A WESLEYAN READING OF H. RICHARD NIEBUHR'S THEOLOGY

by
W. Stanley Johnson

INTRODUCTION

To a Niebuhr scholar, it is noteworthy that Wesleyans have not yet assumed the responsibility of addressing the theology of H. Richard Nie­buhr in a comprehensive manner. Can justification be offered for serious con­sideration of H. Richard Niebuhr's theological and ethical contributions? I believe so, for the following reasons.

First, most interpreters of religious history in America include Richard Niebuhr among those who have most influenced the development of recent theology in America. James Fowler judges that

Across the thirty years of his teaching career at Yale Divinity School, H. Richard Niebuhr contributed to the preparation of more persons who today are influential as professors, heads of departments of religion, deans, and pastors than any other Amer­ican theologian of the twentieth century. He wrote seven books, [all] of which remain in print. Each of these books has shown a remarkably durable ability to interest, intrigue, and inform con­temporary students. Through his books he has gained a lasting place in the formative literature of sociology of religion and of American church history, as well as in Christian theology and ethics which were his chosen field.¹

Because Niebuhr's influence has been so great, we must assess the strengths and the weaknesses of his theology to adequately serve the theo­logical needs of the holiness community. No responsible interpreter would want to ignore the evident positive contributions which Niebuhr makes to recent religious thought. At the same time, no responsible Wesleyan will want to avoid the necessary duty to point out the limitations and weaknesses of Niebuhr's theology.

Secondly, Niebuhr's work should be considered by the holiness move­ment because we address sindlar issues from a similar standpoint. Niebuhr's theological background was pietistic and generally "orthodox." Although his church tradition was tinctured with social gospel liberalism, Niebuhr' s assessment of issues came from the standpoint of a desire to conserve the universal values and truths of his theological heritage without accommodat­ing to simplistic restorationism. We share this vantage point today.

The approach taken in our investigation draws on Niebuhr's dialogical methodology as we review certain salient points which address us in our time.

We shall expose Niebuhr' s doctrines of the Kingdom of God which (1) reigns in power, (2) emerges as creative life amidst structures of decay, (3) transcends particularity of all kinds, and (4) is moved by fundamental hope, a hope which is kept alive within the confessional community which we call the Church of Jesus Christ.

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS TRANSCENDENT POWER

Niebuhr offered to persons without hope, persons without power, the doe­trine of God as powerful being. Grace has been identified with power by many writers of the Christian Church. Unbelievers have doubted precisely the kind of doctrine of power that Niebuhr presents. They offer a "logic of unbelief" which denies the existence of God and universal order. They conclude that the "power" which governs the universe "is either blind in its willfulness" or "careless" of the destiny of that which issues from it.² For Niebuhr, however, grace is seen as transcendent power, known to us in revelation.

Usually when people talk about revelation in religion they seem to me the first kind of thing: communication of propositions in which you believe-for instance, that there is a God. More fun­damentally it is the second kind of disclosure-the disclosure of power, being which has something of the character of a faithful subject on whom you can put your lives, in whom you can trust (my italics), and to whom you can be loyal. Now this is the fun-damental mystery of life to us in a way-that we have somehow been endowed with the ability to conceive faith in the central prin-ciple of being itself and say to it "God.' This is the mystery, and the wonder with which we are concerned.³

Niebuhr speaks of the endowment of this revelation of the God in whom we can trust as powerful being. Grace is the revelation of God as power.

