Cold War, 75 Years Later

From the Archives of Christianity & Crisis Magazine: October 13, 1947.

Rediscovered Notes on the 75th Anniversary of The Uneasy Conscience Reveal Convictions of Carl Henry.

Niebuhr realized that an overweening faith in the powers of human rationality was a severely misplaced and perpetual threat which has reemerged in 2022 America. 

The United States are not prepared for a cold war with China over Taiwan, yet to avoid it, America needs to start acting as if they were already upon them, and learn from the last one.

The economic aid which is required could not be a matter of pure generosity. Nations as nations are incapable of such generosity.

“The people of Munich were informed by proclamation of the city administration that the requisition of private homes for army housing was to be carried through, and to a greater extent than had been hitherto feared.”

From 1945 to 1947 as the United States and Soviet Union moved toward the Cold War, Christian realists writing for Reinhold Niebuhr’s journal, Christianity and Crisis, responded to global dilemmas. Here are five impressions of those articles, along with lessons for today.

At the end of Reinhold Niebuhr’s travels across Western Europe in 1947, he spent a week at the Ecumenical Institute, a facility near Geneva. He was hopeful of how this project would bless the church life of the world, and he offered observations about discussions there about communism, church-state relations, Christian political parties, and more.

Now what is here symbolized has been the most fundamental idea in our American democracy. Ours is a government by discussion.