Sub specie aeternitatis. La teologia della politica di Reinhold Niebuhr

In the twentieth century Reinhold Niebuhr was an important public theologian who influenced the American culture and politics in depth. From the Thirties till the Sixties he wrote several historical, theological and political works, and was also a tireless polemicist and editor of some journals. Furthermore he developed a political philosophy, called Christian realism, which was a criticism of political theology, both as a formula of secularization and as a moment of politicization of the sacred or theologizing of politics. This article analyzes Niebuhr’s work with the aim of highlighting how his Christian realism was and continues to be a form of theology of politics. In other words, it was an expression of a liberal, democratic and pragmatic political theory in which the legacy of St. Augustine’s thought was very strong. In this perspective, we will proceed to the study of two characteristic aspects of his reflection in which the theological-political moment assumes a crucial importance. The first is the exposure of his democratic theory, while the second is the analysis of the US role in the Cold War.