by The Rev. Dr. Max Lynn
SCRIPTURE READINGS Ecclesiastes 7:7-24, Luke 13:31-35
Transcribed from the sermon preached on MARCH 13, 2022
I’m going to do something a little different this morning. I’m going to share multiple quotes from one person who is not a biblical character.
There has been a lot going on in the world the last few years to increase our anxiety and the temptation to reactionary responses. Blatant racism and the riots and protests that follow, the distribution of wealth increasingly out of balance, homelessness, an authoritarian narcissist being elected president and his daily lies and shenanigans, gender definitional fluidity, teenage depression, fires, floods, hurricanes, droughts, and pandemics larger than ever before, election tampering, election denial, storming the Capitol, wars and rumors of wars, nuclear weapons, the list goes on and on.
Along with this we have the introduction of new technology that favors the quick, the bombastic and the self-righteous, algorithms funneling people into ideological echo chambers. And as the right wing has caught up with the left wing in accepting a post-modern definition of truth as relative and subjective, each side jumps quickly to demonize any disagreement or conversation whatsoever from the ideological line. Even people who consider themselves basically on the same side of an issue often have a hard time sharing and conversing as the party line somehow seems to be set already. The righteous already know they are righteous. Freedom of speech and open-minded conversation are endangered species. I consider this to be an extremely important issue. We need to search out and retain points of view worth disagreeing with, to stay familiar with people who might be right about how we might be wrong.
Enter Reinhold Niebuhr, a mid-20th century American theologian, a Presbyterian who wrote his two great works just before and during WWII. Niebuhr is like Ecclesiastes in his understanding that there is nothing new under the sun, and that we are all sinners and can only be so righteous, and only so wise. For Niebuhr, a lack of self-awareness of our own limited and sinful nature, a failure to understand our need for grace, is the biggest problem of humankind. It really doesn’t matter who we are or what out beliefs are, we are sinners in need of God’s grace.
From a Christian point of view, we want to take the log out of our own eye before we take the speck out of our neighbor’s, and Niebuhr is a great place to go to learn about the flaws in our point of view.
He is a bit difficult so you might want to pick up the written version of this sermon to go over it again. For now, I will define a few words that will help us understand.
Man – as with just about everyone in the West before about 1980, Niebuhr uses “man” to refer to humanity which includes women.
Moralist, Sentimentalist, or Idealist – this is us, or most of us in this congregation. These are folks like Jesus and pacifists, educators or social scientists who think human ignorance and unjust institutions remained the only obstacles to a more perfect world. If proper education of individuals and proper reform of institutions did their job, such obstacles would be removed, and we would have peace on earth. These are the all: we need to love and educate people.
Naturalist – these are people whose philosophy thinks cultures, nations, businesses, and individuals are driven and determined by the fact that we are animals in the natural world. We have animal instincts and vitality, primarily the will to live and the will to power, and we follow these drives. Naturalists believe we are more or less determined by these drives. The concept of sin doesn’t make much sense to these folks. Think Thomas Hobbes.
Rationalists: These are folks who think reason will save the day and emotions and animal instincts are to be avoided. Generally, they would tend to view religions as problematic superstition.
Social scientists – these are people who think culture is a social construct, which means God and religion are too. Nature has very little to do with it. These are the driving point of view of intellectuals in our own time today – postmodernism.
Cynic – these are folks who think the world is a nasty place that won’t change, so it is best to grab what power and good we can while we can because none of it means anything anyway. This is a broad group all the way from Epicurious, Ecclesiastes, and the hedonists on one end, existentialists and nihilists, Nietzsche being primary, on the other. God and sin don’t matter to these folks.
Realist – closely related to the cynics, the realists are the folks who think sin is here to stay, power runs the world, so we better make sure we have some, and have some checks and balances if we want to hold off the really bad people and keep ourselves from becoming really bad people. This is the camp Niebuhr places himself in.
Religion - religion for Niebuhr is anything that transcends our immediate natural self-interest and surroundings. It is whatever we call our highest value, whatever we pledge allegiance to. So, from Niebuhr’s point of view, atheists and rationalists have their religion too. This also means idolatry is much more common than most people think. Religion also stands for those higher transcendent values that help society work.
I am sharing a bunch of quotes on a variety of subjects: this is just a snapshot, so you get an idea of his logic.
