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I find it interesting that Niebuhr again and again appeals to what is "ideally" the case, or to "the ideal possibility." Thus he can say, for instance, "Ideally religion is the force which brings all individual action and vitalities into a total harmony by subjecting them all to the realm of meaning" (Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics: 128). Or he can say, "The ideal possibility is that faith in the ultimate security of God's love will overcome all immediate insecurities of nature and history" (75).

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And yet Niebuhr can again and again say or imply that Christianity is "a religion which apprehends the truth about man and God by faith alone" because "the truth which is held by faith" is "beyond all human attainment" (128). Perhaps one possibility of composing the obvious self-contradiction this introduces would be to gloss "beyond all human attainment" in the same way in which Niebuhr sometimes glosses such phrases as "beyond all human possibilities," "impossible possibility," and so on -- namelyon–namely, as meaning, not beyond all human attainments simpliciter, but only beyond all human attainments conventionally understood, or insofar as they are limited by the facts of human finiteness and sinfulness.

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