Wieman on Science and Religion

Wieman's agenda was set forth in his 1926 book Religious Experience and Scientific Method where he envisioned a philosophy of religion based on empirical science. Such grounding would assure that religion “plant itself firmly on the data of sense else it … become the plaything of the sentimentalist and nothing more”(Wieman , 5). Not only did he hope the scientific method would serve to rescue the Christian religion from both sentimentality and from the prison of an outmoded tradition (Wieman , 59); he also firmly believed that, if the findings of science continued and the extension of the scientific method gained increasing influence over diverse areas of life, then there would be an increase in naturalistic religion. At the same time Wieman confessed that while it was science that was the dominant movement of the time, giving the age its “distinctive character,” there was “much in modern life which is a continuation of the past and has not been greatly modified by science” (Wieman and Horton , 247). Assuredly, religion was, for Wieman, the leading candidate.

Wieman's aim was the advancement of a scientifically based theology formulated entirely within the boundaries of the natural world. As time passed it became clear that Wieman had in mind a wide, organic view in which a science limited to mechanical relations would be replaced by a more mature science that “passes over to a stage of development dealing with organic connections found throughout natural existence.” He believed that “only then can science give sufficient room for the higher outreaches of the human spirit. Only then will we have a naturalism which can give ample room for the highest aspirations of love and faith, hope and beauty” (Wieman , 45). By 1946, while advocating a naturalistic view having “no recourse to any ‘transcendental grounds, orders, causes or purposes beyond events, their qualities, and relations,” Wieman insisted on taking “account of all the intricacies and subtleties—all the height, breadth, and depth of human existence—omitting, explaining away, flattening out, or truncating nothing” (Wieman , 6) He stressed that

When science and philosophy seek truth in disregard of that qualitative abundance which value demands, they run dry. They taper off into abstractions which, for a time, a few specialists may pursue with ardor but in which, in the end, even they lose interest. Truth as one component of value must serve qualitative abundance, even as abundance must meet the demands of truth. (Wieman , 161)

Writing for the journal Zygon in , Wieman made it clear that “we cannot take religion as it is and science as it is and put them together in co‐operation to promote the good of human existence. Instead we must distinguish that form of religion which can co‐operate effectively with science; and we must distinguish that application of science which can co‐operate with this form of religious commitment. Otherwise the two cannot work together” (Wieman , 32). What was required was “new religious reformation.” In 1966 he provided a summation of his mature position on the subject:

Science is the way we achieve knowledge and power; religion is the way we give ourselves in supreme devotion to the best we know. If knowledge and power are not merged with supreme devotion to the best we know, they will not be used effectively to serve the best we know. If supreme devotion is not guided, informed, and empowered by the most penetrating method of inquiry at our command, our devotion will stumble and blunder in relative futility. I think we are generally agreed that the resources of science and the resources of religion must be united if the human race is not to destroy itself or sink to desperate futility just when it reaches its highest peak of power. (Wieman , 125)

Wieman on Religion

Wieman's understanding of religion, as we have seen, moved within the context and framework of the natural world—the world as given. Aware that the term “religion” had different meanings, he described “religion in general” in terms of “reacting to something as though it were that to which all human life should be devoted.” More specifically, Wieman insisted that the “religion of the sort we wish to advocate is dedicating life in supreme devotion to that order of existence and possibility which provides the highest values which ever can be actualized.” (Wieman , 135) As Wieman saw it, only by “cultivating an attitude which issues in the passionate search for the utmost possibilities of value which the present state of existence may yield” (Wieman , 252) can existence “be saved from its self‐destructive and degenerative propensities and transformed to contain the fullest content of value that human life can ever embody”(Wieman , 384).

