I. Introduction
The aim of this paper is to discuss the relevance of revelation to morality in H. Richard Niebuhr. At the first glance of this topic, some may ask, Why should we require to deal with revelation when we speak of morality? Niebuhr's succinct answer is that revelation is "the foundation of a rational moral life," without which we become fools in our search for ethical life.1) In this respect we must speak of morality with reference to revelation. Here lies the importance of our topic.
Our research for the relevance of revelation to morality in H. Richard Niebuhr concentrates on the two sections ("Revelation and the Moral Law" and "Human Value and the God of Revelation") of the last chapter of The Meaning of Revelation. This investigation, however, needs to be dealt altogether with Niebuhr's other writings--such as "The Center of Value" and "Faith in Gods and in God" in Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, the first and the last chapter of Christ and Culture, "Value Theory and Theology" in The Nature of Religious Experience, and The Responsible Self--because his illustrations of our topic are sometimes well developed in those writings.
For this reason we are required to reconstruct Niebuhr's teaching on our topic partially, while largely following up with the stream of his logic flowing in the two important sections of The Meaning of Revelation. In research of this topic, my stance is not a faultfinder but a learner. Before examining the main issue, we need to sketch Niebuhr's idea of revelation briefly in order to investigate the relevance of revelation to morality.
II. Preliminary Remarks
Niebuhr accepts the conclusion of historical relativism that "all knowledge is conditioned by the standpoint of the knower" in the sense that any human understanding involves not only the spatio-temporal point of view but also human resources, such as languages, patterns, images, which are all under historical changes and limitations.2) However, this does not lead Niebuhr to agnostic relativism because he believes that, in spite of historical conditioning and conditioned, we can and do know something objective, universal, absolute.3) In a sense it is an act of faith to accept the reality of our experience as psychologically and historically conditioned. For this reason Niebuhr points out "animal faith" in natural and social sciences.4) As for knowledge of God, Niebuhr calls for the radical faith as total commitment to God. This informs that "neutrality and uncommittedness are great delusions where God and the gods of men are concerned."5)
According to Niebuhr, we have two types of history: the external history of dead things and the internal history of living selves. Simultaneously both pure and practical reasoning operate on the 'brute data' given in historical experience. Our talk of revelation does not entail the rejection of the external views of ourselves because, just as sense-perception does not occur without sensational data, so the internal experience does not emerge without external embodiment.6) However, each of perspectives concerns revelation from its peculiar perspective. The immediate data of pure reasoning are the sensations of the mere body, while those of practical reasoning are 'affections of the responsive self' such as joys and sorrows, loves and hates, fears and hopes. As far as ethics concerns the latter, it must seek the meaning of such immediate feelings.
How can the moral self find the meaning of immediate feelings? A typical answer may be that it is through reason that we can seek meaning behind our immediate feelings. Niebuhr, However, replies that "the heart reasons with the aid of revelation."7) He takes into consideration one more element, namely imagination as the section title "Imagination and Reason"8) insinuates.
For Niebuhr, imagination is a capacity to symbolize his experience by employing "concepts, images, patterns," without which "reason does not dispense."9) While pure reasoning investigates the complexity of reality as such by using the impersonal, effectual, and descriptive patterns, practical reasoning deals with it by employing the personal, valuational, and dramatic images. Problematic is not that both science and theology use imagination in terms of their interpretation of empirical data but that they employ false conceptions, images, and patterns.10) Therefore, our moral theology requires adequate imagination for its right understanding of immediate feelings.
What is an adequate imagination? Niebuhr answers that it is revelation. Through revelation moral selves can get to "a pattern of dramatic unity," which "brings rationality and wholeness into the confused joys and sorrows of personal existence ad allows us to discern order in the brawl of communal histories," rather than "the conceptual patterns of the observer's reason."11) From the revelation of Jesus Christ we can abstract 'dramatic images' which help us to illuminate and reconstruct our own beings and deeds in the remembered and anticipating present.
However, this rational value of revelation is not primary but instrumental in the sense that the illumination and reconstruction of our beings and actions are derived from the intrinsic value of revelation, not vice versa. In this respect, the value of revelation cannot be determined apart from the revealer himself. In other words, we cannot know personal and social selves here and now unless we are known by God.12) As far as a self is known by another and so knows itself through another's eyes, the self is the one committed to a certain person.
Who is the person by whom we are known and so whom we come to know? It is God the self-revealer as "our knower, our author, our judge and our only savior."13) This character of revelation informs that "we find ourselves to be valued rather than valuing and that all our values are transvalued by the activity of a universal valuer."14) In this respect, our valued character is the foundation of our valuing character.