On the attitudes of the Elite class:
(we can insert race or gender in place of class)
Differences in faculty and function do indeed help to originate inequality of privilege, but they never justify the degree of inequality created. from Moral Man and Immortal Society, 1932, page 114
The educational advantages which privilege buys, and the opportunities for the exercise of authority which come with privileged position, develop capacities which are easily attributed to innate endowment. On the other hand, it has always been the habit of privileged groups to deny the oppressed classes every opportunity for the cultivation of innate capacities and then to accuse them of lacking what they have been denied the right to acquire. P. 118
Philanthropy combines genuine pity with the display of power and the latter element explains why the powerful are more inclined to be generous than to grant social justice. P. 127</p)
The force they (the privileged classes) use is the covert force of economic power, or it is the police power of the state, seemingly sanctified by the supposedly impartial objectives of the government which wields it, but nevertheless amenable to their interests. They are thus able in perfect good faith to express abhorrence of the violence of a strike by workers and to call upon the state in the same breath to use violence in putting down the strike.
On Hope for the moral and educational uplift of society
There is always, in every nation, a body of citizens more intelligent than the average, who see the issues between their own and other nations more clearly than the ignorant patriot, and more disinterestedly than the dominant classes who seek special advantages in international relations. Although it may at times place a check upon the more extreme types of national self-seeking, it is usually not powerful enough to affect national attitudes in a crisis …
In other words, the nation is a corporate unity, held together much more by force and emotion, than by mind. Since there can be no ethical action without self-criticism, and no self-criticism without the rational capacity of self-transcendence, it is natural that national attitudes can hardly approximate the ethical. Even those tendencies toward self-criticism in nations which do express themselves are usually thwarted by the governing classes and by a certain instinct for unity in society itself. For self-criticism is a kind of inner disunity, which the feeble mind of a nation finds difficulty in distinguishing from dangerous forms of inner conflict. So, nations crucify their moral rebels with their criminals upon the same Golgotha, not being able to distinguish between the moral idealism which surpasses, and the anti-social conduct which falls below that moral mediocrity, on the level of which every society unifies its life.
On Patriotism
There is an ethical paradox in patriotism which defies every but the most astute and sophisticated analysis. The paradox is that patriotism transmutes individual unselfishness into national egoism. Loyalty to the nation is a high form of altruism when compared with lesser loyalties and more parochial interests. It therefore becomes the vehicle of all the altruistic impulses and expresses itself, on occasion, with such fervor that the critical attitude of the individual toward the nation and its enterprises is almost completely destroyed. The unqualified character of this devotion is the very basis of the nation’s power and of the freedom to use the power without moral restraint. Thus, the un-selfishness of individuals makes for the selfishness of nations.
On the hypocrisy that ones nation upholds universally righteous values in a time of war
- values like democracy, justice, equality, freedom or God. i.e. The US invading Iraq in the name of freedom or Putin invading Ukraine to “eliminate the Nazis.”
It is just in the moments when the nation is engaged in aggression or defense (and it is always able to interpret the former in terms of the latter) that the reality of the nation’s existence becomes so sharply outlined as to arouse the citizen to the most passionate and uncritical devotion toward it. But at such a time the nation’s claim to uniqueness also comes in sharpest conflict with the generally accepted impression that the nation is the incarnation of universal values. This conflict can be resolved only by deception. In the imagination of the simple patriot the nation is not a society but Society. Though its values are relative they appear, from his naïve perspective, to be absolute. The religious instinct for the absolute is no less potent in patriotic religion than in any other. The nation is always endowed with an aura of the sacred, which is one reason why religions, which claim universality, are so easily captured and tamed by national sentiment, religion and patriotism merging in the process.
Of Environmental Destruction in the sin of Pride which seeks power
“Sometimes this lust for power expresses itself in terms of man’s conquest of nature, in which the legitimate freedom and mastery of man in the world of nature is corrupted into a mere exploitation of nature. Man’s sense of dependence upon nature and his reverent gratitude toward the miracle of nature’s perennial abundance is destroyed by his arrogant sense of independence and his greedy effort to overcome the insecurity of nature’s rhythms and seasons by garnering her stores with excessive zeal and beyond natural requirements. Greed is, in short, the expression of man’s inordinate ambition to hide his insecurity in nature…Greed as a form of will-to-power has been particularly flagrant sin in the modern era because modern technology has tempted contemporary man to overestimate the possibility and the value of eliminating insecurity in nature. Greed has thus become the besetting sin of bourgeois culture. This culture is constantly tempted to regard physical comfort and security as life’s final good and to hope for its attainment to a degree which is beyond human possibilities. (Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Nature and Destiny of Man. P.190)
On the sin of the Pride of Knowledge
– a common sin in university towns and on Facebook.
