Still Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr

A further consequence of modern optimism is a philosophy of history expressed in the idea of progress. Either by a force immanent in nature itself, or by the gradual extension of rationality, or by the elimination of specific sources of evil, such as priesthoods, tyrannical government and class divisions in society, modern man [sic] expects to move toward some kind of perfect society. The idea of progress is compounded of many elements. It is particularly important to consider one element of which modern culture is itself completely oblivious. The idea of progress is possible only upon the ground of a Christian culture. It is a secularized version of Biblical apocalypse and of the Hebraic sense of a meaningful history, in contrast to the meaningless history of the Greeks. But since the Christian doctrine of the sinfulness of man [sic] is eliminated, a complicating factor in the Christian philosophy is removed and the way is open for simple interpretations of history, which relate historical process as closely as possible to biological process and which fail to do justice either to the unique freedom of man or to the daemonic misuse which he may make of that freedom.

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Intepretation, Vol. I (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press 1996), p. 24.

The problem with The Best American Spiritual Writing 2008 is that it's neither the best American writing, nor is it very "spiritual." Most of it is articles about religious matters, which means they are somehow "spiritual," which means they can be included. Maybe they just needed to continue the series....

On the plus side, this volume did lead me to an article from "The Atlantic Monthly" from November, 2007, about the resurgence in interest in Reinhold Niebuhr. This was a revival which, aside from the appearance of Andrew Bacevich on Bill Moyers' show, I was wholly unaware of. Apparently, however, he is all the rage among neocons and what Mr. Elie calls "theocons." Not surprisingly, almost no one, including the author of the article, Mr. Elie, comes anywhere close to getting Niebuhr "right."

I've had more than a little to say about Niebuhr, but I am not uncritical in my interest in his work. Paul Elie's article calls Reinhold Niebuhr "A Man for All Reasons," but then proceeds to boil his thought down to a few insights from Moral Man and Immoral Society and The Irony of American History. Niebuhr's magisterial and important Gifford Lectures (The Nature and Destiny of Man) get a bare mention, and Niebuhr's other works (especially his sermons, as collected in Justice and Mercy) get no mention at all. This is a bit odd, as Mr. Elie clearly understands that Niebuhr's importance is as a Christian thinker (and pace you non-Christians, in Niebuhr and Elie's hands, that is an inclusive, not exclusive, term). (Mr. Elie also mentions that many of Niebuhr's titles are out of print, but the revival in interest seems to have revived his publications; at least I found Irony and Moral Man are still available.) It's not a surprising elision, though, because although Niebuhr did not consider himself a theologian (Mr. Elie gets that biographical detail right), he did consider himself, to the end, a pastor. So, if one wanted to understand Niebuhr fully, and especially as "the supreme American theologian of the 20th century," (Paul Tillich and H. Reinhold, among others, would be surprised by that designation, to say the least), we have to understand Niebuhr as a Christian pastor and a Christian thinker. Not unlike another misunderstood and misused writer: S. Kierkegaard. But I digress....

Mr. Elie fails to recognize the basis of Niebuhr's thought in ways small and yet important. Niebuhr, he says:

...was a restless and paradoxical figure: an evangelical preacher and the author of the Serenity Prayer, a foe of U.S. isolationism in the 1930s and of U.S. intervention in Vietnam in the 1960s.

Rxcept he was neither restless nor paradoxical, except as seen from the point of view of secular thought. First, Niebuhr was not an "evangelical preacher." True, as Mr. Elie says, he was born to a pastor in the Deutsche Evangelische Synode von Nord-Amerika, which in 1934 would merge with the German Reformed Church to form the German Evangelical & Reformed Church, and then in 1957 merge with the Congregational Christian Church to become the United Church of Christ. But being a German evangelical meant only being a messenger of the good news. It did not mean, and never meant for Niebuhr, being a Bible-thumping, altar-calling, preacher of sin and damnation, hell-fire and brimstone, righteousness and salvation. To imagine Niebuhr an "evangelical" in that mold is not paradox, it's an impossibility. There is nothing in Niebuhr's thought, even in his near-Pietistic "Serenity Prayer," that supports such conservative Christian thinking. Niebuhr was a very orthodox Christian thinker, but his orthodoxy grew out of very different traditions.

Mr. Elie mentions that he first learned of Niebuhr by studying Merton, Day, Percy, and O'Connor. Such is the impermanence of fame, that Mr. Elie doesn't previously know about America's "#1 Theologian", as named by no less an eminence than Time Magazine in the early '50's. This is not really that surprising, of course; as Niebuhr's daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, would write 50 years later:

It's easy enough to assert today, as I do, that Tillich and Niebuhr, or Dun and Temple, or Horton and McConnell were vital presences in the modern life of the Gospel. But they weren't acknowledged as such by most American parsons, and I doubt that they would be today.

One could also point out how few Americans remember Martin Luther King, Jr., was The Rev. Dr. King. His Christianity, despite his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," an ecclesiological treatise disguised as a social justice primer, despite the basis for his "dream," is often, and conveniently, overlooked.

Arthur Schlesinger actually understands Niebuhr better:

Niebuhr was a critic of national innocence, which he regarded as a delusion. After all, whites coming to these shores were reared in the Calvinist doctrine of sinful humanity, and they killed red men, enslaved black men and later on imported yellow men for peon labor - not much of a background for national innocence. "Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem," Niebuhr wrote, "are insufferable in their human contacts." The self-righteous delusion of innocence encouraged a kind of Manichaeism dividing the world between good (us) and evil (our critics).

The idea of "national innocence" comes closer to Niebuhr's true subject in Moral Man and straight through to Irony. Innocence is the idea that relives us of responsibility. Innocence relieves us of the consenquences for our actions, because our hearts (we tell ourselves) are pure. Elie writes of the neocons and theocons who rally 'round Niebuhr's flag, all of whom prooftext his writings and ignore statements that Arthur Schlesinger finds:

"A democracy," Niebuhr said, "cannot of course engage in an explicit preventive war," and he lamented the "inability to comprehend the depth of evil to which individuals and communities may sink, particularly when they try to play the role of God to history."

In fact, to read Niebuhr now is to occassionally wonder at his idealism and naivete, especially with regards to America as a nation unlike any other:

We were, as a matter of fact, always vague, as the whole liberal culture is fortunately vague, about how power is to be related to the allegedly universal values which we hold in trust for mankind... Such Messianic dreams, though fortunately not corrupted by the lust for power, are of course not free of moral pride which creates a hazard to their realization... Only occasionally does an hysterical statesman suggest that we must increase our power and use it in order to gain the ideal ends, of which providence has made us the trustees.

In the post-civil rights world it is hard to see any power that does not produce a lust for power, which lust always creates "a moral hazard." And "only occasionally does an hysterical statesman suggest that we must increase our power"? Since Eisenhower's famous "military-industrial complex" speech, that seems to be all that American statesman have done.

Niebuhr's awareness of evil is one reason he is popular among neocons as well as Democrats like Barack Obama. But this is too easily a distortion of Niebuhr's thinking. As Schlesinger points out:

In these and other works, Niebuhr emphasized the mixed and ambivalent character of human nature - creative impulses matched by destructive impulses, regard for others overruled by excessive self-regard, the will to power, the individual under constant temptation to play God to history. This is what was known in the ancient vocabulary of Christianity as the doctrine of original sin....

The notion of sinful man was uncomfortable for my generation. We had been brought up to believe in human innocence and even in human perfectibility. This was less a liberal delusion than an expression of an all-American DNA. Andrew Carnegie had articulated the national faith when, after acclaiming the rise of man from lower to higher forms, he declared: "Nor is there any conceivable end to his march to perfection." In 1939, Charles E. Merriam of the University of Chicago, the dean of American political scientists, wrote in "The New Democracy and the New Despotism": "There is a constant trend in human affairs toward the perfectibility of mankind. This was plainly stated at the time of the French Revolution and has been reasserted ever since that time, and with increasing plausibility." Human ignorance and unjust institutions remained the only obstacles to a more perfect world. If proper education of individuals and proper reform of institutions did their job, such obstacles would be removed. For the heart of man was O.K. The idea of original sin was a historical, indeed a hysterical, curiosity that should have evaporated with Jonathan Edwards's Calvinism.

It is still an uncomfortable notion, as it should be. It is ignored by Joel Osteen because it gets in the way of feeling good about getting rich. It is wielded as a club by the conservative Christians against those who are considered irredeemably sinful, with seldom so much as a hint of the humility the doctrine actually invokes. But removing it makes Niebuhr, as Stanley Hauerwas has said, “the theologian of a domesticated god capable of doing no more than providing comfort to the anxious conscience of the bourgeoisie.” This, to be fair, is the fate of many a thinker, and whether one has a choice of being a swinherd who is misunderstood by the swine, than a poet who is misunderstood by humans, is not always up to the individual. It's also the ultimate irony, as this divide is the one so carefully analyzed by Reinhold's younger brother, Richard. The play of Christ and culture is always fraught with partisans who line up on opposing sides. Still, Hauerwas' critique of the use of Niebuhr's thought is sound. But Niebuhr's view of history, as Elie points out, is something we very much need.

