Unlike the advocates of the Social Gospel, who often suggested that we could through love build the Kingdom of God on earth, Niebuhr placed justice, rather than love, at the center of Christian social ethics. Since human beings are finite, Niebuhr reasoned that we can never do anything apart from our interests, especially when we act collectively. According to Niebuhr, democracy—“a method of finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems”—was the political system best adapted to the strengths and limitations of human nature. As he put it famously in The Children of Light and the Children of
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