Reinhold Niebuhr

American · 1892 to 1971

Reinhold Niebuhr was born on June 21, 1892, in Wright City, Missouri, the son of Gustav Niebuhr, a pastor in the German Evangelical Synod who had emigrated from Westphalia, and his wife Lydia. He graduated from Elmhurst College in 1910, studied at Eden Theological Seminary, and earned his Bachelor of Divinity and Master of Arts from Yale Divinity School by 1915. That year he was ordained and took charge of Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit, a small congregation he grew to nearly seven hundred members over thirteen years spent watching Henry Ford's assembly lines reshape the city and its workers. He preached against the human costs of industrial labor, opened his pulpit to union organizers, and recorded his disillusionment with easy optimism in the diary later published as Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic. In 1928 he left the pastorate for Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he taught Christian ethics for more than three decades and became the most influential American theologian of his generation, read as closely by policymakers and journalists as by clergy. His 1939 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh grew into The Nature and Destiny of Man, his two-volume argument that human beings are creatures bound by nature yet free enough to imagine themselves beyond it, a freedom that is also the seed of every sin. He helped found the Union for Democratic Action, edited the journal Christianity and Crisis, and shaped the moral vocabulary of American Cold War liberalism. In 1943, at a small summer chapel in Heath, Massachusetts, he first spoke the words that became known as the Serenity Prayer. A severe stroke in 1952 curtailed his public life without silencing him; he kept teaching and writing for years afterward. He died on June 1, 1971, at his summer home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, at seventy eight.