Niebuhr was certainly a trenchant social critic. One might almost call him a prophet (except the term is a dangerous one for any individual to apply; that appellation should arise from community consensus, as it requires a clear grasp of what has been said. We aren't nearly there yet, with Niebuhr.) Consider this, from an article Niebuhr published in "The Atlantic Monthly" in 1916:

The German-American appears to have failed to meet either side of this obligation. He has been too often not only indifferent to our ideals but untrue to the virtues of his race. This is a charge that can easily be made against any immigrant; but since no immigrant came to our shores more richly endowed with the characteristics of a unique civilization than the German immigrant the charge seems to be particularly applicable to him.

The German-American has made contributions to our national life, but they have been economic rather than spiritual. He has served the body of our nation well, but his contribution to its soul-life seems to have been inadequate. In developing our national resources, particularly the agricultural resources of the Middle West, the German-American has had no inconspicuous part. His thrift and industry are proverbial, and these virtues were employed to good advantage upon our countrysides and prairies. The industry of the German immigrant converted our prairies into fruitful fields; his thrift contributed to the prosperity of the nation which established his own. By virtue of his prosperity and affluence, and by virtue also of his well-known qualities of dependability and prudence, he has become a potent influence in the communities in which he had been placed. Where the interests of the nation and his own interest were identical, the German-American can has served the interest of the nation well.

But, unhappily, the interests of the nation are not always identical with those of the individual. They often require sacrifices on the part of the individual, and they always demand large social sympathies. In these qualities the German-American seems to be deficient. His virtues seem to be individualistic rather than social. He has unwittingly served the nation through his qualities of prudence and thrift, but he has been rather indifferent to the problems of the nation that did not directly affect him. He has manifested no great interest in a single one of the great moral, political, or religious questions that have agitated the minds of the American people in late years. His failure to do so is all the more striking because he comes from a country where interest in community welfare on the part of the individual has reached its highest development. This indifference toward our national ideals and problems was vaguely felt by the American people even before the outbreak of this war. Perhaps it is the reason why German-Americanism had only to manifest itself as a definite element, to arouse the resentment of the American people. They had not known it to be hostile to our ideals, but they had felt it to be indifferent to our problems. The German-American had poorly fortified himself by solid achievement against the day when his loyalty would be, justly or unjustly, questioned.

After the Holocaust, and then again after the Civil Rights movement in America, applying cultural characteristics to race is a particularly uncomfortable practice; but this was not so in 1916, so we have to read such anachronisms carefully. Niebuhr is addressing, here, the support of German Americans for Germany in the early days of World War I, and then their shift in support after German U-boats began attacking American ships. Niebuhr writes to critique the German Americans for bringing these problems on themselves; but it is not a condemning attack, a "blame the immigrants first," nor even a self-hatred (Niebuhr himself was still struggling with English when he entered Yale Divinity School in 1913.) His stance is critical, but it is the critique of humility, of recognizing his own complicity in the error, and of pointing out, from the position of a pastor, the presence of sin. Niebuhr's diagnosis is spiritual sloth. That is the critique of a theologian, not a think-tank partisan.

What is too easily overlooked about Niebuhr's Christian Realism is that it was a response, first, to the Social Gospel (Moral Man is largely aimed straight at the heart of this theology), and secondly, to the evils Germany proved capable of in World War II. But Christianity always embraces (or should), humility; which is to say, it requires a recognition that the struggle with evil begins in the human heart, not at the nation's borders (and the struggle with evil is not the same thing as the "battle against evil.") These are subtle and nuanced notions, and they do not serve well the cause of a nation which ever decides it is a moral power in the world. Niebuhr clung to that vision; I cannot. If I could, I would introduce Niebuhr to Howard Zinn, and to the critique and evaluation of power conducted by Michel Foucault, and then engage him on a discussion of the theology of the cross and of the crucified God. Which is pretty much what his brother H. Richard tried to do. Niebuhr's landmark Moral Man is a valid and very Christian critique of the Social Gospel, but it is fundamentally a pastoral work, and its meaning and message are badly distorted when they are applied to American foreign policy outside of that context. The distortion comes, ironically, from the same source as Niebuhr's critique: a failure to recognize the limits and burdens of power. To which I would add: a failure to recognize the limits placed on the Christian as a member of civil society. "Give Caesar the things that are Caesars, and God the things that are God's" is not just a clever retort to get out of a sticky situation but a radical view of the individual's obligations to society. Perhaps that is a much more radical view than Niebuhr would countenance. If we try to understand Niebuhr as a theologian, we run up he against statements like this:

I now realize that I made a mistake in emphasizing [original sin] so much, though I still believe that it might be rescued from its primitive corruptions. But it is a red rag to most moderns. I find that even my realistic friends are inclined to be offended by it, though our interpretations of the human situation are identical.

That's a dangerous theological assertion, but a valid pastoral one. If you recognize Niebuhr as a pastor rather than a theologian, his point is well taken. The problem, of course, is that outside as well as inside the church, for the most part, we don't know what "pastor" means except as a figure like Billy Graham or Joel Osteen; and we don't know what theologians do other than consider matters regarding angels and the head of a pin.

Elie notes the distortions neocons and theocons make of Niebuhr (in this he is more charitable than Hauerwas), distortions created by removing Niebuhr’s thought from its context. When Elie gets around to Bacevich, I find that, despite my admiration for him, I reconsider the wisdom of placing too much trust in too human a vessel:

Bacevich, who teaches at Boston University, characterized Niebuhr as a man like himself: a thinker beyond category who “would likely align himself with those dissidents on the left and the right … who view as profoundly dangerous the claims of both neoliberals and neoconservatives to understand history’s purposes and destination.”

The problem here is the problem of the sympathetic fallacy (how helpful those terms from literary criticism become!): mistaking the words of the person for the person themselves. Niebuhr, as his daughter related in her memoir (something Elie mentions only in passing) was hardly “beyond category”. He told her), on the verge of the Eisenhower administration:

You poor girl, you've never lived under a Republican administration. You don't know how terrible this is going to be.

So I’m less worried with categorizing Niebuhr, than with comprehending his thought. And when that thought is taken out of its pastoral context, it is distorted beyond utility.
Although sometimes, it’s as simple as reading the man’s plain words. Arthur Schlesinger reminds us that sometimes Neibuhr was quite specific:

"A democracy," Niebuhr said, "cannot of course engage in an explicit preventive war," and he lamented the "inability to comprehend the depth of evil to which individuals and communities may sink, particularly when they try to play the role of God to history."

Elie details well the problems with taking Neibuhr's thought out of its Christian context, and treating Reinhold not as a teacher of Christian ethics, but as a “tall, unaffected Midwesterner.” David Brooks will elide the references to God, and overlook the explicit condemnation of pre-emptive war (we no longer "prevent," interestingly enough. In that semantic difference a French philosopher could make a career.) That thinking, of course, is of a piece with Moral Man; but too many think the second part of that title, "Immoral Society," refers to anyplace but the USA. And so the world sails blithely on.

Here is Niebuhr, for example, on democracy:

Democracy has a more compelling justification and requires a more realistic vindication than is given it by the liberal culture with which it has been associated in modern history. The excessively optimistic estimates of human nature and history with which the democratic credo is linked are a source of peril to democratic society, for our contemporary experience refutes this optimism and there is danger that it will seem to refute the democratic ideal as well. Modern democracy requires a more realistic philosophical and religious basis.

You will search in vain to find such sentiments examined in Elie's article, or in most of the others I've linked to here. The idea of "realism" is now equated with realpolitik, which is equated purely with military power. And when that fails us again, as it did in Vietnam, as it has done in Iraq, indeed as it has done in every conflict since World War II, we always concoct of dolchstosslegende to preserve our integrity in the face of reality. John McCain, before the economy dominated our political discussion, asserted once again that Vietnam was lost because the politicians wouldn't let the military fight, an idea that, during that war, meant using nuclear weapons. McCain asserted he wouldn't let that mistake be made again under his Presidency, an idea that should have sent shudders of fear and revulsion down the national spine. Instead, he was credited as presenting a formidable stance on national security. Mr. Elie is right about that much: Niebuhr's thought bids us look at history from a truly historical perspective, something Americans are truly loathe to do.

Ironically, the problem Niebuhr poses today is one described by his brother Richard. It is the question of Christ and Culture, and whether Christ is against culture, or within culture, or alongside culture. That’s the battle Elias describes between Hauerwas and Neuhaus. Interestingly, Neuhaus is represented in the Best Spiritual Writing 2008, with a very orthodox (which presents itself, in this secular age, as unorthodox) view of the nature of the Christian university. Hauerwas, unfortunately, is not included. Which says something, too about what "spiritual writing" is; at least for the editors of that series.

The Serenity Prayer

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference.

— Reinhold Niebuhr

The author of those words was Reinhold Niebuhr, a pastor of an Evangelical & Reformed Church in Detroit in the 1920's, an era of labor strife; a German-American voice raised against the naivete of the "Social Gospel" and those who feared war more than justice before Pearl Harbor; a professor at Union Theological Seminary; and a tireless worker for social justice and what we would, today, call "liberal," if not "progressive," causes.

When he delivered what we now call "The Serenity Prayer" at a worship service, he was asked for a copy. "Take it," he reportedly said, handing over the slip of paper, "I have no further use for it."

