The Christian Realists: Reassessing the Contributions of Niebuhr and His Contemporaries.

• Author: Woods, Jr., Thomas E.
• Position: Book Review

The Christian Realists: Reassessing the Contributions of Niebuhr and His Contemporaries Edited by Eric Patterson Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2003.

Pp. x, 239. $39.00 paperback.

The celebrated American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and most of the thinkers studied in The Christian Realists belonged to a school of thought known as "Christian realism." The ideas of that tradition build on Niebuhr's thesis in Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) that although individual human beings may at times rise above the confines of narrow self-interest, the same is not true of states, social classes, and other collectives, which tend to be governed by considerations of power and self-interest. Niebuhr tried to make this point to Christians who sought "social justice" at home through appeals to conscience and peace abroad through pacifism and international organizations.

This effort did not make Christian realism merely a sanctified Machiavellianism. Niebuhr and the Christian realists sought to avoid, on the one hand, a utopianism that imagined justice (domestic and international) to be attainable without the use of power and, on the other, a cynicism that sought no moral justification for the application and use of power. John Foster Dulles, who was associated with the Christian realist tradition early on, argued that although in the nature of things each nation's foreign policy would be in some way self-interested, nevertheless it "should be judged by something outside itself.... [T]he moral law was the ultimate judge standing over and above [it]" (p. 69).

In the domestic arena, the realists appear to have been conventional liberals. In his essay on John Coleman Bennett, Niebuhr's colleague at New York's Union Theological Seminary, David McCreary praises the Christian realists for "tak[ing] the discussion beyond vague slogans, generalities, and panaceas" (p. 154). To illustrate this statement, he points to two axioms on which Bennett believed all Christians could agree:

1. That the national community acting through government in cooperation with industry, labor, and agriculture has responsibility to maintain full employment.

2. That the national community should prevent all private centers of economic power from becoming stronger than the government.

The level of political discussion in Protestant circles must have been very low indeed if these "axioms" qualify as "mak[ing] more specific the issues at stake" (p. 154). The first of them...