H. Richard Niebuhr

He studied under Roland Bighton, the great 16th century reformer scholar, reformation scholar.

She took classes with Richard Niebuhr, you know, other people there.

Went to...

France to Strasbourg, Basel, one year, 59, and took a course with Karl Barth and was in the Protestant faculty in the University of France in the Strongborn.

It is the devastation of souls and nations to tamper with God's word.

Here's what Richard Niebuhr, I've used this quote before.

I think it's very powerful.

I'll use it again.

You have to read it a couple of times, at least I did, to kind of really get a picture.

But then Karl Barth, Richard Niebuhr, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, post-liberal theologians.

We kind of grouped into one article instead of separating those all out.

And then N.T. Wright to close it out, which obviously he's still alive.

So Uh, Rusty Bryan shapes out Karl Barth, kind of, they're all kind of introduction articles, uh, kind of letting us know why you should know about this person.

I'm, I'm certainly, we've all heard of Karl Barth, but why should we have heard of Karl Barth? You know, Rusty Bryan helped shape that out.

Uh, after that, is it Stan next? Stan Ingersoll with Richard Niebuhr? Richard Niebuhr.

Yes.

Um, I go back to the 1920s for a lot of reasons, as, as, you know, in the 1930s, um, looking at Central Europe, but um, I'll get to that in a minute.

But, but one thing I do is I pull up a, a, an article that H. Richard Niebuhr, a Protestant Christian theologian, um, wrote in the 1920s.

This is 100 years old, and he basically just says, like one of the...

He's writing in the '20s, and he says, "One of the most appalling things, or that should be appalling to Christians in this country, is the color line inside the church." And in the tw- and he goes, in the kind of, in the '20s, kind of highlights what this looks like.

Excuse me, the Japanese invasion of China leading up to World War II.

So you have Richard Niebuhr.

He wrote in an article called The Grace of Doing Nothing, "The inactivity of radical Christianity is not the inactivity of a resigned patience, but of a patience that is full of hope and based on faith." So Richard was arguing for a sort of pacifism, a non-response to what was going on.

The reports of atrocities coming out from this invasion were much stronger than what we would, uh, later on hear in, in Germany and in Europe.

So it wasn't really until after World War II we saw fully what the Nazis were up to in Europe.

You can look that up.

But the war crimes coming out to the press at the time were very vivid of what was going on.

So Richard argues for non-involvement, and then one week later, the paper asked his brother to respond, and his brother reluctantly does so.