Niebuhr was not at all a sentimentalist. He stood for labor unions in their struggles in Detroit. He tells the story of preaching a fiery sermon against management one Sunday morning, following a round of particularly brutal lay-offs and firings. One of his church members, as he left, looked Niebuhr in the eye, and told him of the week he, a manager, had had: having to call people into his office and fire them. The manager was well aware of the families he was hurting, of the lives he was touching. He made it clear to his pastor that this hadn't been an easy or painless task, and Niebuhr realized such situations are always complex, that there are human beings on all sides.

Elisabeth Sifton, Niebuhr's daughter, wrote an excellent memoir of her father's life: The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War. Niebuhr was a friend and advisor and counselor to many of the Democrats in power under FDR. He worked hard for "liberal" political causes, was very concerned about the reconstruction of Germany, about the nature of evil and how it affects international as well as human relationships. I say this because he was a theologian as much as a political scientist, but he blended the two, and even added insights into sociology, in his long career.

But when the war ended, as his daughter makes clear, so did many of his hopes. WWII gave way to the "Red Scare," to Republican presidents and McCarthyism, the ethical questions of the use of nuclear power, to the problems of race relations (which the Republicans worked hard to avoid confronting, even then).

I admire Niebuhr, because he understood things like this:

Democracy has a more compelling justification and requires a more realistic vindication than is given it by the liberal culture with which it has been associated in modern history. The excessively optimistic estimates of human nature and history with which the democratic credo is linked are a source of peril to democratic society, for our contemporary experience refutes this optimism and there is danger that it will seem to refute the democratic ideal as well. Modern democracy requires a more realistic philosophical and religious basis.

When I wrote this 21 years ago, I said: “Given our recent experience, those words could have been written today.” “Today” is still today.

But there is a warning in Niebuhr's life, too. His daughter paints a picture of a man deeply, almost physically, nearly spiritually, disappointed by events. What she writes about could also be taken from the events of today:

Ministers all over America might have been pounding the lecterns and delivering fire-and-brimstone sermons, but their social conformism was pretty complete. Little changed in their privileged lives. They pussyfooted around feel-good mega-preachers like Norman Vincent Peale or Billy Graham-who like so many of their successors never risked their tremendous personal popularity by broaching a difficult spiritual subject, and rarely lifted a finger to help a social cause. They checked up on their pension funds and ignored their parishioners' lives. It's easy enough to assert today, as I do, that Tillich and Niebuhr, or Dun and Temple, or Horton and McConnell were vital presences in the modern life of the Gospel. But they weren't acknowledged as such by most American parsons, and I doubt that they would be today. Freedom and democracy, meanwhile, were being traduced or betrayed. (The Serenity Prayer, Elisabeth Sifton, W.W. Norton, New York, 2003, p. 317)

Ms. Sifton also records a conversation with her father, shortly after Eisenhower wins the Presidency. "You poor girl," he says, without an apparent trace of irony, "you've never lived under a Republican administration. You don't know how terrible this is going to be." (Sifton, p. 328)

Then (21 years ago) as now, a bit of advice about where to put your treasure. The picture of Niebuhr painted by this daughter, wittingly or not, is of a man disappointed in his struggle, who ends perhaps pondering Pound's famous statement about his life's work: "Wrong from the start." Not that Niebuhr despaired as deeply as the poet. But a great deal of what he worked for simply evaporated; if it was ever noticed at all. He was on the cover of TIME (something Trump never achieved) as “America’s Theologian.” But who, aside from people like me, remember him now? A great deal of what he tried to do, was aimed at events simply beyond his control. But he wasn't wrong to do it. It's more a question of emphasis, of wisdom, of, if you will, "serenity." Because of one other thing she says, one other thing that was true about her father. This is, as they say, the "money quote." Or at least it is for me: 

Is it implicit in virtually everything Pa wrote on the subject that there's little point in having a foreign policy, or an arms policy, unless, as a nation, you know who you are, what sort of nation you are or imagine yourself to be. I don't mean in the narrow sense of an instrumentally calculated "national interest" but in the larger spiritual and cultural sense. Pa's constant gripe was that American political leaders imagined a diminished America and presented it falsely, that they themselves were stupider, prouder, more self-righteous, more moralistic, more vain-glorious than the American people on whose behalf they spoke. (Sifton, pp. 329-330)

And before you say “what about the last election?,” I’d remind you of the 71 million who voted for Harris. And urge you to consider we never have to settle for the “stupider, prouder, more self-righteous, more moralistic, more vain-glorious” America some politicians want us to be.

Change the things you can. It’s the only worthwhile effort there is.

"God grant me the serenity...."

The author of those words was Reinhold Niebuhr, a pastor of an Evangelical & Reformed Church in Detroit in the 1920's, an era of labor strife; a German-American voice raised against the naivete of the "Social Gospel" and those who feared war more than justice before Pearl Harbor; a professor at Union Theological Seminary; and a tireless worker for social justice and what we would, today, call "liberal," if not "progressive," causes.

When he delivered what we now call "The Serenity Prayer" at a worship service, he was asked for a copy. "Take it," he reportedly said, handing over the slip of paper, "I have no further use for it."

Niebuhr was not at all a sentimentalist. He stood for labor unions in their struggles in Detroit. He tells the story of preaching a fiery sermon against management one Sunday morning, following a round of particular brutal lay-offs and firings. One of his church members, as he left, looked Niebuhr in the eye, and told him of the week he, a manager, had had: having to call people into his office and fire them. The manager was well aware of the families he was hurting, of the lives he was touching. He made it clear to his pastor that this hadn't been an easy or painless task, and Niebuhr realized such situations are always complex, that there are human beings on all sides.

Elisabeth Sifton, Niebuhr's daughter, has written an excellent memoir of her father's life: The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War. Niebuhr was a friend and advisor and counselor to many of the Democrats in power under FDR. He worked hard for "liberal" political causes, was very concerned about the reconstruction of Germany, about the nature of evil and how it affects international as well as human relationships. I say this because he was a theologian as much as a political scientist, but he blended the two, and even added insights into sociology, in his long career.

But when the war ended, as his daughter makes clear, so did many of his hopes. WWII gave way to the "Red Scare," to Republican presidents and McCarthyism, the ethical questions of the use of nuclear power, to the problems of race relations (which the Republicans worked hard to avoid confronting, even then).

I admire Niebuhr, because he understood things like this:

Democracy has a more compelling justification and requires a more realistic vindication than is given it by the liberal culture with which it has been associated in modern history. The excessively optimistic estimates of human nature and history with which the democratic credo is linked are a source of peril to democratic society, for our contemporary experience refutes this optimism and there is danger that it will seem to refute the democratic ideal as well. Modern democracy requires a more realistic philosophical and religious basis.

Given our recent experience, those words could have been written today.

But there is a warning in Niebuhr's life, too. His daughter paints a picture of a man deeply, almost physically, nearly spiritually, disappointed by events. Again, what Ms. Sifton writes of, could be taken from the events of today:

Ministers all over America might have been pounding the lecterns and delivering fire-and-brimstone sermons, but their social conformism was pretty complete. Little changed in their privileged lives. They pussyfooted around feel-good mega-preachers like Norman Vincent Peale or Billy Graham-who like so many of their successors never risked their tremendous personal popularity by broaching a difficult spiritual subject, and rarely lifted a finger to help a social cause. They checked up on their pension funds and ignored their parishioners' lives. It's easy enough to assert today, as I do, that Tillich and Niebuhr, or Dun and Temple, or Horton and McConnell were vital presences in the modern life of the Gospel. But they weren't acknowledged as such by most American parsons, and I doubt that they would be today. Freedom and democracy, meanwhile, were being traduced or betrayed. (The Serenity Prayer, Elisabeth Sifton, W.W. Norton, New York, 2003, p. 317)

The more things change. And, unfortunately, they keep changing. Ms. Sifton also records a conversation with her father, shortly after Eisenhower wins the Presidency. "You poor girl," he says, without an apparent trace of irony, "you've never lived under a Republican administration. You don't know how terrible this is going to be." (Sifton, p. 328)

Why am I telling you this? As a warning, in part; a bit of advice about where to put your treasure. The picture of Niebuhr painted by this daughter, wittingly or not, is of a man disappointed in his struggle, who ends perhaps pondering Pound's famous statement about his life's work: "Wrong from the start." Not that Niebuhr despaired as deeply as the poet. But a great deal of what he worked for simply evaporated; if it was ever noticed at all. A great deal of what he tried to do, was aimed at events simply beyond his control. But he wasn't wrong to do it. It's more a question of emphasis, of wisdom, of, if you will, "serenity." Because of one other thing she says, one other thing that was true about her father. This is, as they say, the "money quote." Or at least it is for me:

Is it implicit in virtually everything Pa wrote on the subject that there's little point in having a foreign policy, or an arms policy, unless, as a nation, you know who you are, what sort of nation you are or imagine yourself to be. I don't mean in the narrow sense of an instrumentally calculated "national interest" but in the larger spiritual and cultural sense. Pa's constant gripe was that American political leaders imagined a diminished America and presented it falsely, that they themselves were stupider, prouder, more self-righteous, more moralistic, more vain-glorious than the American people on whose behalf they spoke. (Sifton, pp. 329-330)

And we never have to settle for that.

