The Necessity of God
The Nature and Destiny of Man, a Christian Interpretation. Vol. I. By Reinhold NiebuhrtD.D. (Nisbet. r5s.) DR. REINHOLD NIEBUHR is one of those writers on religion who are exercising a wide and distinctive influence on the thought of Protestant circles in the present generation, both in his native America and in the British Isles. The present volume is the first of his-Gifford Lectures, delivered in Edinburgh; Vol. II is still to come. In order to understand the drift and significance of these lectures one has, I think, to recognise in them a polemic against two things in the world of today, against which a fire burns within the sometimes difficult apparatus of Dr. Niebuhr's abstract terminology. One is the shallow. optimism which supposes you can bring about a perfect human society by some change of organisation—the substitution, for instance, of Communism for Capitalism—and fails to take account of the sinfulness besetting all human endeavour ; the other thing is the putting of some element in man—" reason " or romantic impulse, some such idea as the Nazi one of blood and race—in the place of God—in Dr. Niebuhr's language, making " some contingent and relative vitality or coherence into the unconditioned principle of meaning." His concern is to show that, cut off from faith in God, there can be no satisfactory understanding of man's place in the universe or guide for human conduct. If, on the other hand, you look at man and his doings from the standpoint of belief in God, you are confronted by the fact of man's " original sin." Upon this Dr. Niebuhr insists strongly, though he explains that this does not mean, as the Christian tradition assumes, the Fall as an event in time.
There is, of course, no space here for surveying the multitude of ideas set forth in the book, or for any detailed criticism. It must be recognised that Dr. Niebuhr's cast of thought and mode of presentation seems more congenial to the German and Scottish mind than to the English. His English, it need not be said, is grammatically inpeccable, but he is capable of writing sentences which may make an Englishman's head swim. " Implicit in the human situation of freedom, and in man's capacity to transcend himself and his world is his inability to construct a world of meaning which transcends the world beyond his own capacity to transcend it " (page 156). And another thing which may make a meeting between Dr. Niebuhr's mind and an English- man's difficulty is that his Protestant background differs from that of most Englishmen. From the Lutheran and Calvinist standpoint, the " semi-Pelagianism " of the Catholic type of Christianity is the damning offence ; but the Church of England has been semi-Pelagian to as great an extent as the Roman ; Quaker doctrine, as stated by its most authoritative exponent, Robert Barclay, is definitely opposed, in its view of saving faith, to Continental and Scottish Protestantism, and is recognised by the Roman Catholic controversial writer, J. A. Mohler, as
" Catholic doctrine expressed in other terms "' John Wesley, after his breach with the Moravians, spoke of Luther's " crazy solifidianism " and pronounced his commentary on Galatians to be " blasphemous." All this makes a different religious background for the Englishman from the Protestantism which Dr. Niebuhr has in mind. But if the form in which Dr. Niebuhr himself sets forth his gospel may be difficult for the ordinary Englishman to assimilate, it is to be hoped that his ideas will be absorbed by English theologians, and will be reproduced by them for the ordinary man in forms more congenial to the English mind. For much that he has to say is doctrine which the world needs.
EDWYN BEVAN.
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