Wieman's naturalism, as opposed to most naturalists, was a “theistic naturalism.” While preferring nontheistic humanism over traditional forms of theism, Wieman finally rejected humanism because it attributed salvation, understood as “transformation toward the greater good,” to human power. Given his rather unique non‐traditional form of theocentric religion, the question arose as to what sense Wieman gave to the term “God.” In brief, Wieman saw God as that “which carries highest possibilities of values” (Wieman , 106); as “the source of value—the process by means of which increased value is made possible”; as “the integrating process at work in the universe, as that which “advances qualitative meaning.” For Wieman “growth of meaning” was something “ultra‐human,” although not in the sense of something supernatural nor meaning something outside of human life. Growth of meaning referred to the “transformation of the meanings [human beings have] into a richer, more far flung and more closely knit system of meanings” which “necessarily bursts through human control and lifts man to higher levels of meaning.” Such “growth itself man does not do, although he undergoes it” (Wieman , 531). Indeed, “this growth of meaning in the world … is God at work in our midst”(Wieman , 962). Yet even while the “force of the superhuman growth of meaning and value” is at work shattering “old institutions, sentiments, procedures, ideals and habits,” Wieman insisted that men must help clear the way until “old destructive debris is taken out or the way” Anyone who thinks that “God will do it all and man has nothing to do, is wrapped in a blanket of delusion” (Wieman , 964).

Wieman saw “the central problem of religious inquiry” to be finding a way to bring “the whole of human life most completely under the control of that creativity which carries all the constructive potentialities or positive value residing in human existence” (Wieman , 393). God, for Wieman, is preeminently “Creativity” in the sense of being the structure enabling creativity in human life—a transcendent, changeless reality. God is also the “creative event”—the immanent reality that makes possible creative events. Creativity and the creative transformation it brings about in human life belong to God, not man. Both remain embedded in, and operate solely within, the natural world and bear no supernatural reference. According to W. Creighton Peden, Wieman was only referring here to the idea of God “as creative in the sense that God is the character, structure, or form which enables the events of human life to be creative”(Peden , 218). Creativity for Wieman refers to what a human being has been given, namely, “that uniquely developed valuing consciousness which is himself; and this is not produced by himself or by anything other than the creative interchange which is here called creativity”(Wieman , 395). Posing the rhetorical question “What, then, is God?” Wieman answered:

It is that order of actual and possible structures of existence which includes the ultimate consummation which Jesus called the kingdom of God. It is not the total cosmic order. It is not the order of nature, taking nature in its totality. It is that order of structures of value, actual and possible, which will ultimately issue in the realization of the greatest value when we rightly conform to its requirements. That is what God is. (Wieman , 221–22).

Remaining entirely within his naturalistic framework, Wieman even made room for both God's “transcendence” and “hiddenness.” He claimed that “when the naturalist says that God transcends this world he means that God is the uncomprehended totality of all that is best. This totality is not of this world in the sense only that it exceeds, and in many cases, diverges from and antagonizes, the goods and goals which are cherished in the minds of men” (Wieman and Horton , 259). As for God's hiddenness, Wieman identified the domination of “self‐concern” as the reason for our inability to discern God. What is required to overcome God's hiddenness is a fundamental redirection of our interest and transformation of our attention.

When the naturalist says that God is here with us all the time in nature, and when he says that this deity is to be known in the way in which anything else in nature is known and appreciated, that does not mean that any man can lift his eyes and see God standing before him. Our interest must be redirected. The forms of our attentive awareness must be transformed, our desires must be turned toward other objectives, our whole personalities must be changed before the goodness of God can pour into human consciousness. (Wieman and Horton , 437–38).

With his firm desire for a scientifically based religion, Wieman, in a 1954 letter to Ralph W. Burhoe, expressed his conviction that “the schools of religion which provide the accepted intellectual leadership of the church, such as Union Seminary in New York, and those connected with Yale and Harvard and now, perhaps, the Divinity School at Chicago, after recent changes, will not consider the scientific approach to religious questions.” Such institutions, according to Wieman, were the bases for the “resurgence of orthodoxy” (Wieman to Burhoe, November 14, 1954). Reinhold Niebuhr, who, in 1958, Wieman acknowledged to be “the most influential religious thinker in our time in the United States” (Wieman , 145) was among the major voices at Union Theological Seminary.

