Quotes About Niebuhr

The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.

Frequently I remember something H. Richard Niebuhr wrote after having spent a number years trying to formulate a comprehensive perspective on faith. He likens faith to a cube. From any one angle of vision, he points out, the observer can see and describe at least three sides of the cube. But the cube has back sides, a bottom and insides as well. Several angles of vision have to be coordinated simultaneously to do any real justice in a characterization of faith

The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.

Throughout the rest of the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries numerous travelers, each with a different idea as to the identification of the various localities and ruins, journeyed to Mesopotamia, all trying to fit what they saw into the Biblical frame of reference. Between 1761 and 1767, there took place one of the most valuable of these expeditions, that of Carsten Niebuhr, a Danish mathematician who, besides

Every experience proves that the real problem of our existence lies in the fact that we ought to love one another, but do not.

The pretensions of final truth are always partlyan effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge.

Transvaluation of values," a term derived from Nietzsche (who derided Christianity's embrace of the weak), is the heart of Niebuhr's perspective on the cross.