Black Crow

There's a crow flying
Black and ragged
Tree to tree
He's black as the highway that's leading me
Now he's diving down
To pick up on something shiny
I feel like that black crow
Flying
In a blue sky

--Joni Mitchell

This is a wonderful place to start a morning (much better than where I started it); and they even have toast! Paula's House of Toast

Perhaps I am trying to reconicle "matters of transcendence" with ordinary existence, and the two simply will not reconcile:

Mysticism and Christianity agree in understanding man from the standpoint of the eternal. But since mysticism leads to an undifferentiated ultimate reality, it is bound to regard particularity, including individuality, as essentially evil. All mystic religions therefore have the characteristic of accentuating individuality inasfar as individuality is inherent in the capacity for self-consciousness emphasized in mysticism and is something more than bodily particularity; but all mystic philosophies ultimately lose the very individuality which they first emphasize, because they sink finite particularity in a distinctionless ground of existence.

Reinhold Neibuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 1 (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky 1996, pp. 14-15).

I like Niebuhr, but sometimes he sounds so dated ("ultimate reality"?) and he can be so blinkered in his German Protestantism I wonder if he isn't still trying to slay the Pietism of his religious heritage with broad swipes like this. And even as he attacks Romanticism for its excessive emphasis on the individual (a major theme of Nature and Destiny, as as well Moral Man), he relies on it to deny any real value to mysticism (which he seems to deny by omission any heritage in Christianity). But still, I like Niebuhr. I'm like a jackdaw, diving down to pick up the shiny baubles. I am in far too much danger of being a gyrovague.

But the real problem I have with Niebuhr, one I need to elucidate fully someday in order to do my concern and Niebuhr's work full justice, is the flatness of his view, the complete lack of any appearance of transcendence in his theology. His brother was sharply critical of the conclusions, and even the process, of Moral Man, and asked the impassioned question of Jesus: "When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?, a study which reflected a much greater concern for how the individual lives, than how the society functions. Perhaps an ironic turn; perhaps a reflection of which one was the pastor, which always the professor. Problems always look easier from a distance.

Here is a statement on Niebuhr's "Christian Realism," from the introduction to Nature and Destiny that I quoted above:

Niebuhr came to use the name "Christian Realism" for this attentiveness all of the realities at work in social change and conflict. The Christian Realist begins, as Moral Man and Immoral Society suggests, with political realism, identifying the forms of economic and political power at work in history: The majority use the power of numbers to press their claims for a more egalitarian justice against those whose privileged positions rest on the power of wealth. The wealthy respond with their own claims to a just reward for the resources they make available to the whole society. In this, they always claim more reward than strict justice requires, but their adversaries concede them less than they deserve. A realist expects no final resolution to these conflicts, but a stable society must establish a work equilibrium between the claims of libery and equality, freedom and order, or need and merit.

Robin W. Lovin, Introduction, Nature and Destiny of Man, pp. xii-xiii.

There is nothing transcendent in a theology that begins with political realism. Transcendence is relegated to a "sweet bye-and-bye," to a time yet to come, to a date to be announced sometime in the future, and in the meantime, we have livings to procure and societies to defend. Niebuhr would be very comfortable with Foucault, I suspect, and that's another problem entirely.

Niebuhr, in fact, critiques all explanations of human nature that do not accept transcendence on the grounds that humankind can consider matters from a position above materialism, or reason alone, or any other limited basis for human nature. This proves, argues Niebuhr, that the limitation identified does not exist, because we can regard it from beyond those limitations, can see the limits of reason, or nature, etc. But while we can see the limits of politics, apparently we cannot ever hope to transcend those limits. We may not be political creatures, says Christian Realism, but we might as well be nothing more; apparently.

"A gyrovague, if nothing else, is good at translation. At reading between and behind the lines." Which is my problem; as Kierkegaard pointed out, reading too much between and behind the lines is the function of irony; and irony ruthlessly and constantly employed, soon devours everything, even itself. And then what profit have you? But like Niebuhr, I've been a pastor too long to put much stock in pieties and transcendence. Precious few of us live our lives there. I like this summing up best:

Of course, I'm not a monk. But I can't help feeling these minatory words from St. Benedict's Monastic Rule have a wider application and pertain to anyone -- how can I say this ? -- pursuing matters of transcendence. I have been too long flitting from flower to flower; coated with luscious, heavy pollen, I must now return to the hive. What does St. Benedict advise?

Cenobites, monks who live together under a rule and an abbot are, according to Benedict, the best kind of monks.

Reinhold Niebuhr was a pastor; it colored his thinking in ways only other pastors can recognize (and which we largely sympathize with, even those of us who struggle against him). I've likened the process of pastoring a church to planting trees in concrete: a seemingly futile and bootless effort. But all that saves us, in the end, is transcendence. Transcendence that is found, oddly enough, under a rule, and in a like-minded community. Which is why I still read Niebuhr; he keeps me from thinking I've figured it all out.

Besides, there are so very many more shiny things in the world. Which is why I need a community; and a rule.

"Religion is responsibility...."

Interestingly, the poets had already come to Niebuhr's conclusion, albeit on a very different basis.

Moral Man and Immoral Society challenged religious idealism with political realism. Change, if it happens, will happen because those who are oppressed figure out how to get and use power. If change isn't happening, we should seek the causes in the interests of the powerful. And once change does happen, we should not expect the golden age of peace and justice, but a repetition of the cycle, with a different set of people in the seats of the powerful.

That was not how Christians expected change to happen. Protestant Christians in 1932 still put tremendous faith in the power of right-minded individuals to change their society. Compared to moral ideals, law and power played relatively minor roles in securing justice. If poverty, ignorance, and racial hatred were not disappearing as quickly as people of good will might expect, that was largely because the people of good will did not yet know enough sociology to put their ideals into practice. Walter Rauschenbusch had put it this way: "If the twentieth century could do for us in the control of social forces what the nineteenth did for us in the control of natural forces, our grandchildren would live in a society that would be justified in regarding our present social life as semi-barbarous."

Eliot's wasteland; Yeat's gyres; Pound's theory of usury in history; even Hemingway's clean, well-lighted place and Fitzgerald's boats beating against the current but being borne ceaselessly back into the past.

Precisely because that Social Gospel idealism was based in a particular idea of God and of God's dealings with humanity, it proved remarkably durable. Among middle class Protestants in North America, neither World War I, nor the upsurge of racial violence after the War, nor the beginnings of the Great Depression could dislodge it. But Reinhold Niebuhr did.

It was dislodged by World War I and Spain ("Yesterday all the past") for the poets and writers, and never put back together again (except for Eliot and Auden, who turned to a more durable form of Christianity than they were raised with.  For Auden, Kierkegaard also helped.)  But it was an optimism that proved to be durably American, as Niebuhr would point out in his analysis of American exeptionalism, The Irony of American History.  (And just in passing, I don't agree with Hauerwas, though I'd like to read his critique.  I suspect he wants to put God back in charge so humanity can be God's agent and vice-regent.  I find Niebuhr's analysis if power too trenchant to be dislodged by claiming he's a closet heretic.)  The other irony of modern history, as the author points out, is that Niebuhr became the air we breathe, the water we swim in:  the success of his ideas made him invisible:

For the next several decades, Niebuhr was the one who defined how people with a realistic faith would deal with the world. From Martin Luther King in jail in Birmingham to John Foster Dulles at the State Department, hundreds of people in leadership positions consciously drew guidance and inspiration from Reinhold Niebuhr, and thousands more followed his ideas without knowing exactly where they came from. The result, with an irony that Niebuhr himself might have appreciated, is that the widely shared ideas that make the mature Niebuhr appear to fade into the background of his age are in fact often his own.

Niebuhr remains relevant, no matter how much the world no longer resembles the post-war world he grew old in.  I've heard too many complaints in internet comments about having to use one's vote (regarded as a sacrament, a holy thing which should never be sullied by the impure and the insufficiently ideological) on the "lesser of two evils," as if such a choice is anathema and damning to the individual soul.

"We are responsible for making choices between greater and lesser evils, even when our Christian faith, illuminating the human scene, makes it quite apparent that there is no pure good in history, and probably no pure evil either. The fate of civilizations may depend upon these choices between systems of which some are more, others less just."

Clinton or Trump, in other words.  You don't get to claim purity by writing in a candidate, or refusing to vote at all because none are worthy of your effort.  Nor do you abdicate a citizen's responsibility by refusing to participate.

And I catch a glimpse of how I would critique Hauerwas:

On the one hand, it is pretty clear that the political arena as Christian realism pictures it falls far short of the continuity and coherence that MacIntyre would require for a genuine moral discussion. It even more clearly falls short of the theological unity that Hauerwas demands of Christian ethics. 

Hauerwas and MacIntyre are not wrong to regard ethics as the result of a consensus opinion by a community:  that's the very definition Aristotle gave it when "ethics" in his Greek meant "behavior" in our modern English.  Aristotle's ethics describes no more than the behavior of his fellow Athenians; and his book is more akin to a self-help book than a treatise on the difficulties of being moral.

Aristotle wasn't concerned with being moral.  That was more the concern of Sophocles and Euripides (and to a lesser degree, at least in modern terms, Socrates).  Hauerwas demands a theological unity of Christian ethics, but already I hear a claim for power, for setting the terms of the debate and the boundaries of the discussion that suit Hauerwas, but might well exclude someone else.  Very hard to make the first last and the last first if you first insist on unity, theological or otherwise.  A genuine moral discussion does, I think, require continuity and coherence, but you can't even find that in the history of the children of Abraham they wrote for themselves, their history as the people with a covenant with God.  How do you hope to establish a basis for such a "genuine moral discussion" if that is what history teaches us we can accomplish?  Or, as Niebuhr put it:

"God's order can never be identified with some specific form of social organization," he wrote. It is very important to arrive at concepts of justice which draw upon the common experience of mankind and set a restraint upon human self-interest. But it must be recognized that insofar as such principles of justice are given specific historical meaning, they also become touched by historical contingency."

