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Among other treasures, the Palazzo Pitti, the most massive palace in Florence, offers an artistic tribute to the human spirit from the 18th century onward. The more than 2,000 paintings and sculptures housed in its Gallery of Modern Art (one of six museums in the palace) include works of Italian naturalism, neoclassicism, and impressionism. The art is impressive. But something is missing: the religious works that populate the city's other venues.
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This absence leaves the visitor unprepared for Antonio Ciseri's Ecce Homo, an immense canvas re-creating a scene from the Gospel of John. Catching the gallery stroller unawares, it instantly threatens to seize the heart. Pontius Pilate is garbed in a long, extravagant robe, his back turned toward the viewer. Pilate leans into the crowd, left arm extended, hand open, pointing to his prisoner. It is Jesus of Nazareth. He is stripped to the waist and his hands are bound behind his back. On his face is a look of condemnation mingled with deep sadness and resolve.
The claims of Christianity have a way of intruding into our modern lives, like paintings that don't seem to fit the mood of a gallery. Christian leaders can have a similar effect on the societies in which they live: They can be compelling and controversial at the same time.
Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the 20th century's leading public theologians, was such a figure. A one-time pacifist, he became a prominent hawk on the eve of World War II. A man of the Left, he nevertheless defended democratic capitalism on Christian grounds. What is surprising is how often this Protestant intellectual has been cited of late by politicians, commentators, and academics of all kinds.
Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks invokes the spirit of Niebuhr to recommend a "humble hawkishness" in American foreign policy. Peter Beinart calls Niebuhr "the hero" of his book The Good Fight, an effort to breathe life into a moribund liberalism. E. J. Dionne, in Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right, pines for another Niebuhr to relaunch the Great Society vision. Barack Obama praises Niebuhr as "one of my favorite philosophers." As political theorist William Galston told the Religion News Service, "After a period of neglect, Reinhold Niebuhr is the man of the hour."
Clearly there are aspects of Niebhur's "Christian realism," the public theology he formulated in the 1930s, that resonate today. Niebuhr rejected the "utopian illusions" of Left and Right: Politics could not usher in the kingdom of heaven, but neither could believers fail to strive for social justice on earth. The implications for American foreign policy were immense. No matter how noble its founding ideals, Niebuhr warned, the United States could not fully escape the corruptions and complexities of power. To believe otherwise signaled the onset of hubris—and eventual decline. Few thinkers offered such a searching critique of America's world-power status and global promotion of democracy.
Nevertheless, many Niebuhr admirers have a disposition that blunts much of his message. They have fastened onto his critique of America's national foibles and used it like an axe to dismember U.S. foreign policy under the Bush Administration. Remarkably, they tend to ignore the religious core of Niebuhr's political thought: his Christian understanding of the tragedy of human nature. It was this German-born theologian, after all, who tried to reclaim the biblical doctrine of original sin during the inter-war period.
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