[Dialogue] Other World Paper by H. Richard Niebuhr

[Bill Schlesinger]

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Bill Schlesinger
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-----Original Message-----
From: Dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net
[mailto:Dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of John W. Kloepfer
Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2005 5:19 PM
To: Colleague Dialogue
Subject: [Dialogue] Other World Paper by H. Richard Niebuhr

Colleagues 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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