return to religion-online

(ENTIRE BOOK) In this volume Professor Niebuhr explores the philosophical and theological relationship of the human self to itself, others and God, with particular reference to both Hellenic and Hebraic frames of reference in Western thought, and as seen in the evolution of communities.

Part I: The Dialogues of the Self with Itself, with Others, and with God

Chapter 1: The Uniqueness of the Human Self
: Greek philosophy defined the uniquely human in terms of man’s rational faculty, whereas Hebraism’s metaphor of man’s being created in God’s image can be understood as the self’s capacity to dialogue with itself, with others and with God.

Chapter 2: The Internal Dialogue of the Self
The dialogue which the self carries on within itself is certainly more complex than understood in classical philosophy. Depth psychology has uncovered many of these complexities. But it has no doubt obscured many others because it failed to grasp that the same self is in the various personae of the dialogue.

Chapter 3: The Dialogue Between the Will and Conscience of the Self
If the will is the self’s transcendence over the complex of its impulses and inclinations, and the conscience is the self judging its actions and attitudes under a sense of obligation to self and others, Christian theory emphasizes the bondage of will to the interests of the self.

Part I: The Dialogues of the Self with Itself, with Others, and with God

Chapter 4: The Ladder of the Self’s Ambitions, Desires and Qualms of Conscience
Both desires and qualms of conscience about the desires are indeterminate; and both are the fruit of the self’s capacity to transcend every situation, historical or natural, which offers either preliminary restraints upon its ambitions, limits for its desires or justifications for its undue selfishness.

Chapter 5: The Self in Space and Time
While the self is located in time and space, by its memory and foresight it transcends the given moment and is therefore transtemporal. It is also spaceless in that its imagination is free to rove over the boundaries of space.

Chapter 6: The Self and Its Body
The self stands above the functions and capacities of its body and mind, yet it proves its relation to them.

Chapter 7: The Dialogue Between the Self and Others
The self faces the other’s self as a mystery that can never be fully penetrated, and can only be sustained by a generous mutuality of love involving sacrifice, openness and self-giving.

Chapter 8: The Self and Its Communities
The self’s physical and spiritual need of others creates multiple communities with which the individual has a complex relationship of dependence and conflict based on the self’s moral concerns.

Chapter 9: The Self as Creator and Creature in Historical Drama
The self is not simply a creator of human history, but is also a creature of the web of events, in the creation of which it participates.

Chapter 10: The Self and the Dramas of History
The transmutation of the self’s dialogues into dramas occurs whenever they precipitate actions which are then formed into dramatic patterns that are predictable in terms of natural necessities and historical constancies.

Chapter 11: The Problem of Historical Knowledge
The problem of the reliability of any knowledge about history is that nothing can give any observer such detachment from the historical scene as would endow his views with the same kind of unchallenged and unchallengeable validity which the conclusions of the natural scientists well may claim.

Chapter 12: The Self and Its Search for Ultimate Meaning
The thesis of Biblical faith, that the self is in dialogue with a God who must be defined as a "person" because He embodies both the structure of being and a transcendent freedom, is more valid than the alternative theses, both religious and secular, which find much greater favor among the sophisticated.

Part II: Two Components of Western Culture and Their Attitudes Toward the Self

Chapter 13: The Hebraic and the Hellenic Approaches to the Problem of Selfhood and History
Hellenic thought identified the self with mind, and history as intelligible to the mind, while Hebraic understanding views the self as creature in personal relation to God, and human history as the drama of man’s encounter with himself, others and God.

Chapter 14: Faith and Dogma in the New Covenant Community
Dogma, at its best, represents the consensus of a covenant community which lives upon the basis of common convictions and commitments to a revelation of the truth that can not be accepted as true in the manner of philosophical and scientific truths, because the truth does not follow inevitably from the analysis of the processes of nature and history.

Chapter 15: Dogma and Ontology in the Christian Consensus
While Christian faith is drawn essentially from the Hebraic, its continuing encounter with Hellenic streams of thought has issued in the ongoing struggle between revealed and natural theology that occasionally approaches synthesis.

Chapter 16: The Self and Its Dramas: Reason and Nature in the Disintegration of the Medieval Synthesis
The medieval synthesis between Biblical and classical thought disintegrated under the impact of the Renaissance’s emphasis on the self and reason and the Reformation’s focus on the self and God.

Chapter 17: Understanding Nature and Misunderstanding Human Nature
Modern culture’s belief that nature as a system is the ultimate reality, and that the realm of history is essentially identical with the realm of nature, denies the freedom of man and the reality of the drama of history.

Chapter 18: The Climax of an Empirical Culture: Its Blindness to Some Obvious "Facts"
The ironic fact is that a culture, intent upon understanding nature and boasting of ever more impressive achievements in the "conquest" of nature through its psychology, anthropology and sociology, has become involved in ever more serious misunderstandings of the freedom of human nature, of the self in its uniqueness, and of its dramatic-historical environment.

Part III: The Efforts of the Self to Build Communities

Chapter 19: The Resources of the Christian Faith in a Dynamic Civilization and an Expanding Society
In an increasingly technical and complex society, the resources of the Christian faith go beyond personal experience and discernment to the Christ-drama that symbolizes both the indeterminate possibilities of historical achievement and the divine mercy in dealing with the guilt and responsibility of the self.

Chapter 20: Organism and Artifact in Democratic Government
Since every community is an organism in that it starts spontaneously, and an artifact in that it is developed through conscious contrivance, democracy evolved as an artifact to augment and enforce society’s initial need for order and stability under governors by providing the means of securing the consent of the governed.

Chapter 21: Property, Social Hierarchy and the Problem of Justice
However necessary and inevitable the presence of the institutions of property and social stratification have been in the evolution of human society, the injustices they have fostered have been ameliorated through a gradual equalizing of economic and political power.

Chapter 22: The Integration of the World Community
In integrating the world community, a greater knowledge of all the factors involved and a larger perspective upon the total situation is certainly a primary necessity for the kind of statesmanship which will guide the nations toward a political and moral integration.

Chapter 23: Individual and Collective Destinies in the Contemporary Situation
While history constantly enlarges the scope of the collective drama which becomes the basis of all individual destinies, it does not obviate any of the problems which the single self faces in its involvement in, and transcendence over, its collective destinies. The Biblical faith makes the affirmation not only about the divine life which assures significance to selfhood and its dramas, but it also insists that the God who is powerful enough to bring the fragmentary dialogues and dramas to a conclusion also has a power of love which is able to overcome the recalcitrance of human sin.

Viewed 1893 times.