Was the highly destructive conflict of nations that lasted from 1939 to 1945 actually a second world war? Or was it an extension of the first war that had engulfed the world approximately two decades earlier? During his European sabbatical in 1930, H. Richard Niebuhr had seen for himself how the draconian measures the Treaty of Versailles had imposed upon Germany were actually preparing the way for the rise of Hitler and the threat to world peace that he would soon create. In any event, the interlude between these two open conflicts had produced a profound change of attitude among Christians in America. Guilt over their endorsement of the Allied cause in 1917 moved many to become equally wholehearted in their embrace of pacifism. Several prominent Protestant leaders swore publicly that they would never support another war, and others on seminary and college campuses either signed the Oxford Oath or joined pacifist groups such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). When the US Senate consented to the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact in 1929, moreover, the Federal Council of Churches called for the ringing of church bells and prayers of thanksgiving throughout the nation.
During the Depression decade, however, as the Japanese invasion of Manchuria was followed in short order by Italian aggression in Ethiopia, Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland, and a bloody Spanish civil war, cracks began to appear in the pacifist consensus. The division of opinion within the FOR over the merits of dogmatic pacifism led to schism; since this was a hotly debated issue among his Yale students, Niebuhr weighed in with his own perspective. Given the moral utilitarianism undergirding FOR thinking, the minority that had severed its ties with this pacifist group was, in his estimation, being more consistent than the hardline majority. While the minority was inclined to allow the use of physical violence to halt the behavior of aggressive nations, the majority deluded itself into believing that coupling verbal condemnations with economic sanctions remained a nonviolent course of action. “There are a good many men,” Niebuhr pointed out, “who would prefer to die by bullets than by starvation.” In Niebuhr’s view, pacifism that was truly Christian recognized a “divine teleology” that made no “righteous” or “unrighteous” party exempt from God’s judgment. With the aid of the cross of Jesus Christ, moreover, it clearly understood that reconciliation might involve bloodshed on the part of the innocent as well as the guilty.
As the 1930s drew to close, the expansion of the Sino-Japanese War in Asia and the rolling of German armies into Poland (which shattered the accord European leaders had negotiated with Hitler at Munich) served to deepen these divisions among Christians. Bitter debates extended from pacifists to church-related groups and agencies of many types. Those that advocated neutrality found themselves with strange bedfellows that included Christian liberals and socialists with pacifist inclinations on the one hand and conservative Christian voices like Father Coughlin on the other, along with Charles Lindbergh, the isolationists in Congress, and everyone else who favored an “America First” position. In other instances, arguments over the merits of intervention caused good friends to part company. When the editor of The Christian Century came out in favor of a negotiated peace to end the war in Europe and openly attacked President Roosevelt’s efforts to turn America into an “arsenal of democracy,” Niebuhr’s brother Reinhold chose to establish Christianity and Crisis, a rival periodical that reflected his conviction that the only hope for world peace and order was the halting of totalitarian aggression. To say the least, there was as much confusion in the churches as there was in American society over the best course to follow.
This period of crisis in the world as well as the church became Niebuhr’s Gethsemane. He found himself following in the footsteps of Jesus during his passion to the garden where he wrestled with his Father God in prayer over his impending death. Niebuhr agonized over finding a way to lead American Christians both to seek God’s will and to proclaim to themselves and to their fellow-citizens, just as Jesus had in Gethsemane’s garden, “Not my will, but thine be done.” Niebuhr knew that making discernment of God’s will a central feature of the church’s message would likely win more worldly enemies than friends. Yet he believed that this was the way by which Jesus had succeeded in overcoming the world in himself and for his followers. Furthermore, he saw this challenge as a “growth” opportunity for the church to discover anew how reaffirmation of its faith in the God revealed by Jesus Christ could enable its members to see themselves and the rest of God’s creation as contemporary participants in a “grand process of cosmic redemption from death and destruction to life and glory.”
At the same time, Niebuhr recognized how daunting a task it was to gain a hearing for such faith in the midst of a heated and highly emotional debate over America’s participation in another world war. At the risk of being misunderstood, he waded into the isolationist-interventionist controversy by arguing that the religious issue at any critical moment was not about the content of differing potential courses of action but the context in which choices were made. Whether advocating intervention or nonresistance, one’s motive might be egoistic (self-defensive) or nationalistic. Or it might be universalistic: ready to acknowledge one’s own contributions to the conflict and willing both to assume responsibility for the well-being of all of one’s neighbors (victimizers as well as victims) and to help the latter in particular get back on their feet, no matter how long it might take. To him, the church’s duty was neither to take sides in the debate nor to retreat to the sidelines but to expose the faith at the heart of thinking on either side of the issue and, as he put it, “to lead men and nations to the ultimate decision, which is not the decision of war or peace but of American peace or peace of God, American war or acceptance of the judgment of God.”
