Contrasts in 20th century Christian ethics and moral philosophy: Secular humanism of Reinhold Niebuhr versus the fundamentalist orthodoxy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Two of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of Christianity—Reinhold Niebuhr and Dietrich Bonhoeffer—are typically portrayed as essentially like-minded bedfellows within the philosophical school of religious ideological criticism known as liberal Christianity. This contention is, in actuality, inaccurate. The facts support a much different reality. Their polarizing beliefs about Christian ethics and morals and the historic figure who founded the faith—Jesus—placed them antithetically at opposite ends of the contemporary Christianity belief continuum. Their opposing viewpoints are so pronounced it is virtually impossible to accept a line of argument that claims the two men espoused indistinguishable liberal Christian philosophies. This study focuses on the contrasting ways each man confronted the problem of trying to seamlessly blend static Christian ethical and moral codes from a simple agrarian past with the dynamic societal lifestyle that characterized the chaotic war-torn societies of industrialized Western civilization in the mid-20th century.