Nevertheless, since the meaning of revelation does not occur without our "responsive acts" to God as self-revelatory, "revelation...is realized in us only through the faith which is a personal act of commitment, of confidence and trust..."15) Without response there happens no revelation in responsive selves, even though revelation always happens in nature. In this respect, the meaning of revelation does require our response to God the source of being and the center of value, and we must think and speak of Christian ethics in conjunction with God the revealer by whom we are known and so whom we come to know. Then, what relevance does revelation have to moral laws? The answer to this question is given in the following chapter.
III. Main Issue
Traditionally, Christians have confessed "the content of the Gospel as the 'saving truth and moral discipline'" manifested in the Council of Trent, the Westerminster Confession, the Formula of Concord, even though there are more or less differences among those beliefs.16) According to Niebuhr such creeds state that revelation informs that our understanding of God and our moral law are closely tied to God himself; but it does not explicate how they are interrelated. In order to answer to this question Niebuhr begins his argument by his analysis of our memory:
We carry in our personal memory the impress of moral laws; in our personal memory no less there are the long traditions of what ought and ought not to be done. As the latter tradition is embodied in laws, constitutions and institutions available to the external view, so the former doubtless has its physical counterpart in the structure, the neutral pattern of our organism. In both cases the external view does not understand these laws as we do from within.17)
This passage denotes two points: first, that moral law for Christians is mediated by both communal monuments which objectively embody those meanings out of the past and living persons who critically appropriate this legacy in the present; second, that moral laws mediated by our personal and social memory have been formed in the complex of internal history. These points affirm that it is erroneous to identify our moral law with our permanent imperatives because such identification is to confuse the true source with its ramification. For this reason Niebuhr accepts positively the criticism of philosophers and sociologists, the criticism that moral law is derived from the spatio-temporal realm of existence and that moral law is the "literal, habitual and institutional embodiments."18)
However, both of groups don't feel the necessity to refer to revelation in an account for the moral law. Niebuhr briefly criticizes that the case of philosophers is "confusion of views of the universal with universal views" and that of sociologists is "the totalitarian tendency which inclines us to believe that our outlook yields not only truth but all the truth there is."19) Niebuhr rejects the Kantian assertion that the moral law can be spoken and established without reference to revelation. He criticizes this assertion in two respects: our confessor-ship and our Christian context.
At first, Kantian duty "does not represent the self-analysis of the Christian confessor," nor does Kantian God deduced from the imperative reflect "the relativity of our historical reason, of our interest in the maintenance of selves and of our wishfulness for the preservation and victory of this particular individual or social self."20) In addition, Kantian assertion does not fit into the Christian context which concerns the will21) of God behind the moral law, recognizes the moral law as God's will, and sees the moral law as moving.22) Based upon these general criticisms, Niebuhr makes further his criticism about the Kantian presupposition that the moral law can be understood and established without regard to revelation of God.
First, he asserts that the true 'imperativeness' of the moral law is not derived from finite sources but from God the infinite. His explanation is this: if what we ought to do is to achieve what we ought to be, it can be avoided by the question, "why we ought to be anything else than we are; if the moral law is the demand of reason, it can be evaded by indicating that even "the best reason of the best men" is under "our doubt of reason's power and of the goodness of our best reasoners"; if the moral law is defined as "the demand of our society," it can be avoided by getting out of our society; if it is understood "the decree of life," the law can be evaded by "voluntary or involuntary death."23)
All of these finite sources of the moral law cannot be its true imperativeness because they are all evasive and finite. However, revelation informs that the true source of the moral law is nothing but God himself as far as the law is understood as God's demand upon us. Hence, the imperative behind the law is the imperative of God the demander.
Second, Niebuhr points out that "the moral law is changed, furthermore, by the revelation of God's self in that its evermore extensive and intensive application becomes necessary."24) His explication is why the law is a changing thing: while the Kantian duty is confined to some human beings at least or to all human beings at best, God's revealed will is extensively applied to all creatures, human and non-human, any of which is not excluded from the whole nexus of moral relations to God; while the Kantian law observes the good in such a way that "we love those who love us or who share our principles and do no harm to our values," the demand of God is applied not only to our friends, the oppressed, victims, but intensively to our enemies, oppressors, victimizers.25)
As far as a moral law goes on toward its extensive and intensive application, the changeless succession of moralities is illusionary because God's demand is freshly commanded upon us and understood by us in every new moment. For this reason, "when God becomes the will behind the moral law...a revolutionary transvaluation occurs because of it [revelation]".26) This moving character of the moral law is the clue to its corruptible character which connotes that the moral law is always a corruptible thing tainted by false imaginations and interested mind.
