A Review of The Nature and Destiny of Man

by Reinhold Niebuhr (Pgs. 178-228)

Reviewed by: Adam Parker

Class: Contemporary Theology

Instructor: Dr. Youngblood

“Man has always been his most vexing problem. How shall he think of himself?” Thus begins the book that Reinhold Niebuhr considered to be his magnum opus, The Nature and Destiny of Man. This first sentence is actually quite appropriate, given that Niebuhr is more concerned with man than he is with God, per se. It may be argued that it is more appropriate to call him an anthropologian. This review largely concerns his two chapters entitled “Man as Sinner.”

For Niebuhr, sin is “error rather than evil.” He considers anxiety to be the inevitable precondition for sin. “Anxiety is the inevitable concomitant of the paradox of freedom and finiteness in which man is involved” (Niebuhr 182). This anxiety comes from a tension between freedom and finitude. This point deserves some elaboration. The primary question is, what is “freedom,” and what is “finitude,” as far as Niebuhr is concerned?

Freedom comes from the fact that man is a spirit and thus, transcends nature. He has great potential, and Niebuhr considers this potential to be the grounding for saying that man is free. Man is finite, however, and as such, is not capable of ultimate freedom because he is limited and bound by his humanity. It is man’s desire to bypass his finitude and his yearning for more than he is capable, which results in sin. Human beings are created both free and finite, and human sin is inevitable. For Niebuhr, the fact that this is true and yet human beings are responsible for their sin is one of the great paradoxes of the Christian faith.

He then reduces all sin to two categories: pride and sensuality. He gives the example of a leader whose country is in danger. He argues that the leader is more concerned that his constituents look down on him than he is concerned for the safety of the people. Thus, pride is the sin of the leader in this example. For Niebuhr, pride is the desire of the free creature to transcend and surpass his finite existence. In other words, pride is a creature’s desire to perform at a level that he is naturally unable to perform at.

The other category of sin that Niebuhr discusses is sensuality. Sensuality is an internal condition, which results in, for example, “sexual license, gluttony, extravagance, drunkenness and abandonment to various forms of physical desire.” What, for Niebuhr, is that internal precondition for these expressions of sensuality? He defines it according to three different yet interdependent answers: 1) Sensuality is the result of self-love, to the point that it has defeated its own ends. 2) Using the language of Plato, Niebuhr says, “It is an effort to escape the prison house of the self by finding a god in a process or person outside of the self. 3) Lastly, Niebuhr considers sensuality to be a human being’s attempt to flee from the “confusion which sin has created into some form of subconscious existence.”

I was very interested to know what Niebuhr says of original sin and of imputation, but alas, he does not discuss these issues until later in the book. I found the chapters that I was able to read to be very revealing, particular with relation to the motivations human beings have when they sin. My only issue, from what I read, is that Niebuhr does not seem to take Scripture’s own words regarding sin as seriously he does the church fathers and modern psychologists. Nonetheless, Niebuhr does make a valiant effort to remain true to scripture and yet also to remain faithful to natural reason as regards explaining the human motive for sin.  

Adam C. Parker is a philosophy student at Grand Canyon University, in Phoenix, AZ. He can be contacted at: adamc.parker@gmail.com