God's grace is power, not merely an abstract idea known in revelation. It is the God who is acting in the processes of history which Niebuhr wor­ships. Of this God there is much doubt in the world, and much anxiety and sin results from such doubting. Niebuhr explains:

The great anxiety of life, the great distrust, appears in the doubt that the Power whence all things come, the Power which has thrown the self and its companions into existence, is good. The question is always before us, Is Power good? Is it good to and for what it has brought into being?... We recognize good­ness in that which maintains and serves being. But our great question is whether goodness is powerful, whether it is not for­ever defeated in actual existence by loveless, thoughtless power. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, the establish­ment of Jesus Christ in power, is at one and the same time the demonstration of the power of goodness and the goodness of power. . . . When Jesus Christ is made known as Lord it is to the glory of God the Father. And the Absolute is made known as Father in glorification of the Son.⁴

The ultimate "resurrection" of Jesus, which for Niebuhr was the con­tinuing influence of his life, is the sign of the power of God acting on behalf of men. Niebuhr supports this view in the following quotation:

We see the power of God over the strong of the earth made evi­dent not in the fact that he slays them, but in his making the spirit of the slain Jesus unconquerable⁵

The revolutionary way of thinking which is summed up in the life and faith of Jesus requires belief in God as power, indeed this faith is essential to any adequate theology, according to Niebuhr. He writes:

Revelation is no less the revolution in our thought about divine power. In order that any being may qualify as a deity before the bar of religious reason it must be good, but it must also be power­ful. There may be beings we can adore for their goodness which are as powerless as the self-subsistent values and the eternal objects of modern philosophy. But what is powerless cannot have the character of deity; it cannot be counted upon, trusted in; to it no prayers ascend. When goodness and power fall apart and when we have no confidence in the power of the good or in the good of power our religion turns to magic-to the exercise of our own power whose goodness we do not doubt. Our adoration then may be directed to eternal values but our petitions descend upon congressmen and senators, who both exercise power and can be moved. Deity, whatever else it must be to be deity, must be powerful in its goodness as well as good in its power (my italics).⁶

Niebuhr believed that the reduction of God to the status of idea tends to anthropocentrism and inability to transcend the viewpoint and concerns of particular selves. Under this kind of thinking one "may come to a Stoic resignation to the world" which is necessarily understood as a "vast con­spiracy of natural powers which surround him and have him at their mercy."⁷ Only now and then does the self courageously protest or even rebel against the course of fated existence.⁸

When one listens to Niebuhr to discover what kind of power moves in history it becomes apparent that Jesus' relation to the powerful God is not that which men of the world of power would expect and comes as a total surprise to them. His power is not that of Marxism. Niebuhr asserts:

And yet we strangely-must revise in the light of Jesus Christ all our ideas of what is really strong in this powerful world. The power of God is made manifest in the weakness of Jesus, in the meek and dying life, which through death is raised to power.⁹

This language is not unusual in Christian tradition, but Niebuhr goes on to get at his own unique theology of the cross:

We see the power of God over the strong of earth made evident not in the fact that he slays them, but in his making the spirit of the slain Jesus unconquerable. Death is not the manifestation of power; there is a power behind and in the power of death, which is stronger than death. We cannot come to the end of the road of our rethinking the ideas of power and omnipotence. We thought that we knew their meaning and find we did not know and do not know now, save that the omnipotence of God is not like the power of the world which is in his power. His power is made perfect in weakness and he exercises sovereignty more through crosses than through thrones. So with revelation we must begin to rethink all ideas about deity. We cannot help our­selves. We must make a new beginning in our thought as in our action. Revelation is the beginning of a revolution in our power thinking and our power politics.¹⁰

Here the language of the cross introduces the assent form of relation to the power of the world. Niebuhr begins to underscore the point that grace is that which may allow our death and apparent failure to work Christ's higher work in the realm of power, which is beyond the power of the world.

Niebuhr observed that God's power includes all the powers of the world. It is not that His power does not include death, the slaying of others, the conquering of other powers. It is to understand that the way God's power works includes the suffering of His servants even when it seems quite appar­ent from the point of view of one who believes in a loving, just and holy God, that His justice does not seem to be served. Niebuhr's point is that the jus­tice of God is served in God's own way and God's own time. A universal perspective of the whole of history of power must be adopted. The grace of this power is the grace that is good. That grace and that goodness may not be apparent from our limited and finite perspective. From the perspective of the universal knower, the absolute power which, spans all of history, the good is known, the grace is apparent, it is for us only to trust. As such a trusting man, then, Jesus is a demonstration of grace. He died not for my sins in the substitutionary way that classical theology proposed, nor in the sense that the bodily resurrection gives evidence that God has supernatu­ral power, nor in the hope that I too will be given a bodily resurrection and eternal life; but in the special sense that Jesus was aware of the goodness of God, and confident of His omnipotence, even when all the natural indica­tors, especially as interpreted from the sinful viewpoint of defensive "sur­vival faiths," pointed to the fact that God had failed or forsaken him-utterly.

