Writing on theology and ethics
and their application to politics and economics in An Interpretation of Christian
Ethics, Reinhold Niebuhr runs the risk of fusing the respective domains,
which I maintain are qualitatively different, and thereby minimizing or losing outright
what is unique to each domain. Besides occasioning category mistakes, such as
in labeling divine love as ethical rather than as distinctly theological, overreaches
from one domain onto another even at the expense of the other’s own criteria
can occur from the underlying error. Besides being extant in Niebuhr’s text, the
conflation of distinct domains and the related overreaches of their respective
criteria has exacerbated the long-standing conflict between the Jews and Arabs
in what was Palestine when Niebuhr was writing his book on Christian ethics in
which he discusses the sheer intractability of the conflict.
The full essay is at "Jews and Arabs in 1930s Palestine."
