Occasionally I am asked why, with a Ph.D., I am not teaching. Surely I must have wanted to do that with all the work I put in on an advanced degree? Well, “yes” and “maybe not.” When I had the opportunity to return to school (Southern Methodist University in Dallas) after my first pastorate, I did so with the feeling that while I might like to teach, I was also a pastor and could continue that work after completing my degree. That’s what happened, though I did have a couple of preliminary interviews for teaching positions.

One interview was with a Catholic college and one of the people conducting the interview asked me who the most influential ethicists were for my own work. I don’t remember who I mentioned, though probably Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr, James Gustafson and Douglas Sturm (a less well-known ethicist who works from the perspective of process theology). The follow-up question was a little uncomfortable – “there are no Catholics on your list.” What could I say? The Catholic ethicist I had been reading the most, Charles Curran, had just lost his permission to teach Catholic theology and was at Southern Methodist University. I am not sure it would have helped to cite his name.

The other interview I had included a similar question. Who was the ethicist whose work mattered most right then, at least to me? Before I even thought much about it I found myself saying, “Reinhold Niebuhr.” I knew from the reaction that I would not get a follow-up interview. De-briefing that interview later with some friends in the doctoral program, I realized I should have probably said Stanley Hauerwas, from Duke or James Gustafson, from the University of Chicago. Hauerwas has more recently been called by Time the most influential theologian working today. Hauerwas is distinctly Christo-centric in his ethic and concerned for the church as a moral community. For Hauerwas, the church itself is a social ethic. While I disagree with a number of things that he writes, I find him consistently interesting and someone I need to struggle with and argue with regularly. I am grateful for his work. Gustafson comes at Christian ethics from a whole other angle, focusing on God rather than specifically on Christ, “ethics from a theocentric perspective.” I probably am closer to Gustafson on a number of issues (though distinctly Christian), and his work is more systematic and comprehensive than Reinhold Niebuhr’s ever was.

So I blew it, and while I have had the privilege of teaching courses here and there, currently “Religious Perspectives in Health Care Ethics” at a local college, I have never been offered a tenure track teaching position. Maybe all because of Reinhold Niebuhr!

I first became acquainted with Niebuhr’s work in seminary. One required first year course was “Theological Interpretation of Contemporary Society” and Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man was the central text. The next year I was a teaching assistant for this course, and though the texts had changed, Niebuhr was still an important part of the course work – this time his Moral Man and Immoral Society. Yes, Niebuhr wrote before the emphasis on inclusive language (he died in 1971). One of the chapters of my doctoral dissertation, the one I was writing when I was interviewing, was on Reinhold Niebuhr. Can I help it if Niebuhr runs deep in my theological blood?

Anyway, I felt a little vindicated the other day when my issue of The Atlantic arrived. Within the pages of the November issue, the 150th anniversary issue, is an article on, you guessed it, Reinhold Niebuhr. In it, Paul Elle writes, “In think tanks, on op-ed pages, and on divinity-school quadrangles, Niebuhr’s ideas are more prominent that at any time since his death in 1971.” Elle’s article is about how Niebuhr’s thought is alive and well, and yet he is appealed to by a diverse group of thinkers – from neocons to liberal hawks to anti-war leftists. Elle argues that in looking at all these appeals one comes up with a more rounded portrait of Niebuhr and his thinking, and that when we arrive at that, we find that Niebuhr “really does have something essential to tell us about the world and our place in it.”

One may ask if someone’s thought is so amenable to such divergent groups, can it really be valuable and helpful? Is Niebuhr so unclear that those on the anti-war left and the neoconservative war hawk can both make some appeal to him? Is his thought that muddled and muddy, or is it that rich and nuanced. I tend to think it is the latter and people who want to appeal to Niebuhr simplistically do so at the cost of cutting off his richness and nuance. As I read Niebuhr in the midst of our contemporary, post-911 world, here are some of the things I take from him: within history there are important values to be struggled for and secured; sometimes the use of force is necessary to secure such values; we should have no illusions about persons or groups that seek to do harm and create destruction – threats posed by a militant mis-use of Islam can be real and dangerous and we do ourselves no favors by ignoring this (or any other source of harm and destruction); but when we struggle for certain values, we must take great care.