Wieman and Christianity

Writing to Charles Hartshorne in 1938, Wieman identified himself with those who were “deeply concerned to Christianize naturalism and naturalize Christianity”(Wieman to Hartshorne, January, 1938). By and large Wieman's naturalized theology had employed language that was deliberately remote from traditional Christian terminology. Yet in his 1939 article “Some Blind Spots Removed”—reflecting a decade of changes in his thinking—Wieman sought to align his view with traditional Christianity (Wieman , 116). Admitting that he was using traditional Christian symbols more frequently than he had a decade earlier, he denied this indicated any turn toward orthodoxy on his part. Wieman based his decision on the fact that we share this particular history with its tradition and symbols. Insofar as “superstitions and superficialities have been cleared away from these ancient forms of expression, they carry a depth and scope of meaning which no other words can convey.” In the chapter on “Religion” in his 1946 book The Source of Human Good, Wieman opened with these lines:

The religion of Western culture is an inheritance from Christianity and Judaism; hence we have no vital access to the depth of any other living faith. Some few experts may achieve erudition about Buddhism, Confucianism, or the religion of the Australian aborigines; but even they learn only the observable facts. They cannot acquire the personal intimacies and vital resources of these other fellowships. Western man must find his strength in his own tradition—we have to accept this inescapable fact. (Wieman , 263)

Wieman gave priority to the Jewish Christian tradition in the West rather than the Greek Christian tradition because of the former's emphasis on the “sovereign good” working “creatively in history” as opposed to the Greek tradition's emphasis on an abstract system of “Forms or a Supreme Form.” However, in the naturalized version Wieman advocated,

The active God derived from the Jewish tradition and the Forms derived from the Greek tradition are brought down into the world of time, space, and matter and are there identified as events displaying a definite structure with possibilities. When we insist that nothing has causal efficacy except material events, by “material” we mean not merely pellets of inanimate matter but also events that include the biological, social, and historical forms of existence. These, however, never cease to be material. Nothing has value except material events, thus understood, and their possibilities. (Wieman , 8)

Wieman was willing to use traditional Christian words so long as they were employed in the radically changed context of his time. He maintained that “inasmuch as the ancient Christian words, when seriously and nobly used, were employed to designate what the users believed to be the most important realities for all human living, one can likewise use them in this way today” (Wieman , 262). However wary Wieman was of religion based on sheer emotion, he knew that religious words “must incite to action, generate attitudes, and awaken sensitivity.” Consequently, we cannot avoid turning to the symbols that have the power to “shape conduct, generate attitudes, and awaken responsiveness” (Wieman , 263). It is precisely those religious symbols in common use for a long period of time, having “the emotive power required to orient human personalities toward the most important realities,” that have come to us out of the Christian tradition (Wieman , 264).

With the ground cleared, Wieman was willing (1) to use the word “sin” as pointing to our arrogance in assuming “that our own ideals, no matter how far beyond our attainment, can be identified with the infinite riches of God”; (2) to describe the “transforming good” in life as “the Grace of God”; (3) to see this divine grace “in Christ Jesus”—not of the person Jesus himself, but rather “the working of a process of history which used that personality … operating as the growth of a community which broke through all barriers … for the unlimited enrichment of life”; (4) to appreciate the “church” as “an association of people which transmits a way of living that is controlled supremely by the grace of God”; and (5) to use the term the “otherness of God” as the creativity that effects growth in concrete situations (Wieman , 117, 118).

Wieman's aim to Christianize naturalism while naturalizing Christianity thus found a way to proceed. On the one hand, Christian words should be used “seriously and devoutly” since “there is no entry into the Christian way of living … or into the Christian community [or participation] in the stream of Christian history … [and] no purifying and redirecting of Christian life except through the use of Christian words.” On the other hand, “we must also assume the responsibility of determining their meaning… . with minds always ready to catch any intimation of a better understanding of what, in the light of modern thought and personal insight, the realities referred to may be” (Wieman , 267; italics added). Whatever the degree Wieman was willing to go in making his peace with traditional Christian language, there were definite limits. In response to a criticism Bernard Meland made of Wieman's tendency to universalize rather than discerning the distinctive witness to an ultimate good made in Christianity (Meland to Wieman, March 4, 1961), Wieman somewhat stridently replied:

I do object … to saying that Christianity provides the best answer because Christianity has all the extremes of evil and error that any religion can have. Hence the word ‘”Christianity” should be used for the rare mountain peak of excellence appearing on rare occasion in the history of this faith. (I feel so strongly on this point that my typewriter begins to sputter when I try to write about it.) I recoil in revulsion at the bland and complacent reference to “Christianity” and “the Christian faith” and the “biblical faith” consistently made by all the theologians when it is obvious that each is talking about his own version of this multiform religion with its extremes of horror. (Wieman to Meland, March 11, 1961)

