[Dialogue] Other World Paper by H. Richard Niebuhr

[John W. Kloepfer]

Re: [Dialogue] What Copts fearColleagues interested in the H. Richard Niebuhr article, here it is.  I apologize to those who are not.  Please simply delete.
I have it as a Microsoft Word document, which could be attached, but my understanding is that this listserve does not support attachments.  If anyone wants it as an attachment, just let me know.  Otherwise, hopefully you can cut and paste it into Word.
John Kloepfer

TOWARD A NEW OTHER-WORLDLINESS

by H. Richard Niebuhr

 

 

I. CHRISTIANITY AND THE TWO WORLDS

 

Man lives in two worlds and when he tries to make his home in one alone something goes wrong with him. Our race, like that of the migratory birds, cannot live and perform all its functions in one climate but must undertake a periodic flight to another homeland.

 

Not only Christianity but every wise understanding of man in his world, and even primitive custom produced by trial and error, recognize the duality of the human environment and the need for seasonal journeys from this world to another. Oriental wisdom offers its own accounts of the Here and the There and of the soul's transmigration. In the West, Greek theory on the one hand and Hebraic vision on the other have given men understanding of the two regions in which they must dwell as well, as of the routes that lead from one to the other.

 

Christianity is always a double thing. It is concerned with the transformation of this world into a kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, but it is equally interested in the reformation of the other world in which we also live into a land of grace and glory. It assumes a two-world life on the part of man and its proper task has been the conversion of this dual existence rather than the reduction of life to one or the other.

 

            The Gospel is not a plan either for building the kingdom of God upon earth nor for attaining blessedness in a realm of spirit. It is always the double announcement that the Word has become flesh and the mortal put on immortality; it always carries with it the double injunction to seek the things that are above and to go into all the world. Yet it does not consist of two proclamations; for it speaks of one God who redeems a life lived in two worlds.

 

For the greater part of its history the Christian movement has been able to assume the existence among men of a two-worldly life and could direct its message to those who understood the duality of their environment. It could announce a Gospel that dealt with both worlds and undertake to convert the two-world philosophies it encountered.

 

Christianity did not need to challenge the Hebrews' temporal division between a present kingdom of this world and a future kingdom of God, but within the Hebrew framework of thought it pointed out two things: that the other, future world was now ingressing into the present in Jesus Christ so that the present was now being transformed into a strange future, and secondly, that the present-future God was reconciling men to himself in the midst of their journey from life through death to life.

 

Similarly Christian faith did not reject Hellenic two-world thought, though the Greek way of understanding man's two homes was different from the Hebrews' interpretation. The chief concern of Christian faith was to convert this Greek two-worldliness, so that the Greek might see through the revelation of God in Christ how personal were the other-worldly objects of the soul's contemplation, the form of the Good and the logos and how graciously creative and redemptive they were. The resultant two-world theory of the Church has been a curious blend of Hebrew philosophy of history and Greek metaphysics in which the resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul, the eternity and the historicity of the first and the second comings of Christ were equally maintained.

 

A new problem arises for both mankind and the Church when man's normal two-world outlook is obscured, when his migrations cease and he is confined to a single sphere. That situation has occurred twice in the history of the western world during the Christian era. We live in one of these periods, but our problem is not unique. For our situation is comparable to the one which prevailed in the centuries near the beginning of our era when the flight of men from the temporal to the eternal, from the activity of manipulation to the activity of contemplation also created a kind of one-world society, with the difference that the world in which the spiritualists sought to dwell exclusively was the "other" world rather than this one. Both periods seem unhealthy but it is difficult to call either quite unchristian.                          

 

In the early period it was hard to make the Gospel intelligible to men who sought only to know spiritual as self-evidently good, the material as evil. It was hard but it could be done, and while under the circumstances, Christianity became extremely other-worldly, it was still recognizably Christian, centering the attention of eremites and gnostics on the vision of God the Father and Jesus Christ in the other world and disciplining adventurers into the realm of the spirit to humility and love of the brethren. In the inverted situation of our day, when the wheel has come full circle and when, to speak with Bergson, the frenzy of asceticism has been replaced by the frenzy for comfort, it is also hard but not wholly impossible to preach, understand, and live by the Gospel.

 

The great catastrophes and brutalities of our century cannot obscure the fact that Christianity has not only directed men's eyes to God and to Jesus Christ, insofar as they are visible in this world - but made many men see what it points to has not been without converting influence on the this-worldly life. Jesus has never been so well known as he is now, though the one who is known is the Jesus of history only.

