Harry T. Cook will speak at 10 a.m. Sunday, May 24, at C3Exchange in Grand Haven, Michigan. The community meets at the Grand Haven Convention Center, 417 Columbus at 5th Street.


 
A Momentous Beginning
Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook
5/22/15
 

 

 

One hundred years ago this summer, when Detroit was nearing its zenith of national and international attention to its industrial prowess, and as it began an amazing 10-year ascension from a population of 450,000 to 1.25 million, a 23-year-old recent graduate from Yale Divinity School stepped off a train at the then very new Michigan Central station on the way to his first parish assignment as a pastor of a small German Evangelical Church.

 

No one, including probably the young man himself, knew what would come of his decision to turn down offers to lead congregations in Connecticut to come to the loud, clanking, smoky city made famous by Henry Ford's revolutionary assembly line and the $5 a day wage.

 

It's a small part of the story, but the inexperienced pastor wanted his widowed mother to live in his parsonage and do for him what she had done for his pastor father: run the Sunday school and see to the nuts-and-bolts end of things. He would be too busy writing his sermons and articles he hoped to publish to gain public attention for some of his quite different ideas. His mother had spent many years in semirural Missouri and Illinois in the parsonages of her Evangelical pastor husband, Gustav Niebuhr, and was not keen on going as far as the East Coast, so Detroit it was.

 

What the neophyte cleric discovered was a small congregation of fewer than 60 persons, many of them elderly and expecting to hear sermons in German. Not a problem for him as it was the language often spoken in his boyhood home. His bachelor and master's degrees from Yale had removed what hayseed may have stuck to his shoes, but he was a bit at sea as to what to say to his aging congregation housed in an unexceptional building out on the northwest edge of the booming city.

 

It was at first from the pulpit of that church -- and, six years on, in the one at a new church his board of trustees had built to provide him a more visible venue as his reputation grew -- that Reinhold Niebuhr began what would turn out to be nearly a half century of preaching, lecturing and writing, thereby giving voice to religious texts and ideas and their application to social ethics that would make him an international figure.

 

Niebuhr was nothing like Detroit's other clergy. What piety he had he kept to himself. His mission was to connect the contents of the Bible he knew so well to the problems and opportunities of an urban culture that he found in many ways distasteful. He attracted what passed for the city's intelligentsia to the pews of the Bethel Church with his social and political critique, thus making a name for himself.

 

He took on the great Henry Ford and did so unmercilessly, well aware that the great hospital named for and funded by the pioneer automaker stood on the opposite side of the city's Grand Boulevard just a few blocks east of the new Bethel edifice.

 

Of Ford and his announcement that $100 million had been spent on the new Model A leaving him with only a measly $250 million in the bank, Niebuhr wrote in his Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic: "What a civilization this is! Na�ve gentlemen with a genius for mechanics suddenly become the arbiters over the lives and fortunes of hundreds of thousands. Their moral pretensions are credulously accepted at full value. No one bothers to ask whether an industry which can maintain a cash reserve of a quarter of a billion ought not to make some provision for its unemployed." /1

 

Ford had abruptly idled thousands of his workers after shutting down the manufacture of the Model T until the factories had been retooled. A seething Niebuhr had calculated that $50 million in lost wages had been a disaster for Ford's employees.

 

At about the same time, Niebuhr, in an address entitled "Tyrant Servants" before the Detroit Pastors' Union, offered this critique of life in the nation's urban centers, characterizing it as anything but the American Dream:

 

"It is a real question in the modern day whether the nation has not become as much a foe as a servant of human happiness ... It demands the sacrifice of human and personal values, and makes claims upon the lives of eternal significance for ends that have no eternal values ... We fail to see that the possession of the things which modern industry produces is not an unmixed blessing. It is nice to [have them]. But we have become the slaves of these things."/2

 

What a sermon to give to clergy whose very livelihood was dependent via the collection plate on the revenue from the manufacture and sale of those "things"!

