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Catastrophic Paradoxes. And yet, as 20th Century civilization reaches a climax, its own paradoxes grow catastrophic. The incomparable technological achievement is more & more dedicated to the task of destruction. Man's marvelous conquest of space has made total war a household experience and, over vast reaches of the world, the commonest of childhood memories. The more abundance increases, the more resentment becomes the characteristic new look on 20th Century faces. The more production multiplies, the more scarcities become endemic. The faster science gains on disease (which, ultimately, seems always to elude it), the more the human race dies at the hands of living men. Men have never been so educated, but wisdom, even as an idea, has conspicuously vanished from the world.
Yet liberal Protestants could do little more than chant with Lord Tennyson:
O, yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill, To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood...
It was a good deal easier to see that Tennyson was silly than to see that the attitude itself was silly. That was the blind impasse of optimistic liberalism. At the open end of that impasse stood a forbidding and impressive figure. To Protestantism's easy conscience and easy optimism that figure was saying, with every muscle of its being: No.
His name was Reinhold Niebuhr. He was an Evangelical-pastor, a professor of applied Christianity at Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary, an editor of Christianity and Crisis, Christianity and Society, contributing editor of the Nation, and an ex-Socialist who was still unflaggingly active in non-Communist leftist movements. He was also the author of countless magazine articles and eleven books on theology. His magnum opus, the two-volume Nature and Destiny of Man, was the most complete statement of his position.
Against the easy conscience, Dr. Niebuhr asserted: man is by the nature of his creation sinful; at the height of man's perfection there is always the possibility of evil. Against easy optimism, he asserted that life is inevitably tragic. Says Niebuhr: "Mankind is living in a Lenten age."
Dr. Niebuhr was one liberal Protestant who had indeed heard the Voice out of the whirlwind. It spoke the thought of three God-tormented men: Russian Novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, Danish Theologian Soren Kierkegaard and Swiss Theologian Karl Earth.
World War I ended the age of liberalism. More than half a century before it ended, two men had felt that it was ending. They were Fyodor Dostoevsky and Sören Kierkegaard. Both men were pessimists. To Dostoevsky, the human situation was a tragic drama. To Kierkegaard, it was a tragic argument. Both men felt that the anguish of human experience, the truth of man's nature and God's nature and the relationship of God and man, could be grasped only by a new dimension of perception.