Niebuhr at Yale

A reporter from the Yale Daily News was sent to report the visiting speaker. This time it was no routine chapel assignment. The News reporter wrote: "An electrically tense audience packed itself into Battell Chapel last night to hear Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr." The reporter did not exaggerate. For three successive nights Niebuhr, a lightning-fast speaker, held Yale undergraduates spellbound, and left behind a ferment of discussion.

To the audience in Battell Chapel, Nietuhr was no unheralded lecturer: Yale's undergraduates knew him as one of Protestantism's top thinkers, a scholar whose writing often taxes the understanding. But there was no trouble understanding his preaching, for Dr. Niebuhr preached the oldtime religion, without concession to the easy secularism of his time.

"Christian faith," said he, "stands or falls on the proposition that a character named Jesus, in a particular place at a particular time in history, is more than a man in history, but is a revelation of the mystery of self and of the ultimate mystery of existence."

Man, turning away from Christ, has reached "the dubious conclusion that history will emancipate him from all evil." But there is no salvation through history, and no escape from it, either. Determinism is not the answer, nor is the Hegelian theory that man improves on his journey through history, no matter what action he takes. "Christianity moves in all history, but it has a dimension above history . . . We Christians must accept the fact that we are in this age. We have to work out our lives' history in this period . . . We must make decisions."

Contrary to what many Christians believe, history is not the mere increase of love among men. "The anti-Christ grows with Christ," and where faith is strongest, temptation is also at its height. The anti-Christ today is Communism, "because it has the pretension of being God." Escaping it, Christian man must work out his own salvation; history will not save him. The course of the Christian is hard and perilous--but it is a true course.

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