Yet the this-worldly Christianity of our day is as truncated and crippled a movement as its other-worldly counterpart of the so-called dark ages was. Both periods lost that apprehension of God which characterized the prophets and apostles, the apprehension of a living Creator and Redeemer who enters into the world, who not only draws men to himself by the attraction of ideal being but enters compulsively into them, who moves men to respond to love by love, and calls forth great works of faith by his mighty work. Not only is the Christian Gospel in its wholeness obscured when it is translated into one-worldly terms by the life of man, the migratory being, into whose structure the law of a seasonal movement is written is thwarted and distraught by confinement to one world, whether it be the world of sight or the realm of the spirit.

 

II. EARTH IS NOT ENOUGH

 

The insufficiency of secularism is becoming evident to many men in the very hour of its highest development. It appears indeed that a great triumph of this-worldliness is near. It may be that we stand at a point in human history when the one-sided interest of past generations will bring its richest results. The hope of economic man for freedom from want - that is, from anxiety for food, shelter, and warmth - may be achieved within limits. Inches may be added to the physical stature and decades to the life-span of man. Communication and travel will doubtless be exceedingly swift; labor may be light for most men, comfort great, information very extensive. We may discover a transient solution of the problem of power which will give us.external peace for some generations. These things may be.

 

Yet in the hour when men envision the possible achievement of victory over nature in secularized civilization it is becoming clear to them that earth is not enough. They note that man's life in time is neither self-sufficient nor sufficient for him. It is not self-sufficent for if this secular life were not founded on principles that man had learned from other sources than are given him in this space-time world, it could not have succeeded at all. Philosophers and historians have pointed out that natural science is based on convictions about the unity and intelligibility of the universe and on a morality of disinterestedness or, better, of self-denial, which are preconditions and not consequences of its work.

 

The politics of secularism rests on convictions about the dignity, the worth, and the equality of men which neither natural science nor ordinary observation can supply or validate; yet without them the political structure of so-called secular government did not develop and could hardly continue to stand. The self-evident truths about human rights are self-evident to men who have dwelt for a while in another world than the secular, temporal, natural sphere. They imply a human membership in a transcendent society and a human relation to a more than natural Being.

 

Reflective thought is persuaded to accept the conclusion that earth is not enough even for earthly life, that secularism cannot exist as a mode of culture save by accepting principles that must be gained in some other than the secular sphere.

 

Two other considerations need to be made explicit in this connection. Secular life, the realization and enjoyment of temporal goods and the organization of economic-political societies, depends for its continuance and health on the presence of disinterested men as well as of some disinterestedness in the mass. Furthermore it can grow and develop only as men bring new ideas to bear on the new situations which arise for them. In both respects secularism depends on other-worldliness. Plato discerned, Bentham assumed, and Roger Williams illustrated the truth that government can succeed only when governors are not too much concerned with their own temporal goods and when they do not stake too much on the success of government. Such disinterestedness is possible to men only insofar as their interests have been directed to other goods than those which they administer. As Prof. Lovejoy has said in The Great Chain of Being, "There is perhaps nothing so favorable to success in this world's business as a high degree of emotional detachment from it." But without attachment to other goods detachment from this worldly concern is not possible. Today the dependence of government and political health on the disinterestedness which other-worldliness can foster is made apparent in a negative way by the failure of all our endeavors to achieve unity through the compounding and compromising of interests or to find pieces by matching them against each other in a game without an umpire.

 

The paucity of new ideas in secular civilization today appears in the fact that apart from natural science, the new challenges of the new time marked by our planetary wars and our technological civilization are being met with the formulae and mental habits established a century and more ago. In vain men demand of their statesmen creative and hopeful programs for world reconstruction. In vain the Church is challenged to meet the issues of men with prophetic insights. Those who make the demands are as bare of new ideas and adequate plans as are those whom they address. New ideas are not developed in the confusion and immediacy of secular conflict. They are found by those who do not seek them, or do not seek them for the sake of the secular problem. They are found in the contemplation of another world and in the view of this one sub specie aeternitatis.

 

This inadequacy of the secular is apprehended by feeling even when it is not explicitly recognized. Today, when secular values are offered actually and prospectively in an abundance never before achieved, men are giving evidence of their dissatisfaction with them, not only those who ask questions about the foundations of human existence but many others who continue to use the thought forms and the habitual modes of behavior of the this-worldly environment.

 

As migratory birds for whom the season of flight is at hand must feel a vague uneasiness before external impulses combine with internal urges to send them northward in springtime, so now a general sense of discomfort is beginning to oppress men who have lived too long in one climate. They feel hemmed in and express their sense of confinement by calling attention to the narrowness of their world. Though they continue to speak of progress, the high expectations of coming adventures, the anticipation of expanding horizons are gone. They believe in progress after a fashion but have no enthusiasm for it since it only promises them more of the same thing that row they know so well.

