Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic

Reinhold Niebuhr

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781646982004
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Chiesa cristiana

Renowned theologian Reinhold Niebuhr began his career as pastor of Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit, Michigan, where he served from 1915–1928. Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic is Niebuhr's account of the frustrations and joys he experienced during his years at Bethel. Addressed to young ministers, this book provides reflections and insights for those engaged in the challenging yet infinitely rewarding occupation of pastoral ministry.

With a foreword from Jonathan Walton on Niebuhr's enduring insights into the challenges and relevance of pastoral ministry, this powerful book remains as useful today as it was last century.

1928

This conference on religious education seems to your humble servant the last word in absurdity. We are told by a delightful “expert” that we ought not really teach our children about God lest we rob them of the opportunity of making their own discovery of God, and lest we corrupt their young minds by our own superstitions. If we continue along these lines the day will come when some expert will advise us not to teach our children the English language, since we rob them thereby of the possibility of choosing the German, French or Japanese languages as possible alternatives. Don’t these good people realize that they are reducing the principle of freedom to an absurdity?

Religion, like language, is a social product. The potentialities for both are in the child, but their highest articulations are the result of ages of cultural and spiritual experience, and in the right kind of religious education the experience of the race is joined with the inclinations of the individual. We do not get a higher type of religious idealism from children merely by withholding our own religious ideas from them (however they may be filled with error), any more than we would get a higher type of civilization by letting some group of youngsters shift for themselves upon a desert island.

A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architectural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections. More probably it assures the repetition of past errors. We ought of course to cultivate a wholesome scepticism in our young people so that they will not accept the ideas of the past too slavishly. But appreciation must come before criticism.

We do not teach a child the limitations of Beethoven before we have helped it to appreciate him; nor do we withhold any appreciation of the classics in order that the child might be free to prefer Stravinsky to Beethoven. What some of these moderns are doing is simply to destroy the organs of religious insight and the atmosphere in which religious attitudes may flourish, ostensibly for the sake of freedom, but really at its expense.

I have a dark suspicion that some of these modern religious educators do not really know what religion is about. They want a completely rational faith and do not realize that they are killing religion by a complete rationalization. With all their pious phraseology and supposedly modern pedagogy they really are decadent forces.

Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it. Nature has wisely ordained that faith shall have an early advantage in the life of the child to compensate for its later difficulties. If we imagine that we help the progress of the race by inoculating children with a premature sophistication we are of all men most miserable. Reason, without the balance of faith, destroys a civilization soon enough, without giving it this advantage among the young. I wonder if any of these modern religious pedagogues have ever read Unamuno’s “The Tragic Sense of Life”?

Here I am talking like a fundamentalist. But why not? If we must choose between types of fanaticism is there any particular reason why we should prefer the fanatics who destroy a vital culture in the name of freedom and reason to those who try to strangle a new culture at birth in the name of authority and dogma? The latter type of fanaticism is bound to end in futility. The growth of reason cannot be stopped by dogma. But the former type is dangerous because it easily enervates a rational culture with ennui and despair.

1928

This Federal Council meeting is an interesting study in the geography of morals. The race commission presented a report today in which it tried to place the council on record as favoring the enforcement of the fifteenth amendment as well as the eighteenth. It was obviously an effort to exploit the strong prohibition sentiment of the churches for the sake of committing them to the espousal of the interests of the disfranchised Negroes in the south. That is not a bad political strategy. But it did not quite work.

A good brother from the southern Presbyterian church warned that to interfere with this “political issue” would “soil the garments of the bride of Christ.” To him the eighteenth amendment represented a “moral” issue but the fifteenth was a “political” one. I have a sneaking suspicion that the fifteenth amendment expresses more of the genius of the gospel than the eighteenth, but that is neither here nor there. What was interesting was the way in which various church leaders tried to rescue us from the embarrassment into which the council was brought by this proposal. A good brother who was raised in the south and now lives in the north tried to act as mediator. He introduced his remarks with the usual nice story about how much he loved his negro mammy. Some day he ought to have a lesson in ethics and learn how much easier it is to love those who acknowledge their inferiority than those who challenge our superiority. It is indeed a virtuous woman who can love her social competitor as sincerely as she loves her faithful maid.

Another mediator was a southern bishop who has many northern connections. He made much of the fact that the south disregards only the spirit and not the letter of the enfranchising amendments to the constitution. The bishop is really a man of some courage who has spoken out bravely on the industrial conditions in the south. But he was evidently afraid in this instance either to accept or to reject a Christian view of race relations. So he stuck to casuistry about the letter of the law. He has probably preached many a sermon on the text about the letter killing and the spirit making alive. At any rate everyone who spoke revealed how geographic and historical circumstance had qualified Christian conviction.

That was as true of those of us who took an uncompromising position as the southern equivocators and the semisouthern mediators. To the southerners we are not Christian idealists but merely “Yankee” meddlers. And perhaps we are. At any rate it was easy to see from the debate that the north cannot help the south much in solving its race problem. If it is solved the solution must come out of the conscience and heart of the south.

After all, the problem, as every moral problem, is not merely conditioned by geography but by mathematics. Contact between races when the one race is almost as numerous as the other is quite a different story from a relationship in which the subject race is numerically very much weaker than the dominant group. Therefore let us not judge, lest we be judged. It is so easy to repent of other people’s sins.

Nevertheless it does not make one feel very comfortable to have a great church body seek some politic solution for a problem in which the ideal of Christian brotherhood leaves little room for equivocation.