How can we be saved from such corruption? It is possible through our faith relationship to God the creator of all creatures.27) When we have faith in God the creator, we don't need to have false imaginations which glorify our worth and defend our distinctiveness from others. We don't need to fall into self-centeredness which seeks self-preservation amidst the fear of loss of our selves.28)
Then, how can we come to such faith? It is through revelation of God. Revelation of God is not a disclosure of the moral law but of the law's sin. Hence, it is our turning point from the imperative to "an indicative," from the law of love to "a free love of God and man."29) Through revelation of God Christians can continue to re-organize their law and to transform their life. For this reason, Niebuhr calls revelation of God as the "republication of the moral law."30) This implies that, as far as we respond to the demand of God the original author in revelation, our moral law continues to be re-articulated freshly and our moral life continues to be re-shaped creatively without resort to self-defensiveness. Therefore, revelation is the re-organizing principle of the moral law, as part of our understanding of God's will, and the transforming power of the moral life. 31)
In appendix A, The Responsible Self, Niebuhr maintains that our confessional theology finds the re-organizing principle and transforming power in the revelation of God through Jesus Christ. Such general principle and power image are not the purely conceptual but the symbolic principle and image because they are abstracted from Jesus Christ the person.32) For this reason, Niebuhr calls Jesus Christ as "the symbolic form."33)
Similar to Paul Tillich, Niebuhr understands one of functions of symbol as a reference to something transcendent beyond it. Jesus Christ as the symbolic form points to the transcendent God beyond himself and draws us into the transcendent One before whom we are unique selves. In our effort to appropriate the symbolic form we find ourselves in a new dimension or context. The God whom Jesus Christ called 'my father' becomes our father and we become his children. Here our self-understanding including our moral law is reconstructed radically.
Such renewed understanding allows our ultimate trust and loyalty to move from something finite to God the infinite who is worthy of such complete commitment. What was for Jesus Christ a response to God becomes for us as his followers a revelation of God. Through mediation of Jesus Christ, we are reconciled to the One on whom we including the many are absolutely dependent. This reconciliation makes us transform our moral life in every new moment. As Jesus interpreted "all actions upon him as signs of the divine action...and so responds to them as to respond to divine action," so may we do so.34) Therefore, we necessarily require revelation of God and confess that Jesus Christ as the symbolic form is the re-organizing principle for our morality, as part of our self-understanding of God's will, and the transforming power of our moral life.
Here it can be asked, "Is there other way to knowledge of God and the establishment of moral law from it?" Niebuhr answers 'yes.' He does acknowledge our natural capacity to discern moral laws and establish moral principles without the aid of revelation in that "we know an act to be our duty before we know it to be the will of God" and that without such pre-knowledge our cognitive procedure can not proceed.35) Then, is a natural knowledge of God sufficient enough that we can do discern moral laws and establish moral principles? Is revelation unnecessary and illusionary? Niebuhr answers 'no' in his confessional position.
According to Niebuhr, when they deal with values and moral law, Kantian philosophers recognize a source of value in the sufficient cause and "a being who unites worthiness to exist with existence."36) For them, God is demanded as the guarantor who will preserve all their values, existences, and goods. Some social scientists contend that God is the projection of religious need, behind which lies "the fear of death, of loss of goods and the desire for self-maintenance, and the "divine law is the projection of social custom" based upon natural faiths.37) Both of cases does not need to refer to "a source in special revelation."38)
Against philosophers Niebuhr argues that our God is not a personless god, pure abstraction, hypothetical apparatus. Such a god may meet our anticipation and permit "the static unity of established order."39) Our God revealed in Jesus Christ is beyond all our expectations, relativizes all finite values including moral law, and empowers us to proceed toward the growing unity of moral life. For this reason, Niebuhr maintains: "And so the oneness which the God of Jesus Christ demands in us is not the integration of our purposes and values but our integrity, singleness of mind and purity of heart."40) Here Niebuhr emphasizes the importance of our faith relation to the living God in our self-understanding and moral life. Truly, we cannot worship the dead god of philosophers but totally commit ourselves to the living God of Jesus Christ who created, sustains, redeems us.
Against social scientists Niebuhr argues the value of deity in Radical Monotheism and Western Culture. According to Niebuhr, every human being is a theist because she/he needs that which makes life worth living. Rejecting one god is accompanied by accepting another. Hence, to exist as a human being is to have faith in gods, or a god, or God. Polytheism and henotheism are frustrating and divisive because their answer to the inquiries of life's meaning always remains unanswered or partially answered, because their causes and their centers of value exclude other causes and other centers of value or contend with each other. All gods are derived from something finite, so will perish someday. God the One beyond the many alone is the ultimate cause and the ultimate center of value, does sustain our life worth living.
