One of the interesting things about H.R. Niebuhr is that he is often trying to walk the middle ground between a liberal or “natural” theology based on reason or experience and a Barthian “revelational positivism” that limits our knowledge of God to what is revealed.
For Niebuhr, philosophical reasoning, religious experience, psychology, and history all have a role in the formation of our idea of deity. After all, how could we recognize or respond to revelation if we had no prior idea of God whatsoever? What revelation does, on Niebuhr’s view, is transform this idea without necessarily replacing or negating it.
It is true that revelation is not the communication of new truths and the supplanting of our natural religion by a supernatural one. But it is the fulfillment and the radical reconstruction of our natural knowledge about deity through the revelation of one whom Jesus Christ called “Father.” All thought about deity now undergoes a metamorphosis. Revelation is not a development of our religious ideas but their continuous conversion. God’s self-disclosure is that permanent revolution in our religious life by which all religious truths are painfully transformed and all religious behavior transfigured by repentance and new faith. It is revolutionary since it makes a new beginning and puts an end to the old development; it is permanent revolution since it can never come to an end in time in such a way that an irrefragable knowledge about God becomes the possession of an individual or a group. Life in the presence of revelation in this respect as in all others is not lived before or after but in the midst of a great revolution. (The Meaning of Revelation, p. 95)
Niebuhr identifies three particular aspects of our idea of God that undergo revolutionary transformation in light of the revelation we receive through Jesus:
—Divine unity: God’s unity is not the unity of a hierarchy with a “supreme being” at the top; rather, it is the unity of one “meeting us in every event and requiring us to think his thoughts after him in every moment” (p. 96). I think what Niebuhr is getting at here is a more “immanent” idea of God–the pulsating life at the center of every being.
—Divine power: We want a God who is the ultimate force in the universe, who’s on our side and will make sure that nothing bad happens to us or those we love, and will ensure the success of our projects and values. But in Jesus the power of God is “made manifest in … weakness” (p. 97); God conquers evil not by overpowering it, but through the death of an innocent man on a cross. “We cannot come to the end of the road of our rethinking the ideas of power and omnipotence” (p. 98).
—Divine goodness: Our “natural” tendency is to worship God (or the gods) both for what he is and for what he can do for us. And religious life is often organized accordingly: acts of devotion partly undertaken to ensure divine favor. In Christian revelation, however, “[w]e sought a good to love and were found by a good that loved us” (p. 99). God is active in love, seeking us out. A “transactional” understanding of religion, which puts ourselves and our projects at its center, is replaced by the demand that we learn to receive God’s love for us and for those whom we would rather not love.
It follows from this understanding of revelation that we never possess a final definition or understanding of God. We are always “on the way,” with the revelation we receive in Jesus prodding us beyond the comforts of our inherited opinions and orthodoxies. “This conversion and permanent revolution of our human religion through Jesus Christ is what we mean by revelation” (p. 99).
A Thinking Reed 
Yeah, great summary of Niebuhr’s negotiation of two complex thought-systems. The main character in my second novel, Simon Krimple’s Wager, explores/dramatizes some of these very tensions.
Almost makes one wonder if he was reading Bernard of Clairvaux’s On Loving God… Does he cite it at all?
It seems to me that H.R.’s approach to matters of nature and revelation, which by the way are similar in F.D. Maurice, is a quite catholic approach that refuses to divide out creation and redemption.
Derek–no explicit references to Bernard in the index or otherwise. Where do you see the similarities?
Christopher–I think you’re right. If fact, John Baillie wrote a marvelous little book called The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought (where “recent” is basically early 20th c.), and he finds similarities in Niebuhr’s and Maurice’s approaches (among others).
I should add that Calvin is obviously a big influence on Niebuhr here. Particluarly his dictum that the human heart is a “perpetual factory of idols.” (Which has always been one of my favorite Calvin lines.)
I’m just discovering this site, but I wanted to say, right off the bat, that Pascal is the man, totally underrated as a philosopher in the English-speaking world. So, this is a great title and idea for blog. Keep up the good work.