 

When so-called pessimists among them speak of the "end of our time", or of the "decline of civilization", or the "end of an era", even so-called optimists reply with modest prophecies about a continued life measured in centuries, or millennia, or, for mankind, in millions of years. They also see death at the end of the road of secular life. "Shades of the prison house begin to close" on our maturing civilization. The mood of expansiveness and the joyful anticipation of ever new victories in man's so-called conquest of nature have given place to a sober defensiveness, as even the change in the temper of folk between the two world wars indicates.

 

There are days at the end of winter when the increasing brightness of sun does not so much promise the coming of spring as reveal the shabbiness and uncleanness of the wintry scene. Our day in history is something like that. Reflection and feeling apprehend the morbidity of secular civilization, but the promise of newness of life they do not discern.

 

 

III. TOWARD A NEW OTHER-WORLDLINESS

 

When is health and vigor to be found for a human society that is living without great hope, that is vainly trying to preserve values for which it can find no foundations in being, that is trying to solve new problems with old ideas and without disinterestedness, that is unable to satisfy the great human wants with the goods it can offer?

 

It seems plain that without rediscovery of the other world which is also man's home, the world of the soul and the spirit, of God and divine action, no answer to the problems of secular civilization and of men confined to that environment will be forthcoming. Time will not yield its secrets to those who cannot look upon it from this perspective of eternity. But it is also clear that eternity is not something we can know so long as we seek to understand it only for the sake of the illumination it can cast on time.

 

All the goods of the world may be added to those who seek the kingdom of God and its righteousness but none of them seem to be available to us so long as we seek the kingdom for the sake of having these goods. The other world has come into human view as the necessary foundation of this one but our interests, even for the most part in the Church, remain so firmly directed to the temporal sphere that our other-worldliness seems a negative thing, a mere qualification of secularism.

 

            What is needed then, is a new other-worldliness, a new pre-occupation with the super-natural, with the transcendent God and the community of souls in him. And this preoccupation needs must be directed to the Eternal for its own sake alone. It needs to be an intellectual preoccupation producing a theological science comparable in honesty, in intensity and detachment from self to the science which preoccupation with nature produces. It needs to be a moral preoccupation, involving a self-denial and self-discipline comparable to the self-denial and asceticism with which devotion to secular values pursues its ends in science and warfare. It needs to be a practical preoccupation, expressing itself in an intensity of prayer and contemplation.

 

Many of us can understand the need for such an "other-worldliness" today without being able to point out either in ourselves or in our society any real indications of its coming. The signs remain largely negative. There are a few positive signs. Among these are the theological movements of the post-liberal period. They are at one in their common attack on pure secularism and on that immanentism in religion which confines faith to forces evident to the temporal point of view. They agree in their recommendation of a return to the long tradition of mankind with its other-worldly interests and its two-world orientation. They unite for the most part in proclamation of the double Gospel of incarnation and resurrection, of the aggression of God into this world, and of his drawing of men out of the world to himself.

 

Yet apart from a few great representatives of these movements they do not appear on the whole to offer positive evidence of the coming of a new other-worldliness. They remain too largely movements of thought, unaccompanied by those active demonstrations of faith in the reality of the unseen which give the thinker assurance that he is not deceiving himself with abstractions. They have been largely polemic, exposing the fallacies of secularism, and have not been mated with a vital urge to confession of faith and with the desire to proclaim what has been communicated from the transcendent world of God. Again, these movements reveal their limitations by the fact they remain so largely re-pristinations of old ways of thought. Insofar as they carry on a living tradition they are revolutionary rather than reactionary, but often they seem more concerned with tradition than with the realities to which the tradition pointed. This tendency also leads to much fruitless quarrel among those who are of Thomas, of Augustine, of Luther and Calvin.

 

The limitations of the positive movements toward a new other-worldliness in our times do not discourage those who live in dissatisfaction with themselves and their secularism. For they are aware that any true other-worldly movement must come and will come from the other world itself. They live in expectation of springtime, though the expectation survives at times only as the prayer against their own unbelief. They wait for religious revival in themselves and the world and while they wait they labor to use the little faith they have, to respond to the signs from the other world they dimly see, to make clear to themselves what they know vaguely and uncertainly. They say to themselves that the revival of religion, like the kingdom of God, comes not with observation but is suddenly among us like the first day of spring. In the meantime they do what they can in their little faith to make ready the hard soil of heart and mind for a new season of life.



First published in Theology Today Volume One, Number One, 1944.
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