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nizes that "the Christian doctrine of sin in its classical form offends
both rationalists and moralists by maintaining the seemingly absurd
position that man sins inevitably and by a fateful necessity, but that
he is nevertheless to be held responsible for actions which are
prompted by an ineluctable fate." Indeed, he removes the qualifier
"seemingly" in other passages. Relying in the most difficult spots
on Kierkegaard, Niebuhr begins by asserting that man is both creature
and creator, made in the image of God and yet finite, caught in
the necessities of nature and yet able to transcend them. Man's free–
dom creates the temptation to sin, and this produces his anxiety. His
anxiety leads him to try to escape from finitude to infinity, to
try
to be God rather than to subject himself to the will of God. Lacking
faith, man tries to establish himself independently, and by doing so,
by giving his immediate necessities a consideration which they do
not deserve, he loses
his
true self.
This
is why the sin of inordinate
self-love points "to the prior sin of lack of trust in God." Man's
anxiety arises out of his finiteness and his freedom, but when he comes
to the fork in the road, he chooses the wrong path rather than the
right because he has also committed the "prior sin of unbelief." And
then all of the other sins come tumbling after. Finiteness and free–
dom
by themselves
would never lead to these other sins. The sin of
unbelief is the extra factor and it, so to speak, lies behind the other
sins of history. They are inevitable once we grant that we are doomed
to be finite, fated to be free, and forced into unbelief. At best we
can use our freedom to become aware of all this and to develop
contrition, but even contrition is no permanent protection against
slipping into the abyss that anxiety and unbelief prepare for us.
{ Niebuhr says that none of
this
is to be taken "literalistically,"
though one should suppose that it is to be taken literally. He criticizes
literalistic distortions of Christian doctrine, such as the view that
we inherit corruption.
This
is connected with Niebuhr's belief that
we are not doomed to sin by
natural
causes, with his opposition to
the Pelagian notion that original sin is a force of inertia in nature,
and with his constant rejection of the view that man's
finitude
is
solely responsible for his sinning. All of this Niebuhr expresses by
saying that "evil in man is a consequence of his
inevitable though
not necessary
unwillingness to acknowledge his dependence, to ac–
cept his finiten«,:SS and to admit
his
insecurity," and so it is important
