With which Jesus would most certainly not have agreed, otherwise we would know Jesus as a zealot instead of as an eschatological prophet who eschewed human agency in establishing the kingdom of God.
The pacifism against which Niebuhr was reacting is simply one of human beings' competing fall-back positions put forward from his teaching to take the place of Jesus' ultimately mistaken prediction of the end of the world. Pacifism is monstrous in the sense that it is an exaggeration of a part of Jesus' message, distorting that message, as are all interpretations divorced from the eschatological imperative, including Niebuhr's.
There is a direct line connecting Niebuhr to the present, where leftist radicals now eschew the nonviolence of previous civil rights movements and justify aggravated battery in the streets, destruction of private property, and suppression of freedom of speech, among other crimes against the liberal democratic order, in the name of the goals of that order. It's not a coincidence that Niebuhr is a hero to people like Barack Obama, John McCain and James Comey, realists who justify lying for the greater good.
If Niebuhr were alive today, one wonders if the irony of the unintended consequences of his own thinking would be lost on him.
Reinhold Niebuhr, recently discussed here:
A reviewer wrote in 1933 of Moral Man and Immoral Society, “To call this book fully Christian in tone is to travesty the heart of Jesus’ message to the world.” The reviewer took issue with the text because Niebuhr implied that Christians must sometimes resort to violence when dealing with groups. Niebuhr traded barbs with pacifists for the rest of the decade. “If modern churches were to symbolize their true faith,” he wrote in 1940, “they would take the crucifix from their altars and substitute the three little monkeys who counsel men to ‘speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil.” ... In his view the aggressive fascist powers stood on one side. On the other were the naïve pacifists who would refuse to fight evil. We must choose the sensible middle ground, he argued. We must do evil for the sake of the good.
