Hegelian Spirit in Question: The Idealistic Spirit of Liberal Theology

Author(s): Gary Dorrien

Source: American Journal of Theology & Philosophy, Vol. 32, No. 1 (January 2011), pp. 3-22
Published by: University of Illinois Press
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Hegelian Spirit in Question: The Idealistic Spirit
of Liberal Theology
Gary Dorrien I Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics
at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York

I.

M
ysubject is the role of philosophical and social idealism in liberal
theology, and I will argue that both are tremendously significant in
the history of liberal theology and both are problematic, adaptable,
and still important. There is no such thing as a vital or relevant progressive
theology that does not speak with idealistic conviction, however problematic
that may be. I am currently writing a large book on this topic, so some com¬
pression is necessary today.
The book begins, as it must, with Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, and it
ranges over the German, British, and American traditions of liberal theology.
But today I’m going to make most of my case through the least familiar part
of this story, the British part.
The liberal movement in British theology is very much like the American
one in two respects: it spoke English, and it took off in the 1890s. Before
that time there was no movement in either place; there were only smatterings
of forerunners. In the U.S. the key forerunner was Horace Bushnell, who
was influenced principally by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In England the key
forerunner was Coleridge, who mediated Kantian idealism to British and
American theology. Before Coleridge, and for decades after him, it was stan¬
dard fare in British philosophy to dismiss Kant as impossibly turgid, obscure,
ridiculous, and overrated. Coleridge, by contrast, was defiantly admiring,
insisting that Kant towered above everyone in originality, depth, sophistica¬
tion, and importance.1
But there were problems with Kant, Coleridge acknowledged. At the turn of
the 19th century, when Coleridge began to study Kantian philosophy, Fichte
and Schelling were developing their critiques of Kant. Coleridge was deeply
influenced by Schelling, though he later claimed that he adopted his views before

1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 7, Bi-
ographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1983), 1:153.

American Journal of Theology & Philosophy • Vol. 32, No. 1, January 201 1
© 201 1 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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4 American Journal of Theology and Philosophy

he read Schelling. In any case, in 1815 Coleridge published a wild, rollicking,

monumental work, Biographia Literaria, which repeated Schelling’s critique of
Kant, and which, unfortunately, contained entire pages that plagiarized Schell¬
ing word for word. By then Coleridge was wracked with an excruciating array
of physical and emotional problems that included severe addiction to opium.
But the parts that he didn’t plagiarize showed that Coleridge knew his post¬
Kantian idealism. It was hard to say what Kant really thought about religion,
Coleridge argued, there were similar problems with the thing-in-itself, and
Kantian idealism was too mind-centered to treat nature holistically. If Kant’s
autonomy of the will, and thus his ground for a moral system, and thus his
ground for religion, was as central to his theory of human nature and under¬
standing as he claimed, why did he relegate it to practical reason? And if the
noumenon was crucial to Kant’s system, how could he have nothing to say about
it? Nothing could be said about the very thing responsible for the sensory ele¬
ment of knowledge? Coleridge, besides rejecting that opinion, couldn’t believe
that Kant really believed it either.2
Coleridge followed Schelling in conceiving nature as the sum of all objective
things and intelligence as the sum of all that is subjective. Nature is exclusively
represented and lacking in consciousness, while intelligence is exclusively rep¬
resentative and conscious. The objective and subjective mutually exclude each
other, yet all positive knowledge requires a reciprocal concurrence of these two
factors. To Coleridge, there were only two possibilities about how this happens.
Since the objective and subjective mutually exclude each other, one must be
primary. Coleridge opted for idealism and its problems.3
Transcendental philosophy was a mind-centered version of idealism that
derived everything from an act of free self-positing. For Kant and, especially,
Fichte, nature was an organic product of consciousness tending toward the
realization of reason. Philosophy theorized the movement from the pure sub¬
jectivity of self-consciousness to nature. Schelling had started there, but in the
late 1790s he began to say that a deeper course correction was needed, one that
took nature more seriously. Nature is not merely the mind in the process of
becoming, or, more precisely, the positing of the not-I. Rather, mind derives
from nature and nature derives from mind.4

2. Ibid., 1:155.
3. Ibid., 1:162, 163.
4. J. G. Fichte, Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung (Konigsberg: 1792; French edition,
Essai d'une critique de toute revelation: 1792-1993, Paris: J. Vrin, 1988); Fichte, Science of
Knowledge, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1982); F. W. J. Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter
Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

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 Volume 32, No. 1, January 2011 5

To make that argument, Schelling broke his system into two parallel sci¬
ences. The philosophy of nature tracked the determination of the conscious
by the unconscious, deriving mind from nature, while the science of knowledge
tracked the determination of the unconscious by the conscious, deriving nature
from mind. Both series are endless, Schelling argued; reason is realized only
at infinity. For a while he contended that the highest realization of reason oc¬
curs in art, for in aesthetic experience the identity between the subjective and
objective becomes an object to the experiencing I. But later Schelling changed
his mind about exalting art over religion. To secure his absolute idealism, he
needed an ultimate divine ground. The later Schelling argued that reality is
ultimately self-directed will, which has it primordial ground in God, and reason
develops as the self-revelation of God.5
That was the move that Coleridge introduced to British thought. On the level
of Spirit, Coleridge argued, subject and object are identical, each involving
the other: “It is a subject which becomes a subject by the act of constructing
itself objectively to itself; but which never is an object except for itself, and
only so far as by the very same act it becomes a subject.” Spirit realizes itself
as a “perpetual self-duplication” of one power of life as subject and object,
each presupposing the other despite existing only as antithetical realities. For
Coleridge, the high point of scriptural narrative was Exodus 3:14, the master¬
text of absolute idealism, God telling Moses, “I AM WHO I AM . . . tell the
Israelites, T AM’ has sent me.”6
Only in the self-consciousness of spirit does the identity of object and rep¬
resentation occur. Spirit is its own subject, not an object; the very essence of
spirit is that it is self-representative. Coleridge argued that on that account,
spirit is necessarily an act, for spirit, the identity of subject and object, must
dissolve this identity to some degree to be conscious of it. Self-consciousness is
possible only by and through the movement of will. Since spirit exists originally
as subject over against an object, it is originally infinite, but since it cannot be
a subject without becoming an object, it must be both subject and object the
original union of infinite and finite. “We begin with the I KNOW MYSELF,
—
in order to end with the absolute I AM. We proceed from the SELF, in order
to lose and find all self in GOD.”7

5. F. W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville:

University of Virginia Press, 1978); Schelling, Philosophische Schriften: erster Band (Land-
shut: Philipp Krull, 1809); Schelling: Of Human Freedom, trans. James Gutmann (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1937), see xlv-xlvii.
6. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1:275.
7. Ibid., 1:283.

