Christianity and the New Social Crisis
Christopher Evans, Professor of Church History,
Colgater Rochester Crozer Divinity School

Since the 2004 presidential election, it is sobering to listen to the rhetoric within the American “culture war” debates.  Usually, media pontiffs characterize these face-offs as a conflict of  two factions: those on the “right” championed by Christian conservatives and those on the left” represented by secular liberals. Nowhere in these debates is attention paid to the legacy of  mainline denominations. It is easy for those who identify themselves within liberal mainline Protestantism to blame the media for their lack of vision and insight into our heritage. Yet much of the blame for this neglect rests within mainline denominations themselves. Current discussions within mainline churches include a great deal of emphasis on the nature of congregational renewal, especially focused on how churches can reverse declining membership patterns. At the same time, little serious discussion surrounds ways to renew and appropriate one of the most significant legacies to emerge from the heritage of American mainline Protestantism: the social gospel.

     For many, the name of Walter Rauschenbusch is synonymous with one of the most enduring legacies of Christian social action. For liberal and progressive Baptists, the details of his life are well known. Born in 1861, Rauschenbusch was raised by his parents August and Caroline within a tradition of 19th-century Baptist pietism that nurtured his call to ministry. After graduating from Rochester Theological Seminary in 1886, he spent eleven years as pastor of a German immigrant church in New York City, before returning to RTS where he taught until his death in 1918.  Rauschenbusch’s formative writings, especially his 1907 book Christianity and the Social Crisis, had a major impact on the theological and missional direction of American Protestantism in the 20th century. While his impact upon Martin Luther King, Jr. is well known, Rauschenbusch’s influence has also been cited by a number of recent Christian social activists, in America and worldwide.

    By the same token, many who embrace the name of Walter Rauschenbusch  find it difficult to interpret and apply his legacy  within the contemporary church. This problem has been especially difficult for Baptists who either with great pride, or embarrassment (depending on one’s theological beliefs), yank Rauschenbusch from his historical context and attempt to use him as a sounding board for their own theological agendas.  The veneration of Rauschenbusch by liberal Baptists is understandable, given the fact that he was one of the most beloved church leaders of his generation. Yet the tendency of liberal Baptists to see Rauschenbusch as a figure worthy of iconic devotion does little to empower contemporary church leaders interested in keeping his legacy alive.

    Rauschenbusch clearly was an individual who had many “blind spots,” in terms of his theology and social thought, as many scholars have documented.  While sympathetic to the plight of African Americans, Rauschenbusch’s critique of  race relations was over simplistic and ignored the complexities of American racism.  Likewise, his views of gender were bound by his own context in late 19th-century Victorian society.  While a supporter of women’s suffrage, Rauschenbusch could easily match contemporary conservative rhetoric about the sanctity of the home and the need for women to define their roles as wives and mothers.  Like other social gospel liberals, Rauschenbusch championed what strikes us today as a paternalistic vision of the church.  Although he was very much a Baptist in terms of viewing the church as a body separate from the corruptions of the state, Rauschenbusch’s view of the church was welded to a Constantinian paradigm. He fell very much in the mainstream of Protestant thought of his generation, taking for granted that Protestant churches had a cultural and moral hegemony upon the political and cultural fabric of the nation.   Despite the fact that Rauschenbusch  would be appalled by the political and economic agenda of contemporary Christian conservatives, he would have had no problem with their vision to create a Christian nation.  In many ways, contemporary conservatives have succeeded in garnering grass roots support for their social-political agenda, in ways that Rauschenbusch and other social gospelers never did.

     Amidst Rauschenbusch’s shortcomings, I believe now more than ever is the time for faith communities to find ways to live out this man’s theological vision for our era.  In particular, it is time for Baptists who are looking for an alternative to conservative movements, often intent on propagating variations of individual salvation and world-renouncing theologies, to see Rauschenbusch as a resource in the cause of constructing holistic theologies centered on deeply- rooted spiritual conviction, rigorous intellectual foundations, and imaginative social praxis.

Spiritual Depth
     At the core of Rauschenbusch’s social vision was a powerful Christian faith, rooted in prayer, worship, and spiritual discernment.  While he moved miles away from the conservative theological heritage of his parents, he never renounced the Christian piety that had long been a part of the Rauschenbusch family pedigree. We should take note that Rauschenbusch was never afraid to speak openly about his faith convictions and his love for Jesus. Today many liberals winch when they hear conservatives talk about being “born again.” However, Rauschenbusch would have felt no such embarrassment– in fact it would have given him delight to hear persons give testimony to their faith convictions. Rauschenbusch was not afraid to call himself an “evangelical.” Early in his career, he collaborated with Ira Sankey the partner of the famed revivalist Dwight L. Moody in translating gospel hymns into German. Later in his life, Rauschenbusch called upon the proponents of the social gospel to write prayers and hymns that reflected the integration of one’s personal faith with the imperative to work for a just society.  In 1910, he published a book of prayers entitled, Prayers of the Social Awakening that manifested his belief that Christian social action arose from those converted in mind and heart. 

