Five Ways Reinhold Niebuhr Is Still Relevant скачать в хорошем качестве

Five Ways Reinhold Niebuhr Is Still Relevant

I recently spent some time with Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man (https://a.co/d/4sJcZHu) and Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr (https://a.co/d/9t62Mje) . This comes on the heels of my writing about Christian realism (https://open.substack.com/pub/joelcar...) , a theology and philosophy indebted to Niebuhr. Niebuhr reminds me of Jordan Peterson. (https://open.substack.com/pub/joelcar...) Like Peterson, he brought the claims of Christianity to public and political debate. Also like Peterson, Niebuhr arouses suspicion (https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/joseph-ha...) for whether he was really a Christian, this in spite of him being the most influential American theologian of the 20th century. Here are five ways that Reinhold Niebuhr is still relevant to contemporary Christianity. 1. Niebuhr Is Not an Evangelical Thank God. Niebuhr is, for me, the answer to the questions I began to raise in “The Evangelical Critics of the Evangelical Majority” (https://open.substack.com/pub/joelcar...) and “Three Mindsets that Make Evangelicals Ineffective.” (https://open.substack.com/pub/joelcar...) In the former essay, I registered the critique of the evangelical majority coming from believers disaffected with the subculture of evangelicalism and its alignment with partisan Republican politics. In writing it, I began to think that a sufficient Christian public theology must bridge this divide, rather than firmly take up the cause of majority evangelicalism. In “Three Mindsets,” I began to detect that the cause of the problems with the evangelical majority was a mindset of pious and internally consistent virtue-signalling within the evangelical tribe. I contrast that with a hard-bitten realist approach concerned with prudence and effectiveness in public action. People critique Niebuhr for being outside of that evangelical movement, and even for being a theological liberal. In fact, Niebuhr was among the foremost critics of theological liberalism, the others being the Neo-Orthodox theologians Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. However, Niebuhr and Barth were outside of the American movement of evangelicalism. I would argue that they were the most able critics of liberalism because they had been theological liberals, something few evangelicals could claim. As a result, their critique of theological liberalism was most persuasive and cutting to the liberal theological movement. 2. Niebuhr’s Historical Analysis Beats the Trad-Cath One The Reformation did not lead to the downfall of Western Civilization. When in the belly of presuppositionalism, I ran toward Catholic intellectuals to teach me about the natural law. I took several summer seminars at The Witherspoon Institute, with Robert George and the other authors of What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense. At that event and others like it, I was told that my conversion to Catholicism was imminent. It was there that I also first heard the Catholic critique of the American founding, that its lack of religious establishment was, implicitly, secularism. From there, I learned that the Catholic critique went deeper: The Reformation was the ultimate cause of “drag queen story-hour.” Purveyors of this incredibly partisan and anti-American narrative are - strangely enough - some of the most well-respected religious public intellectuals in America today. In Niebuhr, I read a better defense of the relationship of Protestantism to liberalism and modernity than I have seen even in contemporary attempts. (I applaud those of The Davenant Institute (https://davenantinstitute.org/) and associated intellectuals.) If we want to blame today’s optimistic humanism on an early modern movement, Niebuhr argues, the Renaissance would be the culprit, not the Reformation. What is more, the idea that a return to 13th-century conditions would heal our woes is another version of the kind of perfectionism and utopianism that Niebuhr critiques evangelicals, Marxists, and liberals for alike. It’s time for a renewed Protestant public theology. And Niebuhr should be a guide and model. 3. Niebuhr Was a Public Theologian And we should be public theologians too. Reinhold Niebuhr is a striking example of the kind of theology I aim to offer (https://open.substack.com/pub/joelcar...) and the kind of theologian I aspire to be. His theology avoids unprofitable intra-Christian debates (https://open.substack.com/pub/joelcar...) a...