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Karl Paul Reinhold Neibuhr Biography

The prayer was brought to the attention of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1939 by an early member.[14] The prayer was liked by Bill W (William Griffith Wilson), co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous and the staff. It was printed out, handed around and has been part of Alcoholics Anonymous ever since. It has also been used in Narcotics Anonymous and other Twelve-step programs.

Niebuhr's original text, from in Elisabeth Sifton's book The Serenity Prayer appears near the top of this page. The slightly edited Alcoholics Anonymous version below omits the word "grace" from the first line, shortens some of the remainder, and sets out the prayer in the form of verses:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.

From the AA book Twelve and Twelve, Step Three.

This is the entire prayer:

God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
As it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
If I surrender to His Will;
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life
And supremely happy with Him
Forever and ever in the next.
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serenity prayer other page

From the AA book Twelve and Twelve, Step Three.

This is the entire prayer:

God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
As it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
If I surrender to His Will;
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life
And supremely happy with Him
Forever and ever in the ne

KARL PAUL REINHOLD NIEBUHR. Theologian and philosopher, Typed Letter Signed, 1 page measuring approx. 8 ½ in. x 11 in. The letter is signed in ink, “R Niebuhr” and is dated March 25, 1952. The top of the letter features the letterhead of the “International Rescue Committee”. Overall the letter is in great condition and is perfect for framing and display.

The Sander’s Price Guide to Autographs, Fifth Edition, quotes a Reinhold Niebuhr Signed Letter at $100.00. This one, in spectacular condition and featuring the “International Rescue Committee” letterhead, surely enhances its value.

 

The Serenity Prayer

God, give us grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.
Amen.

-- Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)

Biography:

Niebuhr, Karl Paul Reinhold (Reinie), (June 21, 1892 - June 1, 1971), theologian and philosopher, was born in Wright City, Mo., to Gustav Niebuhr, a minister in the Evangelical Synod, a Lutheran offshoot of the Prussian Church Union, and Lydia Hosto. Gustav Niebuhr was a highly respected member of the clergy who combined a high level of intelligence with a vital personal piety. His children were raised in a deeply religious home characterized by faith, optimism, and idealism. Reinhold's brother Hulda became a professor at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, and his brother Richard became a professor at Yale Divinity School. Only his brother Walter, who became a businessman and newspaper publisher, failed to follow Gustav's example by taking up a career in the ministry or theological education.

Reinhold Niebuhr graduated from Elmhurst College in Elmhurst, Ill., in 1910 and Eden Theological Seminary in Webster Grove., Mo., in 1913, both of which were schools for members of the Evangelical Synod. He postponed taking a parish by gaining permission to enter Yale Divinity School. His father died before he entered Yale, causing family hardship. Despite this setback, Niebuhr managed to complete his master's degree in theology in 1915, the same year in which he was ordained a minister in the Evangelical Synod.

Niebuhr served as pastor at Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit from 1915 to 1928. What might have been a two-year stay to fulfill his obligation to the Evangelical Synod instead became a thirteen-year high-level drama that brought Niebuhr national attention as a significant leader in both the religious and the political arenas. Detroit's automobile industry was then expanding, led by the Ford Motor Company, and Henry Ford was being praised for paying his employees $5 per day, creating jobs, and stimulating growth in Detroit. While Detroit quickly tripled in size, Niebuhr's church grew from a handful of members to more than eight hundred. Niebuhr said of that period, I cut my eyeteeth fighting Ford. While the world was focusing on the opportunities Ford was bringing to Detroit, Niebuhr was focusing on the injustices that followed in the wake of industrialization. He saw poor housing; no job security, insurance, or retirement benefits; and worker exhaustion from life on the assembly lines. He wrote, No one asks whether an industry which can maintain a reserve of a quarter billion ought not make some provisions for its unemployed. During this time he became very active in the labor movement and was an influential friend to Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers Union. It was also during this time that Niebuhr developed his socialist ideas, becoming a member of the Socialist party in the late 1920's. He later criticized some of his own socialist ideas but also remained a lifelong critic of capitalism.

His experience in Detroit forced Niebuhr to reconsider the liberal and highly moralistic creed that he had accepted as his Christian faith. In Detroit he began to work out many of his ideas about sin and grace, love and justice, faith and reason, realism and idealism, and the irony and tragedy of history, which would characterize his controversial and influential thinking, preaching, and writing for the rest of his life.

