1
With or Without You
A Response to the Paper
“Reinhold Niebuhr, Liberal Religion and the Free Church” Delivered by Jan Knost at Prairie Group 1998
The Reverend Doctor Brent A. Smith
I have climbed the highest mountains
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you
Only to be with you
I have run, I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
Only to be with you
But I still haven’t found
What I’m looking for …
I believe in the Kingdom come
Then all the colours will bleed into one
But yes I’m still running
You broke the bonds
You loosed the chains
You carried the cross
And my shame
You know I believe it
But I still haven’t found
What I’m looking for.[1]
In the same way that two hundred years from now people will wonder why President Clinton was threatened with impeachment for boorishness, one seeks to comprehend an even more incomprehensible question that has plagued Western religious history: Why was Jesus of Nazareth executed? It just doesn’t make sense.
By the standards of its time, Rome was the most advanced of all civilizations, creating water systems that survive to our day and a language that was the foundation for modern languages now used worldwide. Rome possessed the most civilizing system of jurisprudence of its time. Jesus broke no civil law, and yet was executed within the jurisdiction of Rome.
How could it be?
Jesus was a loyal and devoted Jew, and by the time of his birth Judaism was a several thousand year old religious tradition. Its theology was the most sophisticated and nuanced of its time, predicated upon the advanced arts of reading and writing. Its God compelled followers to recall being slaves and outcasts, strangers in a foreign land, as a necessary prerequisite to understanding moral and ethical law, that to the Hebrew’s God, “All souls are mine.” This was the fulfillment of the covenant between God and humanity. And Jesus spent the greatest amount of his time with outcasts and strangers, all the souls that were God’s own. Yet, it was Jesus’ fellow Jews who inexplicably demanded his blood!
How could it be? And yet it happens all the time. The most just of human civilizations condemns innocents to death. Sophisticated religions that emphasize righteousness and mercy legitimize the creation of outcasts and execute those who pronounce them as God’s children. How could it be that Jesus was crucified? Reinhold Niebuhr has a theological hunch rooted in an understanding of human nature: "What is best in human culture and civilization is involved in man's rebellion against God... Thus does the cross reveal the problem of all human culture and the dilemma of every human civilization."[2]
The problem and dilemma is easily stated: the irony of the human creature as created is that the good we bring into existence contains within it the very evil we seek to overcome. A civilization embodying law and justice condemns innocents. A religion which lifts up justice and mercy towards strangers, outcasts, and unfortunates, as the supreme embodiment of God’s covenant with humankind, winds up creating these “castes” and punishing those who would defend them. So, in knowing such things about human nature, and the civilizations and religions it creates, how can human beings live together in such a way as will yield meaning and hope? This is the central religious question that our culture now faces: Is human existence a tragedy beyond which there is no repair, save for some supernatural intervention that saves through superstition, or an equally absolutistic, but subjective, contextual individualism that shuns anything normative? Ironically, it is the very same question that forms the current core concerns of some deeply interested in the expression of liberal religion through its ecclesiastical structures. And it’s a question that permeates popular culture.
Isn’t it ironic, just a bit?
A little too ironic, yea I really do think.[3]
Jan Knost acknowledges in the beginning of his paper that relating Niebuhr’s thought directly to the liberal church will be difficult. “Reinhold Niebuhr never concerned himself practically speaking with ecclesiology.”(Knost, 3) He was a pragmatist and, as Martin Marty and others have identified him, a public theologian. After his parish experience in Detroit his “congregants” consisted of public figures: “George Kennan, Dean Acheson Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Hans Morgenthau, Walter Lippman and James Reston…”(Knost, 4). Perhaps his ecclesiology is buried deep within Leaves from the Notebooks of a Tamed Cynic, in much the same way that the pragmatic dimension of Langdon Gilkey’s theology is buried in Shangtung Compound. Niebuhr writes:
When I sit through a church conference I begin to see a little more clearly why religion is on the whole so impotent ethically, why the achievements of the church are so meager compared to its moral pretensions. Sermon after sermon, speech after speech is based upon the assumption that the people of the church are committed to the ethical ideals of Jesus and that they are the sole or at least chief agents of redemptive energy in society.[4]
This, and he hadn’t as yet attended a General Assembly of our Churches and Fellowships!
As pessimistic as his view was, he was able “to affirm a doctrine of hope.” (Knost, 3) “Christianity’s view of history is tragic insofar as it recognizes evil as an inevitable concomitant of even the highest spiritual enterprises. It is beyond tragedy insofar as it does not regard evil as inherent in existence itself but as finally under the communion of a good God.”[5] This understanding that evil is not “inherent in existence itself but as finally under the communion of a good God,” places him within the liberal conversation, although few liberals feel comfortable receiving him in their den or offering him a glass of wine!
Yet, as Jan points out, “If, however, one were to look for a partner in the thirst for social justice; for a person of rational excellence who could point to the hypocrisy of Christian ecclesiology, one need look no further than to the life, thought, and teaching of RN.” (Knost, 4) Because of Niebuhr’s “aware[ness] of the pitfalls of human pride” (Knost, 6) he was able to peel back the intentions in ethical behavior to expose the basic hypocrisy of all human doings. An individual may have noble ideals of goodness, but when manifested in the finite world they bear a mark of the evil that the ideals themselves are intended to overcome. “In essence, then, RN observed the tensions and troubles of the age in which he lived and renounced the idealism which Walter Rauschenbusch had shouted.” (Knost, 6) But Niebuhr’s critique of society began not with his theology, his view of God, as did his orthodox contemporaries; but with his anthropology. As is the case with religious liberals, the question “What is the nature of human being?” precedes the question, “What is the nature of God?”
