Niebuhr - Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic

When Reinhold Niebuhr began composing the notebook jottings assembled here, he was in his early twenties, the young and very energetic pastor of a small but growing church in Detroit, a city itself in the throes of rapid development as a center for the new automobile industry. The urban world was in some ways a challenge for him, since it was so far removed from the rural small-town life in which he had been reared. Apologizing for his critical and immature tone in the preface to this books first edition (1929), he hoped at least that his thoughts about his urban ministry might be of interest or use to other young pastors encountering parish work for the first time. He did not hesitate to say that he, and they all, needed to learn their way around the impossible contradictions at the heart of this job: [The modern ministry] is committed to the espousal of ideals... which are in direct conflict with the dominant interests and prejudices of contemporary civilization, he wrote, and nowhere more so than in the United States, where neither ancient sanctities nor new social insights tend to qualify... the heedless economic forces of an industrial era.

He never forgot this fundamental dilemma, and he didnt want his readers or parishioners to forget it either. The Christian ideals of love, repentance, and renewed dedication to the clarity and simplicity of a purified spiritual life had to be central for all of them, however compelling the noise, bustle, allure, and dangers of American business and society. The business of being sophisticated and nave, critical and religious, at one and the same time is as difficult as it is necessary, and only a few are able to achieve the balance.

A quarter of a century later, when a new edition of Leaves was prepared, several generations of lay people as well as pastors were already using Niebuhrs little book as a manual of arms, a book of consolation, an example for imitation, as the Chicago historian Martin Marty put it in a foreword to that edition. Yet Niebuhr once again apologized, now for its dated contents, since the book expressed the typical notions of liberal Protestantism before the whole liberal world view was challenged by world events. The Great Depression, the rise of fascism and totalitarianism, and another horrific world war had inevitably marked him and his contemporaries, causing many of them to revolt against both the secular and religious pieties of the age. Thus indisputable evidence is offered for the fact that we are all, whatever our pretensions, the children of our day and hour. What we think of man and God, of sin and salvation, is partly prompted by the comparative comforts or discomforts in which we live. It is a very sobering reflection on the lack of transcendence of the human spirit over the flux of historical change.

Still, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic continued to gain readers attracted to what some called its prophetic wisdom. Prophetic not only in the sense of prescient or far-seeing, but also in the theological sense of being alert, as Rabbi Abraham Heschel put it, of being, like the biblical prophets Hosea, Amos, and Isaiah, open to what is happening.

The publication of this new edition, using a technology unknown in Niebuhrs lifetime, attests to the continuing value of Niebuhrs thought a full century after he composed the first entry in his notebook. But that is surely no surprise, since the lack of social justice, the yawning gulfs between rich and poor, the dominance of commerce and greed, and the corruption of public lifeevils he preached against his whole lifeare with us still. But so, too, are the human virtues and moral strivings he cherished and nurtured among his parishioners. Decades after he left Detroit, he repeatedly declared his affection for the parish where he had learned so much. He was forever grateful for the chance he had had to share with it in the great adventure, as he once called it, of bringing the difficult, messy facts of modern life into alignment with Christian commandments.

Elisabeth Sifton

December 2014

TO

my friends

and former coworkers

in

Bethel Evangelical Church

Detroit, Michigan