Sin Rediscovered

The religious book-of-the-year was published last week, and it puts sin right back in the spotlight. Its author: Union Seminary's Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, high priest of Protestantism's young intellectuals. Its title: The Nature and Destiny of Man: Volume I (Scribner; $2.75). Its significance: that America's most influential theologian is reversing the optimistic and rationalistic trend of Christian liberalism to lead his legions back to an almost medieval emphasis on the basic sinfulness of man.

The book is doubly interesting because 15 years ago Dr. Niebuhr was himself an outstanding exponent of the liberal credo he now seeks to discredit as opportunism, calling it "a religious accommodation to the prejudices of bourgeois culture." "I confess," he wrote in The Christian Century, "that between Versailles and Munich I underwent a conversion which involved rejection of almost all the liberal theological ideals and ideas with which I first ventured forth. My first book contains almost all the windmills against which today I tilt." In the light of history, especially from 1920 to 1940, he finds liberal optimism about the goodness of man untenable. Therefore he has set out to formulate a firmer faith in God based on much less faith in his fellow men.

The Nature and Destiny of Man he describes as "the first full dress exposition of my philosophy." The man in the pew is not likely to read it, but he will hear about it from the pulpit for years to come. Whether he will be moved by what he hears is another question, for Dr. Niebuhr belligerently repudiates liberalism's "pathetic eagerness" to justify itself to the modern mind. He foresees the unpopularity of his dogma, concedes that little short of world catastrophe can make Babbitt think of himself as a sinner or worry about the problem of sin.

"Modern Man," he says, "has an essentially easy conscience; and nothing gives the diverse and discordant notes of modern culture so much harmony as the unanimous opposition of modern man to Christian conceptions of the sinfulness of man. The idea that man is sinful at the very centre of his personality ... is universally rejected. It is this rejection which has seemed to make the Christian gospel simply irrelevant to modern man."

Dr. Niebuhr's "conversion" is a sign of the times. In the easy '20s sin was becoming an archaism, like the devil's tail and angels with six wings. Calvin Coolidge's preacher was against it, but liberal clergymen were accepting the Platonic conception of sin as ignorance, echoing the words of Socrates that no man knowingly does that which is wrong. The doctrine of progressive evolution had helped explain away the existence of evil in a God-made world; humanity seemed to be getting better and better; and righteousness was somehow just around the corner.

But in these chaotic '40s Dr. Niebuhr is not alone in doubting the goodness of man and the certainty of progress. To him sin is not ignorance, but pride and self-righteousness. He finds the good fully balanced by the evil in humanity, sees hope only if man admits his unworthiness and throws himself on God for help. Convinced that modern civilization is bad and "careening at the present moment to almost certain destruction," he terms the assumption that evolution is tending ever upwards superficial and unwarranted, calls a halt to theology's capitulation to science.

Protestant liberalism is not alone in feeling the lash of its former leader. He also makes out a vigorous case against Catholicism, denounces Marxism as the false religion of the lower classes, Freudianism as the false religion of the upper crust, and Nietzschean fascism as the false religion of the lower middle classes.

Dr. Niebuhr was a social reformer before he was a theologian and until two years ago was a member of the Socialist Party. He stands as far left economically as he now is far right theologically, but nonetheless presents a balanced if pointed view of society: "The anti-aristocratic emphasis of the Bible has been interpreted ... by certain types of sectarian Christianity and by modern secular radicalism in too simple politico-moral terms.

Jesus is reduced in this type of thought to the stature of a leader of a proletarian revolt against the rich. . . . Capitalists are not greater sinners than poor laborers by any natural depravity. But it is a fact that those who hold great economic and political power are more guilty of pride against God and of injustice against the weak than those who lack power and prestige. A too simple social radicalism does not recognize how quickly the poor, the weak, the despised of yesterday, may, on gaining a social victory over their detractors, exhibit the same arrogance. . . ."

The Nature and Destiny of Man was prepared for the famed Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, which only four other Americans have been invited to deliver in 54 years -- William James, Josiah Royce, John Dewey and William Ernest Hocking.

Lord Gifford, great Scottish jurist, established his lectureship in natural theology with a bequest of -L-80,000 in 1887.

Said he in his will: "I wish the lecturers to treat their subject as a strictly natural science, the greatest of all possible sciences, indeed, in one sense, the only science, that of Infinite Being, without reference to or reliance upon any supposed special exceptional or so-called miraculous revelation. I wish it considered just as astronomy or chemistry is." On this bedrock basis, the world's outstanding theologians have lectured ever since. The Gifford Lectures have never been given by a second-rater, and most of the great religious writing of the last half century has been done for them.

At Edinburgh, Dr. Niebuhr delighted his hearers by delivering his complicated lectures extempore, drew the largest crowds in Gifford history. Said one woman: "I dinna understand a word ye say when ye preach, but somehow I ken that ye're makin' God great." Before the lectures were finished, World War II broke out. Even that did not cut down the attendance. Intent on his exposition at one crowded lecture, Dr. Niebuhr suddenly noticed that his audience had grown restless. "Gracious, I'm losing their attention," he thought, "I'd better steam up."

Steam up he did, and the crowd stayed.

Afterwards, intent Dr. Niebuhr found that Edinburgh had had its first air-raid alarm, that four Nazi planes had been potted overhead in the Firth of Forth Bridge raid while he spoke on man's destiny.

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