1928

There is a discouraging pettiness about human nature which makes me hate myself each time I make an analysis of my inner motives and springs of action. Here I am prodding and criticizing people continually because they have made too many compromises with the necessities of life and adjusted the Christian ideal until it has completely lost its original meaning. Yet I make my own compromises all the time.

It is Christian to trust people, and my trust is carefully qualified by mistrust and caution.

It is Christian to love, and to trust in the potency of love rather than in physical coercion. Logically that means nonresistance. Yet I believe that a minimum of coercion is necessary in all social tasks, or in most of them.

It is Christian to forgive rather than to punish; yet I do little by way of experimenting in the redemptive power of forgiveness.

I am not really a Christian. In me, as in many others, “the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er by a pale cast of thought.” I am too cautious to be a Christian. I can justify my caution, but so can the other fellow who is more cautious than I am.

The whole Christian adventure is frustrated continually not so much by malice as by cowardice and reasonableness. Of course everyone must decide for himself just where he is going to put his peg; where he is going to arrive at some stable equilibrium between moral adventure and necessary caution. And perhaps everyone is justified if he tries to prove that there is a particular reasonableness about the type of compromise which he has reached. But he might well learn, better than I have learned, to be charitable with those who have made their adjustments to the right and to the left of his position. If I do not watch myself I will regard all who make their adjustments to my right as fanatics and all who make them to the left as cowards. There is a silly egotism about such an attitude. But it is difficult to be pedagogically effective if you do not hold pretty resolutely to some position.

A reasonable person adjusts his moral goal somewhere between Christ and Aristotle, between an ethic of love and an ethic of moderation. I hope there is more of Christ than of Aristotle in my position. But I would not be too sure of it.

1928

Jack Hyde came up today for a chat. These newspaper men are always interesting company. As religious editor of the Daily ——, he has been following the preachers of the town pretty closely. Of course he is a cynic, though a gentle one. He tells many an interesting story on how the preachers try to get free publicity.

I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth. The interesting part of the contrast is that the newspaper is officially as optimistic about contemporary life as the pulpit. The difference between the two is that the preacher is ensnared by his own sentimentality and optimism while the newspaper man has two views, one for official and one for private consumption.

1928

My good friend —— has sent me his church calendar. Among other things he reports “Last Sunday almost as many strangers as members were present. The weather was a bit cold. Was your loyalty chilly too? You cannot fight battles with half the soldiers in their tents. Lent is here. Give your church the right of way. Do your duty next Sunday.”

Here we see how easily even the Protestant minister gravitates to the viewpoint of the priest. He thinks people ought to regard it as a duty to hear him preach. What is still worse is that he identifies church attendance with moral heroism. Does he not realize that faithful church attendance develops and reveals the virtue of patience much more than the virtue of courage?

I must admit that I have urged people to come to church myself as a matter of duty. But I can do so no longer. The church service is not an end in itself. Not even religion is an end in itself. If the church service does not attract people by the comfort and challenge it brings to them, we only postpone the evil day if we compel attendance by appealing to their sense of duty. It may not be wrong to appeal to their sense of loyalty to the institution and tell them that if they have identified themselves with the institution as members they owe it to the strangers to be there. But even that is dangerous. The church is already too much an end in itself.

These appeals make it appear that we regard religious devotion as a service to God, a very dangerous idea. Of course a modern preacher doesn’t really believe that. What is really in his mind, consciously or unconsciously, is that the people owe him the duty to hear him preach. That is perhaps a natural glorification of his own function but it cannot be denied that there is something pathetic about it.

I can see, of course, that all good things depend in part upon right habits. Customs, attitudes and actions which are desirable cannot always depend upon impulse and will. It may be a good thing that people attend church as a matter of habit and because of a general sense of obligation to the institution. If churches depended only upon people who must make up their minds each Sunday whether or no they will attend church, our attendance would be even smaller than it is.

Yet habitual actions easily become meaningless, and institutions which depend upon them lose their vitality. If habitual actions are not continually revitalized by the compulsion of ideals and the attraction of the values involved in them, they may easily become useless.

1928

Detroit observed Good Friday today as never before. Sixteen theatres and many churches besides were filled to capacity during the three-hour period. I wonder how one is to understand this tremendous devotion of this pagan city. How little place the real spirit of Christ has in the industrial drive of this city. And yet men and women flock by the thousands to meditate upon the cross. Perhaps we are all like the centurion who helped to crucify Jesus and then was so impressed by the whole drama of the cross that the confession was forced from his lips “Surely this was the son of God.”

Before going to the theatre service I passed a Methodist church with a message on its bulletin board that explains many chapters in American church history. It was: “Good Friday service this afternoon. Snappy song service.” So we combine the somber notes of religion with the jazz of the age.

I wonder if anyone who needs a snappy song service can really appreciate the meaning of the cross. But perhaps that is just a Lutheran prejudice of mine.

1928

A very sophisticated young man assured me in our discussion today (student discussion at a middle western university) that no intelligent person would enter the ministry today. He was sure that the ministry was impossible as a vocation not only because too many irrationalities were still enmeshed with religion but also because there was no real opportunity for usefulness in the church. I tried to enlighten this sophomoric wise man.

Granted all the weaknesses of the church and the limitations of the ministry as a profession, where can one invest one’s life where it can be made more effective in as many directions?

You can deal with children and young people and help them to set their life goals and organize their personalities around just and reasonable values.

You can help the imperiled family shape the standards and the values by which the institution of family life may be saved and adjusted to the new conditions of an industrial civilization.

You can awaken a complacent civilization to the injustices which modern industrialism is developing. While ministers fail most at this point there is nothing to prevent a courageous man from making a real contribution to his society in this field.

You can soften the asperities of racial conflict and aid the various gro...