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6 American Journal of Theology and Philosophy

Biographia Literaria rambled, but also sparkled, to a vision of divine creative

power communicated through imagination. Coleridge did not claim that reason
establishes or proves Christian faith. It was enough to show that reason is in
accord with faith. Head and heart belonged together, very much like philosophy
and religion, as Enlightenment theologians had said, or like poetry and religion,
as Enlightenment theologians had not said. Enlightenment religion rightly
held together reason and faith, but it worked with an engineering concept of
reason. Coleridge opened the door in England to Broad Church Anglicanism,
the Hegelian ascendancy, and liberal theology, though all of that came a half-
century after he was gone.

II.
When it happened, idealist theologians and religious philosophers led the way —
Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, Hastings Rashdall, John Caird, Edward Caird,
James Ward, and, a bit later, C. C. J. Webb and William Temple. All were in¬
fluenced by Oxford philosopher T. H. Green and determined to strengthen the
Christian basis of his system. It was exciting to ride the vogue of Hegelianism
that swept British philosophy after decades of fighting off skeptical empiri¬
cism and atheistic rationalism. Idealism was unquestionably the key to making
theology modem. But to the religious idealists, the Hegel vogue was a mixed
blessing, because it gave rise to absolute idealisms that didn’t believe in God
or in individual personalities. For J. M. E. McTaggart, absolute idealism was
about eternal selves forming a conscious unity, and it had no need of God. For
F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, and Richard Haldane, divine Spirit and
human spirit were unified, all relations were internal, everything was logically
connected to everything else, and “individual personality” had meaning, at
best, only in relation to its total context.8
The liberal movement in British religious thought was consumed with getting
the right kind of idealism. This was far more important than biblical criticism

8. See John Caird, The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity (Glasgow: James MacLehose,
1899); Edward Caird, The Evolution of Religion, 2 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1894);
Edward Caird, Hegel (Edinburgh: Wm. Blackwood and Sons, 1883); James Ward, Natural¬
ism and Agnosticism, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1909); C. C. J. Webb, God and Personality
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1919); F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical
Essay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1893); Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1914); Bernard Bosanquet, Psychology of the Moral Self (New
York: Macmillan, 1897); Bosanquet, The Principle of Individualism and Value (London:
Macmillan, 1912); Bosanquet, The Value and Destiny of the Individual (London: Macmillan,
1913); Richard B. Haldane, The Pathway to Reality, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1903,
1904); J. M. E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, 2nd ed. (New York: Russell
and Russell, 1964).

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 Volume 32, No. 1, January 201 1 7

or anything else. Pringle-Pattison, a Scottish Anglican religious philosopher,

and Rashdall, an English Anglican religious philosopher, led the way in wed¬
ding liberal theology to personal idealism. In some ways Rashdall was the
more important figure, unfortunately. A cleric and organizational leader, he
wrote major works on atonement theory and ideal utilitarianism, and he took
white supremacism for granted, folding his snobbish bigotries straight into
his works of moral theory. Philosophically, Rashdall got his idealism from
Berkeley and Kant, which made him slightly quaint in the debates of his time
over post-Kantian transcendentalism. Here Pringle-Pattison better represented
the idealistic spirit of a rising liberal theology movement.9
In his early career, Pringle-Pattison tried to believe, with Hegel, that self¬
consciousness rests in an abstract Absolute for which Hegel claimed ultimate
concreteness. But then Pringle-Pattison decided that Kant was right to locate
self-consciousness in individual selves; Hegel obliterated individuality in the
name of lifting it to something higher. In the mid-1880s, just as the Hegel
vogue was taking off, Pringle-Pattison cleared a path for a liberal Christian
version of it that overcame Kant’s dualism while affirming that individuality
is real.10
British philosophy owed a singular debt to T. H. Green for changing the
field, Pringle-Pattison acknowledged. But Green merely criticized and pointed
to something better; his thought was not a place to rest. Green adopted, more
or less, Hegel’s theory of a universal Self, but he was vague about how this
spiritual principle operated, which was just as well, because he leaned toward
absolute idealism. Being clear about it would not have helped religious thinkers
find their way. The problem for Christian idealism, Pringle-Pattison argued,
was that British Hegelians like Bradley got Hegel right: Hegelian philosophy
was about the identification of human and divine self-consciousness. Hegel
wrongly took an identity of type for a unity of existence, conceiving all of
consciousness as something unified in a single divine Self. 1 1

9. See Hastings Rashdall, Philosophy and Religion: Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge (New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910); Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil: A Treatise on
Moral Philosophy, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907).
10. Andrew Seth [Pringle-Pattison], The Development from Kant to Hegel, with Chapters on
the Philosophy of Religion (London: Williams and Norgate, 1882); Andrew Seth [Pringle-
Pattison] and Richard B. Haldane, Essays in Philosophical Criticism (London: Longmans,
Green, 1883); Andrew Seth [Pringle-Pattison], Scottish Philosophy, a Comparison of the
Scottish and German Answers to Hume (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1 885).
11. Andrew Seth [Pringle-Pattison], Hegelianism and Personality (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood
and Sons, 1887; repr., New York: Burt Franklin, 1971); 3-7; see T. H. Green, Prolegomena
to Ethics.

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8 American Journal of Theology and Philosophy

Pringle-Pattison allowed that Hegel was the greatest modern philosopher.

