162NIEBUHR, REINHOLD
end of his life—that of responsibility—
from both teleological and deontological
approaches. Niebuhr’s approach matured
from one merely sociological to a socio-
logy deeply informed by theology.
In his focus upon the relationship
between religion and culture, he variously
expressed this as the contrast between
accommodation and transcendence or
between withdrawal (from culture) and
approach (of culture). His metaphors for
this begin with the repetitious pendulum,
but shift to the slowly progressing wave
upon the beach. His focus upon both
God’s transcendence and human limits
placed him fully within the Reformed
theological camp.
Some of H. Richard Niebuhr’s most
significant works include: The Social
Sources of Denominationalism (1929),
The Church Against the World (1935, with
Wilhelm Pauck and Francis P. Miller),
The Kingdom of God in America (1937),
The Meaning of Revelation (1941), Christ
and Culture (1951), The Purpose of the
Church and Its Ministry (1956), Radical
Monotheism and Western Culture (1960),
The Responsible Self (1963), and Faith on
Earth (1989, essays from the 1950s).
NIEBUHR, REINHOLD (1892–1971).
Reinhold Niebuhr was the father of polit-
ical and Christian realism and the elder
brother of theologian H. Richard Niebuhr.
He was a product of the German Evangel-
ical Synod of North America which was
a hybrid of the Lutheran and Reformed
traditions of Protestant Christianity. His
life and work was summed up by one
biographer in the phrase “the courage to
change.” Niebuhr began his career serving
as pastor of Bethel Evangelical Church in
the city of Detroit from 1915 through- There, he repeatedly challenged the
unjust business practices of automobile
magnate Henry Ford. During this period,
Niebuhr shifted away from liberal moral-
ism, renouncing liberalism as an ideology
promoting the illusion of human prog-
ress, using Marxist thought to do so. In
1928, he began his four-decade-long ten-
ure of teaching Applied Christianity at
nion Theological Seminary of New York.
By then, he was a socialist. However, when
socialism could muster nothing beyond
pacifism in response to Nazism, he left
the party to become a Democrat firmly
in support of the policies of President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At the close
of World War II, he became a Cold War
fighter siding against the tyranny of com-
munism. He supported the civil rights
and Great Society policies of Lyndon
Johnson, but came to oppose the war in
Vietnam. In this, he made a turn away
from an all-out rejection of liberalism. He
understood that he had earlier equated
it simplistically with the nineteenth-
century myth of human progress. By the
end of his career, he perceived the social
gains American political liberalism had
made possible.
Niebuhr’s realism was deeply rooted
in Augustinian thought. He took human
sin with great seriousness, particularly