Niebuhr Family

When I decided to attend seminary in the late 1960s a friend of mine, Bob Wilson, kindly gave me a little paperback book called A Layman's Guide to Protestant Theology, by William Hordern. This book had been first published in 1955 by The Macmillan Company. Bob said that it would be helpful because it not only gave sketches of several theologians, but also outlined the basic ideas of the several schools of theological thinking current at the time. I read the book the summer before entering seminary in 1969.



There can be no question that Reinhold Niebuhr is the most important living American theologian. This sentence begins the chapter on American Neo-Orthodoxy. (p.147) The particular seminary I attended emphasized Process Theism, and although I read some about Neo Orthodoxy it was not something I studied deeply. I dated a woman who for a time assisted Reinhold Neibuhr in preparing documents when she was living at Union Seminary in New York City. This was where Neibuhr had taught, and he was living on the campus in retirement. He died in 1971.



When in 1991 I was called the the Church of Peace United Church of Christ in Rock Island, Illinois I realized that I was in Neibuhr country. Neibuhr graduated from Eden Theological Seminary in St Louis, Missouri. So had every minister who had served the Church of Peace before me. I had graduated from Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California.

"What did you attend that Congregationalist seminary for?" challenged Bert Kutz, the widow of one of the previous pastors who attended Eden. "I lived in California," I replied, weakly. "Swartz," Bert continued. "That's a German name. Good!" Even if I had not gone to either Eden Seminary of Elmhurst college, my forbears were German immigrants in the post 1850 period, as had most of the early members of the church. That gave us some common ground. Bert read the Christian Century magazine, which Neibuhr had helped edit for years. Her late husband, Ludwig, had read it for years, so Bert just kept it up. I, too, had been reading the Christian Century since I had been in seminary. So this gave Bert and I more in common.



I realized some time later that while Neibuhr had been born in Missouri he had grown up in Lincoln, Illinois. His father, Gustav Niebuhr, had been pastor of St. John's Church in Lincoln. Both Church of Peace in Rock Island and St John's in Lincoln had been German Evangelical Churches at their founding, and had merged with the German Reformed in the 1930s, to become part of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, and then with the 1958 with the Congregationalists to form the United Church of Christ. I snapped a photo of the historical sign at St Johns when I was at that church for a meeting last month.





I don't want to outline Neibuhr's whole career and many books here. If you Google his name you can find lots and lots of information. But I do have one or two observations.

I think Neibuhr's prominence increased greatly when he was on the cover of Time Magazine in 1948. Few Theologians are so newsworthy. You can find the cover and the cover story on Time Magazine's website. www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19480308,00.html

A few years back I read the material and realized that his point of view was far more realistic about what had been happening in Europe leading up to the Second World War. Partly that was because he was at Union Seminary with the likes of Tillich and Bonhoeffer. We often forget that the bulk of American theologians at that time were pretty skeptical of engagement in Europe and critical of war as a means of dealing with conflict. They were generally pretty optomistic about humanity and slow to realize just how bad things were becoming.

Neibuhr was far more sanguine, and considered the war against the Nazi's to be a just war. I think that the reason that he was featured in Time is that his point of view turned out to be far more correct than those of many other theologians at the time.

In addition to his general theological stance of "Christian realism" I have come to believe that the fact that his family was bi-lingual German and English, and that worship in the German Evangelical Church was for fairly recent immigrants, and often in the German language, contributed to a far clearer understanding of the situation in Germany in his family and in his church than most Americans expereinced. The German Evangelical Church and the Neibuhr family was more international in stance - they were reading the European periodicals and writing back and forth to family members who were living there. I think Reinhold Neibuhr was far more knowledgable about specifics of what was taking place in Germany than were most American theologians. His interest and knowledge was specific and he was well informed.

As you might well imagine, those of us in the United Church of Christ here in Illinois are proud of Reinhold Niebuhr and his brother H. Richard Niebuhr and the contribution that this whole family has made over the years. I am glad to have been grafted in, even though I went to that Congregationalist seminary out in California.