (maybe he has, maybe he hasn’t). However, I have heard Cone tell us in class to speak up, especially white people because it takes both sides to work through this.

My critique here is very much something that is attempting to include liberation theology. Certainly the church already is visible and public. [Intentional community not to be named] is public, open and welcoming. By their very existence they call into question the social order. I include the muslim scholars because they seem to have the commitment to their story, community and not working directly within the nation-state, while at the same time they continue to seek liberation. I also see this in Witness Against Torture who come out of the Catholic Worker. In fact, Hauerwas brings up the Catholic Worker and more specifically Dorothy Day as an exemplar of Resident Aliens.

I deal with Niebuhrian contentions everyday here at Union, especially because Cone is doing a Niebuhr class right now and I’m now on a dorm floor, however, the critique here isn’t so Niebuhrian as much as it is black people telling me that racism matters. I want the church to do more than create a space of the Kingdom because the Kingdom also seeks out the world - this again is not Niebuhr, but a watered down social gospel. That said, I still love the Kingdom ecclesiology and Kingdom ethics that Yoder and Hauerwas talk about, the point here is to instead add on top a verbalizing of the prophetic nature of the church. I’m not calling the church to start voting - I still don’t and don’t plan on it. I want to see the church protesting, I want to see the Ekklesia Project be more than just white people, or at least it was nearly all white people for the summer conference. I want to see us condemn racism, torture and the American dream as Christians. I want to see us reflect that condemnation in our diversity while we talk about it. And of course the modern nation-state has an imperial legacy that dates back to Constantine it seems, however, thats too far back in some senses and doesn’t situate us in the present as well as understand the modern nation-state as it truly is a colonizer of race and religion in a very tangible way. And those of us who don’t see it may be the most co-opted of all. So really, I want to radicalize the church even more in the eyes of the world - while the church being the church is the church being the Kingdom, and so an invasion of this fallen world, I also want to see the Kingdom spreading against structural evils. The crazy thing about this in the eyes of Union people here is that I want the church to be communal to do this, not through Washington.

David

Adam:
I feel like I can get behind everything you’re saying, but again want to insist that it is all accounted for within the Yoder/Hauerwas paradigm. I believe every bit as much as you that the church is called to resist structural injustice. However, (and I feel like maybe you were hinting at this in your last paragraph) structural evils cannot be remedied by individuals operating in the democratic process, but must be contradicted by an alternative structure. And of course that alternative structure is the church, which is already by virtue of its very existence a voice “louder than bombs” - and I would add marches and rallies.

- Adam

David:
I go with the Yoder/Hauerwas paradigm when it comes to the church as an ecclesial body and that alternative structure is necessary. However, quite frankly, their history is kindof flawed. First, my complaints on Constantinianism you’ve already heard. Second, a better history - both when it comes to content and relevance lies in Cavanaugh. Sure Rome was imperial and that maintains certain connotations of stealing land from the peasants, however, the modern nation-state is that and more - a colonizer of lands and people with the use of race and gender. In fact, I think running with Cavanaugh and McCarraher radicalizes the church because it talks explicitly about our relationship with the government and the market right now. This also seems to me to open up the church towards direct action. As Constantinianism is vague on history, that vagueness extends into opposition to evil structures. Simply, Constantinianism doesn’t challenge enough both us and the state. I think if the church is more directly challenged, those who take their Christianity seriously will leave the bourgeois christianity (that Metz dislikes/hates so much) behind and speak louder. Simply put, I think we can retain a solid, communal ecclesiology and speak loudly, visibly (that the black community calls me to do) if we understand better the history/story that we are in. We will not work with the colonizers. Solidarity with the poor and oppressed however can be both in visible action and subversive being.

david

Adam:
I think this most recent email of yours clarifies for me what you were getting at in the revised account of history. That part I can definitely get behind. I think that for the most part, the Y/H construal of history as constantinian has vague (perhaps intentionally) by virtue of its rhetorical role as that which opposes their vision of the church. I do think it works for them initially, but for the church to move and act on their vision, I would definitely aggree that their needs to be a concerted effort to engage with and even appropriate other “independent” critical theories.

- Adam

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

R. Niebuhr

This is a repost from my myspace site. This post is comprised of two papers on Niebuhr that I did for two Dorrien classes here at Union.

Part 1

So this is a paper I had to read for class discussion in American Theological Liberalism. Its a response to Dorriens Volume 2 on American Theological Liberalism, specifically on Reinhold Niebuhr as a Neo-Liberal (not a Neo-Orthodox).

One caveat, I approach this critique as a theologian, not an ethicist (actually I personally don’t like the categories as separate, rather that my theology is my ethics, or at least so close to being ethics that it is uncomfortable to separate the categories). Niebuhr liked to just get straight to the issues and set up an ethical answer to a problem, and without a method. In other words, Niebuhr was not a theologian, and in fact never claimed to be (actually claimed he was not a theologian), rather he was a social ethicist and constructed systematic, ethical thought structures. Niebuhr did not construct a theological systematic structure (for example, he had virtually no ecclesiology); however, Niebuhr still did theological things and spoke on theological subjects. And so it is from a theological standpoint that I critique the man who vehemently turned against pacifism and the social gospel.

