Religion: R. N. Retires

The donors included Arnold Toynbee and David Dubinsky. Charles Malik and Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot and Eleanor Roosevelt. They and 66 other sponsors had joined to raise $250,000 for a going-away present to Reinhold Niebuhr. the U.S.'s best-known theologian, retiring this month at 68 as vice president and senior faculty member of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary. The gift: a Reinhold Niebuhr professorship of social ethics. Its first incumbent: Congregationalist John Coleman Bennett. 57, dean of the faculty and professor of applied Christianity at Union, who, like his friend Niebuhr. is deeply concerned with the century's social problems.

Niebuhr, who in 1953 suffered a stroke that partially paralyzed his left arm. has no intention of quitting work after his retirement. He will be busy on a project for the Fund for the Republic this summer, will conduct a seminar at Union next fall, and work for Columbia University's Institute for War and Peace Studies. Looking back last week over his 32 years at Union. Niebuhr noted in an article in the Union Seminary Tower how much the theological climate had changed during that third of a century. Few men have had so strong a hand in bringing about the change as Reinhold Niebuhr himself.

Sin Reasserted. Fresh fiom 13 years as pastor among the auto workers of Detroit, 36-year-old Niebuhr came to Union in 1928 to teach applied Christianity. He had hardly settled in when the Depression struck, putting the U.S. in a new mood to listen to his impassioned preaching, and severely testing the era's "Social Gospel.'' which identified "the Christian faith with a mild socialism and a less mild pacificism, all encased in an overall utopian-ism.'' Against this. Niebuhr reasserted that man is born to sin and striving and cannot dodge either. He attacked both religious liberals and political conservatives, made enemies on the right as what was later called a "premature antifascist'' and enemies on the left as an early antiCommunist. In his book The Nature and Destiny of Man, he spelled out his paradoxical view of man's need to plan and struggle toward ends which his built-in sin will inevitably flaw.

Writing more than 15 books and reams of articles, building a cultural bridge to Europe which attracted men like Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he brought a whole generation of Christians back to theology. Today the delusions of the ''Social Gospel" may have receded, but new problems have appeared. ''The insecurities of our age strongly tempt this generation, not to the utopianism of yesterday, but to flight into any kind of storm cellar of religious security, whether this be Biblicism of eschatological irresponsibility or emphasis on the uniqueness of the church."

In a recent Christian Century article. Niebuhr indicates what he means by ''eschatological irresponsibility"—an end-of-the-world insistence on Christian detachment from society, as preached by Swiss Theologian Karl Earth. Although Earth "is generally acknowledged to be something of a genius" and "certainly has more imagination than any other living theologian." he has made of his theology a neutralist citadel "from which one could hurl anathemas against both the communists and Western democracies."