Reinhold Niebuhr's small book, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, is perhaps his most famous and popular book. It has informed and helped to shape the lives and ministries of seminarians, educators, ministers and other prophetic and ethical people since it was first published early in this century. Niebuhr recounts with astonishing honesty the difficulties facing those who would do ministry, and act ethically, in the church today. His criticism is not held back from any sacred topics.

'I make no apology for being critical of what I love. No one wants a love which is based upon illusions, and there is no reason why we should not love a profession and yet be critical of it.'

Niebuhr talks about the shock of coming to realise the limitations of his ministry, going from being a fresh-from-seminary full-of-grace minister to a person confronting another person in the 'real world'. He talks about

'...the difficulty of acting as priest. It is not in your power to determine the use of a symbol. Whether it is a blessing or a bit of superstition rests altogether with the recipient.'

This real world also presents problems. Parishioners tend to ask practical questions, rather than theoretical ones. They ask, Why won't Jesus heal me? Didn't he heal others? It is in the Bible, after all.

'I do believe that Jesus healed people. I can't help but note, however, that a large proportion of his cures were among the demented.'

He talks about the practical limitations of doing ethical ministry and prophesy for the average pulpit preacher.

'I am not surprised that most prophets are itinerants. Critics of the church think we preachers are afraid to tell the truth because we are economically dependent upon the people of our church. There is something in that....'

Finally, Niebuhr comes to have realistic expectations of the church and his own ministry in it.

'The church is like the Red Cross service in war time. It keeps life from degenerating into a consistent inhumanity, but it does not materially alter the fact of the struggle itself. The Red Cross neither wins the war nor abolishes it.'

Niebuhr in this small work has given great insight. Barely 150 short pages of his journal from 1915-1928 as a parish minister--although he became much better known as a philosopher in later years, this book is most likely his best seller, and the one with the most profound day-to-day impact for his readers.

A must-read for anyone with a calling to ministry; a should-read for anyone in a helping and caring profession. It gives insight into how to remain human and fallible in the face of a congregation's (and one's own!) expectations of holiness and godly perfection.

This is a collection of Neibuhrs short essays. Each one stands on its own as a reflection of reality as applicable today as it was decades ago. I like it so much I am rationing it, reading one or two essays a day and stopping to think about the lesson in each one. These are sermons that are not "preachy" recognizing the human frailities and what should be expected of us. A book for the ages in my opinion

In this marvelous book, which has graced my library for more than forty years, Professor Niebuhr shows himself as a young pastor who grows into his Detroit working "man's" parish. He courageously confronts his struggles, inward and outward.

He writes with a wit that I didn't always find in his more explicitly theological writings. I particularly identified with an early observation, "It is easier to speak sagely from the pulpit than to act wisely in the detailed tasks of the parish."

Another early observation shows him realizing what most of us must experience in our youthful ministries, when he speaks of repeating himself in the pulpit, noting, "A prophet speaks only when he is inspired. The parish preacher mus speak whether he he is inspired or not. I wonder whether it is possible to live on a high enough plane to do that without sinning against the Holy Spirit."

I would whole-heartedly recommend this book for any young pastor.

This is the most compelling argument for democracy I have read. All other forms of government lack the necessary tools to keep corruption or tyranny in check. If the true necessity of democracy is not understood, democracy itself can be used for corruptive or tyrannical ends. Reinhold Niebuhr's insight into freedom and order's mutual dependence in society is simple and yet profound. The individual requires order, and society needs freedom, to a greater extent than is commonly understood.

This is one of the best spiritual books I have ever read. Opens your mind to a lot of spiritual questions, specially for endtimes of our era. How and when it will happen makes you wait for that big event like a child expecting the return of a father to rescue him from deep down under.

This work is known to be a classic, and in my opinion, it is the best written last century. I even enjoyed R. Niebuhr better than Tillich and Barth. His erudition and conclusions are powerful and engaging. I recommend reading this for those familiar with political thought and philosophy of the modern era. By no means is this work parochial, it scope makes it a enthralling read even for those who find themselves outside to sprectrum of Christian belief.

