NIEBUHR'S CENTURY

Historical epochs do not conform to the calendar. Someone has remarked that the twentieth century began in 1914, when World War I shattered the political assumptions and social stabilities of nineteenth-century Europe. Future generations may well say that the twentieth century ended in 1989, when the sudden collapse of communism in Eastern Europe signalled the end of the bipolar world, divided between two hegemonic superpowers.

The years between, what we will remember as the twentieth century, were a time of nation-states that dominated large sections of the globe and took to arms in the name of even larger values. It was a century that needed realism, if its leaders were to escape moral pretensions that would tempt them to crusades, and if its people were to resist concealed powers that threatened to put their lives at the service of other people's interests.

It was Reinhold Niebuhr's century. A young man at its start, he learned its illusion-shattering lessons well. He first found his intellectual center with a group of “younger theologians” for whom the expectations of Jesus' ethics could not be a “simple historical possibility,” but who also understood “the truth in myths” that was more enduring than the rational expectations of scientific progress.

When Niebuhr turned his critical realism on religious hope itself, in Moral Man and Immoral Society, some of his theological colleagues thought that he had surrendered Christian hope and handed the power of social transformation over to fanatical revolutionaries.