THEORY AND PRACTICE

In an important essay published in 1964, the philosopher William K. Frankena sought to clarify the normative role of “love” in Christian thought. “Love” appears in the literature both as a duty and as a goal, Frankena wrote, and if we are to understand the differences between Christian writers, we must make an effort to identify their theories as deontological or teleological, and to specify what sort of deontology or teleology, exactly, the author has in mind. To make his point, Frankena analyzed and classified the ideas of most of the important Christian ethicists during the previous couple of decades, associating each with a consistent theoretical position. There was one important exception: “As for Reinhold Niebuhr, he appears to me to suggest, in one place or another, almost every one of the positions I have described; whether this spells richness or confusion of mind, I shall leave for others to judge.”

Whether or not Niebuhr was confused, he was certainly indifferent to the categories that Frankena made dominant in the American study of ethics. A generation of students trained to recognize act- and rule-deontology and act- and ruleteleology has had no better luck than Frankena himself in locating Reinhold Niebuhr in one of those pigeonholes.

Niebuhr's own inclination was not to elaborate a theory or a system, but to sketch the perspective that marks the thinking of a Christian Realist. For him, realism was a habit of asking certain questions and of questioning the answers one was likely to get in turn. One important expression of that perspective appears in his 1957 formulation of “Christian pragmatism:”