By Schubert Ogden
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Niebuhr speaks of our facing "two temptations" in trying to profit from the experience of extricating the Christian gospel from its various heresies so as to have Christian unity in accepting "the substance of the gospeLgospel."
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fact that all men are sinners and that every historical struggle is therefore a struggle between sinful men. The temptation is to imagine that the cry of I a plague on both their houses' is a Christian solution of every problem; that neutralism is an answer to every political perplexity. This error consists in an effort to rise above the responsibilities which we have as men for the order, the justice, and the preservation of our civilizations and painfully nourished systems of justice, seeking to play the part of God, in whose sight no one indeed is justified. But we are men and not God; and we must distinguish between the moral level of our decisions, where we must carefully weigh whether the ostensible foe may not be a friend with whom we must come to terms and whether the ostensible friend and ally may not be a foe who must be resisted resolutely if our prized liberties are to be preserved; and the religious level, on which we have some knowledge of the fact that both we and the most dangerous foe are equally sinners in God's sight and are equally in need of his forgiveness (Essays in Applied Christianity: 338, 340).
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in trying to profit from reason for this is that it's not clear whether the two levels to which he refers inspeaking of the one temptation are the same two levels to which he refers in speaking of the other.the first temptation, presumably, is that what the so-called disciplines of culturehave to say on the moral level is valid, even though what they-or, at any rate,The one temptation \[he says\] is to renounce all commerce with the wisdom of the world, with the various disciplines of culture, all of which contain the danger of deflecting us from the truth of the gospeL
The other temptation for us \[he says\] is to make too much of, or to make too uncritical application of, the rediscovered \[b\]iblical fact that all men are sinners and that every historical struggle is therefore a struggle between sinful men. The temptation is to imagine that the cry ofIf we succumb to this temptation we will be like the man who hid his treasure in the ground. We will not learn to appreciate the truth of these disciplines which are valid on their own level, and we will not be able to validate the truth of the gospel on the level where its truth is apparent and the truth of the wisdom of the world turns into error. That is the level of the self's freedom and responsibility, the self's sin and need of redemption: of God's freedom as creator and redeemer; of the self's encounter with God and of its redemption through divine grace and the self's response of repentance and trust.... _I_ _a plague on both their houses' is a Christian solution of every problem; that neutralism is an answer to every political perplexity. This error consists in an effort to rise above the responsibilities which we have as men for the order, the justice, and the preservation of our civilizations and painfully nourished systems of justice, seeking to play the part of God, in whose sight no one indeed is justified. But we are men and not God; and we must distinguish between the moral level of our decisions, where we must carefully weigh whether the ostensible foe may not be a friend with whom we must come to terms and whether the ostensible friend and ally may not be a foe who must be resisted resolutely_ _if{_}{_}our prized liberties are to be preserved; and the religious level, on which we have some knowledge of the fact that both we and the most dangerous foe are equally sinners in God's sight and are equally in need of his forgiveness_ _(Essays in Applied Christianity:_ _338, 340)._ _Just what Niebuhr is saying in these passages is not entirely clear. One{_}{_}If{_}{_}they are the same, then his point in what he says about_ _2{_}_"the wisdom of the world"-claim to be true on the religious level "turns into error" (proves to be error?) even as "the truth of the gospel" is validated. One reason I incline to this interpretation is that there are two other passages in Niebuhr's_ |
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