Summary on Reading of “Niebuhr and Christian Pacifism (Yoder)

Niebuhr’s theology is about questioning to whom we bring our peace witness and how to bring down the “impracticable” teaching of Jesus. His theology is anthropology with interest in man and man’s predicament.  Man’s goodness and his sin can be seen positive and negative values of his entanglement in the natural and historical world. Niebuhr’s starting point is a modern analysis of human nature and predicament, and seeing God as personification of the good and of the possibilities of pardon and transcendence.

Human is finite, ignorant, subject to external causes and understandable as an interplay of given factor. Human also is transcendence in being self-conscious and aware to own limits. This tension becomes problem of ethics. Christian doctrine tries to adequate justice to both poles. Sin can be seen and understood as human’s effort to relax its tension.  

Pacifism contention in the political area is a state should renounce the use of war as an instrument of national policy. Christian pacifism said that when a nation makes war, Christian should refuse to participate in the killing. Niebuhr does not grasp this idea. For Christian, the distinction between pacifism and a political policy is and ethical principle. Niebuhr accepts fully the belief in NT. Jesus reveals the absolute normative law of love of the Kingdom of God as final and authoritative revelation for ethic. For Niebuhr, love is like in the Sermon on the Mount, or as a self-giving, non-retaliating, non-calculating gracious love of God to sinner.  He does not agree with people who justify violence on the basis of the Gospel. Love of the Gospel’s ethic is not proposed as an effective social policy. We are sinner and have a tension to do or practice such kind of love. We have tension between simple possibility and the impossible possibility. For Christian our norm is the absolute love of Christ, but never be a simple possibility. Love is the law of life. Love is a principle of indiscriminate criticism that revealing human’s selfishness and rendering a great service to ethics, by making self-righteousness.

Three distinct problems from the contradiction between love which is law of life and sin as the historical reality human’s failure. (1) To have peace in the face of this continuing contradiction, human need pardon of God in his forgiving grace. The contradiction may be still but human can live by assuring justification of faith. (2) How human existence and history have any sense with human life can remain in conflict with norms. (3) How to achieve tolerable balance between egoism in society. This is ethics problem and its solution is not in pure love as a simple possibility, but in equal justice that require, sometimes, use of force and even war.

There explanations of the impossibility of love as a real alternative for actions: (1) Simple experience of persisting selfishness in the life of individual. No human is completely unselfish or completely free of pride as one dimension of sin. (2) Multiplicity of conflicts claim upon one’s love. (3) Group of men are always less moral and more selfish than individuals which compose them. The social groups, clans, classes or nations have less imagination to understand the need and the interest of others, less rational capacity to analyze its own action and thus counteract its egoistic tendencies. Love is possible for individuals but still being impossibility for politics and social organizations.  Egoism remains true when closer to the interest. Economic selfishness of interest of working class is closer to equal justice than the goal of the capitalist. Democracy is good because it is a political system and governs interplay of group egoism with less violence and greatest opportunity of change.      

Niebuhr’s main complaint: pacifist considers the realization of love as a simple possibility in history. It can be refusing to use violence and it underestimates the presence of sin in the world and surrenders to sin too easily. Refusing to go to war against a tyrant is worse than war itself. Pacifism commits an error in both exegesis and ethics when it argues that non-violent resistance is the practical application of New Testament love in politics. Niebuhr insists that the NT teaches non-resistance, not non-violence. Non-violence is a pragmatic method, and on certain occasions may be preferable to violence. Non-violence is a strategy which offers the largest opportunities for a harmonious relationship with the moral and rational factors in moral life. Pacifism that considers pure love as a simple possibility in politics is heretical. But still pacifism present practical solutions to political problems and conscientiously disavow all responsibility for social justice and avoid the danger of self-righteousness by remembering that pacifist is a sinner too.

Niebuhr’s teaching which Yoder agree: (1) Non-resistant love is taught by NT. (2) Love is the ultimate ethical norm. (3) Compromise always endangers the achievement of good ends. (4) Both sides are selfish in war, in politics and even in police actions, and it is false to identify the interest of religion with war. The criticism of pacifism mentioned distinction between pacifism as a political policy and as personal refusal in war: (a) Some pacifisms were over-optimistic to the possibility of easy solution in international problems and unaware of the depths of national selfishness and irrationally. (b) Non-violence and non-resistance are not identical. (c) Christian cannot expect of societies which have not resources and make no claim to be fully disinterested to Christian degree of unselfishness and love.

