“Liberal theologians were claiming that we were on the road to progress, that human beings were perfectible, that there was a possibility of some utopian society in history. It was a kind of captivity to a highly fashionable, secular claim about what the future could be. Niebuhr comes in with this tragic sensibility. . . . He says no, we all have fallen, we all are finite, we all are fallible. There will never be a utopian society in human history, there will never be paradise in space and time.”
