Nature and Destiny of Man

He delivered these lectures in Edinburgh as the war began, and that is the only way to hear them: a theologian before a Gifford audience in a blacked-out city, telling it that the catastrophe outside had begun in a truth about human beings which no optimism could talk its way around. Niebuhr's claim is that we are creatures who know we are creatures, animals dizzy with the knowledge of our own finitude, and that the anxiety of standing at that junction, free and dust at once, is where sin begins.