His vast system was the greatest of the modem age; it was anchored in logic;
it expanded Kant’s table of the categories; and no modern philosopher com¬
pared to Hegel for sheer brilliance. Moreover, Hegel was right to designate
self-consciousness as the ultimate category of thought, though he mystified this
idea, which referred to knowledge as such, by employing grandiose concepts
—
for it the “Absolute Idea,” the “pure Ego.” Hegel’s absolute idea was nothing
more than Aristotle’s principle that the knower and the known have a trans¬
parent relationship; in a crucial sense, the thinker and the thinker’s thoughts
are one. In Pringle-Pattison’s view, the key to Hegel was the problematic thing
that he did with this principle.
Hegel’s concept of the Absolute Idea was a logical notion belonging to the
category of logical abstraction; it was the scheme or form of self-consciousness.
His idea of Absolute Spirit was metaphysical, dealing with facts of existence.
But instead of acknowledging that his philosophy of nature and philosophy
of Spirit were metaphysical, offering a theory of existence, Hegel fused the two
categories, presenting his logic as a metaphysic. That was the problematic key
to Hegel, Pringle-Pattison argued. Hegelian logic was supposedly absolute, not
a logic of subjective thought; thus it was the only possible metaphysic.12
Hegel claimed to deduce nature from the logical Idea, describing nature
as the Idea in the form of otherness. To be sure, he never claimed to describe
anything that actually occurred, just as he did not claim that the Idea was
factually antecedent to nature and Spirit. Hegel’s system was an abstraction,
not a description of a factual process. Nature, like the thought-determinations
comprising the Absolute Idea, was an abstraction lacking any independent
factual existence; both existed only within the life of Spirit. Thus, logically
speaking, Spirit was the only factual reality.
But in that case, Pringle-Pattison noted, deduction had nothing to do with
it. Dialectic was powerless to bridge the chasm between thought and nature, so
Hegel leaped across it. His sparkling metaphors of deduction were just that —
metaphors conveying no factual meaning. The very point and design of Hegel’s
system was “to elude the necessity of resting anywhere on mere fact.” Hegel
excited religious thinkers by showing logically that spirit exists by a necessity of
thought. Like Plato, he constructed the world out of pure abstract universals.13

12. Pringle-Pattison, Hegelianism and Personality, 79-106.

13. Ibid., 101-15, quote 110; see G. W. F. Hegel, Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopedia
of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); Hegel,
Philosophy of Nature: Part Two of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. A. V.
Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).

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 Volume 32, No. 1, January 201 1 9

Pringle-Pattison countered, “We must touch reality somewhere. Otherwise

our whole construction is in the air.” Here, Kant’s critique of the ontological
proof of God’s existence was to the point. Kant argued that a fact could not
be derived from a concept. “Existence” and “being” are not concepts of things
that can be added to the concept of a thing, for existence and being are not
predicates. To say that something exists does not add any value to it. Pringle-
Pattison argued that to speak meaningfully of God’s existence, one must show
that God’s existence is an immediate certainty or that it is bound up with facts
of experience.14
Hegelian idealism magnificently refashioned the Platonic idea that reason
rules the world, or at least, that there is reason in the world. In Pringle-Pattison’s
view, all modem religious thinkers were in Hegel’s debt for that. But Hegel went
too far, describing nature as a reflection of the thought-determinations of the
Idea, or more poetically, as spirit in alienation from itself. Pringle-Pattison
replied that factual reality is not a mere abstraction and nature is not rational
in the manner of Hegelian logic. Things exist side by side in space, or succes¬
sively in time, with utter indifference to logical passage. The size and number
of planets have no logic, and it is not very helpful to lump all such things under
the category of contingency, as Hegel did. Above all, Hegel’s idea of God was
problematic.15
Even putting it that way seemed to require a position about what Hegel said
about God, but Hegel was slippery on this subject, which inspired rival schools
of thought. Hegelian theologians and atheistic left-Hegelians based their an¬
tithetical interpretations on the same texts, which spoke of Self-consciousness
in general, not of divine self-consciousness or human self-consciousness. In
Pringle-Pattison’s view, this was the key to the riddle of Hegel’s religion. He¬
gel’s subject was Spirit, not divine Spirit or human spirits. The world process
was always about the realization of Spirit as self-conscious reason. But Spirit
and reason are abstractions, Pringle-Pattison cautioned; only spirits and self-
conscious selves are real. Though Hegel referred to God as the Absolute Spirit,
even this concept does not establish that Hegel conceived God as a singular
intelligence, a Subjective Spirit.
Hegel’s ambiguity about divine reality was inherent in his absolute idealism,
which treated notions as ultimate reality and real things as exemplifications
of notions. Hegel began with the concept of Self-consciousness in general,
theorizing the world process of existence as the evolution and realization of

14. Pringle-Pattison, Hegelianism and Personality, quote 118; Immanuel Kant, Critique of
Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 500-507.
15. Pringle-Pattison, Hegelianism and Personality, 120-48.

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10 American Journal of Theology and Philosophy