It is on this last point that I would hope Niebuhr’s voice would be most clearly heard. In the last book he wrote before suffering a partly debilitating stroke in 1951, The Irony of American History, Niebuhr wrote, “We… are never safe against the temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we most fervently desire” (173). One of the most consistent themes in Niebuhr’s thought was that the ideals of human persons and communities are never so pure as they imagine. They get mixed in with narrower interests and we need to be careful in taking our moral rhetoric too much at face value. Wars fought to bring democracy to other parts of the world tread on dangerous ground. We can lose our soul if our methods for securing our values undermine those very values. This is a voice we need to hear again and again.

Niebuhr continues to speak to me in countless ways. He may not be the preeminent Christian theologian or ethicist for our time, but his voice should be heard in our time. Here are a few other places where I value Niebuhr’s voice.

The first two quotes are from an essay written in 1967, but not published until years later. It was entitled “A View From the Sidelines” and in it Niebuhr reflects on life after his stroke and the change that required in him.

I found it embarrassing that my moral teachings, which emphasized the mixture of self-regard and creativity in all human motives, had not been rigorously applied to my own motives. I appreciate Niebuhr’s candid assessment that he sometimes taught more adequately than he lived. He frequently rushed from place to place making speeches for cause after cause, not bothering to think that maybe this had as much to do with his own ego as with the causes he also cared about. Once again, I appreciate, too, Niebuhr’s insistence that we look more carefully at our lives to see where narrow self-regard finds its way into even some of our most creative endeavors.

Unpolemical attitudes are not in contrast to moral commitments. After his stroke, Niebuhr was not able to be the same kind of advocate for his faith or his causes as he was before it. In that less polemic context, he found a gift. One could listen more deeply to others without being any less committed to one’s own position. How much we need such an attitude in our congregations, in our communities, in the church at-large, in our world, in the conversation between religious faiths.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness. The Irony of American History, 63. I would state some of this differently, but I would not change its essential meaning. The work of beauty, truth and goodness is a long work. Some part of it can be accomplished in our lifetime – here I disagree with Niebuhr – but much will remain to be done by others. We can only do our part, and sometimes our part will be mixed in with actions that are not as virtuous as we might imagine. The well-lived life does its best, empowered by Spirit, and does so with faith, hope and love. We work for truth, goodness and beauty, knowing that where we fail, there is forgiveness.

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. Yes, this is Reinhold Niebuhr. It is a prayer he composed in 1943 for a church service near his vacation home. It was picked up by others, distributed through the Federal Council of Churches, and, in a slightly revised form, became “The Serenity Prayer” for AA. It is a wonderful prayer for recovering persons, but its meaning and depth go well beyond that context. I pray this prayer often. It is a prayer, above all for grace – grace that will lead to serenity, courage, and wisdom – and I need all three. There are things I cannot change, especially the past. The church I pastor has a wonderful building that has some real drawbacks. We moved up the hill in Duluth in 1966, and took almost none of the old downtown building with us. I wish that were different, but it cannot be changed. God grant me the grace of serenity. Change is difficult. For many in the church it is our only six-letter four-letter word. Our world is not where I would like it to be – too much violence, addiction, war, hunger, poverty, too many directionless people, too many lonely people. God grant me the grace of courage to work for change, in my life and in my world. What can be changed? When is enough change enough for now? How fast can change happen? Should I turn up the heat on change, or slow its pace? God grant me the grace of wisdom to begin to answer these questions.

Not bad stuff from a man who has been dead for over 35 years. One other note, Niebuhr was a distinctly “public theologian,” that is, he lectured widely to diverse audiences and wrote for many publications that were not “religious.” He was also a prolific author of books. I can imagine that Niebuhr might have even blogged were he around now. I’ve got to love him for that, too.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David