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.

Man is troubled—more troubled than at any previous time in the brief sojourn of his kind on this planet. Wars, revolutions and social convulsions all indicate the depth of his disquiet. He is troubled because he does not know, and he wants to know, the meaning of his own life.

The world whether admitting to it or not needs an audacious America that will safeguard that part of civilization cherishing law, liberty, equality, decency and ordered prosperity.

Recognizing the place for a genuine religious hope born of faith and for an enthusiasm for realization of social and ethical gains in any historical situation, Christianity will nevertheless, when true to itself, set its face against utopianism or popular brands of optimism.

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.

The war in Ukraine is proving to be a tragic proving ground for trends that will almost certainly be replicated in other twenty-first-century warfare. Decentralized decision-making, the targeting of population centers, tactical speed in decision-making, the rise of artificial intelligence, vital intelligence sharing, and the strategic impact of moral and spiritual injury demonstrate the boundaries for future combat.

With a seemingly genuine response, John Kirby reflects well on Americans and illuminates something of the Western way of war, which follows the Just War Tradition.

“Unless we accept the Russian view of the nature of man, we cannot work with the USSR to a common end for human society.”