Focusing on Niebuhr Alone

Niebuhr occupied the center of Wieman's critical attention in 1956 by way of a March 3, 1953, invitation to contribute to a forthcoming volume on Niebuhr that Charles W. Kegley and Robert W. Bretall were editing for the Library of Living Theology (Kegley and Bretall to Wieman, March 6, 1953). Wieman's chapter in that volume was appropriately entitled “A Religious Naturalist Looks at Reinhold Niebuhr.” Although Wieman's assessment of Niebuhr's thought was highly critical, because of Niebuhr's recent strokes he did choose to soften the tone of his criticisms.

Wieman began by identifying what he believed to be Niebuhr's central problem, namely, “to direct man's faith to what alone can give ultimate and indestructible meaning to life when the illusions are cast off which conceal the truth about man's predicament”—a predicament of facing “a state of existence in which no adequate meaning can be found in actual events” (Wieman [1956] , 410). Viewing the various meanings found in life itself to be fragile and temporary, Niebuhr insisted on the need for a realm of meaning which transcended yet was related to temporal existence.

Wieman focused on two aspects he believed central to Niebuhr's position. First, Wieman indicted Niebuhr for appealing to faith instead of reason with regard to finding “any enduring satisfaction in the temporal process when freed from self‐deception.” Second, he accused Niebuhr of grounding faith solely on what Wieman called “pragmatic utility” (Wieman [1956] , 411, 416). According to Wieman, Niebuhr's insistence that we must find a transcendent realm of meaning to assuage our despair in discovering that the variety of meanings we find in our temporal world are devoid of ultimate meaning places Niebuhr squarely among the supernaturalists, however modified supernaturalist language had become.

The supernatural/transcendent issue came up two months prior to Wieman's informing Kegley of his willingness to contribute to the Niebuhr volume. In responding to a letter from Japanese professor Ichiro Hara asking for clarification of Wieman's position on the equivalency of “supernaturalists” versus “transcendentalists,” Wieman answered that he, too, wished “to identify the two” and had “classed them together.” However, Wieman pointed out that “these transcendentalists [such as Niebuhr] object to being called supernaturalists.” The reason they object is that

they repudiate a certain traditional form of supernaturalism, namely, the kind which thinks of God as a personality acting in a realm that is “outside” this world and yet is a sort of world parallel to this, from which God presumably dips into this one from time to time. This crude and self‐contradictory way of thinking is rejected by these neo‐orthodox. As I state in my article, they deny that it is possible to represent the Power of Being by any conceptualization whatsoever. (Wieman to Ichiro Hara, January 28, 1953)

Niebuhr's propensity to insist that a life worth living depended on an ultimate meaning found in some transcendent realm was, for Wieman, the basis of what he regarded as Niebuhr's refutation of reason, and thus, his fundamental irrationality. Wieman claimed that Niebuhr's solution to the human condition required that we “must either conceal the truth with illusions, or plunge to the depths of despair, or be possessed by a faith in the transcendent sovereignty of love” (Wieman [1956] , 411). This solution, Wieman concluded, “can be reached only by way of faith and not by reason” and, “as we shall see, reason is definitely rejected not only as incompetent to reach this conclusion but as both corrupt and corrupting” (Wieman [1956] , 412). This question of the nature and limits of reason was the center of Wieman's criticism of Niebuhr.

Wieman insisted that reason alone could distinguish true from false propositions. It did so by way of “(1) observing under conditions more or less controlled the consequences predicted by the implications of the proposition in question; and (2) relating by way of logical coherence the given proposition with other propositions likewise tested.” Wieman found Niebuhr deficient in the rational endeavor of using “observation, inference, prediction, and logical coherence, for the attainment of knowledge and the solving of problems”(Wieman [1956] , 418).

