Reinhold Niebuhr's Analysis
In Reinhold Niebuhr's "The Relevance of an Impossible Ethical Ideal," the author develops many claims regarding the difference of thought between orthodox Christianity and modern secular society. Of these claims, I shall address in this essay how the impossibility of sacrificial love, or agape love, is relevant to our moral lives. As Christians I feel that we are all too often conditioned to see ourselves as pursuing the ideals and beliefs of Christ, yet Niebuhr's explanation offers insight into how mankind is unable to possess true sacrificial love and furthermore how faith and repentance of sin are all that is needed to gain the eternal gift of life in heaven.
In analyzing how sacrificial love is impossible, I found Niebuhr's example on …show more content…
139-140. Freud's argument was that "the command to love the neighbor as ourselves is the strongest defense there is against human aggressiveness and it is a superlative example of the un-psychological attitude of the cultural superego. The command is impossible to fulfill; such an enormous inflation of the ego can only lower its value and not remedy its evil." I think it is important to note that while Freud states that the commandment is downright unattainable for a culture, I do believe that certain individuals posses what is necessary to show an agape love. Yet while it is possible, very few people in the course of history have been able to develop this kind of love for mankind. But to this argument, Niebuhr states that "the faith which regards the love commandment as a simple possibility rather than an impossible possibility is rooted in a faulty analysis of human nature which fails to understand that though man always stands under infinite possibilities and is potentially related to the totality of existence, he is, nonetheless, and will remain, a creature of finiteness" (Christian Ethics 246). He goes on to state that man "will never be able to divorce his reason from its organic relation with the natural impulse of survival with which nature has endowed him; and he will never be able to escape the sin of accentuating his natural will-to-live into an imperial will-to-power by the very protest which he yearning for the eternal tempts him to make against his finiteness" (Christian Ethics
In analyzing how sacrificial love is impossible, I found Niebuhr's example on …show more content…
139-140. Freud's argument was that "the command to love the neighbor as ourselves is the strongest defense there is against human aggressiveness and it is a superlative example of the un-psychological attitude of the cultural superego. The command is impossible to fulfill; such an enormous inflation of the ego can only lower its value and not remedy its evil." I think it is important to note that while Freud states that the commandment is downright unattainable for a culture, I do believe that certain individuals posses what is necessary to show an agape love. Yet while it is possible, very few people in the course of history have been able to develop this kind of love for mankind. But to this argument, Niebuhr states that "the faith which regards the love commandment as a simple possibility rather than an impossible possibility is rooted in a faulty analysis of human nature which fails to understand that though man always stands under infinite possibilities and is potentially related to the totality of existence, he is, nonetheless, and will remain, a creature of finiteness" (Christian Ethics 246). He goes on to state that man "will never be able to divorce his reason from its organic relation with the natural impulse of survival with which nature has endowed him; and he will never be able to escape the sin of accentuating his natural will-to-live into an imperial will-to-power by the very protest which he yearning for the eternal tempts him to make against his finiteness" (Christian Ethics