When I arrived in New Haven I was in no mood for all that “church-y” stuff. I looked at my fellow students and marveled at how they could be so narrowly focused. On Christianity, that is.
I didn’t see myself as bound to just one singular, outward manifestation of religious expression. I had concluded that all religions were blinkered attempts to grasp a greater truth, one that lay hidden at the core of human existence.
I was intrigued by Carl Jung’s idea that the world’s varied religions were myths that served to symbolize this deeper, often unconscious, universal truth.
Taking the content of any one of these religions literally, therefore, was fundamentally misleading. (This was, for me, very much in keeping with the 60’s creed that all institutions were suspect and must yield to a larger, more enlightened perspective.)
Over time my views began to shift. Perhaps the biggest change was due to a course I took on the Niebuhr brothers, R. Richard and Reinhold. The latter’s two-volume work, The Nature and Destiny of Man, based on a talk he gave at the 1939 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, was an eye-opener and changed my whole way of thinking.
The most important insight Niebuhr advanced was a basic human truth, one I had completely ignored, despite both its obviousness and profundity: Original Sin.
Niebuhr had written in Vol. 1: “The final sin of man, said Luther truly, is his unwillingness to concede that he is a sinner.”
In my earlier days, my idealism had no practical limits. When I looked around the world I saw what Christians would label sin, but, unbelievable as it is to me now, I didn’t see any of this as applying to me!
The obvious errors and failings of society and its institutions, in other words, were due to the malfeasance of others, those in control of the levers of power.
What I eventually came to understand is that all of society, and every single one of its institutions, reflects the sin of individual humanity writ large. If we are all sinners, as Judeo-Christian faith attests, how could our institutions be anything other than imperfect? They’re made up of fallible human beings, after all.
The 20th century contemplative, Thomas Merton, once wrote about a similar awakening in his life. He had been an academic star. He defined himself as cultured and sophisticated. But he eventually became disillusioned, a jaded, despondent intellectual, though a sensitive and socially concerned one.
Here he confronted his true self, and saw weaknesses and failure for the first time. This insight humbled him. For the first time he saw that the very sins he condemned in others were his as well. It changed him.
The trouble with unfettered idealism is that it compares what exists with some unrealized future, often an idealized future where love, justice, and peace reign supreme. It’s as if simply imagining it will make it so.
Niebuhr helped me to see that sin is an inescapable fact, one that resides deep within every human heart. Before I can change the world, assuming such a thing is even possible, I must first come to terms with the brokenness within.
Because of the fact of human sin, Niebuhr (who was deemed a “Christian ethicist”) argued that God’s justice, God’s truth, always stands over and against the best human attempts at either. An awareness of this fact produces humility.
Our problem is that the human mind is capable of conceiving perfection, the Platonic ideal. It’s a short step, then, especially while standing on the sidelines, to criticize anything that fails that ideal. Possessing a false stance of moral purity, we are quick to blame others when life comes up short.
I was struck by something Niebuhr wrote in Vol. 2. He said, in effect, that the inevitable abuses of power by those who, for whatever reason, currently possess it, are not at all unique to them as individuals.
Once those out of power (the “innocent”) gain power, he said, they are just as prone to the very same sins they previously thought the unique province of their erstwhile “oppressors.” Here the history of the Soviet Union is instructive.
In the end, what made the Pharisees “self-righteous” was not their desire to effect the good, but simply their failure to recognize their complicity in life’s ills, the very thing they had hoped to root out.
Niebuhr helped me see that I too had become a Pharisee.
Though, in retrospect, it was more likely the grace of God.