this abstraction. Thus, his theory was abstract from start to finish. Pringle-
Pattison took seriously Hegel’s claim that his idea of Spirit, or the concrete
Idea, improved on previous Christian understandings of the divine-human
unity. But Hegel’s rendering of this idea was concrete only with reference to the
logical Idea preceding it, not in the sense of designating anything that existed.
—
Absolute Spirit a product of the self-creative projection of the Idea into
—
existence was “real” only as a real duplicate of the Idea; it was knowledge
hypostatized. This idea united God and human selves by stripping both of all
real content except the notion of intelligence as such. In Hegelian theory, God
and selves were sublimated into a logical concept.16
Many Hegelian theologians denied that Hegel denied that God might have
a separate personality or self-consciousness, and Hegel made statements that
sounded like personal theism. It was impossible to be certain what Hegel re¬
ally believed. But Pringle-Pattison advised theologians to make their case for
personal idealism without insisting that Hegel agreed with them, because the
“drift of Hegel’s mind” was toward absolute idealism. If Hegelian idealism
—
was about an impersonal system of abstract thoughts the Absolute coming
—
to consciousness of itself, it was hard to say no to atheistic left-Hegelians like
Ludwig Feuerbach, David Friedrich Strauss, and Bruno Bauer, who took liter¬
ally Hegel’s statements about the iron necessity of his logic and dispensed with
the supreme Spirit. If Hegel’s project was to construct reality wholly out of a
logical Idea, the atheistic Hegelians had reason to claim that they brought the
Hegelian project to its logical conclusion. Pringle-Pattison put it dramatically,
warning that if the Idea is all in all, then human beings and God are stripped
of personality, cynical realism is bound to prevail, and Hegel’s chauvinistic
Prussian conservatism was a plausible position: “If we take away from Idealism
personality, and the ideals that belong to personality, it ceases to be Idealism in
the historic sense of the word. To call it so is merely confusing the issues, for it
has joined hands with the enemy, and fights for the other side of the field.”17
Good idealism is progressive, hopeful, and life-giving, Pringle-Pattison
urged. It embraces the truism that there is no thought without a thinker, but
it spurns Hegel’s strange concept of the self-existence of thoughts. It accepts
that human beings lack any capacity to trace the development of God; all we
can do is trace the development of human thoughts about God. Religion is
about the subjective spirit of human selves, Pringle-Pattison contended. It
has a ground to stand upon even as it reaches for the stars. It was sheer “ef¬
frontery” for Hegel “to narrow down the Spirit of the universe to a series of

16. Ibid., 149-59.

17. Ibid., quotes 188, 193-94.

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 Volume 32, No. 1, January 2011 11

events on this planet.” Worse yet, in Hegel’s account the spiritual development
of the Absolute was confined pretty much to the shores of the Mediterranean,
an attitude that yielded his laughable claim in the Philosophy of Right about
the Prussian state’s world-historical superiority.18
Pringle-Pattison countered that real idealism is allergic to Hegel’s arrogant
nationalism and false universalism. It accentuates ethical subjectivity and the
struggle for unrealized ideals. The real thing has a buoyant zeal for moral
progress, prizing ethical feelings that fuel struggles for social justice. The Phi¬
losophy of Right abounded in pedestrian admonitions to do one’s duty, keep to
one’s station, and not make trouble; Pringle-Pattison remarked that it reeked
of a “satisfied acquiescence in things as they are, which the years bring to the
—
man of the world a mood as far removed as possible from the atmosphere of
moral endeavor.” Idealistic ethical feeling, by contrast, is contentious, energetic,
generous, and visionary. It flows naturally from being enlivened as an ethical
and spiritual being by the Spirit of a personal God. Every self is the apex of the
principle of individuation by which the world exists. As such, Pringle-Pattison
insisted, each self is “impervious” to other selves, “impervious in a fashion of
which the impenetrability of matter is a faint analogue.”19
That put it too strongly, conveying exclusivist connotations that clashed
with Pringle-Pattison’s meaning. His point in rejecting the fusion of selves
in a logical universal was to play up the uniqueness of each self. To Pringle-
Pattison, the idea that selves literally merged in a Universal Self or Absolute
was an impossible contradiction, worse even than the idea of bodies occupy¬
ing the same space. Pringle-Pattison launched a British school of thought on
this theme, after which he regretted having reached for the term “impervious.”
He spent the rest of his career pleading that getting personality right — human
—
and divine is the key to creating a genuinely progressive theology. We must
describe God as personal, he urged, because personality is and reveals the
highest that human beings know. There is such a thing as intrinsic value,
which yields an intelligible world, because personality is the central clue to
the ultimate nature of reality and the one thing that cannot be explained by
something else.20
William James, taking aim at absolute idealism, protested that philosophers
preferred elegant logical solutions to the real world. In his telling, religious and

18. Ibid., quote 195; G. W. E Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clar¬
endon Press, 1952), quote 222.
19. Pringle-Pattison, Hegelianism and Personality, quotes 209, 216, 217.
20. Andrew Seth [Pringle-Pattison], The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy: Gifford
Lectures, 1912 and 1913, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1920), 389-90.

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12 American Journal of Theology and Philosophy

social ideals were better defended by an open-minded radical empiricism that

tracks the flow of experience, which is relational and fluid. Radical empiricism
respects the human experience of plurality and different kinds of unity in a
world of flux and sensation. Nonempirical philosophies are simply unreal, he
protested; they parade mere suppositions about reality, “notes taken by our¬
selves.” In James’s striking images, speculative philosophy held reality no better
than a net holds water, fashioning abstract “cut out and fix” concepts.21
Pringle-Pattison admired the “stirring quality” of James’ philosophy and
sympathized with his opposition to monism. He appreciated that James was
still an idealist and an advocate of moral religion. He even admired that James
faced up to the implications of his radical pluralism by arguing for a finite
God and an “unfinished world.” But James’s “struggling deity” was a high
price to pay for avoiding monism, Pringle-Pattison urged, and Jamesian moral
religion was too secular and utilitarian to be much of a religion: “The deeper
—
expressions of religious faith and emotion the utterances of the saints, the
—
religious experts appear quite irreconcilable with the pluralistic conception
of a finite God, an unfinished world and a dubious fight.”22
The victory for which morality fights is already won on the religious plane
through Christ and the promise of the kingdom of God, Pringle-Pattison urged.
It is the “assurance of this victory” that inspires individuals to be courageous
and hopeful in fighting for the good. Just as the absolute idealists overreacted
to something they were right to avoid, the myth of a substantial self, James
overreacted against the absolute idealist concept of finite beings as mere objects
of the Absolute. Pringle-Pattison, saying no to both, held out for a view of
the soul as essentially active and spiritual, not a substance, and a panentheist
idealism conceiving God as suffering in, with, and for the world.23
In Pringle-Pattison’s generation, virtually all theological liberals were philo¬
sophical idealists and only a small minority were social progressives. In English
Anglicanism, the Anglo-Catholic party had a stronger record of social justice
activism than did the liberals. Pringle-Pattison made a winsome case for the view
that one kind of idealism leads to another, and that both needed to prize person-

21. William James, A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), quotes
253; see James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking and The Mean¬
ing of Truth (1907; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); James, Essays in
Radical Empiricism (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912); Josiah Royce, Studies of
Good and Evil: A Series of Essays upon the Problems of Philosophy and of Life (New York:
D. Appleton, 1898).
22. Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy, 393-96, quotes 395,
396; see James, A Pluralistic Universe, 43-82.
23. Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy, 396, 411.