You can see the bones of modernism poking out of the soil there, ready to raise mountains.

"The honesty of knowing that we are not honest"

"Power," observed Adams, "always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His laws."

Believe it or not, I thought of Niebuhr while watching Bill Moyers' interview of Andrew J. Bacevich. Then I found the introduction to his latest book on Moyers' website:

The United States today finds itself threatened by three interlocking crises. The first of these crises is economic and cultural, the second political, and the third military. All three share this characteristic: They are of our own making. In assessing the predicament that results from these crises, THE LIMITS OF POWER employs what might be called a Niebuhrean perspective. Writing decades ago, Reinhold Niebuhr anticipated that predicament with uncanny accuracy and astonishing prescience. As such, perhaps more than any other figure in our recent history, he may help us discern a way out.

Is it any coincidence that Niebuhr was a theologian, or that the crises Bacevich identifies are, at their root, spiritual? I think not. Because here's Bacevich on Niebuhr:

In Niebuhr's view, although history may be purposeful, it is also opaque, a drama in which both the story line and the dénouement remain hidden from view. The twists and turns that the plot has already taken suggest the need for a certain modesty in forecasting what is still to come. Yet as Niebuhr writes, "modern man lacks the humility to accept the fact that the whole drama of history is enacted in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension or management."

Such humility is in particularly short supply in present-day Washington. There, especially among neoconservatives and neoliberals, the conviction persists that Americans are called up on to serve, in Niebuhr's most memorable phrase, "as tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection."

Evolution, anyone? Evolution usually regarded as the counterpart to religion that everyone praises and no one understands? That pernicious notion of "progress" that means we are all moving toward a telos, and that telos, of course, is "perfection". Whether you claim your telos from some apocalyptic vision provided by "God", or from some sense of the proper direction of human endeavor and "survival," you are pursuing the same goal with the same hubris. Or, as Bacevich puts it:

Despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary, modern man, Niebuhr writes, clings to the view "that history is the record of the progressive triumph of good over evil." In that regard, President Bush certainly fits the definition of a modern man. So too do those who announce that with history having "ended" plausible alternatives to democratic capitalism cannot exist, who declare categorically that globalization will determine the future of the international system, or who prattle on about America's supposed "indispensability" as the sole remaining superpower. All of these deep thinkers fall prey to what Niebuhr described as "the inclination of wise men to imagine that their wisdom has exhausted the infinite possibilities of God's power and wisdom." The limits of their own imagination define the putative limits of what lies ahead — a perspective that, as we learned on September 11, 2001, serves only to set the observer up for a nasty surprise.

I find that observation about good triumphing over evil particularly salient to those who lament the rise of the GOP from Ronald Reagan forward, or perhaps going back to the defeat of Barry Goldwater. We have not moved from a time of enlightenment to a time of darkness. We have gone neither forward nor backward. As Bacevich concludes in his interview with Moyers, we're really stayed in one place for quite a while, no matter who occupies the White House. And there are warnings about neglecting that truth that go back to the tragedies of Sophocles, and are as current as Niebuhr 40 years ago:

Let me make the case more directly: to read Niebuhr today [is] to avail oneself to a prophetic voice, speaking from the past about the past, but offering truths of enormous relevance to the present. As prophet, Niebuhr warned that what he called "our dreams of managing history" — dreams borne out of a peculiar combination of arrogance, hypocrisy, and self-delusion — posed a large and potentially mortal threat to the United States. Today we ignore that warning at our peril.

Since the end of the Cold War the management of history has emerged as the all but explicitly stated purpose of American statecraft. In Washington, politicians speak knowingly about history's clearly discerned purpose and about the responsibility of the United States, at the zenith of its power, to guide history to its intended destination.

That sentiment, Bacevich points out, is distinctly and truly American. He quotes George Bush on how the Middle East will be remade, a claim Bacevich asserts could be made by any President, from Jefferson to Kennedy to Reagan. It is, says Bacevich, a narrative the American people believe in: our power to change the world, and make it better, by making it over in our image. And there's a reason that narrative is so compelling:

This narrative renders the past in ways that purport to reveal the future. Its defining features are simplicity, clarity, and conviction. The story it tells unfolds along predetermined lines, leaving no remove for doubt or ambiguity. History, the president goes on to explain, "has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty." Furthermore, at least by implication, the Author of Liberty has specifically anointed the United States as the Agent of Liberty. Thus assured, and proclaiming that "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," the president declares that "We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom."

It is a human thing, to want a narrative that reveals the shape of the future. One of the powers of stories like that of the Great Selchie, is that some creature on this planet can explain the shape of things to come and can, through magic, explain that shape to us; even if what is to come is fatalistic. But remove the fatalism, and all that can be left is inevitability, an inevitability that, of course, means we will prevail. The opposite of that is also proposed: for every self-confident American, sure of the rightness of the present course, there is an American sure the present course can bring nothing but doom and disaster. The current label for such discussions is "partisanship," by which both sides are derided but neither side critiqued. And again, everyone hacks at the branches of the tree of evil, while only a theologian and occassionally a Professor of International Relations, tries to get at the root.

Niebuhr, as I said, was a theologian (a point almost lost on Bacevich; or more likely he downplays it because theology, once the mother of all the sciences, is now at best a bastard stepchild), but obviously not one you will hear quoted from the pulpit of Saddleback Church. As Bacevich says:

Niebuhr has little patience for those who portray the United States as acting on God's behalf. In that regard, the religiosity that seemingly forms such a durable element of the American national identity has a problematic dimension. "All men are naturally inclined to obscure the morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity," observed Niebuhr in an article appearing in the magazine Christianity and Crisis. "This is why religion is more frequently a source of confusion than of light in the political realm." In the United States, he continued, "The tendency to equate our political with our Christian convictions causes politics to generate idolatry." The emergence of evangelical conservatism as a force in American politics, which Niebuhr did not live to see, has only reinforced this tendency.

Idolatry comes in many forms. This is just one of them:

RW: The answer is, we must do all we can. People say America is not the policeman of the world. We may not be, but the Bible says, if you have been blessed, then you are to care for people who can't care for themselves, you are to speak up for people who can't speak for themselves, and to defend the defenseless.

There is a difference between that and living under oppression, living with fear for your life. That's why whether or not they found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is beside the point. Saddam and his sons were raping the country, literally. And we morally had to do something. If you have a Judeo-Christian heritage, you have to believe it when God says that evil cannot be compromised with. It has to be resisted, it has to be overcome.

To step away from Niebuhr for a moment, and make the point from the Hebrew Scriptures: there is a reason Mosaic law does not forbid the owning of slaves, or command the people of Israel to go and make the earth pure in a post-Noah vision of apocalypse for the purpose of paradise. The law of the Torah makes clear that the widow, the orphan, the slave, the oppressed, are to be treated fairly, and given consideration. They are not elevated above the powerful, but neither are they to be the footstools of the king. (The line to the kingdom of God where the first are last and the last first, is a direct one.) It is not a vision, actually, far removed from Candide's conclusion that we all must tend our own gardens. The people of Israel: the leaders, the wives, the widows and orphans, the slaves and aliens, were all the "garden" Israel had to tend, and sufficient unto the day was the work thereof. Israel's vision of a peaceable kingdom came to embrace all of creation through Isaiah's visions after the Exile. But the salient feature of those visions was that Israel would be peaceful and prosperous, and all the nations would see that and come to Israel to share in that peace and prosperity. When swords were beaten into plowshares it wasn't to be after those swords had vanguished evil and converted the world to one religion: it was because Israel's vision would inspire the world to come and learn from them, from the people truly blessed by the Creator of the Universe, and through them the blessing would flow.

It's a peculiarly Christian, and American, vision that we must help that kingdom come by imposing it through force of arms, or through force at all. The problem of evil, after all, is a particularly Christian one; as with all such thorny problems, we tend to deal with them by blaming someone else for the situation. The splinter in their eye, a reflection of the log in our own; and nothing bothers us so much as what we see in the mirror:

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I've been troubled by the course of U.S. foreign policy for a long, long time. And I wrote the book in order to sort out my own thinking about where our basic problems lay. And I really reached the conclusion that our biggest problems are within.

I think there's a tendency on the part of policy makers and probably a tendency on the part of many Americans to think that the problems we face are problems that are out there somewhere, beyond our borders. And that if we can fix those problems, then we'll be able to continue the American way of life as it has long existed. I think it's fundamentally wrong. Our major problems are at home.

BILL MOYERS: So, this is a version of "Physician, heal thyself?"

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, yes, "Physician, heal thyself," and you begin healing yourself by looking at yourself in the mirror and seeing yourself as you really are.

But can we be honest enough to be honest with ourselves? Aye, there's the rub. As Bacevich says in the introduction to his latest book:

The impulses that have landed us in a war of no exits and no deadlines come from within. Foreign policy has, for decades, provided an outward manifestation of American domestic ambitions, urges, and fears. In our own time, it has increasingly become an expression of domestic dysfunction — an attempt to manage or defer coming to terms with contradictions besetting the American way of life. Those contradictions have found their ultimate expression in the perpetual state of war afflicting the United States today.