“The philosopher who imagines himself capable of stating a final truth merely because he has sufficient perspective upon past history to be able to detect previous philosophical errors is clearly the victim of the ignorance of his own ignorance. Standing on a high pinnacle of history he forgets that this pinnacle also has a particular locus and that his perspective will seem as partial to posterity as the pathetic parochialism of previous thinkers …Not the least pathetic is the certainty of a naturalistic age that its philosophy is a final philosophy because it rests upon science, a certainty which betrays ignorance of its own prejudices and failure to recognize the limits of scientific knowledge…Intellectual pride is thus the pride of reason which forgets that it is involved in a temporal process and imagines itself in complete transcendence over history. Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Nature and Destiny of Man. P. 195
On the Pride of Virtue or self-righteousness
This is a danger for people all across the map. It could be Christians in church, Vegans and Tesla drivers, those who consider themselves “Woke”, those who work harder and sacrifice more than their siblings, people who have become wealthy through hard work, white Americans, non-binary gender folks, preachers who preach about other people’s self-righteousness, nuns who renounce the world, anybody and everybody is in danger of falling into this pit.
“The self mistakes its standards for God’s standards…Moral pride is the pretension of finite man that his highly conditioned virtue is the final righteousness and that his very relative moral standards are absolute. Moral pride thus makes virtue the very vehicle of sin…The sin of self-righteousness is responsible for our most serious cruelties, injustices and defamations against our fellow men. The whole history of racial, national, religious, and other social struggles is a commentary on the objective wickedness and social miseries which result from self-righteousness.”
On Religion
If religion be particularly occupied with the absolute from the perspective of the individual, it is nevertheless capable of conceiving an absolute society in which the ideal of love and justice will be fully realized. There is a millennial hope in every vital religion. The religious imagination is as impatient with the compromises, relativities and imperfections of historic society as with the imperfections of individual life. The prophet Isaiah dreamed of the day when the lion and the lamb would lie down together, when, in other words, the law of nature which prompts the strong to devour the weak would be abrogated.
The religious sense of the absolute qualifies the will-to-live and the will-to-power by bringing them under subjection to an absolute will, and by imparting transcendent value to other human beings, whose life and needs thus achieve a higher claim upon the self.
Speaking of the simplistic and hypocritical nature of middle-class protestant call for love when benefitting from privilege in an unjust society: Think for example Malcom X or the tension over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter, or humanitarian aid to Central America while backing a dictator.
Those who benefit from social injustice are naturally less capable of understanding its real character than those who suffer from it. They will attribute ethical qualities to social life, if only the slightest gesture of philanthropy hides social injustice. If the disinherited treat these gestures with cynicism and interpret unconscious sentimentality as conscious hypocrisy, the privileged will be properly outraged and offended by the moral perversity of the recipients of their beneficences. Since liberal Protestantism is, on the whole, the religion of the privileged classes of Western civilization, it is not surprising that its espousal of the ideal of love, in a civilization reeking with social injustice, should be cynically judged and convicted of hypocrisy by those in whom bitter social experiences destroy the sentimentalities and illusions of the comfortable.
On the importance of Religion in Society
Furthermore, there must always be a religious element in the hope of a just society. Without the ultrarational hopes and passions of religion no society will ever have the courage to conquer despair and attempt the impossible; for the vision of a just society is an impossible one, which can be approximated only by those who do not regard it as impossible. The truest visions of religion are illusions, which may be partially realized by being resolutely believed. For what religion believes to be true is not wholly, true but ought to be true; and may become true if its truth is not doubted.
Meanwhile it must be admitted that no society will ever be so just, that some method of escape from its cruelties and injustices will not be sought by the pure heart. The devotion of Christianity to the cross is an unconscious glorification of the individual moral ideal. The cross is the symbol of love triumphant in its own integrity, but not triumphant in the world and society. the triumph would have to
come through the intervention of God. The moral resources of men would not be sufficient to guarantee it.
A day which confronts immediate problems of social reconstruction will have little understanding for this aspect of the religious life, this soaring of the soul beyond the possibilities of history. That appreciation can come only when the new and just society has been
built, and it is discovered that it is not just. Men must strive to realize their individual ideals in their common life, but they will learn in the end that society remains man’s great fulfillment and his great frustration.