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 Volume 32, No. 1, January 201 1 13

ality. Along with Charles Raven and William Temple, he helped to strengthen
the social conscience of theological progressives.
British theologians stuck with idealism long after the tide turned against it
in Anglo-American philosophy. Philosophical idealism at its best and worst
possessed a religious character that appealed to theologians. Thus they were
not inclined to give it up merely because G. E. Moore and William James poked
a few holes in it, or later, merely because World War I savagely destroyed the
hope of a better and better progressing world.24

III.
World War I knocked the bourgeois optimism out of English theology, but
not its animating idealism. English theologians did not have to ask why their
leaders and teachers promoted a catastrophic war that destroyed the nation.
For William Temple and other liberals of his generation, World War I was
tragic and terrible, but not their fault, and nothing like a refutation of their
idealism. On religious and philosophical matters they said the same things
during and after the war as they said before it, though in the 1930s, Temple
risked offending his audiences by stressing the role of British imperialism as
a cause of the war. British theology did not turn neoorthodox until the 1940s,
and its liberal stream spoke the language of philosophical idealism into the
1980s, often by citing Temple.
One measure of the persistence of idealism in liberal theology is that Temple
stuck to it and played up the idealistic aspects of Whiteheadian thought after
he partly adopted Alfred North Whitehead’s system. From 1915 through the
1920s, Temple wrote neo-Hegelian works of religious philosophy and made
bishop; in the 1930s he became a world figure as the Archbishop of York and
gave the Gifford Lectures for two years. The book version of his Giffords,
Nature, Man and God (1934), recycled Temple’s usual themes: Spirit is a vera
causa, a real source and cause of process; Spirit is the nature of the Supreme
Reality that created all things; the world is the creation of Creator Spirit think¬
ing itself; the Will of Christ is one with the Will of God and expressive of it,
but not identical with it; Will and Personality are ideally interchangeable terms;
Love Divine creates and calls out from created things the Love that all things
were created to be and to express.25

24. See G. E. Moore, “The Nature of Judgment,” Mind (April 1899); Moore, “The Refuta¬
tion of Idealism,” Mind 12 (October 1903), 433-453; Moore, Philosophical Studies (London:
K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1 922); Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development (London:
Allen & Unwin, 1959), 53-62.
25. William Temple, Nature, Man and God (London: Macmillan, 1934), 3-56.

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14 American Journal of Theology and Philosophy

Fifteen years after the Barthian revolt overthrew German liberal theology,
Temple had no trace of Barth’s polemic against philosophical theology. “Cri¬
sis theology” did not suit Temple’s mode or temperament; always he was an
advocate of reasoned faith. But Temple was a democratic socialist who wor¬
ried that the crisis of capitalism might deliver the world to fascist barbarism
or Communist totalitarianism. He noted that Marxism spoke powerfully to
the Depression generation. If modern Christianity did not develop an equally
comprehensive and realistic dialectic, he warned, it had no chance of competing
with Marxism. Temple judged that the long reign of mind-centered idealism
was over in theology and philosophy; a new dialectic was needed, which he
called dialectical realism. To make Christian idealism make sense to a genera¬
tion that no longer believed in progress, he had to find a realistic basis for it,
one that built upon the struggle for the world.26
At the social ethical level, Temple stuck to his guild socialist politics, ad¬
vocating a form of decentralized economic democracy. At the philosophical
level, he blended his idealism with Whitehead’s organicism. Temple’s attitude
toward organic realism was much like the one he had taken previously toward
absolute idealism. It was the best option, but it had to be Christianized, with a
real Incarnation and a personal God. He didn’t want to believe that Barthian
theology had any future in England. Neoorthodoxy ignored the real world
described by science, while Whitehead’s system was consistent with the modem
understanding of evolution as a long, slow, gradual process of layered stages
in which complex forms of life built upon simple ones. Whitehead’s expertise
in relativity theory was a major strength of his system, which conceived the
universe as dynamic and interconnected.
So Temple gave it two cheers. It seemed to him that a great dialectical move¬
— —
ment of thought Cartesianism was finally passing away in the world-his¬
torical crisis of the 1930s. Modern thought, lured into a tunnel by Descartes,
had approached a phase of Hegelian antithesis, which is usually a briefer phase
than that of thesis or synthesis. Every dominant thesis has inertia and the
impression of common sense going for it; the antithesis is a protest against
the limitations of the thesis; once the antithesis has been worked out and its
shortcomings exposed, it gives way to a synthesis. The thesis, in the case of
modem thought, was the Cartesian project of beginning with radical doubt,
which Temple called mere “academic doubt,” since Descartes did not really
doubt that the world was out there or that he was distinct from his kitchen.27
Descartes, pretending to doubt everything, set modem philosophy down the

26. Ibid., ix-x.

27. Ibid., quote 66.

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 Volume 32, No. 1, January 2011 15