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS CREATIVITY

The grace of God is known also to Niebuhr as creativity. In his unpub­lished lectures on Christian Ethics he shows that the ground of the good­ness of all things is to be found in the fact that all things were created by God. He cites Genesis 1, Psalm 104, Psalm 8 and II Isaiah to support this claim.¹¹

The presence of God's grace is discussed in The Responsible Self as he speaks of the primacy of God's action: in making himself known by the revelation of his goodness rather than allowing himself to be found by search; in giving the faith, the love, and the hope that aspire toward him; in creating and re-creating, making and remaking.¹²

Henri Bergson's work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, initi­ates his presentation of the essentials of his theory about creativity and "Dynamic Religion" with these words:

Let us cast a glance backward at Life, this life which we had previ­ously followed in its development up to the point where religion was destined to emerge from it. A great current of creative energy is precipitated into matter, to wrest from it what it can.¹³

The influence of Bergson is evident from the very first writings of Nie­buhr. In his first published scholarly article, An Aspect of the Idea of God in Recent Thought, published in 1920, Niebuhr explains the values of Berg-son's point of view:

The argument against pantheism and in favor of the theory of a finite God on the basis of evolutionary thought has received a great measure of support from BERGSON, of course. In the vast world of change he discerns the action of a "life-force penetrating matter" like a broad current and issuing in a cease­less flowering forth of life-forms. Matter and mechanism are the bitter opponents of this force and conflict can end in victory only at the cost of much blood and many tears. In the fountain of the life-force and in its continuity Bergson discerns God, "who is a creator and is free, and whose creative effort continues on the side of life thru the evolution of species and the formation of human personalities." In this definition of God as creative activity, absolutely free, the philosopher sees a refutation of all pantheism and mysticism.¹⁴

Several themes emerge from this statement which point to the compati­bility of Bergson with Niebuhr's theology, even if it cannot be absolutely determined that Bergson was the most formative influence upon Niebuhr's development of those themes. At a Yale conference on science and religion, Niebuhr said:

The question concerning creation is extremely unsatisfactory to me as a theologian. To speak about creation as something that happened at the beginning is not terribly interesting to us theo­logically. This is to confuse religious concern for the presence at the source. . . of something to which you can ascribe some­thing like intelligence, something like goodness with the Gene­sis account. I think the discussions of theology and science have been dominated entirely too much, not by genuine theological concerns, but by biblicistic concerns as though creation means what Genesis is tailing about and not what II Isaiah for instance is talking about.¹⁵

The principle of the elan vital Bergson develops is very similar to the Niebuhrian God who is the "principle of being." For Niebuhr, however, the total process of structural reality is essentially creative, whereas, for Berg-son, special attention and emphasis is given to humanity.¹⁶ For Bergson, humanity is the result of "a special outburst" of the elan vital, which is to be deemed more valuable, or, which is the same thing, a higher form of the creative impulse, than is the relatively lesser level of being which is matter. This distinction is not true for Niebuhr. He criticizes Bergson for opting for a "closed society" of being, which is the human community. For Niebuhr, this is an idolatrous view of man and nature, resulting in the glorification of an aspect of being at the expense of, with the tendency to devalue, another aspect of being. For Niebuhi; the whole realm of being is the realm of grace, or just as importantly, the realm infiltrated by grace. As being under the influence of grace, all being is valued, this is true because all being is God-created.

