By Reinhold Niebuhr
Theologian, ethicist, and political analyst, Reinhold Niebuhr was once a towering determine of twentieth-century non secular concept. Now newly repackaged, this crucial booklet gathers the simplest of Niebuhr’s essays jointly in one quantity. chosen, edited, and brought through Robert McAfee Brown―a pupil and good friend of Niebuhr’s and himself a unique theologian―the works integrated right here testify to the intense polemics, incisive research, and deep religion that characterised the full of Niebuhr’s life.
“This positive anthology makes to be had to a brand new iteration the concept of 1 of the main penetrating and profitable of twentieth-century minds. Reinhold Niebuhr continues to be the good illuminator of the darkish conundrums of human nature, background and public policy.”―Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.“Sparkling gemstones. . . introduced from the shadows of historical past into modern mild. fantastically chosen and edited, they express that Niebuhr’s fiery polemics and gracious assurances nonetheless converse with strength to us today.”―Roger L. Shinn
“An tremendous important volume.”―David Brion Davis, New York overview of Books
“This assortment, which brings jointly Niebuhr’s such a lot penetrating and enduring essays on theology and politics, may still display for a brand new iteration that his top notion transcends the fast historic atmosphere within which he wrote. . . . [Brown’s] advent succinctly provides the significant gains of Niebuhr’s existence and thought.”―Library Journal
Read or Download The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses PDF
Similar theology books
How can the physique and Blood of Christ, with no ever leaving heaven, emerge as fairly current on eucharistic altars the place the bread and wine nonetheless appear to be? 13th and fourteenth century Christian Aristotelians proposal the reply needed to be "transubstantiation. "
Acclaimed thinker, Marilyn McCord Adams, investigates those later medieval theories of the Eucharist, focusing on the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham, with a few connection with Peter Lombard, Hugh of St. Victor, and Bonaventure. She examines how their efforts to formulate and combine this theological datum provoked them to make major revisions in Aristotelian philosophical theories in regards to the metaphysical constitution and site of our bodies, adjustments among substance and injuries, causality and causal powers, and primary kinds of switch. environment those advancements within the theological context that gave upward thrust to the query attracts recognition to their understandings of the sacraments and their objective, in addition to to their understandings of the character and future of human beings.
Adams concludes that their philosophical adjustments have been commonly now not advert hoc, yet systematic revisions that made room for transubstantiation whereas permitting Aristotle nonetheless to explain what commonly and of course occurs.
Born in Saxony in 1096, Hugh grew to become an Augustinian monk and in 1115 moved to the monastery of Saint Victor, Paris, the place he spent the rest of his lifestyles, ultimately changing into the top of the college there. His writings conceal the total variety of arts and sacred technology taught in his day. Paul Rorem bargains a easy advent to Hugh's theology, via a accomplished survey of his works.
The Turnings of Darkness and Light: Essays in Philosophical and Systematic Theology
This number of essays, written among 1975 and 1987, covers themes together with the doctrine of analogy, the Trinity, theological realism, the problims of evil and ache, ecclesiology, and the so-called theistic proofs. the sooner writings relect the author's education as a thinker within the Anglo-Aamerican analytic culture.
- Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition
- God and Evil: In the Theology of St Thomas Aquinas
- The mystery and agency of God : divine being and action in the world
- Christianity Is Not Great: How Faith Fails
- Did You Receive The Holy Spirit When You Believed?: Some Basic Questions For Pneumatology (Pere Marquette Theology Lecture)
- Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology
Additional resources for The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses
Example text
OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND RELIGIOUS FAITH 5 the process of divorcing God from the nation was a matter of both spiritual insight and actual experience. If the early prophets had not said, as Amos, "Are ye not as the children of the Ethiopians unto me, saith the Lord" (Amos 9:7), faith in the God of Israel might have perished with the captivity of Judah. But it was the exile which brought this process to a triumphant conclusion. A second Isaiah could build on the spiritual insights of an Amos, and could declare a God who gave meaning to existence quite independent of the vicissitudes of a nation, which had been the chief source of all meaning to the pious Jew.
There is no purely spiritual method of preserving minimal justice and order in a world, for the world is not purely spiritual. Power is the basis of justice in history as it is of order in the entire natural world. To declare the omnipotence of God is to insist that the ultimate power which maintains the order of the world is superior to all subordinate powers and majesties which tend to create anarchy by making themselves the premature and inadequate centers of order in the world. THE "POWERLESS" CHRIST Yet, despite the certainty of biblical faith that God is all-powerful, it looks upon the crucified Messiah as the final revelation of the divine character and the divine purpose.
The weakness of God's love is not the weakness of goodness striving against the recalcitrance of some "given" stuff of creation. It is the self-imposed weakness of His love. If God has created free spirits who have the capacity to defy Him in their freedom, He has created forms of life so independent that even the power of God, acting merely as power, cannot reach the final source of their defiance. The divine power, the very structure of the world, the requirements for mutual living which are made part of the very character of h u m a n existence, all these are able to set an ultimate limit to man's defiance of the order of creation.