path in which Berkeley abolished the material world and Hume claimed that
he didn’t have a mind, all that he had was a flux of ideas caused by nothing,
held by nothing, and merely happening. Temple judged that Hegel and, espe¬
cially, English Hegelianism came close to reuniting reason and experience. But
Hegelianism shared the standard philosophic sin of conceiving cognition as
the original form of apprehension. Temple still believed in the real priority of
Spirit, but he no longer believed in the metaphysical priority of the Subject in the
subject-object relation of knowledge. One does not have to uphold the primacy
of Spirit as Subject of knowledge to uphold a spiritual worldview, he urged. In
fact, it is important not to say that the mind begins with itself and its ideas before
apprehending the external world through construction and inference.28
Idealism had to be corrected by organic evolutionary theory. Pringle-Pattison
had taken a step in this direction, but he was still essentially intellectualistic.
The breakthrough came from the organic school, especially Whitehead, which
viewed the world as apprehended as something that antedates apprehension.
If apprehension occurs within a given physical world, Temple reasoned, and
if one assumes with modem science the postulate of continuity, one must con¬
ceive apprehension as the action and reaction of electrons or as the action and
reaction of embryonic apprehensions. The former option was absurd; the latter
option was the key to Whitehead’s system.29
Experience precedes consciousness, even if Whitehead overstretched in de¬
scribing all actions and reactions of physical entities as experience; Temple
was skeptical about panexperientialism. In any case, he agreed with Whitehead
that consciousness first arises emotionally, as an organic reaction coming to
awareness of its significance through feelings of pleasure and pain. As White-
head put it, the feeler is “the unity emergent from its own feelings, and feelings
are the details of the process, intermediary between this unity and its many
data.” Consciousness, in its earliest forms, is an awareness of feeling within an
environment and a responsive feeling thereby evoked. Temple appreciated the
difference between this picture and the idealism in which he was trained, which
speculated about how the mind passed from its ideas to an external world. In
the Whiteheadian scheme, the mind arose and moved through its apprehension
of an actual world through feelings that the world elicited.30
The mind discovers beauty and extension in the world, which are there in the
initial datum. Temple’s realism was dialectical, not naive; an object apart from

28. Ibid., 57-81.

29. Ibid., 110-11.
30. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Mac¬
millan, 1929), quote 122; Temple, Nature, Man and God, 124.

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16 American Journal of Theology and Philosophy

knowledge is not exactly what it is for knowledge. He conceived the subject¬

object relation as ultimate in cognition; neither the subject nor the object is
reducible to the other. All apprehension is of objects and is interpretive from
the beginning. Thought expands by adjusting to wider environments. The mind
emerges through the process of apprehensions and adjustments that it appre¬
hends. The fact that the world gives rise to minds that apprehend the world tells
—
us something important about the world that there is a deep kinship between
Mind and the world.31
The world has a relation of correspondence to Mind, something that every
rational being experiences in discovering oneself to be an occurrence within
the natural process with which one recognizes kinship. But mind and matter
are related dialectically, Temple stressed. Matter does not generate thought,
nor does thought generate matter; the world of matter, always a relative flux
of forms, lacks a self-explanatory principle, while mind has the principle of
purpose or rational choice. Since there is no materialist explanation for the
emergence of mind, and because mind contains a self-explanatory principle
of origination, it is reasonable to believe that Mind contains the explanation
of the world-process: “The more completely we include Mind within Nature,
the more inexplicable must Nature become except by reference to Mind.” Put
differently, if mind is part of nature, nature must be grounded in mind; other¬
wise nature could not contain it.32
Temple did not worry that materialists would ever prove otherwise. To sup¬
pose that consciousness was caused by some combination of nonconscious
physiological functions is to imagine a fantastic disparity between cause and
—
effect, he insisted one that strips the idea of causation of meaning. It is like
supposing that a robot parked at a street corner will turn into a police officer if
traffic becomes sufficiently congested. Whether or not one adopted Whitehead’s
thoroughgoing panexperientialism, what mattered is whether mind is real.
Since mind has an obvious tendency to take control, becoming the principle
of unity of anything though which it is active, the case for the reality of mind
was very strong. Without mind there is no freedom, beauty, or goodness, and
no explanation of consciousness: “Thus, starting without any of the presup¬
positions of Idealism, and from an initial view far nearer to Materialism, we are
none the less led to an account of the living organism, and specially the human
organism, as essentially and fundamentally spiritual, or at least mental.”33
With Temple’s blending of Hegel, Whitehead, and Nicene orthodoxy we

31. Temple, Nature, God and Man, 128.

32. Ibid., quote 133.
33. Ibid., 201.

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 Volume 32, No. 1, January 2011 17

are on the doorstep of today’s debates over religion, science, and emergence in
which Ian Barbour and Philip Clayton have played leading roles in this country,
and John Polkinghome, Arthur Peacocke, and Keith Ward have played leading
roles in England. Process thought affirms temporality, indeterminacy, holism,
and the possibility of alternative potentialities, very much like the microworld
of contemporary physics. It accepts the reality of chance and lawful relation¬
ships among events. To be sure, reductionism is a powerful force in biology
today, especially molecular biology. But Barbour was at the forefront of an
important countertrend that emphasizes the irreducible properties of higher-
level wholes. Two-way interactions of wholes and parts occur at many levels
of the natural world; every entity exists within a hierarchy of more inclusive
wholes; and evolution often brings about the emergence of novel and unpre¬
dictable forms of order and activity.34
Today, emergence theorists are pressing hard on the difference that emergence
makes to the philosophy of mind. Dualists violate the principle of continuity,
failing to explain how a new kind of actuality sprang into existence, and they
do not explain how such radically different things as mind and matter can
causally influence each other. Materialists do not account for the existence
of mind, the unity of experience or the reality of freedom. Liberal religious
thought has a great deal at stake today in arguments that are very similar to
those that Temple mapped out in the early 1930s.
Last summer Keith Ward told a conference in England that the debate that
matters today cuts across the sciences. It is the debate between dead matter
materialists and advocates of emergence, relationality, and holism. I agree
that this is an enormously important debate, as I argued in my third volume
on liberal theology. But I don’t believe it is our most important debate, so I
cannot finish this talk by rattling on about mind and matter. Liberal theology
began as philosophical idealism, then it acquired a social conscience; even the
Chicago School was idealistic in the ways it conceived God, history, the Social
Gospel, and the realization of value. As a mind-centered worldview, idealism
was never actually refuted, and it is adaptable to scientific realism, as Temple
argued. Historically, where liberal idealism fell out of fashion was at the social-
ethical level, and here the critiques were devastating.
I have left myself only enough time to aim for the heart of the matter
Reinhold Niebuhr and his legacy. Niebuhr has the Barth role in the story of
—

34. See Philip Clayton and Paul Davies, eds., The Re-emergence of Emergence: The Emer-
gentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Clay¬
ton, Mind & Emergenc: From Quantum to Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004).