Grace is the activity of God which inheres in the total process of being, as Niebuhr expressed the notion in the following:

God, I believe, is always in history; he is in the structure in things, the source of all meaning, the "I am that I am,' that which is that it is.¹⁷

An important aspect of this gracious activity is that it is present even in the times and events which bring suffering and evil into our lives. Although this causes us the greatest difficulty in interpreting reality so as to see the good, the grace of the benevolent God, it is a fundamental reality and a pri­mary concern of Niebuhi's theology. He writes:

That structure of the universe, that will of God does bring war and depression upon us when we bring it upon ourselves, for we live in a kind of world which visits our iniquities upon us and our children, no matter how much we pray and desire that it be otherwise.¹⁸

THE KINGDOM AS UNIVERSAL

Two kinds of universalism commingle in Niebuhr's theological system. The first is that broad vision of universal being which enables Niebuhr to look at the forest and see more than trees. It is the comprehensive perspec­tive which few theologians achieve that allows Niebuhr to consider all ques­tions from the standpoint of all reality rather than assuming the idolatrous perspective of a particular part of reality. Of course, Niebuhr recognizes the relativity and incompleteness of this universal perspective at the same time that he goes beyond most thinkers in his rigor and consistency in the attempt to consider the meaning of the whole.

Another kind of universalism pertains to the question of whether or not all men are "saved." Niebuhr considers the question from two perspectives in The Responsible Self:

I believe that man exists and moves and has his being in God; that his fundamental relation is to God. That is the starting point, not the conclusion: hence the temptation to call this a theistic moral philosophy. But though God's relation to man is not quali­fied by man's acceptance or rejection of his presence, man's rela­tion to God is evidently so qualified.¹⁹

Whatever man's standing is before God, it is not determined by man, but by God, who has taken the initiative in the divine-human relationship. The variable occurs at the point of human initiative.

The posture of God toward man is benevolence and acceptance into His Kingdom: "all - are citizens of the one Civitas Dei."²⁰ This acceptance is not limited to those who call themselves Christians, according to Niebuhr:

...we do not fail to note that among our companions who refuse to take the name of Christian, responses to action are made that seem to be informed by the trust, the love of all being, the hope in the open future, that have become possible to us only in our life with Jesus Christ and in the presence of the One whom he encountered in all his encounters and to whom he gave fitting answer in all his answers to his companions. We believe that the reinterpretation of existence has come into the world and that it is not confined to those who say, "Lord, Lord," nor even neces­sarily best represented by them.²¹

GRACE AS HOPE

Niebuhr fills out his definition of grace as he introduces the important idea of hope as central to understanding the Christian message of salvation in Christ and Culture. He first finds the existentialism which describes Jesus "as radically obedient" and the orthodox Protestantism for which Jesus was the "exemplar" and the bestower of "the virtue of faith" to be "extreme." Then he turns to Albert Schweitzer who, according to Niebuhr, offers a better way.

Niebuhr says that Schweitzer described Jesus "as uniquely character­ized by expectancy rather than love" or obedience or faith. "He hoped," Niebuhr continues, "for the great reversal in history through which evil would be finally overcome...."²² It was the establishment of "God's reign" which was the ultimate concern of Jesus. This hope was heightened by the conviction that in him the Messianic future had come very near. Hence the ethics of early Christianity is set forth as the ethics of the great hope.²²

This hope is not a matter of determined consciousness but is the result of the free interpretation of the individual self which attempts to make sense out of its observation of what is going on in the world. This hope is rooted in an understanding and faith in God, rather than self-confidence or stub­born wishfulness.

The good result of such interpretations and the contribution that such "eschatologists" have made to modern theology, according to Niebuhr, is that the "overwhelming heroic greatness" of Jesus is presented with force. This extreme of hopefulness cuts across "average morality," according to Niebuhr, which "presupposes complacency tempered by a little cynicism, or resignation qualified by moderate expectations of good."²⁴ Niebuhr sums up Schweitzer's interpretation of Jesus' understanding of history: Jesus "is thought to have staked his hope upon what turned out to be an erroneous belief about the shortness of time . . ." and to have failed to change the unchangeable course of events to fit "his dogmatic pattern."²⁵ Niebuhr coun­ters this interpretation with his own:

His eschatological view of history did not differ from the doc­trine of progress only or primarily by regarding time as short.

