During a lifetime of active involvement in American political life, Reinhold Niebuhr did much good and a certain amount of mischief. Both the good and the mischief are traceable to the same source: his faith. For too long, Niebuhr has been misrepresented by the political theorists and the historians as a link in the pragmatic tradition. It is time we began to do Niebuhr the justice of taking him at his own evaluation - as a dogmatic Christian. The meaning of his own life, he believed, was in the keeping of God. And so, he believed, was the meaning of his nation's history. He believed that history was radically open to all possibilities of both good and evil until its end—and he could thus nonchalantly apply to America's collective destiny the dictum of St. Paul that he applied to his own: that, "whether we live, we live unto the Lord, and whether we die, we die unto the Lord; whether we live therefore or die we are the Lord's." |