Wieman also faulted Niebuhr for holding the view that sin corrupted reason. He claimed that it is when reason is denigrated rather than being applied to the products of human creativity that “fictions are mistaken for facts, myths for historical events, fantasies for perceptions, visions for gods. All the wild illusions, insanities, obsessions, and horrors known to man take possession of him like evil spirits when the new creations brought forth by creativity are not subjected to the judgment of reason” (Wieman [1956] , 414). Two years later, in a chapter entitled “Reason, Faith, and Freedom,” Wieman quoted from Niebuhr's Nature and Destiny of Man to the effect that “religious faith cannot be simply subordinate to reason or made to stand under its judgment.” Seeing this as a “typical statement” of Niebuhr, Wieman again referred to the horrors of such a view stating that “the answer to this condemnation of reason is obvious … faith becomes demonic when it refuses to submit to these tests” regarding “true and false religious beliefs” (Wieman , 145).

As early as 1938 Wieman had made this point by asserting that

when the new supernaturalists repudiate in the field of religion every rational method by which to distinguish between truth and error, between reality and illusion, between good and bad, they open the gates to every form of bigotry, cruelty, and violence. In the last analysis there are only two ways by which an organized interest can support any claim against the assaults of those who do not accept it. One way is that of persuasion, reason, and the data of experience; the other way is that of dogmatic unreasoning enthusiasm, violence and cruelty. (Wieman and Horton , 257)

Although Wieman identified Niebuhr with neo‐orthodox figures such as Brunner and Barth, he singled him out for one outstanding trait, namely, Niebuhr's “pragmatism.” Although he credited Niebuhr for “not trying to use religion for his own purposes” and with “doing the very best he can in service of the Christian faith,” Wieman nonetheless indicted Niebuhr for abandoning reason for the corruptions of pragmatism. In brief, Wieman accused Niebuhr of holding a variety of beliefs on strictly pragmatic utilitarian grounds in order to save man from “skepticism,” “nihilism,” fanaticism”, “pride,” a “tragic view of life” and for “generating religious vitality” (Wieman [1956] , 417). Wieman found the appeal to pragmatic utility as grounds for deciding what religious beliefs should be held utterly deplorable. He argued that Niebuhr's “method of pragmatic utility exposes religion to corruption worse than anything else can do”—presenting “rational absurdity” as “useful in generating religious vitality” (Wieman [1956] , 417).

Wieman feigned a defense of Niebuhr from the charge that he was too pessimistic. With tongue in cheek, Wieman claimed Niebuhr was the extreme optimist in anticipating the mere approximations of self‐sacrificial love in this life to reach a state of perfect love “beyond history,” ending sardonically with the words “What more can you ask of any sane optimist?” Obviously, Wieman found this optimism unwarranted on the grounds that Niebuhr, in fact, did “not recognize anything in human life which might produce” such approximations of perfect love (Wieman and Horton , 422). Niebuhr's God seemed to have “actual presence and power,” not in life's daily process, but only “at the ultimate source and the ultimate outcome of human life and history, except for the presence of Jesus Christ”—and even in Christ, quoting Niebuhr, God was “powerless in history” (Wieman and Horton , 424).

Niebuhr, in his limited responses to his critics in the Kegley‐Bretall volume, included Wieman among those with whom he had “the most substantial differences.” In replying to Wieman's criticism, he suspected that Wieman “would be ready to admit that he disagrees not so much with my particular interpretation of the Christian faith as with any classical statement of that faith, which he views from the standpoint of what he defines as ‘religious naturalism’” (Niebuhr [1956] , 522).

Overall, Niebuhr expressed his view of Wieman as follows:

[Wieman] believes in God. That is, he believes in a “process” which he calls “God.” He is a very religious man; and he has a religious attitude toward the process. I should prefer less reverence toward the process for it is in fact ambiguous; and there is no room in it either for the human or for the divine person. Professor Wieman identifies this process with “nature,” and that is only because all modern naturalism defines every form of reality as “nature.” (Niebuhr [1956] , 523).

Although Niebuhr was wrong in his claim that Wieman equated the divine process with nature, he went on to make the point that the prevailing naturalism as represented by Wieman ends up with a culture which

prides itself on its “empiricism,” obscures and denies every “fact” which does not fit into its frame of meaning. The frame of meaning is determined on the one hand by the concept of “nature” or the “temporal process,” and on the other hand by the so‐called “scientific method” which ironically enough is meant to ascertain the “facts.” Unfortunately, there are some “facts” which escape the “method.” The irrationality of this cult of “reason” is that it merely denies the reality of any fact which does not fit into its conception of rational coherence. (Niebuhr [1956] , 524, 525).