Niebuhr has developed the most balanced statement of our character, identity, and core behavior motivations. He references all major worldviews from Eastern Naturalisms to Western Rationalism to Bibilical Revelation. The Bibilical Worldview provides the most balanced perspective of our human nature, which is offensive to the contrasting perspectives. In Volume 1, he identifies our form and our vitality as essential components of our nature. He also identifies that our desire for freedom, our ability to transend our natural state, and our self interest leads to "Man's Problem." Volume 2 focuses on worldviews that have messianic expectations and resolutions of history through corporate indentities. One can understand Niebuhr's perspecive on the eve of WWII's Fascist nations. In summary, this is absolutely one of the best works I have read to help clarify our human nature. His perspective is pragmatic, but is still very focued on core christian doctrines. Buy it, read it, wait a year, read it again, and ponder the depth and breath of his insights!

Niebuhr was not only one of the great Protestant theologians of the last century: he was one of very few thinkers ever to have derived a sophisticated and illuminating approach to the worldly order from theological premises. This collection of his writings contains some truly essential expressions of his philosophy, in the form of shorter essays and addresses.

The volume's consistent theme is the Augustinian realism that Niebuhr expounded in the darkest years of modern history, when the western democracies faced the tyrannies of Nazi Germany and expansionist Communism. Against these messianiac creeds, Niebuhr posited the merits of democracy, *not* because of its supposed congruence with the characteristics of the Kingdom of God but because of its effect in tempering the destructiveness of man's urge for dominion.

He did so, moreover, when many Christians were susceptible to the romantic illusion that discipleship required them to oppose the militant defence of western values. No one has better exposed these pretensions than Niebuhr in his essay 'Why the Christian Church is not Pacifist', included in this volume. Those Christians' mistake was to fail to understand the nature of evil. To regard the Sermon on the Mount as a manual for political action without seeing it in the context of Jesus's expectation of the irruption of the Kingdom of God into human history is a misreading. The message of the Gospels is not non-violence, but the immanence of the Kingdom. Niebuhr argues that while conflict is not part of the Kingdom of God, it does not thereby dissipate if Christians act as though they are already living in the Kingdom.

This is a powerful corrective to much wishful thinking that passes for Christian social ethics. It ought to be read urgently by anyone who imagines that the sentimentality of today's anti-war movement, when the western democracies are fighting an enemy as destructive and nihilistic as any seen in the last century, is an expression of the Law of Love.

The irony of this review's title is that Reinhold Niebuhr (1895-1971) would not have claimed the title of theologian. He was a preacher and Christian apologist who sought to demonstrate the superiority of the Christian approach to history over common secular approaches. These latter included both Marxism and liberalism, the first as it took shape in the Soviet Union and the latter as it influenced Niebuhr's colleagues in pulpits and seminaries. Langdon Gilkey, late of the University of Chicago Divinity School, begins with a personal memoir that illustrates the impact of Niebuhr on Gilkey's generation. Full of pacifist sentiment in the wake of the horrors of World War I, Gilkey and his peers found it increasingly difficult to reconcile a thoroughgoing pacifism with the obvious excesses of the Nazi regime. With the beginning of World War II in 1939, the issue could no longer be ignored. About this time, Gilkey heard Niebuhr preach. He was mesmerized and heartened. Niebuhr's analysis of the dilemmas of the self in history, taking seriously the reality of sin and eschewing an otherworldly approach to eschatology, had a lasting effect on Gilkey. Simply put, Niebuhr taught that the proper arena of concern for Christians is living in history in such a way that the amount of justice and love in the world is maximized. Niebuhr criticized what he considered the undue optimism of liberals, particularly in the Social Gospel movement, who believed in the myth of progress. Against this, Niebuhr asserted the reality of sin, or the universal human tendency for even our best efforts to be corrupted by self-interest, or pride. Because of this focus on history as the locus of Niebuhr's theology, Gilkey limits himself to the study of only a few books. Notable are the Gifford Lectures, compiled in The Nature and Destiny of Man (two volumes) and a later work, Faith and History. Gilkey mines these with thoroughness.

