REINHOLD NIEBUHR: A BIOGRAPHY
Richard Wightman Fox
New York: Pantheon Books, 1985
340 pp., $19.95
Reinhold Niebuhr's appearance on the cover of Time magazine's twenty-fifth anniversary number on March 8, 1948, sealed his reputation as America's leading theologian. Though never a household word--like Billy Graham or Jerry Falwell in the present era--Niebuhr was for more than three decades a towering figure among American intellectuals and a major force in defining both theological and political liberalism.
Richard Fox is a young historian who teaches at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. His new biography of this complex and sometimes controversial thinker fits well into the current genre of critical biographies of Christian leaders such as Dorothy Day, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Martin Luther King, Jr., Oral Roberts, and Francis Cardinal Spellman. And it follows three other books that deal with both Reinhold Niebuhr's life and thought--all of which it surpasses in quality. June Bingham's Courage to Change: The Life and Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr (1961) was the first comparable study, and the only one of three to make extensive use of unpublished sources. But it is not documented and bears the marks of overenthusiasm and the biases of an ardent disciple. Then came Richard H. Stone's Reinhold Niebuhr: Prophet to Politicians (1972), which draws heavily on the journalism in which Niebuhr's concrete intelligence was often more apparent than in his books. It is scholarly and clearly written but lacks a critical distance from its subject and exaggerates Niebuhr's prophetic detachment from cold war ideology. The third study was Paul Merkley's Reinhold Niebuhr: A political Account (1975), which is provocatively argued and thoroughly researched but, in a manner symmetrical to Stone's work, overstates the consistency of Niebuhr the Cold Warrior, while it identifies him too much with radical groups and philosophies in tension with his own ideology. Richard Fox, however, commits none of these errors as he offers us the first full-scale biography of America's greatest twentieth-century theologian in Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (1975).
Fox begins his study with Niebuhr's family life as a child, his education (culminating at Yale Divinity School), and his pastorate in Detroit. Reinhold's father, Gustav, came to America from Germany in 1881 at the age of eighteen, attended Eden Seminary in St. Louis, and was ordained in the Evangelical Synod, a basically liberal Protestant denomination of German heritage, which merged into the United Church of Christ in the late 1950s. In 1902, after several years in San Francisco, Gustav Niebuhr accepted the call as pastor of St. John's Church in Lincoln, Illinois--a corn farming town of 9,000 residents, two-thirds of whom were German. Here Reinhold, born in 1892, grew up with his sister and two brothers, all of whom were deeply influenced by their father's moderate theological liberalism and his insistence that traditional religious ideas and practices had to be subjected to critical scrutiny.
In 1902, Niebuhr--following in his father's footsteps--enrolled at Eden Seminary, where he was an excellent student and a champion debater. He graduated and was ordained in 1913, and after Gustav's untimely death earlier that year, Reinhold began his studies at Yale. His father's liberalism had combined both a flexible attitude toward dogma
...
Read Full Article
|
