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Reinhold Niebuhr and the Soviet Union, 1930-1945 Chen View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ScholarBank@NUS FROM A CHRISTIAN SOCIALIST TO A CHRISTIAN REALIST: REINHOLD NIEBUHR AND THE SOVIET UNION, 1930-1945 CHEN LIANG (M.A) The Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE 2007 Acknowledgements This study of Reinhold Niebuhr would not have been possible without the generosity of the National University of Singapore (NUS). I want to express special thanks to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) of NUS for awarding me a research scholarship for four consecutive years. FASS also funded my four months’ fieldwork in the U.S. in 2005, as well as an earlier conference trip to the University of California, Davis. The Png Poh Seng Prize (Best Student in History) it awarded me in the 2003- 2004 academic year has been a constant reminder that this thesis should be written to a high standard. My supervisor Professor Ian Lewis Gordon, former head of History Department of NUS and Dr. Stephen Lee Keck, my former supervisor, who left NUS to teach at the American University of Sharjah in 2006, played critical roles in the development of this thesis. Professor Gordon painstakingly went through the whole draft and provided invaluable suggestions and corrections. His attention to details in editing my writing has left indelible marks on my mind. I am truly grateful to him for the time and energy he has put in my thesis. Dr. Keck, a very supportive and patient supervisor as well, guided me through the initial stages of this project until he left Singapore. With Dr. Keck’s introduction, I was honoured to get acquainted with his father, Professor Leander Keck, former dean of Yale Divinity School (YDS), who, despite his old age, personally introduced me to the librarians of YDS library and showed me around Yale during my i fieldtrip to the U.S. Stimulating conversations with Professor Keck at Yale made my U.S. trip a much more memorable experience. I want to take this opportunity to thank Professor Keck for his kindness and generosity. I also want to express my gratitude to Dr. Keck for everything he has done for me over the years. Thanks must also be expressed to the following people, who, in different ways, helped during my study at NUS. They are: Ms. Sherry Su of Dow Jones Newswires; Professor Peter Borschberg, Professor Thomas DuBois, Professor Huang Jianli, Professor Brian Farrell, and Ms. Kelly Lau of History Department, NUS. I am also grateful to the librarians and staff at the NUS library, the Library of Congress in Washington D.C, the Burke Library at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City, the YDS library at Yale University and the National Library of China in Beijing. The superb Inter-library Loan Service provided by the NUS library was particularly helpful in my initial research. To all those, named and unnamed, who helped in various ways I am grateful. Whatever errors or mistakes found on the pages of this thesis are my own. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements i Summary iv Introduction 1 Chapter One: The End of a Decade: 1920s 26 American Intellectuals and the Soviet Union in the 1920s 27 The “Tamed Cynic” in the 1920s 30 The Move to New York 33 Niebuhr and Harry Ward 37 Niebuhr and Sherwood Eddy 40 Chapter Two: A Trip to the Soviet Union: Early 1930s 49 An Unforgettable Trip 50 Observing the Impact of the Soviet Union’s Industrialization from afar 70 Chapter Three: The Religion of Communism: mid-1930s 79 The Nature of Religion 80 The Religion of Communism 89 The Origin of Russian Communism 102 Chapter Four: Toward a Christian Political Ethic: Late 1930s 111 Criticisms of Christianity 112 Theologians and Communism 122 The Need for a Radical Religion 129 Myth and Meaning 135 The Rediscovery of Sin 151 Political Sin Revealed – the Moscow Trials 161 Chapter Five: Russia, a Great Comrade: World War II 177 An End to Illusions 179 Russia, a Comrade in Arms 189 Russia, a Partner after the War 198 Conclusion 216 Select Bibliography 229 iii Summary Built largely on his journalistic writings, this study reveals that the Soviet Union occupied a very special position in the development of Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought. Niebuhr’s engagement with the Soviet Union from 1930 to 1945, this dissertation argues, played a decisive role in the formation of Christian realism, a process that was marked by his unflagging effort to bring Christianity to bear upon the urgent social and political problems of contemporary society. This was embodied in the following aspects. First, Niebuhr’s encounter with the communist religion (as he called communism) not only resulted in his rejection of the liberalistic interpretation of religion but also greatly deepened his understanding of the nature of religious faith itself. Second, grappling with this communist religion also drove Niebuhr to see more clearly the impotency of Western Christianity when it came to the problem