Historical Fact Or Symbol? The Philosophies Of History Of Paul Tillich And Reinhold Niebuhr Second Article -- By: John W. Sanderson, Jr.

Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 21:1 (Nov 1958)
Article: Historical Fact Or Symbol? The Philosophies Of History Of Paul Tillich And Reinhold Niebuhr Second Article
Author: John W. Sanderson, Jr.


Historical Fact Or Symbol?
The Philosophies Of History Of Paul Tillich And Reinhold Niebuhr
Second Article

John W. Sanderson, Jr.

WHEN we turn from the study of Tillich to the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr, we pass from the field of deep ontological speculation to the ideas of a practicing political and ethical philosopher. Since concepts are fewer in number and are relatively less difficult and much of Niebuhr’s thought parallels the more profound thoughts of Tillich, we shall not devote as much space to the exposition of his ideas.8

Reinhold Niebuhr brings to the study of the philosophy of history a background colored by the disillusionment which recent events of history have produced in the idealist and the liberal. His pastorate in Detroit during a period of labor unrest; his early inability to bring personal peace of mind to his parishioners; and finally, the tensions which beset the world during the first half of our century—these caused him to turn from liberalism to something else which would meet the needs of the world. However it is evident that this something else could never be orthodoxy. He writes:

The obscurantism of historic faiths is aggravated by the fact that a type of religious orthodoxy betrays man’s natural skepticism about the truths of love and faith, and also the natural human inclination to avoid a genuine encounter with God, by transmuting Heilsgeschichte into a series of miraculous events, miraculously attested, so that

one need not appropriate them existentially, but merely claim some special knowledge of historical miracles. It is incidentally one of the minor trials of one who is engaged in a polemic against liberalism in theology to be described on occasion by ignoramuses, including even college presidents, as a ‘neo-fundamentalist.’ One cringes at such a description, for it shows that our culture knows of no distinctions short of the difference between the modern credo and a graceless and obscurantist version of Christian orthodoxy.9

Just what actually moulded his thought most is not evident even to him. He says:

It is difficult to know whether the criticism of both liberal and Marxist views of human nature and history was prompted by a profounder understanding of the Biblical faith; or whether this understanding was prompted by the refutation of the liberal and Marxist faith by the tragic facts of contemporary history which included two world wars and the encounter of a liberal culture with two idolatrous tyrannies, first Nazism and then Communism, resting respectively upon the foundation...

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