 

Niebuhr published similar critiques in such well-known journals as The Atlantic Monthly and The Christian Century, thereby building a national audience. In 1928, he was tapped by the president of New York City's Union Theological Seminary -- the nation's best-known Protestant graduate school of theology -- to teach applied religion.

 

After a whirlwind 13 years -- one of them serving as chair of a mayoral committee created to deal with the city's racial crisis that arose over the Ossian Sweet case/3, Niebuhr departed for Union Seminary and there became one of the prominent voices in the theory of public policy and its ethical foundations. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1948 when he was at the height of his influence in the formation of Protestant clergy and as the voice of conscience to liberal politicians.

 

His major works that are still read and taught include The Nature and Destiny of Man, Moral Man and Immoral Society and The Irony of American History. To be sure, Detroit gave the world more than the Model T and its many shiny successors down the years.

 

1/Cynic. Louisville, KY. Westminster/John Knox Press. 1957.

2/Young Niebuhr. New York, NY. The Pilgrim Press. 1977. 166, 170

3/see Boyle, Kevin. Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age. Henry Holt and Company, LLC. 2004

 

 


Copyright 2015 Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.
 


Readers Write
Re essay of 5/15/15 Back to the Bible But Not How You Think
 

 

 

 

Harriet Parker, Ft. Wayne, Indiana:

You said it all in this essay. Instead of putting me off the Bible as church has made me for some time now, you have rekindled my interest in it. I know the parable of the prodigal son by heart. It never occurred to me that there were depths in it unexplored. Keep writing.

 

Philip Power, Ann Arbor, Michigan:

Nice essay. Your three-passage system reminds me of our mutual friend, Harvey Guthrie.

 

Ronald Payne, Milford Center, Ohio:

I really enjoyed Χωρα μακρα. The obscene profligacy of the greedy disciples of Ronnie Raygun must be called out again and again. I'm afraid though that nothing short of the kind of revolution being solicited by Chris Hedges will change things. You and I will probably not see the restoration of a middle class. We can though, imagine a justice-event that 'stirs in the name of God,' as Caputo/Derrida might put it.

 

Fred Fenton, Concord, California:

No matter what the Prodigal was doing "in a far country," or, if you prefer, Milton's Reign of Chaos and old Night, the older brother in the story thinks he knows. He confidently tells the father that his brother has "devoured your property with prostitutes." Perhaps that is what the older brother knows something about. This unthinking, judgmental attitude is contrasted with the father's unconditional love toward his wayward son. The lesson applies to religions today that seem to take great pride in setting themselves against each other.

 

Harold Fielding, Hoboken, New Jersey:

Your essay "Back to the Bible But Not How You Think" was certainly an eye-opener for me. I thought the parable of the prodigal son had long since been milked for everything in it, then you come up with a different translation of "far country." I forwarded a copy of your essay to the pastor of my church and suggested that he contact you for advice on how to deal with the Bible in the way you suggest. If you hear from a Methodist minister in this state, it will be him.

 

Laurence Palmerston, Bellingham, Washington:

I am sojourning here for a time while Her Majesty's government gets things sorted out. A friend passed on to me your article about "Back to the Bible." That, sir, was a magnificent piece. The Jesus Seminar people could learn something from you. To find out that there is more to learn about a thing I thought I knew well is something that should happen to a person more often than it does. You made it happen to me today. P.S. I am by no fact ever vouchsafed to me a relative of Lord Palmerston, the British prime minister who favored the Confederacy during your civil war.

 

Tracey Martin, Southfield, Michigan:

The existence of our current "one percent" present different difficulties. Republicans prefer private generosity (in reality condescending swelling of ego) to government "hand-outs." But there's little reason to believe that the rich share that inclination. Instead, they demand termination of the inheritance tax, as if a return to a kind of primogeniture were the greater ideal. We-are-all-in-it-together is not an authenticity they're willing to embrace. 

What do you think?
I'd like to hear from you. E-mail your comments to me at [email protected].