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This chapter looks at how Niebuhr has been variously interpreted. It focuses on two representative writers — former New Republic editor Peter Beinart and historian David Chappell. Their efforts range widely and impressively beyond a focus on Niebuhr. But both fit the mould of public intellectuals who desire to reconstruct a ‘usable’ Niebuhrian legacy for our times. Their common flaw is to claim a more or less perfect Niebuhr from one stage of his intellectual career. While Chappell celebrates the radical 1930s Niebuhr of MoralMan and Immoral Society, Beinart champions the Cold War Niebuhr found in such 1950s works as The Irony of American History. In effect, their accounts serve as critiques of each other's portraits.

Because Reinhold Niebuhr has been so widely criticized by feminist theologians, a critical retrieval must first examine the extensive charges against him. To this end, this chapter outlines feminist criticisms of Niebuhr and develops a framework for a feminist reappropriation of Niebuhr that takes into account these criticisms. It is suggested that feminist criticisms of Niebuhr's understanding of gender roles do not fundamentally challenge Niebuhr's model of the free and bound self (human self‐transcendence and boundedness). Indeed, these criticisms actually exemplify the need to recognize the moral significance of both our given bodily reality and our human freedom partially to transcend and transform that givenness. Niebuhr's understanding of human moral experience provides a framework for that recognition.

This chapter begins with Reinhold Niebuhr's claim that human experience is both bound and free (human boundedness and human self‐transcendence), and goes on to examine the broader ethical implications of this claim for feminist theologians and others. Though Niebuhr is drawn on as the primary resource for this position, the alternative offered is not simply Niebuhr dressed up in feminist vocabulary or feminism disguised by Niebuhrian concepts. Niebuhr's “hermeneutic of suspicion” creates a greater ambivalence about the moral status of the natural world and human communities than is necessary in a realist position. Instead, the alternative, a feminist Christian realism, accounts both for feminist criticisms of Niebuhr and for feminism's positive contributions to a realist ethic.

This chapter discusses criticisms against Reinhold Niebuhr. It attempts to put Reinhold Niebuhr in historical perspective, in the same way that Niebuhr himself arrived at a more balanced appreciation of Walter Rauschenbusch and the generation that brought American Protestantism through the years of ‘social crisis’ and the First World War. It so doing, it treats Niebuhr's work with the same sort of Christian realism that he himself eventually applied to Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel. The chapter presents a Niebuhrian view of Niebuhr and his critics, which seeks to recognize both continuity and difference and to further our own reflections on what it means to be realistic about our place in history.

This chapter examines American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on Christian realism. Analyses of Niebuhr's works suggest that he offered almost no reflection on how the church as an institution could best involved itself in public life. Niebuhr's lack of attention to the church was at least partly a function of his liberalism in that “his God did not act in history”. God's action in the Biblical narratives and even the career of Jesus Christ was not clear in Niebuhr's writing in regard to what can be called its historical faculty.

This chapter considers the issues in relation to humanitarian interventions, arguing that moral compassion without a sense of the political realities can be disastrous. It also looks at Niebuhr's ethical realism in relation to the Just War tradition.

This epilogue offers a historical perspective on the career of Reinhold Niebuhr, the most acclaimed intellectual within a distinctive American Protestant generation: the generation that brought the tradition of Protestant liberalism to its greatest moments of public authority, and then presided over that tradition's decline in relation to secular dispositions on the one hand and evangelical sensibilities on the other. Niebuhr's career displays the fissures and fusions that constitute much of Protestant liberalism's struggle to define its own relation to the United States and its various component parts. At issue, often, has been to what extent the faithful should make common cause with, or against, people who do not profess Christianity at all, or who profess the wrong kind. Those fissures and fusions have been propelled by many immediate historical conditions, but also by a variety of often conflicting senses of how Protestant Christianity can best accommodate the Enlightenment.

One of the most pressing challenges of our time is how different religions can live peacefully together. This chapter explores the contribution that Niebuhr's fundamental approach to conflict might make to this and identifies some insights which seem both illuminating and potentially helpful to the issue. It shows that the basis of Niebuhr's approach to pluralism is in fact deeply rooted in assumptions that belong to the Western Christian tradition: one is the conviction about the universality of original sin; the other is the imperative towards progress, albeit on Niebuhr's highly qualified form of understanding of such progress. This poses, in an acute way, the question of whether Niebuhr's basis for a fruitful pluralism can in fact exist without those religious assumptions, and even more somberly, whether religious pluralism is even possible.

This concluding chapter discusses four key themes which are raised in different contexts throughout this book. These are: Niebuhr's theological anthropology; some key issues relating to ecclesiology; Niebuhr's role as a public theologian; and finally a focus on democracy and the implications of this for his ‘Christian Realism’.

Ecclesiology is one of the weaker aspects of Niebuhr's thinking. He frequently collapses the ideas of ‘Church’, ‘Christianity’, and the aggregate of believers into one another in sometimes confusing ways. This chapter shows that his theological outlook, which has come to be known as Christian Realism, gave him an awareness of the way those who stood outside the Church might view the institution, its beliefs and actions, and the individuals with whom they had daily contact in the wider social environment, and by doing so, indicates an ‘outsider ecclesiology’ which describes the Church from the standpoint of those who are not its members.