Thoughts anyone?

Niebuhr as Critic and Prophet
If there is one thing to write easily about Reinhold Niebuhr, it was his prophetic role within theology; Niebuhr was clearly a critic. However, he and his followers thought of themselves as more than critics, but rather they were carving a new way (459), and the first steps along this new path required the rejection of past theology.

Although Niebuhr did build up his own theses and ideas within theology, he neglected to flesh out a systematic theology in any sense of the term or outline a method (480) and thus seemed to remain a critic by virtue of what he did say. In other words, Reinhold Niebuhr was a man who yelled “no” very loudly, repeatedly, and many times harshly (449). For instance: “The United States had barely entered the war against Japan when Niebuhr began to complain that American Christianity’s prowar pronouncements were nearly as insufferable as its earlier isolationism” (472).

As Niebuhr played the critic, without acknowledgement to the debt he owed liberal theology, he achieved a renowned status. Nevertheless, it was a status of negation, without a strong systemized thought of his own and taking liberal theology for granted, the result of Niebuhr’s work satisfied not only himself and fellow neoliberals, but also encouraged something he did not intend – “illiberalism, dogmatism or conservatism in politics or religion” (479). It is difficult for others to appropriate to a large extent what one says when one is explicitly grounded in a systematic thought.

To Niebuhr’s credit, near the end of his life, he did attempt to further clarify his position (478-479, 482), but only with varying degrees of success. Ultimately, Niebuhr as critic gained a great deal of support, but not necessarily only those with Niebuhr’s goals in mind, rather anyone opposed to the conventional liberalism of the time. However, personally, I feel that Niebuhr by and large retained too much of a prophetic role and did not flesh out well enough a theology for others to build upon.

Niebuhr the Critic as Ideologue for the Government Status Quo.
It is arguable, and indeed seems likely, that Niebuhr as a critic wrote for the advancement into World War II when he backed the re-election of Roosevelt (465), but it is very clear that Niebuhr the critic became the basis “for the ‘containment’ strategy of Cold War liberalism” and his realism “a form of apologetics for the American status quo” (473, 475). Niebuhr as critic wrote for an action of containment of communism, that “perverted religion” bent on world conquest, with the idea to maintain pressure on the Soviet Union and limit its growth (475). To a theoretical end, Niebuhr’s realism of the 1950s could be used to justify actions like the Korean and Vietnam wars – which actually did happen, despite Niebuhr’s eventual denouncement of the Vietnam war (475). Thus in the end, Niebuhr spoke for the status quo.

Niebuhr also spoke the status quo concerning domestic issues:
“Welfare-state capitalism was attaining as much of the democratic socialist ideal of social justice as appeared to be attainable, he believed. By creating a system of countervailing labor, capitalist, and governmental power, American civilization had vindicated the dreams of the social gospelers and progressives without resorting to (much) economic nationalization.” (475)

Unfortunately, Niebuhr’s grasp of the social gospel seems limited, for when setting power against power, the poor are now crushed between the two mighty powers in their fights against each other, instead of powers off setting one another and therefore freeing the poor.

Ultimately for a time, Niebuhr the critic became apologist for the status quo in his refutation against the communist threat and, though he said, “the struggle for social justice is never finished,” his realism became the American status quo and ceased acting prophetically, but instead argued for American conquest.

Niebuhr’s Idea of the Sin and Social
One of the redeeming actions that Niebuhr took, for me that is, was his stance on sin. Though I disagree that sin equals pride, for it seems too simplistic and may have hindered him from speaking out on race problems, I do agree with the relational aspects that Niebuhr incorporated (456, 476). Also, I agree that liberalism of the past had lost touch with the nature of humanity, biblically speaking, and Niebuhr stood as a good corrective for the liberal tradition. If there is one great and lasting mark that Niebuhr has made within the liberal tradition, it is the fact that liberalism will always have some voice that speaks prophetically against the Enlightment ideals of humanity in favor of human fallenness (456).

However, I strongly disagree with Niebuhr’s formulation of the individual and society, particularly in this case that Jesus preached moral ideals for the individual, not for the social (458). Niebuhr broke apart the individual and the social, claiming the social can “never overcome the power of self-interest and collective egotism that sustains their existence” (449). I can see how Niebuhr got to his compartmentalizing, but I disagree with it. Unfortunately, he seemed to ignore the church within the kingdom, because he looked upon it as “sentimental idealism” of the Social Gospel (450).