His thinking returned to the biblical myth and the vision of our fallen nature. He viewed sin as pride, and selfish self-centeredness as the root of evil. He saw this sin of pride not only in those who commit obvious crimes, but more dangerously in people who consider themselves good. The human tendency to corrupt the good was the great insight he saw manifested in governments, business, democracies, utopian societies, and even in religious institutions. This position is laid out profoundly in one of his most influential books, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932). He was a debunker of hypocrisy and pretense and made the avoidance of self-righteous illusions the center of his thoughts.

Niebuhr did battle with the liberals over what he called their naïve views of sin and the optimism of the social gospel. He did battle with the conservatives over what he viewed as their naïve view of Scripture and their narrow definition of true religion. He was a liberal thinker who supported many liberal religious and social causes, but his ideas were often too orthodox for most liberals, while his view that the Bible could not be taken literally was too liberal for the conservatives. Likewise, he found himself to be too secular for many of the religious and too religious for the secular.

Niebuhr's thinking was dynamic and dialectical, marked by the process of constant reassessment, and filled with paradox. So too was his life. He became head of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation in the late 1920's even though he was not a pacifist true believer. He was a part of the social gospel school of Christianity, which professed an optimistic faith in human progress and the belief that evil is socially caused and therefore socially alleviable; he also flirted with Marxism as part of his critique of individualism and naïve political optimism. He also helped found the Fellowship of Socialist Christians in the late 1920's just at the time he was becoming critical of liberal and Marxist illusions.

He became a member of the faculty at Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1928, where he assumed the chair of Christian ethics even though he lacked a Ph.D. and had no obvious scholarly competence in this field. Later he humbly asserted that it was a full decade before I could stand before a class and answer the searching questions of the students. His An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (1935), however, in which he interpreted Christian love (agape) as the possible impossibility, demonstrated once and for all his intellectual and theological depth.

Niebuhr was as imaginative and energetic in the classroom as he had been in the pulpit. He was extremely popular with his students and always seemed to have a group of students gathered around him. His office door was always open. He was in demand on the lecture circuit, kept up a lively interest in applying religious values to everyday issues, and devoted most weekends to college preaching.

His life took a major turn on Dec. 22, 1931, when he married the intelligent and attractive Ursula Keppel-Compton, a learned and religious woman who eventually became chairman of the Religious Department at Barnard College; they had two children.

One Sunday in 1934 he preached in a small church near his summer home in Heath, Mass., where he wrote his now-famous Serenity Prayer. A neighbor asked for a copy, which Niebuhr gave him after saying he had no further use for it. It was published as part of a pamphlet the following year and has since been adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous and numerous other organizations. He wrote: O God, give us/serenity to accept what cannot be changed,/courage to change what should be changed,/and wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

In 1939 he was invited to give the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He lectured on the nature and destiny of humanity, comparing biblical with classical and modern ideas of our nature and destiny. In these lectures and the Beecher Lectures he gave at Yale in the late 1940's, he argued that modern views were similar to classical idealism, but that the biblical view of human nature was superior to both classical and modern views.

In 1941 the first issue of Christianity and Crisis, edited by Niebuhr, was published. This small, unpretentious journal was a biweekly devoted to religious and social concerns. Influential far beyond its circulation numbers, its contributors included the best social, political, and religious thinkers of the time, and it was read by many of the leaders in these fields. Niebuhr wrote that his journal was devoted to an exposition of our Christian faith in its relation to world events. For more than twenty-five years this journal brought a religious viewpoint to bear on such issues as civil rights, the labor movement, women's equality, government, and war and peace.

Following World War II Niebuhr's writings and lectures focused more on religious realism and what it meant in the international sphere. He became influential in Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), which he helped found, and through which he helped to influence men such as George Kennan and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The idea of political containment of Communism was born in this circle of people.

Niebuhr wrote about the possible impossibility of love, and his life's work was an attempt to discover the proper relationship between the forces of love, power, and justice. In the pursuit of the good society, he believed the commitment to democratic principals and the avoidance of self-righteous illusions was society's best hope in achieving progress and justice.

Only in appearance can Niebuhr be described as ordinary; in every other way he was extraordinary. His intellect in the classroom and the pulpit was unmatched, yet his gentle spirit and wit balanced his analytical powers. His words came out in rapid fire, but he could listen with astute rapture. In conversation he might have tugged at an ear, pulled on his ample nose, smoothed his bald spot, or clamped a pipe between his teeth; his genial humor was unfailingly inviting.

During his life Niebuhr wrote almost twenty books and contributed more than 1,500 articles to journals and magazines. In 1952 Niebuhr had a stroke that slowed him down, but he continued to teach, write, and speak out. He retired in 1960 and moved to Stockbridge, Mass., where he carried on his efforts to teach and reform until his death.