Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.01.2007, Blaðsíða 45

ways ambiguous, project for the Gospel itself. There are many negative effects
of this mistake, the first being a dishonoring of God’s will to save through
his son, the Christ. But others follow. Human efforts that are invested with
salvific import are often dangerous. Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, pointed
out the perils of both hard and soft Utopianism.6
In the “hard” category, the awful legacies of Nazi and Marxist revolutions
are a case in point. When humans claim to bring the heaven to earth by force
they bring hell instead. A fascinating aspect of hard utopianism is its endorse-
ment by so many respectable intellectuals.7 One can only make sense of this
by reminding oneself that the longing for salvation has not departed from the
minds and spirits of even secularized intellectuals; it is merely displaced into
utopian schemes whose claims, in retrospect, seem utterly incredible.
Softer varieties of utopianism abound. The secular world is prone to view
an expansion of scientific knowledge as salvific. Or education in a broader
sense will save us. Or health and well-being will, or schemes of self-esteem,
or new spiritual techniques. But all, since they are infected with human self-
interest, are ambiguous at best. They are not able to reconcile us to God. Yet,
depleted religious traditions often grasp at this soft utopianism, and some-
times even at the harder variety, when they lose their confidence in the Gos-
pel. Not only the world mistakes the Law for the Gospel; churches themselves
do too.
Making the Gospel into the Law
Reinhold Niebuhr, though he did not put the issue in the concepts I am using,
was a formidable opponent of this confusion. He believed that liberal Chris-
tianity had taken the radical love of the Gospel and turned that “impossible
6 See Niebuhrs discussion of both types of utopianism in ReinholdNiebuhr on Politics, ed. Davis and Good (New
York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1960), pp. 12-36.
7 It remains to be seen whether intellectuals on the left will be called to account for their flirtations with the vari-
ous Marxist-Leninist regimes and movements of the last fifiy years. Intellectuals who showed any affinity with
fascist regimes and movements are constantly being exposed for their errors. Heidegger s intellectual respectabil-
ity has been solely challenged. Recently even Mircea Eliade, who tried to stay clear of politics for the last thirty
years of his life, has been scrutinized for his earlier lapses. But thus far, few intellectuals who sympathized with
Marxist-Leninism are being called to account. Indeed, they seem to wear their past enthusiasms as proud, even
if faded, garlands of moral authenticity rather than as shameful reminders of their complicity with regimes at
least as destructive as the fascist ones we rightfully condemn.