Gauging their implications requires that we acknowledge their source: They reflect the accumulated detritus of freedom, the by- products of our frantic pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.

Freedom is the altar at which Americans worship, whatever their nominal religious persuasion. "No one sings odes to liberty as the final end of life with greater fervor than Americans," the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once observed. Yet even as they celebrate freedom, Americans exempt the object of their veneration from critical examination. In our public discourse, freedom is not so much a word or even a value as an incantation, its very mention enough to stifle doubt and terminate all debate.

Think about how accurate that is. Freedom is what allows us to worship as we choose, or to get religion as involved in politics as any individual wants it to be. Freedom is also what allows us to critique religion, and deride it's place in politics. All exercises of freedom, but what is the point of the exercise, except to flex our particular freedom, to intone our particular version of the incantation so as to ward off the evil spirits of mythology or atheism? Do those who most strongly assert their freedom of, or from, religion, ever critically examine that which they venerate, and ask why it is so important? Or do we blame it on the fundamentalists and the atheists, and aver we cannot be free until we are free of them? "No one sings odes to liberty as the final end of life with greater fervor than Americans." Yet, if you catch that car, what do you do with it?

In his interview with Bill Moyers, Bacevich praises Jimmy Carter and the famous "malaise" speech (even though, as Bacevich points out, Carter never used that word in the speech). He understands why Carter failed and Reagan triumphed, though. Carter called us to be responsible; Reagan told us we were Americans, and so responsible to no one. Party on!

BILL MOYERS: I was in the White House, back in the early 60s, and I've been a White House watcher ever since. And I have never come across a more distilled essence of the evolution of the presidency than in just one paragraph in your book.

You say, "Beginning with the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, "the occupant of the White House has become a combination of demigod, father figure and, inevitably, the betrayer of inflated hopes. Pope. Pop star. Scold. Scapegoat. Crisis manager. Commander in Chief. Agenda settler. Moral philosopher. Interpreter of the nation's charisma. Object of veneration. And the butt of jokes. All rolled into one." I would say you nailed the modern presidency.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, and the - I think the troubling part is, because of this preoccupation with, fascination with, the presidency, the President has become what we have instead of genuine politics. Instead of genuine democracy.

We look to the President, to the next President. You know, we know that the current President's a failure and a disappoint - we look to the next President to fix things. And, of course, as long as we have this expectation that the next President is going to fix things then, of course, that lifts all responsibility from me to fix things.

One of the real problems with the imperial presidency, I think, is that it has hollowed out our politics. And, in many respects, has made our democracy a false one. We're going through the motions of a democratic political system. But the fabric of democracy, I think, really has worn very thin.

We are not responsible; we just elect the people who are responsible. Hmmmm...nice work, if we could get it. But of course with responsibility goes authority, and with authority goes power, and pretty soon the people as the sovereign is just an empty phrase. And then what....?

I started off saying this was a spiritual problem, not a political or even material one. The abdication of responsiblity is a spiritual issue, an issue that opens the door to acedia, as we abandon responsiblity and authority and are soon left with what Graham Greene calls the unforgiveable sin: despair. But sometimes we need to get down that low to see we are truly at the spiritual lick-log:

Although politics may not be exclusively or entirely a quest for power, considerations of power are never absent from politics. Niebuhr understood that. Borrowing a phrase from John Dewey, he reminds us that "entrenched predatory self-interest" shapes the behavior of states. Even if unwilling to acknowledge that this axiom applies in full to the United States, Americans might as a first step achieve what Niebuhr referred to as "the honesty of knowing that we are not honest."

Why is this so important? Because self-awareness is an essential precondition to Americans acquiring a more mature appreciation of history generally.

On this point, Niebuhr is scathing and relentless. Those who pretend to understand history's direction and ultimate destination are, in his view, charlatans or worse. Unfortunately, the times in which we live provide a plethora of opportunities for frauds and phonies to peddle such wares.

These two convictions are tightly entwined. Those convinced they know the shape of history, convinced history has a telos and they are enlightened as to what that telos is, are also convinced they have the authority, if not the responsibility, to clear away the obstacles to that eschaton. Whether they are religious fanatics hoping to spur Armaggedon, or entrenched atheists sure they are liberating humanity from the shackles of ignorance and mythology, the goal is still the same: their vision is the one worthy of achievement, and nothing must stand in its way. Or, in a milder form, their vision is the one that will save humankind, or life on the planet, and it must win the day. Because the end of history can be known, and the purpose of our lives today is to achieve the proper, not the improper, end.

History as a comic book, in other words. History in which we alone are honest, and those who oppose us are dishonest, and whatever meliorating factors there may be on our side, they pale in comparison to the fecklessness of the opposition, and so we must prevail and impose our purer, if not wholly pure, vision on the world.

We easily forget honesty is born of humility; and hubris blinds us to the cliff we are about to step over. And yet we should have learned that lesson by now, eh?

Niebuhr regarded this line of reasoning [the validity of pre-emptive war] with horror. "The idea of a preventive war," he wrote "sometimes tempts minds, whose primary preoccupation is the military defense of a nation and who think it might be prudent to pick the most propitious moment for the start of what they regard as inevitable hostilities. But the rest of us must resist such ideas with every moral resource." In Niebuhr's judgment, the concept of preventive war fails both normatively and pragmatically. It is not only morally wrong; it is also stupid. "Nothing in history is inevitable," he observed, "including the probable. So long as war has not broken out, we still have the possibility of avoiding it. Those who think that there is little difference between a cold and a hot war are either knaves or fools."

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, such cautionary views, shared by American presidents, helped avoid a nuclear conflagration. Between 2002 and 2003, they did not suffice to carry the day. The knaves and fools got their war, which has yielded not the neat and tidy outcome promised, but a host of new complications. Yet that has not dissuaded those still committed to the proposition that military power offers simple solutions to otherwise daunting problems. Keen to dispose of the difficulties we have brought upon ourselves in Iraq, they are now calling for an even wider application of the Bush Doctrine, with Iran the next target.

Notice we are back, again, to the notion that the future can be known, and that we, privileged by God or fate or the Enlightenment as we are, can know it. And if things didn't work last time, well that's only because we didn't try hard enough, or support the troops firmly enough. The Big Idea never fails; only its acolytes prove all too human.

So where does this leave us? On a darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night? In the final redoubt of prayer, pinned in our cells by our apathy and rejecting action? I prefer the insight of John Fowles in such matters: "Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation." Bacevich says:

The United States today finds itself threatened by three interlocking crises. The first of these crises is economic and cultural, the second political, and the third military. All three share this characteristic: They are of our own making.

I think he's right; which is why I call the crises, at base, spiritual; and why I think a spiritual solution is the only one available. Because what Bacevich is calling for is a whole sight, is a brutal and ruthless honesty that is not possible absent the despair brought about by the destruction of all we hold valuable, or by profound self-examination. The first is the way of war, and the hope of war: that from the ashes something new and pure will arise. We all know the lesson that hope actually teaches. The second is the way of religion, of religion that is responsibility, or it is nothing at all. Whether we can, in this age and nation of "mega-churches", is another question. But I think Professor Bacevich is right in this: this is what Paul Tillich, another 20th century theologian, contemporary and friend of Niebuhr's, would probably label as our nation's "ultimate concern."

"Man the master, ingenious past all measure"--Sophocles

The liberal culture has been informed by similar hopes since the eighteenth century. It has been as impatient as Marxism with the seeming limitations of human wisdom in discerning the total pattern of destiny in which human actions take place, and the failure of human power to bring the total pattern under the dominion of the human will. "If man can predict with almost complete certainty," asked Condorcet, "the phenomena of which he knows the laws, if...from the experience of the past he can forecast with such probability the events of the future, why should one regard it is a chimerical undertaking to trace with some likeness the future destiny of the human species in accordance with the facts of history?" Condorcet was not only certain the future could be known but that he knew it. "Our hopes for the future state of the human species," he continued, "may be reduced to three important points: the destruction of inequality between nations, the progress of equality among the common people, and the growth of man toward perfection" required no more than that "the vast distance which divides the most enlightened people...such as the French and the Anglo-Americans" from those people who are "in servitude to kings" should "gradually disappear."

Obviously the idea of the abolition of the institution of monarchy as the most important strategy for the redemption of mankind was characteristic of the peculiar prejudices of middle-class life as the idea of the abolition of the institution of property was of the unique viewpoint of the propertyless proletariat. In each case they identified all evil with the type of power from which they suffered and which they did not control; and they regarded particular sources of particular social evils as the final source of all evil in history. Neither Condorcet, nor Comte in his subsequent elaborations of similar hopes, placed all their trust in this single strategy. The liberal world has always oscillated between the hope of creating perfect men by eliminating the sources of social evil and the hope of so purifying human "reason" by educational techniques that all social institutions would gradually become the bearers of a universal human will, informed by a universal human mind. These ambiguities, which have saved the Messianic dreams of the liberal culture from breeding the cruelties of communism, must be considered more fully presently. At the moment it is worth recording that the Frenchman, Condorcet, envisaged the French and the "Anglo-Americans" as the Messianic nations. Here we have in embryo what has become the ironic situation of our own day. The French Enlightenment consistently saw the American Revolution and the founding of the new American nation as a harbinger of the perfect world which was in the making. Though Comte, almost a century later, rigorously clung to the idea of French hegemony in the coming utopia and fondly hoped that French would be its universal language, France has fallen by the wayside as a nation with a Messianic consciousness, its present mood being characterized by extreme skepticism rather than apocalyptic hopes.

--Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1952), pp. 66-68.

Though it doesn't appear strongly here, it is impossible to read Niebuhr on the irony of American history without reflecting on the irony of the history about to be made when he published these lectures, and which is wholly lacking even as a storm cloud on the horizon on his analysis.

Writing from the vantage point of 1952, Niebuhr is concerned with global conflicts, and concerned far less with justice than with order (which, in the classic American construction, proceeds from law. Contrast that with the end of Sophocles' "hymn to reason" in "Antigone," where law clearly comes from human endeavor (not Aquinas' "nature") and justice from the gods. By Niebuhr, we have neatly divorced the two, and law imposes order, which eventually gives rise to justice. It is that divorce that is the root of our modern problem, at least where Christian theology and politics are concerned.) Niebuhr goes so far as to state that Americans are not accustomed to using power, and so are unaccustomed to the abuses of power, a sentiment that would have been quite a surprise to the Native Americans (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee) or African Americans (the Civil Rights Movement, which would begin only a few years after Neibuhr published this book), or even gay and lesbian Americans, who started their own effort for justice a few decades after Irony was published. And, of course, there is also the Church Commission Report; the revelation of the Tuskegee Experiments; the history of US involvement in Central and South America; even Twain's work denouncing US involvement in the Phillipines ("The War Prayer" is a direct response to that involvement). Not so long ago, I'd have cited that list and said "We will never be so innocent again" about Niebuhr's perspective. Now I'm convinced it's a permanent condition of American culture, something else I'm not sure Niebuhr saw.

There isn't a glimmer of any of those things in Niebuhr's analysis, which is perhaps the greatest irony of all. He is focussed solely on foreign affairs, and despite being the preacher from Detroit he always thought of himself as, missed entirely any anticipation of those justice issues. To further the irony, none of those movements had to do with party politics. They were political, in that they were taken that way. But King and the Civil Rights Movement and the American Indian Movement and the gay rights movement, were all concerned with justice, not political power. They did not associate themselves with a political party, the political parties eventually associated themselves with the movements. Perhaps the most effective one was the civil rights movement, which was grounded in Christianity, never sought politial party affiliation (King's break with the Vietnam War earned him a new round of enemies, including supporters of civil rights), and focussed solely on justice. Niebuhr, on the other hand, warned his own daughter about the dangers of a Republican administration.

Despite that, there is a great deal in this passage that speaks to our current situation, and even to the reaction to it in left blogistan. Niebuhr was right: "Modern democracy requires a more realistic philosophical and religious basis." It requires both, and I'm less and less convinced either of those are the province of a particular political party, or that the defeat of the worse party means the rise of the better party. Democrats, after all, are running right now pretty much on the platform of: "We're not the GOP!"

Which is not the same thing as saying they are an improvement; or that politics and faith truly live in a creative tension with one another. Politics, after all, is about winning power. Faith is about how one lives one's life. Religion and faith speak to the question of evil, which in turn encompasses the realm of politics.

And that perspective is the source of a very creative tension, indeed.

"I just wonder when we're going to 'start taking sin seriously again.' "

This, as pastordan points out, is the crux of the issue. At one time "evangelicals" especially were mostly concerned with sin. It would be a fair criticism to say they took it too seriously.

But having set it aside, they turn now to either the Gospel of Wealth (Joel Osteen's church website proclaim him: "... a proven leader for this generation - a generation that believes all things are possible!"), or the gospel of power:

"We were able to hold off Michael Moore and the folks in Hollywood, and most of the national media, and George Soros and the Kennedy crowd that fought so fiercely against the election of George Bush," former Moral Majority chairman Jerry Falwell told about 600 people gathered in the Greater Exodus Baptist Church [which received more than $1.6 million in Faith-Based Initiatives handouts] here.

Pat Robertson, after all, wasn't worried about salvation when he declared Ariel Sharon's stroke a sign of God's judgment; nor when he condemned Dover, Pennsylvania, or Disney World in Florida.

Pastordan refers to Reinhold Niebuhr's first important work, Moral Man and Immoral Society. The book has its flaws, but it was written in part in response to the doctrine of the Social Gospel, an idea that started with Walter Rauschenbusch ( a Baptist, by the way) and the same concerns for industrialized society that Niebuhr expressed (and had; he was the pastor of an E&R church in Detroit in the late 20's and early 30's). But Rauschenbusch and his followers placed the burden for bringing the Kingdom of God on society itself. The end sounds familiar enough: government, the rights of labor, and socialist ideas. "The Church as an transformational institution would stand up for those who had no voice and provide for those who could not do enough to help their own families."

The problem was, as Niebuhr understood, that societies had to take care of themselves. They could not put their existence at risk in order to care for the weakest and the poorest. In this his analysis was more purely American than he could know, since modern Europe managed the transformation far better than America, and without the Church as a necessary "transformational institution." But, as sociologists Emerson and Smith wrote, paraphrasing Niebuhr's central insight:

At the individual level, selfishness is usually considered negative, but at the group level, it is considered moral and just. Indeed, at the group level, it is not called selfishness, but morality, service, sacrifice, or loyalty. Although we are selfish if we always look out for our own individual needs first it is considered wrong and immoral if we do not consider the needs of our family first, ahead of other families. We house our families first, and only if we can spare extra do we help house other families. To do otherwise is considered immoral or, at a minimum, a sad case of misplaced priorities.

As Niebuhr says (and pastordan quotes):

For this reason, relations between groups are always mainly political rather than ethical or moral. As Niebuhr says, "They will always be determined by the proportion of power which each group possesses atleast as much as by any rational and moral appraisal of the comparative needs and claims of each group.

And so the Social Gospel fails, being built upon the sandy foundations of human endeavour and human institutions. And Niebuhr made this analysis in part by taking sin seriously.

Which may be what the Pope was doing the other day:

With Michelangelo's dramatic depiction of the Last Judgment as a backdrop, Benedict attacked the "thing-infliction of mankind", suggesting that people had become little more than objects to be traded, picked up and discarded at will.

He singled out ancient Rome's Colosseum amphitheatre and the gardens of the
emperor Nero, where Christians were once martyred, as a "real perversion of joy
and a perversion of the sense of life."

"The anti-culture of death was a love of lies and of deceit. It was an abuse of the body as a commodity and as a product. Even in our times there is this culture and we must say 'No' to it," he said.

It was the first time since he became pope that Benedict has ignored the prepared text of his homily, sent to the media beforehand, and instead spoken at length off the cuff.

NPR reported that teen depression is a major problem in this country. A problem, like other problems, that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and some members of the Senate Judiciary committe would attribute to the actions of the Supreme Court, if not the entire Federal government. Which attribution, curiously and perversely enough, run on the same assumptions as the Social Gospel, and are subject to Niebuhr's analysis: that our fundamental problems are political, and the solutions lie with government.

But, as pastordan (again!) points out this morning, that, too, can be precisely the problem:

The reigning conservative ideologues in the White House and on Capitol Hill believe, with apparent sincerity, that the path to economic and social progress for all is to reward--"incentivize"--the rich and to liberate private business from the wealth-destroying fetters of regulation. When these become the highest purposes of public policy, and when the ameliorative functions of government are held in contempt, then a single thread ties together upper-income tax cuts, the dismantling of environmental and safety protections, the shredding of the social safety net, the peopling of regulatory agencies with cronies hostile to their purposes, and, finally, outright corruption. If government is seen as a whore, why not treat her as one? All that remains is to fleece the johns and divide the take.

Niebuhr understood the fundamental problem was in our hearts, not in our systems. We cannot build a system which will cleanse our hearts for us, or do good for us in spite of our lesser intentions. That idea is the "magical" one that critics accuse religion of: that something outside of ourselves will save us from our failings, that some power will exert our will but filter it to do only the good, and not allow the bad, even if that power is nothing more than our best intentions.

Niebuhr, ultimately, did not offer an apologia for the way things were. He assessed with clear eyes why institutional efforts would not bring about the desired change. We have to start with our hearts.

Which returns us to the question of when, and how, to take sin seriously again.

Taking Time to Remember Lent

Joseph is practicing the rough art of statecraft, testing the suppliants who have come to him for food.  But he is also toying with his brothers, secretly working revenge on them by keeping them in suspense and letting them experience the danger of being before him.

By contrast, Paul continues his rigorous instructions to the Corinthian Christian community.  He makes a sharp contrast between those inside the church community who are held to a higher moral expectation and those outside the church.  He urges this because of a more radical ethic, the church will do well to maintain its own discipline.

The juxtaposition of these texts poses the difficult question of the relationship between a public ethic that governs both the state and the corporate world, and a more intense ethic that guides the church.  On the other hand, Reinhold Niebuhr has famously allowed that much more latitude is to be recognized in the pubic domain, as public affairs require greater "realism" about issues of justice, unlike the church, with its more insistent requirements of mercy and compassion.  on the other hand Stanley Hauerwas[*] more recently, in a sustained appeal to the "peace church" tradition, refuses such a sharp distinction and expects more in the public sphere.

