FAITH IMPOSES OBLIGATIONS:

The fatal problem with this view is that historic Christianity--especially Protestant Christianity--has never reduced the gospel to these elements. The cross of Christ cannot be comprehended without an awareness of the depth of human guilt and the power of radical evil. "The gospel is something more than the law of love. The gospel deals with the fact that men violate the law of love," wrote Niebuhr in "Why the Christian Church is Not Pacifist". "The gospel presents Christ as the pledge and revelation of God's mercy which finds man in his rebellion and overcomes his sin."

Like no other American theologian of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr exposed the assumptions of progressive Christianity that helped to create a mood of political ambivalence and isolation in an age of global terror. Niebuhr's political theology--what became known as "Christian realism"--sought a more biblical view of how the Christian citizen can live responsibly within a civilization in crisis. During the 1930s and 40s, through his books, articles, and the magazine he founded and edited, Christianity and Crisis, Niebuhr reminded his generation that Protestant Christianity possessed unique resources to confront the problems and perplexities of the modern age.

We need to recover something of the Christian realism that proved so prescient in an era of theological confusion. As Niebuhr argued, contemporary historical events confirm the Reformation emphasis on the persistence of sin at every level of moral achievement; there is no way to fully escape the corrupting influence of power in any political act. To believe otherwise is to imagine that politics can transcend these earthly realities if only "the ethics of Jesus" would shape our priorities and methods.

No amount of Bible citations, Niebuhr explained, can conceal the humanistic assumptions behind this effort:

We have, in other words, reinterpreted the Christian gospel in terms of the Renaissance faith in man...We have interpreted world history as a gradual ascent to the Kingdom of God which waits for final triumph only upon the willingness of Christians to 'take Christ seriously.' There is nothing in Christ's own teachings...to justify this interpretation of world history. In the whole of the New Testament, Gospels and Epistles alike, there is only one interpretation of world history. That pictures history as moving toward a climax in which both Christ and anti-Christ are revealed.

Progressive Christianity, whatever its merits, bases its politics on a fundamentally flawed understanding of the human predicament. By insisting on political outcomes akin to the vision of life held out in the Sermon on the Mount, it promotes a foreign policy largely detached from political reality.

A foreign policy rooted in Christian realism, by contrast, begins with a sober view of the exercise of power. Enforcing justice, punishing wrongdoing, building democratic institutions--all of this is exceedingly difficult work, a truism as easily forgotten by political conservatives as it is by progressives. One of the most deeply mistaken ideas surrounding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, was that liberal democracies would emerge organically, almost inevitably, out of the ashes of decades of repression and war.

In The Case for Democracy, former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky argued that the democratic revolutions which toppled the Soviet Union depended on three key elements: enslaved people who yearned to be free, leaders outside who believed they could be, and policies that linked the world community to the regime's treatment of its own people. The book was mandatory reading in the Bush White House. "It will work anywhere around the world," Sharansky wrote, "including in the Arab world."

How could that be true? History--especially recent history--reminds us that there is no formula to assure a transformation from tyranny to democratic self-government.

The Protestant tradition, which emerged as a reaction against Catholicism's doctrine of perfectionism, is well-equipped to defend against this myth of progress. "The political life of man," wrote Niebuhr, "must constantly steer between the Scylla of anarchy and the Charybdis of tyranny." It is for good reason that the American Founders, armed with a strong dose of Protestant realism, worried that factions--especially those fueled by sectarian hatreds--would prove fatal to national unity. Thus Madison's insight in The Federalist: "Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob." [...]

Third, a foreign policy based on Christian realism makes the defense of Western political and religious ideals an overarching priority.

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