He was not dealing with history at all in the first place, but with God, the Lord of time and space. He hoped in the living God, by whose finger demons were being cast out, whose forgiveness of sins was being made manifest. The times were in His hand, and therefore predictions about times and seasons were out of place. And was not the object of Jesus' intense expectancy God Himself, the manifestation of divine glory and the revelation of divine righteousness? The Kingdom of God for Jesus is less a happy state of affairs in the first place than God in his evident rulership. He rules now, but His rule is to become manifest to all.²⁶

For the Biblically rooted interpreter of Jesus, this passage must become an exciting part of the theology of Niebuhr. Niebuhr seems to deny the essen­tially pessimistic views of Schweitzer, which leave the church with a Jesus who was deluded in his belief about the coming Kingdom, who naively held on to the hope that the Messianic Kingdom was coming on earth immedi­ately. An essentially destructive position is countered and replaced with a basically positive understanding of the hopefulness of Jesus. Hopefulness is basic to the Church, which is the confessional community that trusts in Jesus Christ.

THE CHURCH: THE COMMUNITY OF HOPE

Niebuhr's view of the church corresponds to his view of the Kingdom of God, yet draws a line between the two. The Church is first

a community of memory and hope, sharing in the common mem­ory not only of Jesus Christ but also of the mighty deeds of God known by Israel, expecting the coming into full view of the king­dom on earth and/or (my italics) in heaven.

and secondly "the community of worship, united by its direction toward one God    and thirdly "as a community of thought in which debate and conflict can take place because there is a fundamental frame of agreement. .."3~ The expectation of the coming Kingdom is the hopeful confession of a community which shares a common faith in God. Niebuhr says that "negatively, the Church is not the rule or realm of God; positively, there is no apprehension of the kingdom except in the Church - . ." and, "the subject-counterpart of the kingdom is never an individual in isolation but one in community, that is, in the Church."²⁸ Hope is engendered within the community of hope.

Our reading of Niebuhr's theology of the Kingdom of God must go beyond description to evaluation to fulfill the function of translating his thought into our life story. The following observations seem helpful as a step toward fulfilling that task.

1. Wesleyans will certainly appreciate the understanding of God as the powerful One of the world. To accept a view of a powerless God would go against our historical emphasis upon the victory and empowerment, which is claimed through the cross of Jesus Christ. So, an important aspect of Niebuhr's Kingdom of power is seen in its willingness to endure the cross. "Death to self" is not an idea new to Wesleyan theology. On the social as well as the individual level, we must be willing to face the inevitable judgment that our particular institutions or dreams of individual conquest may be radically transformed through crucifixion. Nations and warriors alike con­tinually face their limitations and must surrender to God's will. There is power and humility in the way of the cross.

2. The Methodist heritage will also approve of the idea that the Kingdom of God is creatively powerful. Nothing lends any greater impetus to destruction than for the church to lack the courage to create new forms and accept changes in process and structure. The realm of God is open to new possibilities. (John Wesley's many new methods were a scandal to the church of his time.) We must be open to "reviving" institutions and individuals through the renewal, or alteration, or destruction of outmoded structures, whether they be personal, conceptual or social.

3. The universality of grace poses a possibility and a question. First, it is important for us to see with Niebuhr the extent of the influence of God's presence in the whole world. Particularisms of many kinds have crept into our movement with disastrous results. Niebuhr helps us see that God's gra­cious Kingdom extends its influence beyond the holiness movement to actively influence and involve other groups. (It would be well for us to con­sider new possibilities for Church union among our related holiness bodies. Niebuhr certainly would say so.)

A serious question arises when we confront Niebuhr's confident expec­tation that humanity is saved, even though sinful. This kind of universal­ism truncates the justice of God at the same time that it reduces the meaning of the cross of Christ. It is clear to this reader that outer darkness awaits those who are finally impenitent. The loss of this conviction led followers of Troeltsch and Niebuhr to abandon missions and evangelism. Wesleyans who deserve the name will not capitulate at that point.

