14
PARTISAN REVIEW
agnostics, have been converted by definition: they all have religion.
This is innocent enough so long as we never lose sight of the
differences between religions or
what
men believe in, and so long
as we realize that although life cannot be lived without some acts
of faith, death may be the consequence of other acts of faith,
e.g., faith that pneumonia can be cured by absent treatment.
What Niebuhr must now show as a theologian is that the faith
necessary for life is necessarily faith in God. This he completely
fails to do. Instead by another essay in redefinition-one not so
innocent-he equates the meaning which is the object or reference
of
any
faith, with God. "There is no action without religious
orientation and no religion without God."* To be alive is not
only to be religious, it is to have faith in God even if we deny
his existence. This is still not the end. Niebuhr must now as a
Christian
theologian show that the God we affirm in action is the
God of revealed Christianity who is transcendent to the world
and yet intimately connected with it. This is accomplished in
his Gifford Lectures by describing man as a "self-transcendent
spirit" consumed by a metaphysical anxiety and hunger which
can only be appeased by belief in the symbolical (not literal!)
truth of the Incarnation. lnsofar as arguments are employed
instead of exhortation they are fallacious. For example: what is
unique about the human spirit cannot be derived from man's
animal nature; nor is it an expression of
reason~
Therefore, infers
Niebuhr, man is a child of God who can only comprehend himself
"by a principle of comprehension which is beyond his compre–
hension." One mystery calls to another and the plain fact that
what is distinctive about human traits has its origin and fruit
in the social and cultural matrix, is not so much as considered.
Man, Niebuhr asserts, is not only a creature of God, he is
a sinner. He is an inevitable sinner and yet cannot escape respon–
sibility for his sins. He is a sinner because he forgets that he is
a creature of God, because he thinks he is more than he is, knows
more than he does, because, in short, he is not God. When he
is contritely aware of his sinfulness, of its inevitability and his
responsibility for it, grace descends upon his soul and he receives
remission from sin.
• "Religion and Action,"
Religion in the Modem World,
University
of
Pennsylvania
Bicentennial Conference (1941) p. 91.
