Reinhold Niebuhr in Contemporary Scholarship

Recent studies of Reinhold Niebuhr's life and work demonstrate his continued importance in theology, ethics, and political thought. Historical studies by Heather Warren, Mark Kleinman, and Normunds Kamergrauzis provide new assessments of Niebuhr's role as a political and religious leader in his own time and trace the consequences of the movements in which he participated. They also show us more clearly how his work was connected to the ideas and programs of his contemporaries. Colm McKeogh offers a more systematic treatment of Niebuhr's political realism in relation to just war theory. Niebuhr's intellectual legacy remains disputed, with Stanley Hauerwas and Langdon Gilkey offering radically different assessments of his theology. Hauerwas sees in Niebuhr a close connection to the religious liberalism of William James that precludes any authentic Christian witness. Niebuhr's empiricism reduces God to a necessary feature of human consciousness. Gilkey notes Niebuhr's early use of James' psychology, but discerns a theology of history that is central to Niebuhr's mature work. In that theology, the ground of hope necessarily lies beyond human consciousness, and indeed beyond history itself.     

The Neo‐Barthian Critique of Reinhold Niebuhr

The author notes an unclarity in David Novak's defense of Reinhold Niebuhr against Stanley Hauerwas's critique and identifies some issues left unsettled in the exchange between Novak and Hauerwas over Niebuhr's ethics. Specifically, the author proposes that the Barthian‐Hauerwasian communitarian rejection of Niebuhrian natural theology and natural law ignores the historical abuse of biblical theology in the German Christian response to the Nazis, fails to account for the fact of general moral revulsion against Nazism, and flirts itself with a conventionalist form of nihilism.     

Reading Reinhold Niebuhr against Himself Again: On Theological Language and Divine Action

Since 1937, when Reinhold Niebuhr articulated his most developed understanding of the function of theological language, there has been debate about how his approach should be understood. Recent readings of Niebuhr have assumed that Niebuhr's account of theological language rests upon dualistic presuppositions. While acknowledging manifestations of post‐Cartesian dualism in Niebuhr's thought, this article argues that Niebuhr's thought also reflects a more compelling strain of Augustinian/Kierkegaardian anti‐dualism, and that reading Niebuhr through the lens of this anti‐dualism allows for a fruitful account of his treatment of theological language.     

Niebuhr One More Time

In this essay Stanley Hauerwas offers a response to Edmund Santurri's review of Reinhold Niebuhr's An Interpretation of Christian Ethics.     

美国基督教界的"新保守派之父"尼布尔的复活

美国政治神学家莱因霍尔德·尼布尔有"新保守派之父"之称.在9.11事件之后,他的思想再次得到了人们的关注.但由于尼布尔思想的复杂性,也导致了对他的种种误读.要想真的理解他的复活,就必须进入到他后期的应用政治神学中去.尼布尔对美国力量在世界事务中的使用的看法具有一体两面,即对美国历史的反讽和对帝国力量的承担的思考.作为一个公共哲学家,尼布尔的思考很能代表美国基督教思想,特别是不同于欧洲基督教界的特点.     

用生命演绎"自我与历史的戏剧"——美国现代思想家尼布尔思想综述

莱茵霍尔德·尼布尔是美国20世纪的神学政治哲学家.他的大量著述在当今的神学、伦理学、政治哲学等领域产生了很大的影响.对于这个人,国内学界关注较少,本文旨在对尼布尔的思想历程进行概要的介绍.     

莱茵霍尔德·尼布尔的基督教现实主义道德观

莱因霍尔德·尼布尔是20世纪在美国乃至西方最著名和颇具影响的基督教神学家.他坚持原罪论,并将基督教伦理思想广泛应用于社会问题及政治问题的研究,从而形成了系统并具有现代精神的基督教应用伦理学(即基督教现实主义伦理学),在现代宗教伦理学的推广方面做出了独特的贡献.他所倡导的现实主义伦理学影响了一代神学家和政治家,后来更是成为冷战时期美国对外政策的哲学依据.本文考察了尼布尔的原罪论及其与理想主义的分歧,以及尼布尔现实主义道德观的基本内容及其影响.     

Reinhold Niebuhr's Paradox: Groundwork for Social Responsibility

This paper is an examination of Reinhold Niebuhr's embrace of the paradoxical in relation to his conception of the self. While it explores the theoretical and practical difficulties entailed in Niebuhr's account, it also seeks to defend his position, suggesting that in the light of Niebuhr's negative apologetic, the paradoxical self represents the only intelligible means of self–understanding available. Though Niebuhr never develops this epistemological ground, it may provide a way of avoiding the moral consequentialism to which Niebuhr appears to be resigned. The resulting framework points toward moral pragmatism, retaining its orientation and relevance in the midst of deliberations concerning means and ends.     

Reinhold and the Promise of a Higher Metaphysics

While Reinhold was no doubt interested in harnessing Kantian practical reason as a rational ground for our fundamental religious convictions, it remains unclear as to whether he reserves any role for theoretical or speculative reason in moral faith, and if so, what. This paper argues that he continues to assign an important role to speculative reason in the establishment and dissemination of a “religion of reason” in his efforts across three major texts of the Jena period (namely, the 1786–1787 Letters on the Kantian Philosophy , the 1789 Attempt at the New Theory of the Human Power of Representation , and the 1790 first edition of Contributions to the Correction of the Misunderstandings of Previous Philosophers ) to outline a “new metaphysics” that accounts for supersensible objects (God, the soul, freedom, and the physical, the moral and the intelligible world) in terms of forms of reason. It shows how Reinhold develops a unified account of speculative and practical reason by extending the former's role to include that of producing ideas that pertain to the practical postulates and narrowing the latter's role to that of imparting objective reality and further content to the ideas.