4. Amidst a despairing world, we applaud Niebuhr's vision of a hopeful Kingdom. The individual and social despair generated by gloomy eschatol­ogies work havoc among those who seek justice on earth. The Kingdom of God offers the potential for renewal in the face of opposition, discourage­ment and alienation. Wesley's driving ambition to save the whole world was motivated by that hope. And, with Niebuhr, Wesley believed that the Church is the confessional community which alone sees the Savior, Jesus Christ, as the symbol and reality of God's saving grace.

These points of comparison cannot exhaust the many possible compari­sons, which need to be made. They merely illustrate the fruitfulness of attempting further dialogue among these traditions of faith.

NOTES

¹James W. Fowler, To See the Kingdom, The Theological Vision of H. Richard Niebuhr (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1974), p. vii.

²H. Richard Niebuhr, "Illusions of Power," Christian Century Pulpit, 33 (April 1962): 100.

³H. Richard Niebuhr, "Science and Religion," Yale Divinity News, (Jan. 1960):21. Hereafter cited as "Science and Religion."

⁴H. Richard Niebuhi, Faith on Earth (unpublished book manuscript, Ch. 6: "The Reconstruction of Faith", p. 20, cited by James W. Fowler, To See the Kingdom, The Theological Vision of H. Richard Niebuhr, p. 232.

⁵H. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning Revelation (New York: The Macmil' lan Company, 1970), p.136.

⁶Niebuhr, Meaning, pp. 134-135.

⁷Niebuhr, Meaning, p.135.

⁸Niebuhr, Meaning, p. 135.

⁹Niebuhr, Meaning, p.136.

¹⁰Niebuhr, Meaning, p.136.

¹¹1t is interesting and significant that Niebuhr can draw upon the authority of these Old Testament materials in the case of God's creativity but omits similar basic data from his discussions on other subjects.

¹²H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self (New York: Harper Row, Publishers, 1963), p.135. Hereafter cited as Responsible Self.

¹³Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company, [French first ed. in 1932, first English trans., 1935, reprinted by Doubleday] n.d.), p.209. At occasional points in his work, Nie­buhr acknowledges indebtedness to Bergson. This debt has not been fully calculated by the interpreters of Niebuhr and deserves the closest critical scrutiny.

¹⁴H. Richard Niebuhr, "An Aspect of the Idea of God in Recent Thought," Magazin for Evangelische Theologie und Kirche 48, (1920):42.

¹⁵The reference to II Isaiah refers to the view of God as acting in all events, with the understanding that that action is a function of the creative intention and activity of God. God is not, in Niebuhr's view of God, known primarily as the initiator of being, but as the principle of being by which every moment is and by which all being participates in the ongoing process of being.

¹⁶This is noted in his discussion of creativity in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion.

¹⁷H. Richard Niebuhr, "A Communication: The Only Way into the King­dom of God," Christian Century, 49 (1932):447.

¹⁸The statement runs counter to the view that "prayer changes things," or that one may expect a supernatural intervention in history which may alleviate or miraculously confute the forces of nature and reality which threaten us. Niebuhr's answer to the supernaturalist who believes in mira­cles, is to enjoin such an individual to accept that which is happening to him/her as part of the gracious activity of God. Even though the meaning of that activity is beyond the power of human comprehension, it is to be accepted as essentially gracious.

¹⁹Niebuhr, Responsible Self, p 44.

²⁰H. Richard Niebuhr, "The Gift of Catholic Vision," Theology Today, 4(Jan. 1948):513.

²¹Niebuhr, Responsible Self, p.144.

²²H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), pp. 19f.

²³Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, p.20.

²⁴Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, p.20.

²⁵Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, p.21.

²⁶Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, pp. 21f.

²⁷H. Richard Niebuhi, Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956), p.23. Hereafter cited as Purpose. ²⁸Niebuhr, Purpose, p.19.

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