The Christian Dilemma
IF Christians hold to the reality of God they are likely to lose the sense of responsibility for the world ; if they are concerned with the world they tend to regard Him as a name for their own scheme of improvement. In the one case there is a dualistic pessimism and religion becomes a refuge from the concrete problems of life. In the other there is a romantic or rationalist optimism that ignores the tragedy of man. This is the dilemma of the Christian ages and the form it takes today is starkly stated in this book. • Dr. Niebuhr thereby adds to his already distinguished reputation as one of the most penetrating and provoking religious thinkers of this generation.
This is a book of first importance. There is no Christian but 'will be the more comfortable for leaving it unread. It will make him ask not only what he is doing with his religion (we have had plenty of books about that) but where he has got it from. He will almost certainly be made to feel that his is one or other of the two attitudes which Dr. Niebuhr stigmatises as opposite perversions of Christian truth. In the author's judgement, to dismiss the relevance of the Christian ethic to the practical affairs of the world has been the fault of what he calls Christian Orthodoxy. While orthodoxy has rightly insisted upon the sinfulness of all things human it has falsely made this a- reason for refusing to utter any effective voice about world conditions. To ignore the sinfulness of the actual world and to attempt to apply- the Christian ethic directly to the human situation as though this only needed a moral puff, has been the weakness of Christian Liberalism. Liberalism has rightly insisted that the relations of men in the world are to be determined by the Christian standard, but it has lapsed into sentimental romanticism by ignoring that the world stands alienated from God as well as linked with Him through Creation.
Reasoning with acute understanding of the actual situation in politics and religious thought and with deep moral con- viction, Dr. Niebuhr warns again and again of the dangers incurred by these false trails, and maps out the true path of what he calls Prophetic Religion. This was the religion of Jesus who proclaimed the truth of God's love to man. Not, as Liberalism suggests, to imperfect man, but to sinful man. The rigour of Christ's condemnation of egoism rebukes the moralist more severely than the wicked and it utterly shatters all moralities of prudence. Traditional Christianity haS by its realism and pessimism recognised that this love perfectionism " is something human nature has not the resources to fulfil. Sin has introduced a measure of determinism for evil in the world, and so " the most ideal aspirations of the human spirit always contain an alloy of idealising pretention.s." Men are saved from such sinful pretention only by realising their inability to achieve absolute goodness. Because Christian orthodoxy, which Dr. Niebuhr seems to understand almost exclusively as Augustinian (and only one side of Augustine at that), attributes to sin much that is due merely to the finiteness of the human creature, it is frequently indifferent to justice and equity in htunan relations. Christian Liberalism on the other hand by ignoring the fact of sin imagines that the Gospel ethic can be applied directly, and that reason can overcome social evils which it conceives as springing from mere limitation. In the central chapter on " the Relevance of an Impossible Ideal " Dr. Niebuhr attempts a description of a prophetic religion that will keep the tension of the truth in both attitudes unsnapped. There is obligation to make moral decisions in the historic world on every plane, even though every such choice will but effect a partial and broken replica of the perfectionism of the religious ethic. But also, if the impossible standard is lost sight of, the qualified values which are all that can be realised in history will be given unqualified worth and set in the place of God. Because traditional Christianity has confined the sphere of moral decision to the man-and-God relation, Liberalism has by reaction infected its social idealism with demonic pretentious.
These criticisms of Orthodoxy and Liberalism are fully worked out in two chapters entitled " The -Law of Love in Polities and Economics." Cotrunitnism and Fascism as well as absolutist attitudes like Pietism and Pacifism are assessed and judged: Then " Love as a Possibility for the Individual " is discussed in a chapter full of deep-insight into human nature, which our ecclesiastical humanists would do well to ponder.
"Moralistic appeals are in fact indications of the dissipation of primary religious vitality .• . . What. men are able to will depends not upon the strength of their willing, but upon the strength which enters their will and over which their will has little control."
Morality is therefore ineffective for good without religion. The book closes with a commentary upon the real motives of love in the Christian gospel. These motives are gratitude and contrition. In the final Chapter on "Love as Forgiveness " Christians are bidden to take a hand in the struggles of their generation, always repenting for and forgiving what is bound to be evil in the best they can support. Neutrality in the interests of a spurious spirituality is the greatest treason.
If this book is more critical than positive we cannot complain overmuch. It is doubtful whether a constructive Christian theology for the present huMan crisis can emerge for some time. One solid and fairly practical conclusion can be drawn from this searching work. A revived sense of sin among those • who act in world affairs would give them a more real because a more chastened confidence, for they would be released from the lie in the soul which makes them pretend that the cause of the relatively better in a sinful world is the cause of the absolute good.
In any further development of his thought Dr. Niebuhr would do well to consider that the two weakening tendencies he identifies in Christian history have their origin each in a one-sided emphasis of one aspect of Christian orthodoxy which cannot therefore be identified with either of them.
V. A. DE3IANT.
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