Just read this thoughtful piece in The Plough on Bonhoeffer’s famous essay “Protestantism without Reformation.” He meant the (white) Protestant church in America, which celebrates “freedom” as the sheer absence of constraint, the freedom to do as I please. Certainly not the freedom of the gospel, where freedom is defined in relation to God and neighbor!
The essay mentions Reinhold Niebuhr, who had hoped he could persuade Bonhoeffer to stay in America in 1939. That effort failed, of course. But I have been thinking about Niebuhr of late. My first year in graduate school I took a seminar on political theology in which we read key texts by Niebuhr: likely parts of The Nature and Destiny of Man , or maybe The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. Almost all of us in that classroom had come under the spell of Karl Barth—not that anyone would admit to being a Barthian, that just wasn’t done at Yale, but he set the standard for being theologically serious. One of my classmates was rather dismissive of Niebuhr, saying that his work read “like a kind of wisdom literature.” No Trinity, thin Christology, and in place of an ecclesiology, the American liberal democratic project. Ouch.
Fair enough. Niebuhr has his limitations, and I would not turn to him for guidance on, say, the eternal generation of the Son or the question of divine simplicity. He simply was not in Barth’s league as a theologian. But … isn’t there a place for wisdom literature? We could use some Niebuhrian humility in our body politic, a salutary sense of limitations and an understanding that we do not “own” the truth. Niebuhr’s genius for epigrams—proverbs, if you will—is of a piece with his being a writer of wisdom literature. Among other things, he left us this lovely prayer: “God grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