Here some may ask to Niebuhr, how can you say that such a living God, such a transcendent God is not a hypothetical apparatus, the projection of human need? Niebuhr answers that our living, transcendent God is neither hypothetical apparatus nor human projection because we find some image and pattern about such God in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
A life-death matter is beyond our control.41) For this reason, faith is understood a personal commitment to "something...that has power or is power."42) As far as that something has and is power, it requires us a total devotion to it more than a simple knowledge or an intellectual assent, although the former is closely related to the latter.
On the cross Jesus met God the enemy, the slayer, before whom all finite powers, such as existences, morality, values, are destroyed. Some may think death as the ultimate power and distrust God in face of death. However, Jesus trusted the ultimate power behind the power of death.43) Unto death Jesus Christ trusted God the last power rather than overwhelmed by the fear of his ultimate destiny believing his everlasting faithfulness to all his creatures. God kept his faithfulness to Jesus by "the raising of the temporal plane." On the cross God is known the enemy, the ultimate power, the inscrutable One, while we are known sinners, unbelievers.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the victory of universal trust over suspicion, of universal loyalty over disloyalty. This victory is won whenever and wherever we are reconciled to God. In this manner Jesus as revelation works as the reorganizing principle and transforming power of our morality, value, and life in our amidst to the end that we may respond to the One beyond the many as our friend.
In this final context we find that the will of God revealed in Jesus Christ stands beyond our expectations, moral law and principle. A god or gods may bestow us some integration of purposes and values, allow us to establish some universal moral law and principle, and guide us to the unity of moral life. However, this is simply an instrumental good, namely the good-for-us. The intrinsic goodness of God belongs to God himself. God as powerful enough for his goodness and good enough for his power refuses to serve our all our expectations and morality which have been made from the good-for-us perspective. Rather, he 'ministers' all our expectations, moral principle and law in a creatively transforming way.
Through the revelation in Jesus Christ the powerful and good God demands us "the sacrifice of all we would conserve and grants us gifts we had not dreaded of--forgiveness of our sins..., repentance and sorrow for our transgressions..., faith in him..., trust in his mercy." This is what Niebuhr calls "the revolution of the religious life" through revelation.44) Thus, it is evident that the true binding force of all beings and actions is derived from neither the self, nor the law, but the living God revealed in Jesus Christ.45) It is only when we see morality in light of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ that our human-centered ethics is reconstructed into God-centered ethics and our morality is empowered to proceed out of the foolish and sinful self-defenses toward its endless transformation. Therefore, we become fools in our search for morality without conjunction with revelation as "the foundation of a rational moral life."46)
IV. Conclusion
Similar to traditional theologians, Niebuhr begins his teaching of revelation and morality with the Christian conviction that revelation is the normative foundation of our morality. Unlike to them, Niebuhr rejects their identification of revelation with morality because he is well aware that our truths of revelation is subjected to historical relativism. In this respect, he accepts historical and Kantian criticisms. However, he doubts whether historical and metaphysical methods are sufficient enough for discussing the morality issue.
From his confessorship Niebuhr maintains that any universal imperative underived from the will of God is evasive and finite. In the Christian context he discovers that moral law is a moving thing, so that it should be applied extensively and intensively to changing everyday situations. Thus, he assert the changeless succession of morality to be illusionary and calls for faith in the revealed God in Jesus Christ.
In interpreting the will of God revealed in Jesus Christ Niebuhr abstracts the symbolic images and concepts from this revelation rather than the conceptual ideas and patterns from the established truths or order. Of course, he acknowledges a natural knowledge of God and the establishment of morality based upon it. For Niebuhr this approach is, however, not sufficient enough for our discussion of morality because in this rational but finite context we cannot understand and define the true feature of morality adequately. For this reason, Niebuhr falls for the ultimate and infinite context illuminated by the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. In the ultimate and infinite context of the special revelation Niebuhr finds adequate images, such as enemy, friend, and general principles for re-organizing and re-shaping our morality.
Throughout this entire work Niebuhr coherently and successfully opens the theological foundation for reassessment and transformation of morality in light of revelation. Specifically, his discoveries of relativism as the principle of limitation and conditioning, of faith relationship to the living God, of imagination and symbol in our reasoning process, of revelation's re-organizing and transforming power deserve to be praised.
