Faithfulness: remembering H. Richard Niebuhr - Column

Christian Century, Oct 5, 1994 by James M. Gustafson

AT THE FUNERAL service for H. Richard Niebuhr held in Marquand Chapel of Yale Divinity School in July 1962, his close friend Paul Schubert said, "The depth of our grief is the measure of our loss." Schubert spoke for all who attended that service, and for countless others. Why was our grief so deep, and our loss so great? What was it about Niebuhr's life and thought that distinctively affected so many people, at so many levels of their existence? Why, a hundred years after his birth on September 3, 1894, does a conference on his theology and ethics seem impoverished without a session on his personal qualities?

All who knew HRN personally probably cherish particular events or contacts that are icons of his larger significance to them. They might be his wrestling with a theological, ethical and pastoral matter (such as the drowning of a young person) in the course of a lecture--or, as many students received them, a lecture sermon; or his passionate chapel talks through which biblical texts addressed his hearers in a compelling way. Some will recall prayers with which he opened his classes--prayers often written on a pad from the Presbyterian Ministers Fund as his final preparation in his study. Others will recall times when they, with anxiety, sought his counsel and guidance about a personal problem, or about an event in their lives in which they were faced with a serious choice. Doctoral students might remember the extensity of the readings, and the intensity of the discussion in a seminar room as smoke-filled as any in which Mayor Daley ever met his "pols" at the Bismarck Hotel in Chicago. Or they might recaall questions he wrote for their written examinations and his interrogation of them subsequently in an oral.

Some will never forget both the excitement and the frustration of writing a dissertation under HRN's direction--in my case, having a sheaf of material handed to me with a friendly glint in his eyes and the words: "scribere, et rescribere, et rescribere; et rescribere; et rescribere," or a discussion in which the central issue would get redefined about 15 degrees so that not a paragraph or chapter but the whole dissertation had to be rethought. (In this he was simply counseling what he did; he told me that he rethought and rewrote every sentence and paragraph in The Meaning of Revelation with two close friends and colleagues in mind, Robert L. Calhoun and the distinguished liberarian Raymond P. Morris.)

His former colleagues will recall a unique camaraderie: discussions about literature, politics, theology, moral issues, baseball, the Civil War, music or what have you in which we engaged, very junior and very senior faculty together, over sack lunches in Julian Hartt's office. Particular arguments might come to mind, as for example when Hartt pressed Niebuhr to be clear about the nature of the historical event that could be the sufficient basis for the meaning of the resurrection that Niebuhr affirmed: the Lisbon earthquake provided the analyogy. And there were all the moments that had no profundity: I have been told that a student once followed HRN and me as closely as he could as we walked to our offices in order to overhear something very memorable. He did. We were talking about how to get rid of the crab grass in our lawns.

One persistent theme in tributes to HRN is the unity, coherence or integration of his life and his thought. The impression of this came not from any public disclosures of his personal life; he was much too private a person to engage in such. Rather it came from a profound, even existential, wrestling with the great themes of the Christian tradition in view of historial and personal events which could be illumined by those themes, but which also contradicted any facile use of those themes. The full force of human struggling and suffering was absorbed in its own terms; critical historic and personal events had to be confronted in all their religious, moral and social ambiguity. They had to be interpreted theologically, and theology had to be interpreted in their light.

It was in the CHRISTIAN CENTURY, in fact, that the finest published expressions of this theological activity were published: the "war articles," as they have come to be labeled. "War as the Judgment of God," "Is God in the War?" and "War as Crucifixion" (published in 1942 and '43) demonstrate a deep conviction of the reality of God's sovereign presence in historic events, a presence that had to be wrestled with in the face of the occasions leading to World War II, and its continuing reality. War, for HRN, was not just an ethical problem (was it, for example, justifiable according to the just war tradition?); war was a religious and theological problem: what was its meaning in the light of the Christian story about God and how could that story be understood in the light of war's evils?

HRN's devotion to God was coupled with open and critical inquiry into all the human words and actions evoked by religious faith. Historical and cultural relativism were experientially and intellectually ingrained in him, but always together with faithfulness to essential elements of the Christian message as he understood it. From this stance he could analyze critically a variety of religious and theological stances. He could defend the Christian story by showing how it could be made intelligible as "revelation" against those who tended to denigrate its importance. He could be equally critical of the Christocentrism, ecclesiocentrism and bibliocentrism that he found in prominent trends of Protestant theology in the 1950s.