     One of the sins carried by the heirs of the social gospel after Rauschenbusch’s death was a tendency to see social action as a substitute for a deeply-rooted Christian piety. While Rauschenbusch worried that Christian piety was no guarantee of a relevant ministry praxis, social action alone was a poor substitute for a God-centered faith.  During his lifetime, Rauschenbusch was accused by his critics of dismissing the key tenants of Christian belief, a criticism that continues to be leveled against him today by conservatives. Yet even a cursory reading of his writings reveal not only the depth of his faith, but an awareness that the quest for justice was inseparable from Christian discipleship. 

    Even after leaving the parish in 1897, Rauschenbusch tended to approach theology from the perspective of a working minister.  In other words, he engaged theological issues not from a systematic perspective, but in terms of the practical usefulness of specific ideas. (In this regard, Rauschenbusch has lots of company in church history, when one remembers that most church leaders/theologians never wrote detailed systematic theologies, but engaged specific theological questions that tended to define one’s life and times.) At his core, Rauschenbusch was an evangelical who embraced that which was most sacred from his Baptist-pietist heritage and a liberal who was not afraid to explore the social-political context of his era, using a wide range of intellectual sources. 

     Rauschenbusch’s theological outlook reflected the type of reformed zeal that characterized much of Protestant evangelicalism up to the Civil War. This zeal was integrated into an outlook, borrowed from key figures within western Protestant liberalism that looked to historical events as a way to bear witness to the activities of God in human history. “History is the sacred workshop of God,”  Rauschenbusch frequently told his students. Like other liberals, Rauschenbusch was prone to romanticize certain historical events and time periods. However, his outlook provides a fresh alternative to world-renouncing theologies that emphasize an apocalyptic view of Christianity.  Long before Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind filled up the shelves of religious and secular bookstores, America has given refuge to a series of dispensationalist authors who have promoted end-time scenarios of “the rapture” and Christ’s second coming. Although Rauschenbusch had high personal regard  for some 19th-century dispensationalist church leaders, in particular Dwight L. Moody, he looked with alarm to the growing prominence of this tradition within American Protestantism and regularly challenged this trend. 

    One of Rauschenbusch’s most insightful statements against dispensationalism came in a series of articles published in the Baptist Examiner in the mid -1890s. At a time when an increasing number of Baptist churches in the north were moving in the direction of dispensationalism, Rauschenbusch  incisively dissected the inconsistencies within this theological movement. While acknowledging that faith in Christ’s imminent return had the potential to stir conviction in the short run,  he doubted if such a faith could be sustained with great zeal over the long haul.

    Faith in salvation by catastrophe cuts the nerve of action, but only in the unselfish pursuits of life.  In the common affairs of life which press with directness on our love for self and love for family, and twinge the nerve for self-preservation, common sense gets the better of theory.   I have yet to see proof that those who believe in the imminence of Christ’s coming are indifferent to the security of real estate titles, the length of leases, the education of their children, and other things that involve a long look ahead. ... At first the thought, “Christ may come today,” thrills the nerve of action, but as the years of life roll by, the thrill grows weaker. The doctrine is still held, but it is merely a doctrine and not a living verity. The question is, which will do more to make our lives spiritual and to release us from the tyranny of the world, the thought that we may at any moment enter into the presence of the Lord, or the thought that every moment we are in the presence of the Lord?

      Rauschenbusch confidence that dispensationalist theology would disappear from the American religious scene has proved to be one of his most erroneous predictions.   Yet at a time when dispensationalism is more popular than ever, Rauschenbusch remains a foundation for an alternative theological vision that is Christ-centered, socially visionary, and defends the sanctity of creation.  Central to this vision was Rauschenbusch’s teachings on the kingdom of God

The Kingdom is Always but Coming
     It was Rauschenbusch’s faith in the doctrine of the kingdom that most defines his legacy in western Protestant thought.  From the earliest days of his ministry, the kingdom of God became the central theological emphasis for Rauschenbusch and a point of departure for much of his intellectual inquiry. However, his view of the kingdom, despite later criticisms to the contrary, was never rooted in anything approximating a theological utopia. At times,  Rauschenbusch’s theology displays a high optimism concerning the possibilities of achieving permanent social amelioration. Yet in an era in which many secular and religious leaders were  engaging a host of social problems related to industrialization, urbanization, and drastic economic disparities between the rich and poor, Rauschenbusch had the foresight to see these problems as profound faith issues that needed to constantly prod the Christian’s conscience. Later generations of American theologians, epitomized by Reinhold Niebuhr , would criticize the social gospel for lacking an adequate theology of sin.  While there were times when Rauschenbusch spoke highly optimistically of achieving social and moral betterment, his major theological arguments emphasized the dual themes of social opportunity and social crisis.   

