The Work
The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation was delivered as the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in two series (1939 and 1940) and published by Charles Scribner's Sons: Volume I (Human Nature) in 1941 and Volume II (Human Destiny) in 1943. Together the two volumes constitute the most comprehensive American theological anthropology of the twentieth century - an analysis of human nature and human destiny from a standpoint described as 'biblical realism' but deeply engaged with the entire tradition of Western philosophy, theology, and social thought.
Niebuhr delivered the lectures during the opening years of the Second World War, a context that gave his argument about sin and human limitation an immediate political urgency. Volume I's analysis of human nature - particularly its account of anxiety, pride, and the misuse of freedom - was understood by contemporaries as a diagnosis of the pathology of totalitarianism and as a critique of the liberal optimism that had failed to anticipate it. Volume II's account of human destiny - of history, the Christ event, and the Kingdom of God - provided a framework for thinking about political action in a world permanently characterized by ambiguity and partial achievement.
Niebuhr's influence on American public life was extraordinary. He was cited by political figures across the spectrum; his framework of Christian realism shaped American foreign policy thinking from the Cold War through the War on Terror. Barack Obama named him as one of his favorite thinkers.
Biblical Engagement
Genesis 1:26 ('And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea') is the foundational text of Niebuhr's anthropology. The imago Dei - the human being made in the image of God - is the biblical concept that organizes his account of human nature. Niebuhr reads the image of God not as a quality (reason, righteousness, or spiritual capacity) but as a relationship: the human being is the creature who stands in a unique relationship with the God who created and addresses it. This relationship is the source of human freedom - the capacity to transcend any given natural or historical situation - and also the source of human anxiety.
Romans 7:19 ('For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do') is Paul's account of the divided will - the experience of knowing the good and being unable to do it - and it is Niebuhr's psychological touchstone. He argues that this Pauline experience of the divided will is not a neurosis or a cultural pathology but a permanent structural feature of human existence: the human being is both free and limited, capable of imagining the good and incapable of fully achieving it, and the tension between freedom and finitude is the structural precondition of sin.
Genesis 3:5 ('For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil') is the serpent's temptation and the type of what Niebuhr calls the sin of pride: the attempt of finite human beings to secure their existence by claiming the status of the infinite - by becoming 'as gods.' Niebuhr identifies pride as the root sin: not merely arrogance or self-aggrandizement but the attempt to overcome the anxiety of human finitude by claiming divinity. This analysis is directed simultaneously at political totalitarianisms (which claim to represent absolute historical necessity) and at religious establishments (which claim to represent absolute divine truth).
Romans 3:23 ('For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God') is the universal claim that grounds Niebuhr's democratic realism: because all have sinned - including the rulers, the elites, and the religious authorities - no human institution can be trusted with unlimited power. The democratic system of checks and balances is, in Niebuhr's famous formulation, made necessary by humanity's tendency toward injustice and possible by humanity's capacity for justice.
Author and Context
Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) was born in Wright City, Missouri, the son of a German-American immigrant pastor. He was educated at Elmhurst College, Eden Theological Seminary, and Yale Divinity School (BD, MA). He was pastor of Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit from 1915 to 1928, where his experience of industrial capitalism and its effects on workers - particularly Ford Motor Company's treatment of its workforce - shaped his social theology. He joined the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1928 and remained there until his retirement in 1960.
Niebuhr's intellectual development moved from the liberal Social Gospel of his early ministry through a socialist phase in the 1930s to the Christian realism of the mature work. His critique of liberal optimism was sharpened by the rise of fascism in Europe and by his assessment that Marxism represented a secular version of the same utopian error - the belief that human nature could be transformed by changing economic conditions.
His Gifford Lectures were delivered during the phony war (1939) and the Blitz (1940), circumstances that gave the analysis of sin and the limits of human achievement an immediate existential weight.
Themes
Volume I develops Niebuhr's anthropology: the human being stands at the intersection of finitude and freedom, nature and spirit, and this 'anxious' position - aware of its own mortality and limitation but possessed of a freedom that transcends any given situation - is the structural precondition of sin. Human beings cannot bear the anxiety of their finite freedom; they resolve it either by grasping after the infinite (pride, the sin of the strong) or by sinking back into the finite (sensuality, the sin of the weak).
Volume II develops his eschatology: the Christ event is the 'impossible possibility' - the moment in history where the transcendent norm of sacrificial love (agape) enters history without being corrupted by it. This norm remains permanently beyond historical achievement while serving as the criterion by which every historical achievement is judged. The Kingdom of God is not a historical program to be achieved but an eschatological reality that relativizes all historical programs.
Reception
The Gifford Lectures established Niebuhr as one of the major theological voices of the twentieth century. They were received enthusiastically by Protestant theologians who shared his neo-orthodox critique of liberalism and by political realists who found in Christian realism an intellectually serious framework for Cold War politics.
Legacy
The book's legacy in political thought has been as significant as its theological legacy. Niebuhr's framework of Christian realism - human beings capable of justice but inevitably tending toward injustice; democratic institutions necessary precisely because no one is trustworthy with unchecked power - shaped American foreign policy thinking for decades. His influence can be traced in the foreign policy realism of Hans Morgenthau, the neoconservatism of Irving Kristol (who acknowledged Niebuhr as a key influence), and the liberal internationalism of Samantha Power. His serenity prayer ('God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference') - of disputed authorship but widely attributed to him - has reached hundreds of millions of people through Alcoholics Anonymous.