This chapter places John Gray in conversation with Reinhold Niebuhr. In Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, John Gray argues that Christianity provides much of the impetus for the utopian tendencies in the political discourse that dominates Britain and America. Gray believes the best example of this was the so-called ‘neoconservative’ confidence in liberal democracy and the attempt to use force to create a democratic Iraq. Reinhold Niebuhr understood all too clearly the danger of a utopian propensity shaping political discourse. So having summarized the principles out of which Reinhold Niebuhr shapes his outlook, three principles embedded in Niebuhr's thought that can both challenge all utopian aspirations and help us understand more clearly the nature of hope are identified. These principles are then applied to the current economic predicament. Having sketched, briefly, the reasons for the current difficulties (much of which vindicates Niebuhr's analysis), it is argued that a Niebuhrian approach can help us navigate this crisis.

American evangelical political theology is facing a crisis of self-identity. Many evangelicals have claimed that evangelical political theology has been taken captive by the Republican Party. In reaction, evangelical reformers have attempted to wrest their political theology from the grip of partisan political programs. God, they claim, is not a Republican or a Democrat. Despite agreement on this project, however, proposals in American evangelicalism have failed to provide a political theology that maintains a sense of evangelical public responsibility and a sense of God's transcendence over partisan political debates. This chapter argues that Niebuhrian Christian Realism offers a theological approach that could open new avenues for political thought which might carry evangelicals past their present conundrum.

This chapter is organized into five parts. First, it takes Niebuhr's essay ‘Why the Christian Church is not Pacifist’, and sets out its arguments as a characteristic Niebuhr manifesto. It then explores two weaknesses of the essay — its inadequate account of pacifism and its impoverished account of realism. Third, it is argued that at the heart of Niebuhr's theology, and significant in both the weaknesses already named, is his particular reading of the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13). This parable concerns the nature and destiny of humanity in the face of evil, and Niebuhr's treatment of the parable is seriously flawed. Fourth, the chapter suggests what a Christian pacifism free of Niebuhr's assumptions might look like. Finally, it explores what might make for a more appropriate sense of Christian realism than that offered by Niebuhr.

This chapter argues that it is a mistake to understand liturgy as being enacted in a place of withdrawal from society. Liturgy is a public event with a relationship to public life. If this is understood it ought to be possible to have a much more integral relationship between the kind of political theology represented by Niebuhr and liturgy as performative and transformational for society as a whole.

This introductory chapter starts by describing the setting within which the book was written, and provides an outline of the main contents. It the next two sections, it goes on to give the historical background to and definitions of Christian realism, and describe the assumptions and methodology used. The next section sketches a general argument about transcendence and immanence that is common to many, but not all, Christian theologies, and the following one argues that common feminist rejections of radical human self‐transcendence are bad for feminism because they undercut that which makes the feminist experience possible. The last four sections of the chapter discuss feminists on freedom, feminists on divine transcendence, Reinhold Niebuhr as a feminist resource, and feminist Christian realism as it emerges in the book from a mutually critical interaction among Niebuhr, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Sharon Welch.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of President Barack Obama's thoughts about what he has learned from Reinhold Niebuhr. It then identifies other senior politicians and distinguished political theorists who have been influenced by Niebuhr. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

Reinhold Niebuhr's theological anthropology receives less critical attention than his direct pronouncements on political and social matters, especially those that touch on conflict and war. But Christian realism of the Niebuhrian sort turns on a cluster of interlocked features, including theological realism with its attendant commitment to a particular account of the nature of human beings after the fall. This chapter explores Niebuhr on this issue, turning to his major work, The Nature and Destiny of Man. In the first volume of this work, Niebuhr's Gifford Lectures, Niebuhr critiques models of man he finds woefully inadequate even as he unpacks his own views. In our era, when talk of ‘human nature’ is proscribed in many circles as tales of ‘constructionism’ dominate — as if human beings are infinitely malleable and entirely ‘constructed’ out of features of the culture in which they find themselves — Niebuhr's views are a refreshing tonic. What do we make of what we are given? And what is given in the first instance? To appreciate Niebuhr's efforts is not, of course, to endorse them perforce. One must ask certain questions: Are his views adequate and persuasive? Is there a clear connection between his theological anthropology and his political and social arguments and conclusions? If there are flaws or shortcomings in Niebuhr's understanding of the ‘nature of man’ does this undercut his Christian realism in any significant way? These and other considerations are examined.

This chapter focuses on the reason for Reinhold Niebuhr's separation from the masses. In 1928 he had left his ministry at Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit for Union, the nation's premier seminary. As his career advanced, moreover, he routinely associated with other academic superstars and political dignitaries. Yet despite his departure from parish ministry for academe, Niebuhr retained an interest in and a fundamental respect for lay believers. He communicated his deep regard for the laity to generations of students at Union by telling two stories about his days at Bethel. One of these was the story of a young boy who had challenged Niebuhr in a Sunday school class. Niebuhr would finish the story by recalling how, at the time, he had no sufficient answer for the boy. Niebuhr confessed that this experience had taught him a lesson about the naivete and inadequacy of simplistic Christian piety in the face of such a tragic, sinful world.