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18 American Journal of Theology and Philosophy

American theology, the one who changed the field by blasting liberal idealism
and rationalism, though Niebuhr still belonged to the liberal tradition, unlike
Barth. In 1932 Niebuhr launched a ferocious assault on liberal Christian ide¬
alism in his icy, aggressive, sarcastic work, Moral Man and Immoral Society.
Politics is about struggling for power, he taught. Human groups never willingly
subordinate their interests to the interests of others. Liberal denials of this
truism were stupid. Morality belongs to the sphere of individual action. On
occasion, individuals rise above self-interest, motivated by compassion or love,
but groups never overcome the power of self-interest and collective egotism
that sustains their existence. For this reason, the liberal Christian attempt to
moralize society was not only futile, but desperately lacking intelligence.35
With Moral Man and Immoral Society, “stupid” became Niebuhr’s favorite
epithet, followed closely by “naive.” Liberal idealists failed to recognize the
brutal character of human groups and the resistance of all groups to moral
suasion. Secular liberals like John Dewey appealed to reason; Christian liberals
appealed to reason and love; both were maddeningly stupid. Christianity needed
to regain a sense of the tragedy of life, Niebuhr urged. The historical sweep of
human life always reflects the predatory world of nature. For the sake of justice
and peace, modern Christianity had to renounce its ethical idealism.
Resigning from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Niebuhr declared that
liberal Christian pacifism was too consumed with its pretense of virtue to
make gains toward justice: “Recognizing, as liberal Christianity does not, that
the world of politics is full of demonic forces, we have chosen on the whole
to support the devil of vengeance against the devil of hypocrisy.” He chose to
support Marxist vengeance, knowing there was a devil in it, rather then allow
the devil of hypocrisy to avoid conflict and preserve the status quo. To avoid
any traffic with devils was simply to make oneself an accomplice to injustice
and tyranny; moral purity was an illusion.36
These were political arguments, however, with very hard edges. Social gospel
theologians did not talk about preferring Marxist vengeance to the devil of
hypocrisy. They thought that ethical idealism applied everywhere, including
politics. In their revulsion against the vengeful outcome of World War I, they
had turned against war. Pacifism was ascending in the mainline denominations;
it spoke mostly in religious terms; and its leaders included popular religious

35. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Politics and Ethics (New
York: Scribner’s, 1932).
36. Reinhold Niebuhr, “Why I Leave the F.O.R.,” Christian Century 51 (January 3, 1934),
reprinted in Niebuhr, Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold
Niebuhr, ed. D. B. Robertson (1957; reprint, Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press,
1992), 254-59.

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 Volume 32, No. 1, January 201 1 19

writers such as Harry Emerson Fosdick, Georgia Harkness, Vida Scudder, Kirby
Page, and John Haynes Holmes. They appealed to the nonviolent way of Jesus
as the normative way of Christian discipleship. In the mid-1930s nearly every
mainline Protestant denomination declared it would never support another war.
Niebuhr had played a role in bringing about this outcome; now he sought to
undo it. But to challenge the pacifist ethos of American liberal Protestantism,
he had to deal with Jesus, not rest with politics.
That was the point of his signature work, The Interpretation of Christian
Ethics, published in 1935, which argued that Jesus taught an ethic of love per¬
fectionism, which is not socially relevant. Niebuhr put it starkly: “The ethic
of Jesus does not deal at all with the immediate moral problem of every hu¬
—
man life the problem of attempting some kind of armistice between various
contending factions and forces. It has nothing to say about the relativities of
politics and economics, nor of the necessary balances of power which exist
and must exist in even the most intimate social relationships.”37
The teachings of Jesus are counsels of perfection, not prescriptions for social
order or justice. Jesus had nothing to say about how a good society should be
organized. In Niebuhr’s rendering, Jesus lacked any horizontal point of refer¬
ence and any hint of prudential calculation. His points of reference were always
vertical, defining the moral ideal for individuals in their relationship to God.
Jesus called his followers to forgive because God forgives; he called them to
love their enemies because God’s love is impartial. He did not teach that hatred
could be disarmed by returning evil with love. He did not teach his followers to
redeem the world through their loving moral care. These Ghandian sentiments
were commonplace in liberal sermons, but Jesus-style love perfectionism was
not a social ethic.
In Niebuhr’s rendering, the teaching of Jesus had social relevance in only
one sense: It affirmed that a moral ideal existed, which judged all forms of
social order. It was a good thing to have an ideal, but the ethic of Jesus, being
impossible, offered no guidance on how to hold the world in check. The central
problem of politics, which is justice, was about gaining and defending a rela¬
tive balance of power. Jesus was no help with that. Since the highest good in
the political sphere was to establish justice, justice-making politics could not
disavow all resorts to violence.
Liberal Christian leaders preached that a Christianized society would not
require coercive violence. Niebuhr blasted them mercilessly, especially Shailer
Mathews, who claimed that Christianity was committed to a “moral process”

37. Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (1935; repr., San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1969), 105.

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20 American Journal of Theology and Philosophy

of regeneration and cooperation. Niebuhr acidly replied: “Christianity, in other

words, is interpreted as the preaching of a moral ideal, which men do not fol¬
low, but which they ought to.”38
The social gospelers tried to moralize the public square, but Niebuhr pleaded
with them to stop, because politics is a struggle for power driven by interest
and will to power. The social gospel taught that a cooperative commonwealth
is achievable; Niebuhr replied that the very idea of a good society ideal had
to be given up.
Niebuhr’s attentiveness to irony and paradox, his insistence on the inevitabil¬
ity of collective egotism, and his sensitivity to the complex ambiguities inherent
in all human choices made permanent contributions to Christian thought. His
passion for justice roared through all his work through all his changes of posi¬
tion. But his denigration of the “good society” idea was costly for Christian
ethics. The idea of a good society emerges from discussion and is always in
process of revision. To let go of it is to undercut the struggle for attainable
gains toward social justice, negating the elusive but formative vision of what
is worth struggling for. Without a vision of a just society that transcends the
prevailing order, ethics and politics remain captive to the dominant order,
restricted to marginal reforms. The borders of possibility remain untested.
Moral Man and Immoral Society drew the lines that are still at issue. Nie¬
buhr repudiated the liberal belief that the ethos of a moral community can be
insinuated into the public realm. Politics is not about community or ethical
aims. Since the liberal quest for a politics of community is an illusion, the only
recourse for Christian ethics is to strengthen the capacity of the state to act
as a moral guarantor.
Thus, Niebuhr’s chief interest was always to determine what the government
should do about this or that problem. Social ethics focused on consolidating
state power for relatively good ends. To enlist the church in this enterprise,
Niebuhr distinguished between the moral identity and social mission of the
churches. The social mission was no longer the social gospel project of con¬
verting society to a biblical vision of freedom, justice, community, and peace.
Niebuhrian realism was about providing religious support for a secular liberal
agenda that served the struggle for a decent society.
But this dichotomizing between the moral identity and social mission of the
church weakened the church’s identity and social agency, helping to strip the
public sphere of the language of moral value. The upshot was ironic because
no one struggled more brilliantly than Niebuhr to make Christianity relevant to
modem society. Near the end of his life, Niebuhr warned Wolfhart Pannenberg