Niebuhr's style tended to be free-wheeling, topical, and often polemical. Gilkey occasionally illustrates a yearning for a more disciplined theological method in Niebuhr, symbolized by his frequent appeal to another of his theological mentors, Paul Tillich. Though often helpful, this is sometimes distracting. While Niebuhr would have agreed with Tillich on many points, his approach was much further removed from the academy. Still, Gilkey does this in moderation and does not attempt to recast Niebuhr in the mold of Tillich.

In the final, reflective, chapter, Gilkey notes that Niebuhr did not address (and could not have addressed) two issues that now loom large on the theological horizon. One is the stewardship of nature. The other is the relation between religions. Gilkey finds no help in Niebuhr for the first. He gives Niebuhr credit for advancing Christian-Jewish friendship, which was a major thrust of his age, especially after the Holocaust. Given his otherwise firm grasp of Niebuhr's thought, it seems odd that Gilkey does not note the obvious: Niebuhr would have said that the Christian commitment to love and justice extends to stewardship of the earth because we humans are ourselves part of nature. To care for nature is to care for ourselves and, in some small way, to help overcome the effects of sin. As for the pluralism of religions, Niebuhr would likely view current relationships between Christians, Israel, and the Islamic states in a larger context than simple faith commitments. Niebuhr would have been interested in the ways that the central myths of each faith have been co-opted for political ends. This, of course, is illustrated by an American president who appeals to Christian symbols in order to make war on an Islamic country, a reversal of the behavior of Osama bin Laden. This is why those of us who have long appreciated Niebuhr found ourselves in March, 2003, saying, "Reinhold Niebuhr, where are you now that we need you?" Still, Gilkey helps us recover a sense of Niebuhr's ongoing relevance.

Niebuhr defined religion as the human response to revelation. As the years pass, and events do more and more to prove him right, it begins to feel that, in certain ways, Niebuhr's thought itself approaches the heights of revelation. Not that he was divine. But God spoke through him in powerful ways. Langdon Gilkey does him justice, and then some.

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) was--and probably still is--America's most famous theologian. From the 1920s to the 1960s, hw wrote numerous books on religious and political issues, as well as articles for LOOK, THE ATLANTIC, and THE NEW REPUBLIC among many other magazines. One of his lesser known works ("God grant me the strength to change the things I can, the serenity to accept the things I cannot and the wisdom to know the difference") still adorns the bric-a-brac sold in Christian bookstores. And, not far from his old office at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, a street is named after him. Richard Wightman Fox argues that beginning in the 1930s, Niebuhr became disenchanted with the "social gospel" theology that had come to dominate the so-called "mainline" Protestant churches. Niebuhr concluded that man is an inherently imperfect creature (and therefore all attempts to create a perfect society are futile), but that Christians still have to try to Christianize the social order. Such efforts are doomed to fail if their ultimate goal is the perfectability of man, but they can succeed if they have more limited goals. In other words, the world could be made better but it could not be re-made. In this way, Niebuhr reconciled in his own mind two opposing groups: the social gospel liberals and the conservative theologians who believed in sin. Niebuhr's belief in the reality of sin combined with his quest for social justice is generally called "neo-orthodoxy," though Fox uses this term only a few times. Fox does an excellent job of demonstrating how well Niebuhr's ideas fit with the assumptions of American liberals from the 1940s through the 1960s. Cold War liberals prided themselves on being both idealistic and realistic. To borrow one of Niebuhr's own phrases, American liberals were the optimistic "children of light" when it came to wiping out poverty and racial discrimination at home, but they were the pessimistic "children of darkness" when they dealt with Soviet Communism. No wonder Reinhold Niebuhr was the intelligentsia's favorite theologian. If Fox fails to capture anything about Niebuhr, it is just how un-spiritual (non-religious?)so much of Niebuhr's writings now seem. Niebuhr focused on four topics: God, Sin, Man, and the Social Order. But somehow Sin, Man, and the Social Order frequently crowd God out of the picture, and we're left wondering if we're dealing with a theologian or a social theorist or the Democratic Party's leading intellectual. To put it only slightly unfairly, Niebuhr was a brilliant and profound theologian, but he was the kind of theologian who maybe spent too much time wondering about who the next President ought to be.