Reinhold Niebuhr

Life

Niebuhr was born on June 21, 1892, in Wright City, Missouri, the son of Gustav Niebuhr, a German immigrant pastor. His father was a minister of the Evangelical Synod of North America. His younger brother was the theologian H. Richard Niebuhr, known for Christ and Culture. Niebuhr studied at Elmhurst College and Eden Theological Seminary before attending Yale Divinity School.

He was ordained in 1915. He then served for thirteen years, until 1928, as pastor of Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit, a center of the automobile industry. During this period he observed firsthand the conditions of assembly-line workers and publicly criticized industrialists such as Henry Ford. In 1928 he joined the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he taught until 1960. He died on June 1, 1971, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Ministry and Contributions

• Christian realism: Niebuhr developed a distinctive understanding of human nature that stood between liberal theology, with its optimism about human reason and progress, and fundamentalism, with its literal interpretation of the Bible. At its center lay human self-love (the impulse to put oneself first) and sinfulness. Niebuhr held that Christian ethics must be able to address concrete problems such as politics and economics, a position commonly called Christian realism.
• Major works: In Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), he argued that while individuals may be moral, they tend to become more selfish within groups. Drawing on his 1939 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, he published The Nature and Destiny of Man.
• Political involvement: He was for a time a member of the Socialist Party but broke with it in the 1930s, and in the 1940s he became an anti-communist Democrat. With the experience of World War II, he turned away from pacifism and advocated participation in the war.
• The Serenity Prayer: He is known as the author of the prayer asking for the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference. The prayer is widely used by groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous.
• In 1964 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Influence on the Korean Church

The Korean pastor Kang Won-yong is said to have gained profound insight from encountering Paul Tillich and Niebuhr at Union Theological Seminary in 1956. Kang championed the idea of "Between and Beyond," which sought a new path through dialogue and mutual understanding rather than choosing one of two opposing sides. This idea is regarded as grounded in Christian realism, and it led to the founding of the Christian Academy in 1965. Works such as Moral Man and Immoral Society and An Interpretation of Christian Ethics have been translated into Korean. In Korean theological circles, Niebuhr continues to be studied in the fields of Christian ethics and public theology (theology concerned with the church's public responsibility).

Assessment

Niebuhr is regarded as one of the leading American Protestant theologians and political thinkers of the twentieth century. He is sometimes called a "realistic idealist" for his effort to strike a balance between ideals and reality. Theologically, he is commonly classified within neo-orthodoxy. At the same time, his criticism of fundamentalist biblical interpretation set him at a distance from conservative theology, and his strong critique of pacifism placed him at odds with the pacifist camp as well. Some Korean commentators have also noted that his realist understanding of justice can be received in ways that differ from his original intent.