Without the discovery of relativism we cannot discern morality from the will of God as its true source; without the discovery of faith relationship to the living God we fall into self-worship or supernaturalism by replacing the will of God by the established truths or miracles47); without the discovery of imagination and symbol we are astray according to the guidance of foolish reason led by false imaginations; and without the discovery of revelation's re-organizing we cannot come to the new but renewable understanding and the creative transformation of morality. Based upon such discoveries, it is, therefore, concluded that Niebuhr constructs his ethics and argument of morality fairly coherently, even though we can find that some ideas and issues are not fully developed.
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1) H. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1960) p. 132.
2) Ibid., p.7, 8-18.
3) Niebuhr states that "the recognition and acknowledgement of our relativity, however, does not mean that we are without an absolute" [H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper Torchbooks,1951), p.194].
4) The Meaning of Revelation, p.22.
5) Ibid.. p. 36.
6) Ibid., pp. 89, 84-7. See: "The Responsibility of the Church for Society," The Gospel, The Church And The World, ed. Kenneth Scotte Latourette (New York: Harper, 1946), pp. 116-17. See also The Responsible Self (New York, Evaston, and London: Harper & Row, 1963), p.63-65.
7) Ibid., p. 131.
8) This is the first section of chapter III.
9) The Meaning of Revelation, pp.96-7.
10) Niebuhr explicates false imaginations by three examples: an example of mental insanity, of social misunderstanding, and of egoism (Ibid., pp.99-101).
11) Ibid., pp. 109, 110.
12) This known-knowing process continues to happen between a self and its object, while in science it is performed in such a one-sided way from a subject to an object (Ibid., p. 145).
13) Ibid., p. 152.
14) Ibid., p. 153.
15) Ibid., p. 154.
16) Ibid., p. 156, 156-58.
17) Ibid., p. 159.
18) Ibid., p. 161.
19) Ibid., p. 162.
20) Ibid., p. 164.
21) Niebuhr is reluctant to attribute the term 'lawgiver' to God because it has a possibility of misuse in that the moral law is the consequence of the self's interpretation of God's actions upon it in the personal and social memory, that the law is not given without mediation in any way. For this reason, Niebuhr prefers doer to lawgiver in his other writings. Here the term 'the will [of God]' signifies God as doer who is the true source of the moral law. Cf. The Responsible Self, p. 67.
22) In The Responsible Self, Niebuhr maintains that deontological ethics tend to preclude the question of what is going on because it fails to see that living reality is moving and so may betray the universal law (The Responsible Self, p. 67).
23) Ibid., p. 165.
24) Ibid., p. 166-67.
25) Ibid., p. 167.
26) Ibid., p. 168.
27) Niebuhr asserts that "knowledge of God is available only in religious relation to him" ["Value Theory and Theology," The Nature of Religious Experience: Essays in Honor of Douglas Clyde Macintosh, ed. com.: J.S. Bixler, R.L. Calhoun, H.R.Niebuhr (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937) p.115].
28) Ibid., p. 173. Cf. The Responsible Self, p. 100.
29) The Meaning of Revelation, pp. 170, 171.
30) Ibid., p. 171.
31) In the conclusion of "The Center of Value," Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, Niebuhr maintains that the radical faith in God the One beyond the many transforms our knowledge and action adequately (See "The Center of Value," Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, pp. 125-26).
32) In Christ and Culture, Niebuhr locates Jesus' practice of faith, hope, love, obedience, and humility virtues in his relation to God. Each virtue abstracted from the others manifests a personal identity before God that accounts for the excellence of that virtue and the other as well. For this reason, Niebuhr maintains that "the strangeness, the heroic stature, the extremism and sublimity of this person, considered morally, is due to that unique devotion to God and to that single-hearted trust in Him which can be symbolized by no other figure of speech so well as by the one which calls him Son of God (Christ and Culture, p. 27).
33) See appendix A, "Metaphors and Morals," of The Responsible Self (pp. 154-59).
34) The Responsible Self, p. 167,
35) The Meaning of Revelation., pp. 163, 175-76.
36) Ibid., p. 179.
37) Ibid., p. 181.
38) Ibid., p. 181.
39) Ibid., p. 184.
40) Ibid., p. 185.
41) The Responsible Self, pp. 114-15.
42) Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, p. 117.
43) Ibid., p. 187.
44) Ibid., p. 190.
45) The Responsible Self, p. 122.
46) Ibid., p. 132.
47) Niebuhr distinguishes his dogmatic faith in God from "uncritical dogmatism" which is "the practice of those explicit or disguised relational systems of thought about the good which arbitrarily choose some limited starting point for their inquiries and either end with the confession that value is an irrational concept which must nevertheless be rationally employed because nature requires this, or otherwise rule out of consideration great realms of value relations as irrelevant" [Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1960), p. 113)].