It must be understood that the children of light are foolish not merely because they underestimate the power of self-interest among the children of darkness. They underestimate this power among themselves.[6]
One could surmise that Niebuhr’s ecclesiology would be rooted in the same methodology he formed as a public theologian. Jan rightly adopts this assumption in analyzing “areas of social action and RN’s religious and ethical thinking”(Knost, 8) concerning pacifism, freedom, reason and tolerance, politics, and the place of love and hope in areas of social justice. I’d like to expand upon the foundation Jan laid in his paper by taking two of these concerns, freedom and love, and, using Niebuhr, relate them to current issues facing us.
In his “The Ethic of Jesus and the Social Problem,” Niebuhr pointed out that Jesus “spoke of the kingdom, and not of salvation, and the kingdom meant an ideal social relationship, even though he might emphasize that it proceeded from internal spiritual forces. His was an ethic of love and it therefore implied social relationships.”[7] The yield of an ethic of love is above any social ethic or longings for social relatedness: “We are asked to love our enemies not because the social consequence of such love will be to make friends of the enemies, but because God loves with that kind of impartiality.” [8] Yet it has a social consequence in that it implies a deeper kind of relatedness than personal preference or motivation. The problem? Human beings cannot manifest disinterested impartiality. There is always a social, cultural, historical condition we cannot completely transcend. “What the church fails to realize is that its responsibility is chiefly for the moral and spiritual attitudes of the privileged rather than the disinherited… The perfectionist ethic of Jesus… demands that love be poured forth whether or not we suffer from injustice.”[9] The problem is that the “internal spiritual force” of love can be unleashed only as it has been liberated. All you need is love? Not if you’re a finite human being. You also need to be free. Love and freedom are inseparable.
The premise of some of us who consciously place ourselves within the Free Church tradition, is that we've always possessed a distinctive revelation which is derived from the faith that life has meaning, and projected into human life will yield a powerful hope. And that distinctive revelation begins with a simple statement: God is Love, and appears in this world in the form of freedom. But the world as created is finite and always displays irony. Civilizations, religions, and churches will always crucify the Christ. “[Sin] is not a defect of creation but a defect which becomes possible because man has been endowed with a freedom not known in the rest of creation.”[10] Sin is what we do with freedom. God’s revelation of himself in the finite world is through a created form made in his image: human being. We take it into ourselves and become subjectivistic, narcissistic, and exploitative. We locate it primarily or exclusively here or there, and the individual is lost. Human existence is an ever-constant tension between the manifestation of freedom through self-fulfillment, and the manifestation of freedom through right relationships. It is never resolved because existence is finite. “Man is and yet is not, involved in the flux of nature and time. He is creative, subject to nature’s necessities and limitations; but he is also a free spirit, who knows of the brevity of his years and by this knowledge transcends the temporal by some capacity within himself.”[11] It is in the struggle to live authentically in the midst of this tension that God’s work is done.
The Free Church is the institutional embodiment of this kind of tension. But what God does it embrace today? Recognizing that supernatural superstition is the false god we fought the last century we rightly refuse to embrace it in this one. “It is to be noted that in Hebraic religion the transcendent God is never an escape from the chaos of this world. This world is not meaningless, and it is not necessary to escape from it to another supramundane world in order to preserve an ultimate optimism.”[12] Yet, because of our unwillingness or inability to accept the form God takes in existence, we hoist him instead upon the cross of a postmodern subjectivism “[which] is defined as a rejection of modernity’s wish for an inclusive theory of history and community.”[13] Irony of ironies! I’ve heard a man say that “you have your truth, I have mine,” while bemoaning the lack of any transcendent quality to his common life. In the midst of an institution that has witnessed to the historical exclusion of women in the religious sphere, a woman banishes me from her church community because I am a man. An African-American individual announces that anti-racism work begins with the premise that all white people are racist. An individual insists diversity is the central mission of the Free Church while ignoring the observation that the most diverse of all Western faiths is Catholicism, which has coercion as its final mode of theological arbitration. There is a sense in our midst that loyalty to our “social enterprise” is the source of redemption without some kind of transcendent referent that identifies the evil lurking in that loyalty. “In primitive life the meaning of existence is revealed in the relation of the individual to his group. Life achieves meaning through its organic relation to a social enterprise. This loyalty usually results in some form of totemistic religion which gives a mythical and symbolic expression of the feeling that the value and meaning of the social group really represents absolute meaning. Such totemistic religion remains, in spite of some people in all ages and all cultures, who refuse to ask ultimate questions about the relation of the value of their social group to some ultimate source of meaning.”[14]
"Thus does the cross reveal the problem of all human culture and the dilemma of every human civilization."[15] How could it be? We gather nails for Christ’s execution when we turn our back on or completely ignore the very God who will then stare down upon us from the cross. And the tragedy is that we are ones with the best vantage point to see who God really is.
There has never been a time when the liberation of the human spirit and the fullness of the unfolding self in a free community (“becoming a Christian,” Kierkegaard called it) are more possible. God is all around us. But we are wandering in a “free and responsible search for truth.” Instead, maybe we ought to be on a find. We are with God and without God. What an irony. And the preacher’s role in these times? To live as a distinctive man or woman of a free faith. To see redemptive possibilities in finite forms. And preach the Gospel of liberation. Like Reinhold Niebuhr did in his own manner, through his own tradition, and to his own generation.