38. Ibid., 116.

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 Volume 32, No. 1, January 2011 21

and Richard John Neuhaus to steer clear of the kingdom of God. The social
gospel had proved that the kingdom idea was a loser, he urged. Any appeal to
the biblical idea of the kingdom as an inbreaking spiritual and historical reality
was bound to produce disasters. It made Rauschenbusch incorrigibly naive about
how to relate Christianity to politics. Niebuhr declared that if it were up to him,
he would tear the kingdom of God out of the Bible and Christian doctrine.39
That was an over-the-top expression of the problem of Niebuhr’s realism.
Realism is a reactive disposition; a boast, not really a position, one that is soaked
in nationalism. Reinhold Niebuhr, for all his prophetic spirit, never opposed an
American national interest in the name of Christian ethics. He tried to save a
place for the church in a secularizing society by accepting the liberal bourgeois
dichotomy between a virtue-producing private realm and a hardball public realm.
That reduced Niebuhrian realism to support work for anticommunism and other
causes established by the Democratic Party establishment.
Niebuhr criticized liberal theology for watering down Christian teaching, but
he interpreted Christian doctrines as religious symbols, stressing that Christian
scripture and teaching are pervaded by myth. He blasted liberal theology for de¬
pending on philosophical idealism, but he depended on the idealistic concepts of
self, consciousness, self-consciousness, transcendence, self-transcendence, spirit,
will, and personality. He blasted liberal rationalism too, yet he took for granted
that reason and critically interpreted experience are the tests of religious truth.
For Niebuhr there was always a dialectic between realism and idealism, even
when he claimed otherwise. For many years he blasted everyone who tried to
get a social ethic out of Jesus. Always he admonished that Jesus is no help with
problems of proximate means and ends, necessary violence, and calculated
consequences. But something nagged at him. Something was missing in his
stark dichotomizing between love and justice. The later Niebuhr realized what
it was: That the love ethic kept him and others in the struggle, whether or not
they succeeded. That was its relevance.
Love is not merely the content of an impossible ethical ideal, but the motive
force of the struggle for justice. Love makes you care, makes you angry, throws
you into the struggle, keeps you in it, helps you face another day. In the 1930s
Niebuhr equated justice with equality, or an equal balance of power. In his later
thought he stressed that justice is a relational term, it depends on the motive
force of love, and it cannot be defined abstractly. There are no definitive prin¬
ciples of justice, for all such instruments are too corrupt to be definitive. But

39. Richard John Neuhaus, Introduction to Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom
of God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), 31-32; See Neuhaus’s discussion in Reinhold
Niebuhr Today, ed. Richard John Neuhaus (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1989), 108.

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22 American Journal of Theology and Philosophy

Niebuhr judged that three regulative principles are useful: Equality, freedom,
and order. Social justice is an application of the law of love to the sociopolitical
sphere, and love is the motivating energy of the struggle for justice. The meaning
of justice cannot be taken directly from the principles. It is determined only in
the interaction of love and situation, through the mediation of the principles
of equality, freedom, and order.40
The upshot, this being Niebuhr, was of course paradoxical. Love is uncal¬
culating concern for the dignity of persons; as such it asserts no interests. But
because love motivates concern for the dignity of persons, it also motivates a
passion for justice overflowing with interests and requiring principles of justice.
For decades many readers wondered how anyone as cynical and depressing
as Niebuhr could be a prophetic social ethicist, or at least, could be regarded
as one. He seemed to revel in dispiriting proclamations, such as, “the possi¬
bilities of evil grow with the possibilities of good.” Any gain toward a good
end simultaneously creates new opportunities for evil. Every gain in equality,
freedom and democracy engenders new opportunities for tyranny, squalor, and
anarchy, giving rise to new kinds of unanticipated consequences and enabling
greater numbers of people to do evil things.41
So how are people supposed to rally around that? Why would they even
bother? Niebuhr evaded the question because it was never a serious one for
him. He was an ebullient, passionate personality who took his own Christ-
following passion for justice for granted. Only in a few scattered references and
interviews did he refer to the problem in a way that bordered on self-disclosure.
For him the love ethic with all its idealism was always the point, the motive,
and the end, even when it had no concrete social meaning. Since he followed
Jesus, he had to take up responsibility for society’s problems, even if Jesus did
not. In his own way, sorting out the paradoxes of that fundamental paradox,
Niebuhr was always rooted in, and sought to be faithful to, the love ethic to
which the Word of the gospel called him. And that is the irreducible idealistic
core of Christianity and progressive religion.

40. See Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Problem of a Protestant Social Ethic,” Union Seminary Quar¬
terly Review 15 (November 1959), 1-11; Niebuhr, “Justice and Love,” Christianity and Society
(Fall 1950), reprinted in Niebuhr, Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of
Reinhold Niebuhr, 27-29; Niebuhr, “Reply to Interpretation and Criticism,” in Reinhold Niebuhr:
His Religious, Social, and Political Thought, ed. Charles W. Kegley and Robert W. Bretall (New
York: Macmillan, 1956), 434-36; Niebuhr, Faith and History: A Comparison of Christian and
Modern Views of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 171-95; Niebuhr, The
Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 2:246-69.
41. Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, 60.

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