Excerpt
from Speaking of Faith: Why Religion Matters - and How to Talk About It
by Krista Tippett
In the mid-twentieth century, before
the temporary death of God, before Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson,
there was such a thing as "public theology" in American life, and
Reinhold Niebuhr was its most trenchant voice. In my life of
conversation, he is one of the thinkers most often cited as an
influence by a vast array of modern people. He is one of the religious
voices who guides my thought about what has gone wrong with religion in
our common life and how it might go right again. Niebuhr, who died in
1971 at age seventy-eight, did not propose religious ideas as policy.
Rather, he articulated a theological point of view to challenge
thinking on every side of every important question. He understood
theology as a discipline by which religious people could temper and
deepen political life, not inflame it. In his day, Niebuhr influenced
presidents and Supreme Court judges, social activists and poets. He was
unclassifiable politically -- or rather, he was alternately called a
liberal, a hawk, a reactionary, a pacifist. In his "Letter from
Birmingham City Jail," Martin Luther King Jr. quoted Niebuhr as an
influence as he developed his idea of Christian nonviolent resistance.
Niebuhr's books had grand, evocative titles: The Nature and Destiny of Man, Moral Man and Immoral Society, The Irony of American History.
He was also a prolific author of essays and sermons. He drafted a
prayer during World War II that was later adapted as the Serenity
Prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous. And he was famous for other prayers
that captured his theology succinctly:
As pragmatically as any other figure in modern memory, Niebuhr connected grand religious ideas with messy human realities. He coined the term "Christian realist" -- a middle way between religious arrogance and religious impracticality. People in our society long for a middle way between arrogance and irrelevance. And whether they are religious or not, they long for religion to live up to its best ideals. These would include a humility about the fact that while there may be a transcendent God and a transcendent good, these only intersect imperfectly with the complexities of politics and social order and human failings. Like Niebuhr, I take my analysis of religion in the world -- its excesses and redemptive possibilities -- from its source in the richness, mystery, and mess of human life. He opened his classic work of theology, The Name and Destiny of Man, with this succinct, perfect line: "Man has always been his own most vexing problem."
Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from SPEAKING OF FAITH by Krista Tippett. Copyright © Krista Tippett, 2008