My path towards a Social Gospel is a minority for most social gospelers. I started with a problem that I saw in the evangelical church, that it lacked cohesion and relationality in the church, specifically the mega-church. Instead of brothers and sisters gathering for encouragement and support for themselves and those in the surrounding community, the church in my eyes seemed like a poorly done academic lecture with the inclusion of a popular sub-culture that had no intention of addressing the needs of people, much less addressing people holistically. I began focusing on what I saw to be the root of the problem, the presupposition of individualism over community; instead of relational nature of the church acting like the body of Christ, the church attempted to merely convey bits of knowledge for personal change, if the change was not too uncomfortable, and a few songs in a sing-a-long form. My struggle for visioning a right community led me towards kingdom theology – that is, the body of Christ enacting now the values of the suffering Christological and eschatological kingdom. From kingdom theology, it is a very small step to the Social Gospel.

I realize I come at this from a very different way than Niebuhr, perhaps he was not located or rooted well within the church or he focused too much on Americanizing himself and his German church, but it seems inadequate to merely call idealistic and brush away the idea of the kingdom breaking into the now, particularly after I have experienced it with others on a continual basis. While the Social Gospel would have done well with a critique, I fear that Niebuhr dismissed too quickly and too radically the Social Gospel in his prophetic role and, when he did finally find a foundation, it was as the status quo of imperialism which the Social Gospel is always seeking to change and not the final realization of the Social Gospel.

Conclusion
While I value some critiques that Niebuhr brought forward, like his re-emphasis on sin and human fallenness, I wonder that he acted too prophetically and broke too radically from liberal tradition without acknowledging his debt and therefore actually left a relatively small legacy beyond his own time in comparison to his height during his life.

Part 2

This is an addition for another Dorrien class to the previous post. It should help explain the Social Gospel and Niebuhr a bit better for those of you have read neither.

…I have elected to focus on Walter Rauschenbusch’s and Reinhold Niebhur’s ideas of sin. I focus on sin because it was: a. one of the more positive steps I saw of Niebuhr (as I wrote earlier) and b. sin can be a starting point in theology – for we must recognize that there is something very wrong with the world in order to respond to the problem – and therefore the view of sin can govern our theology, much like the questions we ask determine the answers we discover.

Contrasting Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr’s Ideas of Sin
Interestingly, both Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr reference the fall (Rauschenbusch, 39-40; Dorrien, 456), which should seem an obvious place to start; however, both also are intent with reinterpreting the fall, sin in general, and also specifically original sin (Rauschenbusch, 38-68; Dorrien, 456). However, there is little that they have in common beyond merely talking about sin and fallenness.

Rauschenbusch’s definition of sin is “self-love”, that is to say: “We set our desires against the rights of others, and disregard the claims of mercy, of gratitude, or of parental love” (Rauschenbusch, 46). And this sin of self-love is found in three forms: sensuousness, selfishness, and godlessness, which accordingly are sins against “our higher self, against the good of men, and against the universal good” (Rauschenbusch, 46-47). Importantly, Self-love is open and flexible to encompass all number of violations both personal and relational. Nevertheless, more important from an idea of sin as relational is the idea of identity. Sin is intrinsically linked to the kingdom of evil (Rauschenbusch, 77-94), the structure that opposes the kingdom of God in whom the Christian resides as a part of, specifically the body of Christ from which identity comes from. Thus the Christian opposes sin on two fronts, the personal and social.

Niebuhr saw sin as pride and pride, as defined by Niebuhr, is to: step beyond one’s self; to assume too much about one’s self; that “evil is always a good that imagines itself to be better than it is” (Dorrien, 456). Essentially pride is assuming a greater eminence of one’s self than one ought – not in relation to others, but in terms of self-abilities, or lack thereof, and in relation to the infinite. In other words, pride (followed by deceit – which can be the relational aspect of sin) is decided by hierarchy, rather than through relationality. Simply put, pride is a comparison and misidentification of power and innate ability.

In my view, Niebuhr’s view of sin is limiting, lacks nuance, and problematizes identity. While it is possible to extrapolate a social idea of pride, inherently the social pride would be the pride of a group of individuals and not the pride of an organism. Also, this group is given amnesty by Niebuhr when he charges that the teachings of Jesus are for “counsels of perfection, not prescriptions for social order or justice” (Dorrien, 458). Rightly understood, groups are not held to a theological understanding of right because Niebuhr claims there is none. Therefore, pride only extends to the individual and only to when the individual is not acting within a group, otherwise they would be exempt for their actions (i.e. war is not murder). Thus, Niebuhrian sin is limiting because: it only speaks to the individual; lacks depth for it only speaks of the vertical relationship between human and divine-infinite (Dorrien, 458); and resolves identity down to power and ability.

Ultimately I prefer the Rauschenbusch understanding of sin; it most clearly coincides with the identity of a Christian – within the organic body of Christ (the basileia) – and thus does not look at people as power, but rather as relational beings who embody and reflect the social Trinitarian God in both personal and social atmospheres.

The texts used are: Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity 1900-1950 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003) and Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1977).