Niebuhr’s wrestling with God in order to discern his will for the church and a world at war also appears to have been a motivation for the writing of his third major work, The Meaning of Revelation, published in 1941. Finding the intellectual support he needed to understand revelation to mean “both history and God” caused him considerable anguish, forcing him at one point to tear up his manuscript in frustration and start over. In the book, Niebuhr ended up separating internal from external ways of interpreting any historical moment. For him, the internal perspective was more normative in character than an external point of view because it reflected the values that held communities together. For the Christian community, revelation provided this perspective. It not only furnished the church with a pattern for interpreting events in every place and time but also continually called forth allegiance to the one whom Jesus regarded as Father. Hence, Niebuhr contended that what Jesus revealed of God remained a “moving thing,” and every contemporary event could be viewed as part of the same drama of divine-human interaction that Jesus first brought to light through his life, death, and resurrection. Niebuhr was in no way trying to suggest that this was the only authentic view of history. Nor did he wish to devalue the findings of “external” historians. On the contrary, he believed the church could only confess to the world beyond itself what this hermeneutic was leading it to see.
With the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, America’s involvement in World War II ceased to be an issue for debate. Pacifist ranks quickly shrank, and the number of clergy enlisting as military chaplains rapidly increased. As clergy at home went about ministering to congregations with members caught up in patriotic fervor, they tended to be more circumspect about assigning blame for the conflict and more highly committed to the achievement of a lasting peace among nations.
For Niebuhr, America’s entrance into the war became a “Good Friday”; the Nazi extermination of Jewish populations and the Allied firebombing of Dresden were equally tragic features of it. Disturbing as well were efforts on the part of Christians either to establish the “relative rightness” of the Allied cause or to separate their religion from the political expediencies of engaging in warfare. Niebuhr gave these people the name Ditheists because they were in effect worshiping country as much as the God of Jesus Christ.
In several ways, standing beneath the cross where Jesus was crucified between two thieves helped Niebuhr make his case for the church’s response to the war. For one thing, he saw God acting in the war as “vicarious sufferer” for all of the afflictions of his people and using the suffering of the innocent for the remaking of the guilty. He also concluded that since so much of the burden of suffering in this war was falling on its innocent victims, the cross negated any “just war” theory or “amoral” perspective on it. At the same time, the cross served to convince him that nothing in world history lay beyond the scope of redemption. “Neither the crucified brigand nor the crucified righteous are regarded as forsaken by God and far from Paradise,” he wrote in 1942. “Even should death come to them hope wraps their broken bodies in fine linen, conserving what it can, preserving on Good Friday for an Easter miracle of divine action.” For Niebuhr, the church’s message to a nation and world once again at war involved a repentance intended to trigger in people nothing short of a “spiritual revolution.” This revolution included not simply sorrow over sin, but “no excusing” of those who might consider themselves more righteous and the exacting of “no vengeance” on the part of anyone. This revolution would took place in hope and “in reliance on the continued grace of God in the midst of our ungraciousness.”
As the Civil War drew to a close, a clergyman from the North is said to have written a letter to President Lincoln expressing the hope that he might now be certain that God was on their side. In reply, Lincoln stated that this did not worry him because his chief concern was that the North be on God’s side. The following Niebuhr writings illustrate how he, in the context of World War II, endeavored to provide the church with a similar perspective.
If there were a Christian season that best describes the disposition of Niebuhr as colleagues and students have remembered him, it would be Lent, with its focus on Jesus’ passion. The following are two sermons he delivered during that season in 1939 at the Yale Divinity School’s Marquand Chapel. Niebuhr feared that Christians might grow weary of hearing over and over again the sad news of the “agony of China” and the “crucifixion of the Jews” in Europe, allowing this to dull them into fatalistic resignation. Therefore, they needed not only to follow Jesus to the Garden of Gethsemane in order prayerfully to wrestle with God but also, upon their discovery of at least a fragment of his plan for the world, to be prepared to encounter plenty of opposition. One may suspect in reading these sermons that Niebuhr was speaking to himself as much as to the church.
Source: Yale Divinity News 35 (March 1939): 3–4.
“Tired Christians”
Luke 22:39-46
Were one to select and describe the ten decisive moral battles of history surely the conflict in Gethsemane would take first place among them. As military men gain knowledge of strategy from study of Hannibal’s operations at Cannae, so those who seek a wisdom apt for the direction of life in its internal conflicts go back again and again to examine the strategy of Jesus in his great victory in the garden. Our present purpose is not to deal with the major points of the struggle but rather to attend to the lost engagement where Jesus’ allies were defeated so that He was left alone. All the accounts agree that although the disciples had been warned to be exceedingly watchful they fell asleep. They were tired, the first gospel states; “their eyes were heavy”; but Luke says that they went to sleep for sorrow.
We all understand the weariness which can flow from sorrow. In the conflicts of the inner life there comes a time when we are tempted to go to sleep. We have fought against our pride, our self-centeredness or our desires and having been often defeated we grow very sad. We do not resign ourselves but our watchfulness diminishes and at last we are asleep. The temptation to go to sleep is even more manifest in our social conflicts. The tired radical is a familiar figure and so is the tired Christian. We have looked at the millions of unemployed for almost ten years, have thought about their sufferings, physically and spiritual, have tried to share in their agony and to alleviate it. But now we go to sleep for sorrow. We have become used to the agony of China. We were told last fall that bye and bye we would lose our sense of horror and of pity as we contemplated the crucifixion of the Jews. And we are doing so. We think we cannot stand the continued sight of suffering and sometimes say that nature has provided us with a defense against pity by allowing us to become callous or to go to sleep. Such sleep may be physical or it may be a matter of escape to a world of dreams—to the world [of] sports, or of cinema romances or of historical novels. We are very tired, we say, and must have some escape.
