On the other hand, the biblical portrayal of God as the redeemer and transformer of human life plays a smaller role in Niebuhr’s constructive ethic. For this reason, Martin Luther King, Jr., for whom Niebuhr had been a significant influence, finally came to believe that his account of the New Testament’s symbolic world was unbalanced: I came to see that Niebuhr had overemphasized the corruption of human nature. His pessimism concerning human nature was not balanced by an optimism concerning divine nature. He was so involved in diagnosing man’s sickness of sin that he overlooked the cure of
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