of justice. The launch of Radical Religion in the mid-1930s represented Niebuhr’s concrete effort in revitalizing Christianity so that Christians could rise up to the challenges of contemporary political and social problems. Third, his “flirtation” with Marxism not only led him to “rediscover” sin, the linchpin of Christian realism, but also contributed to the emergence of the key category, namely, myth and meaning in his theology. Lastly, Niebuhr’s realistic approach to international power politics, culminating in the “positive defense” policy regarding the reconstruction of Europe during the period under examination, was a direct result of his engagement with the Soviet Union. iv Introduction Background of the Study Reinhold Niebuhr, “the greatest Protestant theologian born in America since Jonathan Edwards,” left behind not only a legacy of theological realism that was underpinned by his reinterpretation of the notion of “sin”, but also a remarkable career of active political involvement almost exceptional in his profession. 1 A Christian idealist in the 1920s, a socialist radical in the 1930s, a seasoned realist during the Second World War and afterwards, the trajectory of Reinhold Niebuhr’s career was as impressive as the scope of his masterpiece, The Nature and Destiny of Man , in which he grappled with various philosophies like Rationalism, Idealism, Romanticism, and Marxism. In his intellectual biography essay, Niebuhr described the central interest of his life as “the defence and justification of the Christian faith in a secular age, particularly among what Schleiermacher called Christianity’s ‘intellectual despisers.’ ” 2 Indeed, like his distinguished contemporaries Emil Brunner, Karl Barth and Paul Tillich, who worked for more than twenty years as his friend and colleague at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City, Niebuhr’s deepest conviction was that the Christian estimate of man is truer and profounder than any of its secular alternatives. But unlike these prominent figures – and other American Christian thinkers such as Harry Ward, another of his colleagues at Union – Niebuhr developed a distinctive perspective in understanding 1 “Death of a Christian Realist”, TIME magazine (Monday, June 14, 1971). 2 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Intellectual Biography”, in Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1956), edited by Charles Kegley and Robert Bretall, P. 3. 1 human nature and social realities, and was passionate in relating biblical faith to political and social problems. Emil Brunner once summarized Niebuhr’s distinctive contributions this way: With him theology broke into the world; theology was no longer quarantined, and men of letters, philosophers, sociologists, historians, even statesmen, began to listen. Once more theology was becoming a spiritual force to be reckoned with. Reinhold Niebuhr has realized, as no one else has, what I have been postulating for decades but could not accomplish to any degree in an atmosphere ruled by abstract dogmatism: namely, theology in conversation with the leading intellects of the age. 3 When TIME magazine featured Niebuhr in the cover story of its twenty-fifth anniversary issue, as one of his biographers Charles Brown pointed out, it was essentially in recognition of his stature as the nation’s foremost religious and political thinker. 4 Often thought of as “the father of Christian realism,” Niebuhr had fully developed his “liberal realist faith” by the end of the Second World War. 5 But As Robin Lovin observed, Niebuhr gave little time to definitions in his work and this was especially apparent in the terminology of Christian realism itself: “Niebuhr’s position emerged as a complex of theological conviction, moral theory, and meditation on human nature in which the elements were mutually reinforcing, rather than systematically related.” 6 In a nutshell, these mutually reinforcing elements include (but are not limited to): an understanding of faith as primarily an expression of trust in the meaningfulness of human existence; a reinterpretation of “sin” as pride or human self-centeredness; a recognition of love as the 3 Emil Brunner, “Some Remarks on Reinhold Niebuhr’s Work as a Christian Thinker”, in Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought , P. 29. 4 Charles Brown, Niebuhr and His Age: Reinhold Niebuhr’s Prophetic Role in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992), P. 2. 5 Richard W. Fox, “Reinhold Niebuhr and the Emergence of the Liberal Realist Faith, 1930-1945”, The Review of Politics , Vol. 38, No. 2 (April 1976), P. 264. 6 Robin Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1995), P. 3 2 highest ideal in ethics and justice as the ultimate goal in politics respectively; an emphasis on the dialectic relationship between love and justice; an apprehension of mystery and meaning within and beyond the dramas of history; a pragmatic tactic of pursuing proximate rather than final solutions in politics.
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