But Jesus seemed to think the disciples’ excuse invalid, and the old church always tended to think that sleeping for sorrow was somehow a moral fault. It counted tristitia, or sloth, or accidy [sic] among the seven deadly sins. It could not be regarded as a purely physical reaction, really amoral, for both in its sources and in its consequences it had a moral character. The disciples were doubtless physically tired; their flesh revolted against further vigilance but more than a physical revolt was present. Perhaps they suffered from wounded pride, as Stonewall Jackson seems to have done when he went to sleep while Lee was fighting at Mechanicsville. They had some right to feel wounded. They had been left out of Jesus’ counsels; their advice had been rejected; had he followed Peter’s injunctions the Master would never have come into such a dilemma. So Longstreet felt at Gettysburg and went to sleep for sorrow. Tired radicals and tired Christians feel that way sometimes about the social situation or about the church. Their counsel has been rejected, their advice scorned; why not go to sleep?
Tristitia may be due to our desire not to become involved. Everyone would like to be able to say, “Whatever happens, it won’t touch me”. [sic] We want to be Stoics who do not get too much wrapped in emotions and in the fate of others. We desire isolation, not like that of Jesus fighting his lonely battle, but like that of a spectator who wisely enjoys tragedy, comedy and farce. If the play becomes too much for us we close our eyes and go to sleep.
But the most important source of sloth is faithlessness. We look upon the agonies of men for a while with a little confidence that there is meaning in this life and a cure for its woes. But having seen the struggle continue without solution we are tempted to give up and say, “There is no sense in the whole thing. Nothing good can be done. The case is hopeless”. [sic] So men go to sleep because in sleep they can forget the utter confusion. Such sleep is the consequence of loss of faith in God.
As sloth has moral sources so it has moral consequences. When the unprepared disciples were awakened by the critical event they could do nothing but run away or slash out at the soldiers with their awkward swords. Psysical [sic] sleep may be good preparation for hard and skilful work, but spiritual slumber is the worst possible preparation for meeting life’s issues. Its consequences are likely to be flight and denial and betrayal and utter confusion, as in the case of the disciples.
Is there any cure for sleepiness from sorrow? Perhaps Jesus’ example in Gethsemane suggests such a cure. Surely if anyone had a right to get a good night’s rest before the great ordeal he had that right. But he stayed awake and he did so by wrestling with God. He did not try to subdue God to make Him do a miracle but he struggled with Him until he saw His will, His plan. Jesus refused to let God off, to say “This whole situation is so bad that God can have nothing to do with it”.[same as previous] He proceeded on the assumption that there was a divine meaning in the whole sorry situation and he engaged in mental strife with God until some fragment of the divine plan was revealed. His effort was not directed toward achieving fatalistic resignation to a God who would do anyway what he had purposed to do, but rather toward understanding what God was doing in this whole affair, so that His own action might be adjusted to divine action. When he saw God’s will he was ready to do his part, which was neither the part of the aggressor or of the coward.
We have many things to do in the Christian Church in these hours of world crisis, but not the least task by any means is that of wrestling with God in the faith that he has a plan and a meaning, relevant to the whole sorry and tragic situation. Such wrestling will serve at least to keep us from sloth and may prepare us for some other action in the hour of darkness than the activity of flight or of foolish sword play.
Preparation for Maladjustment
Luke 22:35-58
Luke’s story about the two swords has had to bear the weight of elaborate theories and great argument. It has been thought that by this lesson Jesus was preparing his disciples for the world rulership. So Boniface VIII in the bull Unam Sanctam interpreted the passage to mean that both temporal and spiritual power had been committed to the church and based on it the claims of medieval Christianity to world dominion. Similar claims are sometimes made today in more subtle forms, as when Christianity is set over against communism and fascism as an alternative form of world rule. But this view of the role of the church is not only too formidable and weighty a thing to be built on the slight foundation of the story about the two swords, it is too heavy for the church itself. A Christianity which has been counselled by its Master not to rule as the Gentiles do breaks down when it is equipped with the temporal sword. Jesus surely did not want to prepare His disciples to rule in any other way than the one in which He ruled.
Again it has been said that this passage indicates that Jesus wanted to prepare his followers for self-defense. It is hard to find Biblical passages which will support that practice of coercion which we find so inescapable and apparently necessary in political life; this one seems to be a God-send after all the statements in the gospels about loving the enemy and turning the other cheek. But what an inept foundation it is for the great weight of armament which we rest upon it! The swords among twelve men! What militarist, what advocate of self-defense, would be content to equip twelve men with two swords? And perhaps, as Chrysostom suggests, they were only butcher knives at that used for th...