Niebuhr’s teaching which Yoder disagree: (1) His sentimental depreciation of the horror and sinfulness of war. There are two fallacies: (a) False judgement to modern war is a better means of conflict than non-violence, or less harmful to civilization and moral values than tyranny. (b) Moral fallacy in the failure to distinguish between agents. (2) His presuppositions of ethical reasoning. (a) Impossibility. The impossibility of the good is a central element of Niebuhr’s dialectic. Loving action may be impossible because in freedom every individual is unwilling to sacrifice. Love is no binding because some other value more important. Some involve guilt because real freedom existed and a real possibility was rejected for selfish reason. Others involve no freedom and thus no guilt and there is no ethical problem at all. (b) Necessity. Nothing is necessary in itself as far as ethics is concerned. An act is necessary in view of certain end. This is possible if there is a moral absolute higher than love, and for a Christian it is difficult to imagine. (c) Responsibility. Niebuhr said that it is not our obligation to concern with all need around us in term of love ethics. According to pacifist, there are a real Christian’s responsibility for social order which a derivative of Christian love, not a contradictory and self-defining ethical norm.

Niebuhr uses impossibility, necessity and responsibility to introduce new norms into ethics which are allowed to cancel out love that may lead to suspect a deeper error in Niebuhr’s approach to morality. There are: (1) No amount of reasoning can derive an “ought” from an “is” an imperative from a declarative, a judgement of value from a judgement of facts. The situation must be considered by ethics and must guide the application of ultimate. The existence of sin cannot be admitted under the name of “necessity” or otherwise as an ethical norm. (2) Fact that Niebuhr rehabilitates the selfish motives of self-preservation as ethical determinants explains how he justifies any compromises that his nation undertakes foreign policy. His argument about “responsibility” and “impossibility” or about using love to choose between imperfect alternatives or about supporting egoism interesting to justice may be used in any country to approve foreign policy. (3) This ethical pluralism is possible only when one rejects from the start a belief that God’s wills can be known and that right action can be identical for all. Niebuhr recognizes any pacifism which agrees to Niebuhr’s non-pacifism as equally valid. There can be two contradictory position, both are right as long as both are held tolerantly. This must be presuppose that there is no one knowable good and that conflicting actions carried on with good intentions or in the awareness of their imperfection are all equally right. The presence of sin in the world justifies or necessitates an ethic which is no better than enlightened opportunism claims to agree with Christian insights, to the nature of man and of the good. Ethics from   man’s predicament and the Bible derives not only ethics, but everything, like God’s redemption. Christian doctrines related to the redemption are consistently slighted by Niebuhr and transferred to another realm of being or read as mythological expressions of man’s capacities for transcendence.

Niebuhr can consider forgiving grace as central in our relation to our sinfulness, and enabling grace as only a temptation to pride. Whereas the Bible speaks of our “resurrection with Christ” as opening new ethical possibilities, grace is primarily the way to have peace in spite of our continuing sin.

Body of Christ differs from other social bodies in that it is not less moral than its individual members. Thesis of Moral man and Immoral Society falls down in crucial case, the only one which is really decisive for Christian ethics.  One of the strongest arguments of Christian pacifism is that when churches endorse nationalist aims. When Christian kills Christian the greatest possible offence against the unity of the body of Christ takes place. Niebuhr sees this argument meaningless. The church as distinguished from society has no significant place in his ethical thought. The Bible teaches that there is a significant difference between the saint and the unbelievers by virtue of a change of motives called a new birth. Niebuhr has no place for the doctrine of regeneration since the saint is a sinner. The doctrine of regeneration means that ethics for Christians and ethics for unregenerate society are two distinct disciplines. Niebuhr, to construct a Christian ethics for unregenerate society naturally runs into impossible possibilities, prematurely resolved tensions and other such monsters. But their origin is not in the nature of man or in the nature of redemption. They result from the illegitimate union of Christian and non-Christian elements.

The church and regeneration is the work of the Holy Spirit, which is neglected in Niebuhr’s ethics. In the NT the coming of the Spirit means the imparting of Power that is not a mythological symbol for the infinite perfectibility of human rationality. It is working reality within history and especially within the church. This power opens a realm of history possibilities: not “simple possibilities" but crucial possibilities. The acceptance of cross is the path to the accomplishment in history, not of perfection, but of action which can please God and be useful to men.  Sin is vanquished every time a Christian in the power of God chooses the better instead of the good, obedience instead of necessity, love instead of compromise, brotherhood instead of veiled self-interest.

Yoder sees that all the insistence upon the possibility and the relevance of the law of love should not lead to forget the humiliating fact that we do not obey it. We are too often being selfish and proud and if God designs to tolerate us and use us, it is only by his grace. Niebuhr is not as pessimistic is all realms as we have had to portray him here in his dialogue with pacifism. Loving action and the achievement of good in history is a possibility. There are no limits for the achievement of a more universal brotherhood, for the development of more perfect and more inclusive human relations. Christian doctrine which regards the agape of the kingdom of God is a resource for infinite development toward a more perfect brotherhood in history. 

True visions of religions are illusions, which may be partly 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. We can hardly avoid feeling that such statement would lead to Christian pacifism if it were not for Niebuhr’s unbiblical assumption of responsibility for policing society and for preserving western civilization. The ways in which a presupposition is defended, lead Niebuhr pragmatically to militarist conclusions. Militarists and pacifist share alike the risk of identifying the Kingdom of God with a particular social order, particular strategy or a particular peace.