[PT 6.4 (2005) 473-486]
Political Theology (print) ISSN 1462-317X Political Theology (online) ISSN 1473-1719
BEING WRONG AND BEING RIGHT: A RESPONSE TO LARRY RASMUSSEN AND ROBIN LOVIN Scott R. Paeth Assistant Professor of Religious Studies DePaul University, Chicago, IL 60641 USA spaeth@depaul.edu
ABSTRACT Larry Rasmussen and Robin Lovin have offered compelling perspectives on Reinhold Niebuhr’s legacy, asking whether he was wrong or right on the economy, and whether Stanley Hauerwas’s analysis of Niebuhr’s work is wrong or right. In this reply, Scott Paeth argues that Niebuhr was a complex theological thinker and social critic, and is best understood as a “pragmatic idealist” who was willing to change strategies in response to changing circumstances. He was also quintessentially a public theologian who, contrary to the arguments of Stanley Hauerwas, was a vociferous critic of his social context rather than an assimilated spokesperson for it. Finally, Paeth offers some suggestions about what Reinhold Niebuhr’s legacy might mean in light of the American election of 2004.
The blessing and the curse of studying Reinhold Niebuhr is often simply the difficulty of figuring out which Reinhold Niebuhr it is that you’re studying. He was a thinker who exhibited in his work a “courage to change”1 over time and in light of new circumstances, and any analysis of his thought that treats him, as Professor Rasmussen notes, as a static figure, is bound to get the whole wrong even if it is right about a particular part. In that sense, then, it seems inevitable that any short article, and therefore any 1. The phrase “courage to change” comes of course from Niebuhr’s famous “Serenity Prayer,” in which he petitions God for the “Serenity to accept with grace the things that cannot be changed, the courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.” The history of the Serenity Prayer is recounted by Elisabeth Sifton, Reinhold Niebuhr’s daughter, in her recent book, The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003). The phrase is also the title of one of the earliest biographies of Niebuhr, Jane Bingham’s The Courage to Change: An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1961).
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