This is an issue in which Christians must be engaged, especially since our public economy has largely been taken over by an oligarchy of wealth that skews all social relationships and that readily leaves behind those it judges to be disposable.  Paul seems to want an exclusive focus on the church.  In our time we might do well to require more of the state and the world of corporations. 

I take this from Thought Criminal, and because it prompts me to rise up (slightly) in defense of Niebuhr, because it's easy to over simplify someone's work, and thereby distort it.  I'm not as familiar with Hauerwas, but what I am familiar with I'm not as impressed by as Niebuhr's thought.  Take that for what it's worth.

Brueggemann is referencing Moral Man and Immoral Society, but let's not go directly there.  Rather, we'll work back toward it from Niebuhr's later works, like this one:

A further consequence of modern optimism is a philosophy of history expressed in the idea of progress. Either by a force immanent in nature itself, or by the gradual extension of rationality, or by the elimination of specific sources of evil, such as priesthoods, tyrannical government and class divisions in society, modern man [sic] expects to move toward some kind of perfect society. The idea of progress is compounded of many elements. It is particularly important to consider one element of which modern culture is itself completely oblivious. The idea of progress is possible only upon the ground of a Christian culture. It is a secularized version of Biblical apocalypse and of the Hebraic sense of a meaningful history, in contrast to the meaningless history of the Greeks. But since the Christian doctrine of the sinfulness of man [sic] is eliminated, a complicating factor in the Christian philosophy is removed and the way is open for simple interpretations of history, which relate historical process as closely as possible to biological process and which fail to do justice either to the unique freedom of man or to the daemonic misuse which he may make of that freedom.

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Intepretation, Vol. I (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press 1996), p. 24

There's quite a bit of room there for engaging the world and acting as a Christian in the "public sphere."  In fact, Niebuhr's argument is that the whole idea of "progress" is a Christian one, so the question of engaging in the public sphere is one of degree, not of engagement v. disengagement.   I would bring in Merton here, too, to argue that even the seeming disengagement of the cloistered is actually an engagement with the world.

The contemplative life is not, and cannot be, a mere withdrawal, a pure negation, a turning of one’s back on the world with its sufferings, its crises, its confusions and its errors … The monastic community is deeply implicated, for better or for worse, in the economic, political, and social structures of the contemporary world. To forget or to ignore this does not absolve the monk from responsibility for participation in events in which his very silence and ‘not knowing’ may constitute a form of complicity.

....

  ‘The monk is essentially someone who takes up a critical attitude toward the world and its structures,’ he remarked, ‘somebody who says, in one way or another, that the claims of the world are fraudulent.’

I'm not picking on Brueggemann, I'm trying to open up the discussion.  You can't disgengage from the world while calling its claims fraudulent (as Brueggemann often does).  But neither can you rest your argument (pace, Walter), on a claim that Niebuhr clove Christian morality from Christian engagement with the world.  Most of Niebuhr's insights, in fact, were, as that quoted passage above indicates, based on understanding the nature of sin in humanity.  He brought the world and religious thought together quite often:

Democracy has a more compelling justification and requires a more realistic vindication than is given it by the liberal culture with which it has been associated in modern history. The excessively optimistic estimates of human nature and history with which the democratic credo is linked are a source of peril to democratic society, for our contemporary experience refutes this optimism and there is danger that it will seem to refute the democratic ideal as well. Modern democracy requires a more realistic philosophical and religious basis.

What Niebuhr taught is called "Christian Realism."  This is a fair summation of what that means:

Niebuhr came to use the name "Christian Realism" for this attentiveness all of the realities at work in social change and conflict. The Christian Realist begins, as Moral Man and Immoral Society suggests, with political realism, identifying the forms of economic and political power at work in history: The majority use the power of numbers to press their claims for a more egalitarian justice against those whose privileged positions rest on the power of wealth. The wealthy respond with their own claims to a just reward for the resources they make available to the whole society. In this, they always claim more reward than strict justice requires, but their adversaries concede them less than they deserve. A realist expects no final resolution to these conflicts, but a stable society must establish a work equilibrium between the claims of liberty and equality, freedom and order, or need and merit.

Robin W. Lovin, Introduction, Nature and Destiny of Man, pp. xii-xiii.

I highlighted two sentences there to focus on the nature of justice, which in the world is always connected with power.  That is a connection Neibuhr would have us always keep in mind.  Consider that passage a prelude to this longer passage from another of Niebuhr's works:

The liberal culture has been informed by similar hopes since the eighteenth century. It has been as impatient as Marxism with the seeming limitations of human wisdom in discerning the total pattern of destiny in which human actions take place, and the failure of human power to bring the total pattern under the dominion of the human will. "If man can predict with almost complete certainty," asked Condorcet, "the phenomena of which he knows the laws, if...from the experience of the past he can forecast with such probability the events of the future, why should one regard it is a chimerical undertaking to trace with some likeness the future destiny of the human species in accordance with the facts of history?" Condorcet was not only certain the future could be known but that he knew it. "Our hopes for the future state of the human species," he continued, "may be reduced to three important points: the destruction of inequality between nations, the progress of equality among the common people, and the growth of man toward perfection" required no more than that "the vast distance which divides the most enlightened people...such as the French and the Anglo-Americans" from those people who are "in servitude to kings" should "gradually disappear."

Obviously the idea of the abolition of the institution of monarchy as the most important strategy for the redemption of mankind was characteristic of the peculiar prejudices of middle-class life as the idea of the abolition of the institution of property was of the unique viewpoint of the propertyless proletariat. In each case they identified all evil with the type of power from which they suffered and which they did not control; and they regarded particular sources of particular social evils as the final source of all evil in history. Neither Condorcet, nor Comte in his subsequent elaborations of similar hopes, placed all their trust in this single strategy. The liberal world has always oscillated between the hope of creating perfect men by eliminating the sources of social evil and the hope of so purifying human "reason" by educational techniques that all social institutions would gradually become the bearers of a universal human will, informed by a universal human mind. These ambiguities, which have saved the Messianic dreams of the liberal culture from breeding the cruelties of communism, must be considered more fully presently. At the moment it is worth recording that the Frenchman, Condorcet, envisaged the French and the "Anglo-Americans" as the Messianic nations. Here we have in embryo what has become the ironic situation of our own day. The French Enlightenment consistently saw the American Revolution and the founding of the new American nation as a harbinger of the perfect world which was in the making. Though Comte, almost a century later, rigorously clung to the idea of French hegemony in the coming utopia and fondly hoped that French would be its universal language, France has fallen by the wayside as a nation with a Messianic consciousness, its present mood being characterized by extreme skepticism rather than apocalyptic hopes.

--Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1952), pp. 66-68.

The highlighted sentence is a point Niebuhr made quite often:  that ethics in the world usually serves power; those who have it, or those who want it.  In doing so, it usually ignores what is being done by the powerful to the powerless; and so ethics is almost always identified with the powerful and their interests.  What I want is right, and I will do right when I have the power to remove evil from the world.  But evil, and my evil?

This is where I would return to the key insight from Moral Man:  that ethics, rather as Sartre would say 30 years later, is a choice; but it is the choice of an individual. I can choose to be ethical for myself; but can I make an ethical decision for others?  If I choose to ethically decide to make myself a martyr for a cause, for example, what choice have I made for my family?  If my choice leaves my family exposed to the vicissitudes of society, perhaps without a source of income, my children without a father, my spouse without a husband, is that an ethical decision, or a selfish one?  After all, death relieves me of a great many responsibilities, and shifts them to others rather decisively.  Is that ethical?  Likewise, can I choose for society how it will conducts its affairs?  I may refuse violence and not defend myself against the violent; should I do the same thing for my family, as a husband, as a father?  Should I do the same thing for the country?  Should a pacifist President refuse to respond to violent attacks on the nation because of his ethical beliefs?  Again, is it ethical to decide for others what their ethic will be?

Niebuhr didn't say "No matter, never mind, nothing we as Christians can do."  He did argue that we first check our arrogance, our self-interest, our self-involvement, because that is ever with us.  It is, I think the lesson of the Scriptures.  Brueggemann references the story of Joseph and the writings of Paul; but context is everything.  Joseph's story takes place among and in the community of the children of Abraham, in the context of the covenant with the God of Abraham to which they are inheritors.  Paul's letter is to Gentiles acting as a "house church," in the very particular context of what we today would call an "extended family," although the house church here would included blood relatives and those made by marriage, as well as slaves serving the family (a radical idea indeed.  Even the rosy life of "Downton Abbey" never went so far.  Servants always knew their place, and it wasn't as equals to the master or the family.).  In both contexts, what is ethical is limited to a circumscribed set of people.  We distort those stories by assuming the world as we know it was the world as they knew it.  Our world is not their world, our culture not their cultures.  Again, self-interest and arrogance lead us to believe we know all we need to know; when humility would be the better approach to any such questions.  Should we, as Christians, be engaged in the world?  How can we not be?  What should be the nature of our engagement?  First, with humility; we are called to be last of all and servants of all.  We speak for ourselves, not as head of the household.  We may bear witness to the sins of the world; but that doesn't excuse our sins.

I am being quite unfair to the work of Stanley Hauerwas, even as I admit what of it I have read does not persuade me to read more.  As I say, I'm really just trying to continue the conversation.  Let it be unto you according to your faith.