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Niebuhr's chief contribution to U.S. liberal thinking, his friends say, is keeping his fellow liberals on the path of the pos sible. "You don't get world government," he once said, "by drawing up a fine constitution. You get it through the process of history. You grow into it." The feelings of his fellow theologians are more mixed. Some criticize his failure to think and act in terms of the church or to generate ideas that would help to counteract modern irreligion and immorality. Others find his ideas of sin too grandiose, too remote from the common tares of mankind. Some feel that he could do with more human warmth and less intellectual incandescence.
But there are few who do not respect his questing intelligence or the spiritual inspiration which has infused old ortho doxy with the tremor of new life. Most would agree with the words of the late Dr. William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, when he met Reinhold Niebuhr for the first time: "At last I've met the troubler of my peace."
*The doctrine that God is the sole cause of the world process, the world and man having no independent reality.
*The belief that every generation is directly under God's judgment (as opposed to "teleological eschatology," which puts the judgment at some future time).
* Dr. Niebuhr was ordained in the Evangelical Synod of North America, a German Lutheran church now a part of the Evangelical and Reformed Church.
*The other four: Philosophers William James, Josiah Joyce, John Dewey, William Ernest Hocking.