Six years earlier, in 1949, Niebuhr had cited Wieman as a “modern philosopher of religion who, in common with most religious naturalists, has sought to reinterpret religious faith in terms of [a] new dogma of redemption” that envisages “an ultimate triumph of the rational over the irrational.” Niebuhr found this creed in a passage from page 336 of Wieman's book The Growth of Religion where Wieman claimed that “God is growth of meaning” and that since “meaning grows when connections do,” the way to God comes by an attempt to “seek out and foster mutually sustaining and enriching connections between activities which make up his living and those of persons and groups and physical nature round about him.” Niebuhr concluded that Wieman's statement summarized “the creed succinctly” (Niebuhr , 67, 69). What naturalists such as Wieman had inadvertently done, according to Niebuhr, was to incorporate into their understanding of science very unscientific presuppositions containing the notions of the idea of human perfectibility and the idea of progress. Niebuhr saw these as characteristic illusions of the modern world. In uncritically accepting the view that “evil and illusion” are “derived from the ignorance of a mind involved in nature and, from the impotence of a will, involved in natural necessity” Wieman ends up failing to grasp how “the possibility that increasing freedom over natural limitations might result in giving egoistic desires and impulses a wider range than they had under more primitive conditions seems never seriously to disturb the modern mind.” (Niebuhr , 67, 68). Niebuhr's criticism of all forms of rationalism aimed at showing how, when reason ends up being the source of virtue, the result is that evil is erroneously equated with the sub‐rational vitalities of the self.

Niebuhr denied Wieman's charge that he disparaged reason. He attempted to clear up Wieman's “misconception” by claiming he had “never maintained that the corruption of sin is ‘in reason’.” Rather, sin “is in the self and that a self‐centered self is able to use reason for its own ends, which is why there is no protection in reason as such against sin” (Niebuhr [1956] , 523). Naturalists of all stripes fail to “understand the distinctive character of the human person, particularly, its radical freedom of the person over natural necessity.” Consequently, they “do not understand why coherence should not be a final test of truth” (Niebuhr [1956] , 523).

For Niebuhr, in viewing the Christian faith as a crude, pre‐scientific way of seeing the world, naturalists such as Wieman attempt to construct a more adequate, that is, rational conception of God and the world by “defining either the temporal process itself as God, or that part of it which is value‐creating.” While agreeing that such a picture is more “’rational’ than the Christian picture in the sense that its coherences are neater and that its mystery has been abolished from the realm of meaning” Niebuhr insisted that “all significant truths and facts about man and God, about the nobility and the misery of human freedom, and about the judgment and mercy of God, are left out of the picture” (Niebuhr [1956] , 524–25).

Unfortunately, Niebuhr provided only a tepid response to Wieman's assault on his alleged “pragmatic utility.” Niebuhr phrased his reply by saying that “Professor Wieman is also in error in suggesting that I have a purely ‘utilitarian’ attitude toward faith. He thinks this is dangerous, though he is not warning against the particular ‘utility’ which interests me. I confess that I do not quite know what he means by ‘utilitarian.’ Is it, for instance, ‘utilitarian’ to use an instrument for the achievement of truth?” (Niebuhr [1956] , 523). What is fair to say is that Niebuhr's pragmatism was far broader in scope and application that Wieman's view suggested. Niebuhr was not appealing to “rational absurdity” as grounds for religious belief. Instead, the faith he professed was the basis from which he sought to illuminate the complexities of experience. Indeed, Niebuhr was consistent in maintaining that “no religious faith can maintain itself in defiance of the experience which it supposedly interprets” (Niebuhr , 6).

