Abstract

Not fully recognizing that H. Richard Niebuhr, like Augustine, identifies the fundamental moral imperative with the call for conversion to faith, Niebuhr's critics have sent their barbed shafts wide of the mark. Contrary to complaints, Niebuhr's ethics, properly understood, provides both rational grounds for moral judgment and a functional normative program, while at the same time clearly specifying the necessary connection between religious faith and the life well-lived. The critical response to his work remains worthy of study because it exhibits the expectations, anxieties, and objections which any dispositional ethics will inevitably encounter and therefore must address.