Why Can't I Be Reinhold Niebuhr?

(I originally wrote this as a posting to an online discussion group from my January class on Reinhold Niebuhr).

I thought I’d choose a provocative title, barring hubris.

In our discussion of ‘public theologians’ today (public intellectuals? Oy.) I was identifying the following elements of what made the phenomenon of Niebuhr:

+Household name; known outside the seminaries; accessible
+Work encompasses theology, politics, ethics, social problems
+Work combines writing, organizing, teaching, and preaching/speaking
[+Changes and adapts with and respond to times] (needed?)
….and according to Fox, a generous dose of ego?

Let me know if my list is incomplete in terms of being public, theological, and influential.

And a few things which didn’t seem to be needed:
+ a Ph.D (whew!)
+ great grades (um, whew!)
+perfectly referenced footnotes of other theologians
+quotations around stuff you borrowed, actually…
+ money?
+100% of your siblings going into the same field?

Okay, so that list is a work in progress. And I’m still wrestling with whether ‘maleness’ might be a necessity; that is, if a woman wrote in the vein of Niebuhr, would she just come across as ranting? (Or other terms applied to women exercising male behavior)

So…what are those barriers to raising up a voice that meets these criteria, ie, a new Niebuhr? Is it that those who are most like him in thinking are operating in such small circles; or that they only specialize in one area (Rossing vs. La Haye only); or that they only operate in one mode (writing but not organizing)?

So, are there other ‘invisible/unknown’ barriers? In trying to get to this, I started polling people during the break. What prevents Joe Genau or Kathleen Owens or Pat Morton from becoming the next Reinhold Niebuhr? What prevents Bob Cathey or Ken Sawyer from just stepping forward and becoming the next Niebuhr? (Come on, guys, it’d be fun…)

Are we ‘liberal seminarians’ too cognizant of self-care to ‘go there’? Or too modest? Or is it really just impossible, at least in this time? Just throwing out ideas here.

Or are we afraid of claiming that role and the weighty responsibility that comes with it? The Lutheran left in me says, ‘uff-da!’ Are we afraid of how greatly it would change our lives, that we would be confronted so heavily with our own inadequacies? That Niebuhr was somehow born so unique and special that he is to be isolated from us, that we are not to claim our own agency to such a broad horizon?

Sure spooks me. After all, I'm just an average schmuck, right?

So Joe wrote me a note last night using the phrase ‘the Legend of LeAnne,’ which makes me laugh, though I’ve heard it before. And it also embarrasses me (no worries, Joe). What I feel is that I am pretty much the same schmuck I was six years ago. I had some passion around human rights that compelled me to volunteer a year in a ‘relatively safe’ Oslo process zone; circumstance had it that the outbreak of war greeted me on my doorstep, literally, three weeks into that one year I was planning on. The choices after that were always, ‘so what to do now, given the circumstances I’m in?’ It wasn’t really so unique to me.

It strikes me that Niebuhr could not have planned for much if any of this, either. Nor can any of us, right? There are one's life circumstances which may prevent their engagement at the level they would prefer; there's their own passions, which are either frustrated or channeled; there is the chance of being in a 'right place' in a 'right time' (although I think there are many such, including where we are).

And then I ask, is this a worthy goal? Would it be useful to have another ‘Neibuhr’ around? Or would it just spawn a personality cult with more mindless followers? (i.e., La Haye)

One more thought I had, is it more likely that we will see another MLK Jr. before we see another Niebuhr? Now, he was a Rev. Dr., but he otherwise himself seems to have fit the bill. And, on a cynical note, would we be more likely in our supremacist tendency to acknowledge one leader rather than a movement within a repressed minority, might we recognize another MLK before recognizing another Niebuhr? I don’t know. And how much does assassination and isolation/idolization of the one discourage others from claiming their agency? I don’t know.

So, I’d be interested in hearing on this, and was quite attracted by the question in the syllabus for the day: the impossibility, and yet need for.

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True confession and learned wisdom: Mmm…coffee-cake. Thank you for gifting our class with such a treat! However: If one might wish to jot down a poignant observation in the middle of another’s presentation, pertinent to the presentation at hand, mind you, and one chooses to ‘share’ that poignant observation with a friend, one might wish to not write it on a folded-over napkin containing the streusel topping crumbs. Particularly if that friend is working at a laptop and might need to lift up the note to read it, thereby showering keyboard with said streusel topping. So sorry Joe, I do hope the computer will be okay despite its angry whirring noises, and my apologies to the class for the distraction of efforts to extricate said crumbs.

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And another question from our presentation on community, government, tyranny and anarchy—what about communities of anarchists?

(‘Come on everybody, let’s get together and smash a Starbucks?’)

Niebuhr is curiously silent, or had not had the privilege of meeting G8 protestors…

definitions of tyranny and absolutism are up for grabs…

peace,
Le Anne