An unfortunate occurrence in the Wieman/Niebuhr story occurred soon after the Kegley‐Bretall volume on Niebuhr was published. In 1957, Niebuhr turned down an invitation to contribute an essay for the anticipated fourth volume on Wieman that would be published in 1963 by the Library of Living Theology under the title The Empirical Theology of Henry Nelson Wieman. Niebuhr was one of thirty‐six individuals invited to contribute. On the un‐alphabetized list in the Wieman Papers Niebuhr's name is listed first. Niebuhr declined the invitation a week later on February 20, 1957. Although no reason was given for his decision, it most likely had to do with his rapidly declining health, previously referred to as the basis for Wieman's choice to tone down his attacks in his contribution to the Niebuhr volume.

There were two additional events that figured into the Wieman–Niebuhr relationship. The first involved a 1961 colloquium on Niebuhr held in New York; the second a 1962 invitation to Wieman to write the article on Niebuhr for an encyclopedia being planned by the philosopher Paul Edwards that was published in 1967.

Wieman was an attendee at the October 20, 1961, Reinhold Niebuhr Colloquium held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. The featured speakers were Paul Tillich, John C. Bennett, and Hans J. Morgenthau. Wieman did not address Niebuhr directly. However, in the discussion sessions following each speaker, Wieman posed questions to both Bennett and Morgenthau that focused on Niebuhr. Wieman told Bennett that he missed “in Niebuhr a clear formulation of a standard for judging right and wrong and in indicating the direction for which history and society should move … a standard that is universally applicable” (Landon , 91–92). In responding to Morgenthau, Wieman again repeated his basic criticism, namely, that to him “Niebuhr is less clear and articulate on the general principles that should guide our lives than is desired” (Landon , 115–16). Niebuhr did not respond to Wieman's criticisms. Nonetheless, after Niebuhr responded specifically to the featured speakers, he did speak to the issue raised by Wieman in a reply directed at another attendant, the economist and social theorist Eduard Heimann. Niebuhr said,

I am a pragmatist who tries to be guided in pragmatic judgments by the general principles of justice as they have developed in Western culture. But I know of no principles which could guide us in choosing between various emphases on various competing or complementary principles, according to the weight they are given by historical contingencies. I know of no general principles, Christian or otherwise, which will solve the cold war and the nuclear dilemma. I agree with Morgenthau that if this should be the responsibility of philosophy, it is certainly not the task of political philosophy. A Christian engaged in political philosophy can do no more than seek to prevent premature solutions of essentially insoluble problems, hoping that time will make some solutions possible tomorrow which are not possible today. (Landon , 122–23).

One year later, in 1962 Paul Edwards, the editor‐in‐chief of his new encyclopedic adventure, invited Wieman to write the proposed article on Niebuhr for the Encyclopedia of Philosophy which was eventually published in 1967. In his article Wieman reiterates his earlier criticism of Niebuhr:

Reason is an instrument, says Niebuhr, which can be used for either good or evil. One evil use of reason is to impose rational coherence upon reality and to reject as unreal what cannot be fitted into that coherence. But Niebuhr is mistaken in thinking that one who insists on subjecting every affirmed belief to the tests of reason is thereby claiming that reason comprehends all reality. To the contrary, such a person fully admits that unknown reality extends beyond his knowledge, but he refuses to conceal his ignorance by superimposing religious beliefs where knowledge cannot reach. Niebuhr defends such beliefs because they relieve anxiety by providing courage and hope. (Wieman , 503).

During an exchange of letters with Niebuhr's colleague John C. Bennett over Wieman's upcoming article on Niebuhr submitted to Edwards, Wieman wrote: “I have studied Niebuhr very earnestly because I truly think he is one of the very great men of our time. I have always admired him and have learned much from him. But one can admire and learn and still not agree on all points” (Wieman to Bennett, February 11, 1963). In this tone, Wieman summarizes his view of Niebuhr for the Encyclopedia of Philosophy by saying that “With his highly developed rational powers and critical intelligence, Niebuhr has sharply distinguished between problems subject to rational treatment and religious beliefs than cannot be rationally defended,” giving us “what at times seems to be two Niebuhrs: one, the naturalist struggling with the problems of our existence with all the tools of human reason; the other, the mystic upholding a superstructure of religious belief beyond the tests of reason. Whether one of these, or both, will prevail in the course of history, only time can tell.” Regardless of the outcome, Wieman was convinced that “the impact of Niebuhr's thought and action on our civilization will continue in one form or another for a long time” (Wieman , 504).