     For Rauschenbusch, the kingdom of God was always an  ideal that faith communities struggled to obtain, but could never ultimately achieve within history.  Rauschenbusch tended to use scripture very selectively, ultimately deriving his theology from the Old Testament prophets and the synoptic gospels.  In this regard, his theology reflected the theological assumptions of many liberal church leaders of the late 19th century who attempted to show how Jesus’ teachings from the first century might be applied to conditions of contemporary society.  For all of his disparate theological influences, ranging from Catholic mystics, Puritan and Anglican divines, Anabaptist martyrs, and 19th-century political thinkers, Rauschenbusch did not develop his biblical exegetical skills to the extent of other contemporaries. Yet if he was guilty of showing favoritism to certain biblical texts, he was no different in this regard to his conservative critics, both past and present. If anything, Rauschenbusch helped western Protestantism break a fixation with Pauline texts, and enabled many to see the gospels with a new vision: through the eyes of Jesus. In juxtaposition to predominant apocalyptic and eschatological views, Rauschenbusch kept faith that Jesus’ redemptive message for past, present, and future generations was found in the enduring significance of Christ’s social teachings.  Christ’s teachings against wealth, his solidarity for the dispossessed, and his teachings on the radical reversal of values, where “the last would be first, and the first would be last,” represented the core of Rauschenbusch’s faith in the kingdom.  It was this basic premise that made Martin Luther King, Jr. comment that Rauschenbusch reminded the church that Christianity needed to address both the spiritual and material needs of the person. “It has been my conviction ever since reading Rauschenbusch that any religion which professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the social and economic conditions that scar the soul, is a spiritually moribund religion only waiting for the day to be buried.”

    Yet Rauschenbusch never saw Jesus’ teachings as a blueprint for a ready-made ethical system. These  teachings were a guide for the contemporary church to engage in social action that would be Christ-centered and transformative, both individually and collectively.   Rauschenbusch was always clear that the kingdom of God always lay outside the domain of history.   Writing at the end of Christianity and the Social Crisis, he asserted, “we know well that there is no perfection for man in this life; there is only growth toward perfection... At best there is always but an approximation to a perfect social order. The kingdom of God is always but coming.” 

    While there were representatives of the social gospel movement that came precariously close to associating specific social-reform systems with the teachings of Jesus, this oversimplification  certainly does not apply to Rauschenbusch.  Despite the assertions of later critics of the social gospel, Rauschenbusch’s optimism was always counterbalanced with a clear sense of human sinfulness. While he had little use for Augustinian views of humanity’s original sin through Adam, he repeatedly emphasized the fact, even in his earliest writings, that humanity’s proclivity was toward sin. “Ethically man sags downward by nature,” he wrote in the early 1890s, “moral gravitation is downward. It is accelerated in us by years of sin and by the swirling rush of centuries of wrong which pushes us from behind.”   Toward the end of his life, Rauschenbusch wrote how the “superpersonal” forces of evil that took shape in humanity’s collective life, inevitably unleashing forces of social injustices that transcended the sinful actions of individuals. At a time when America had just entered World War I, Rauschenbusch repeated a point that he expressed many times in his career that the achievement of the kingdom of God only came through social struggle. “The coming of the Kingdom of God will not be by peaceful development only, but by conflict with the Kingdom of Evil. We should estimate the power of sin too lightly if we forecast a smooth road.”    Rauschenbusch’s beliefs on the corporate nature of sin defined a larger tradition of Christian social ethics in the 20th century.  A recovery of this tradition is essential for churches that seek to challenge a social complacency that uncritically accepts the sanctity of contemporary American political, military, and economic power. 

Social Praxis
     Finally, the contemporary church would do well to take another look at Rauschenbusch’s teachings on economic and political justice and their relationship to Christian social reform. Rauschenbusch would be the first to admit that he was no economist or political scientist, and he candidly expressed his embarrassment at his knowledge gaps in these disciplines. Yet his economic-political analysis defined a core set of issues that succeeding generations of church leaders would follow (and many would lack Rauschenbusch’s astuteness).  Rauschenbusch defined himself as a Christian socialist and, for better or worse, that label has followed him to this day. Yet doctrinally, Rauschenbusch was a liberal capitalist in sentiment and in practice. While he did call for extensive government control and regulation of industries that he believed were essential to the greater public welfare (such as railroads and public utilities), he believed in the right of economic competition and was highly critical of Marxist theorists who advocated for a government controlled, command economy.

    Yet Rauschenbusch never turned a blind eye to the sufferings caused by the abuses of capitalism, and believed that the church’s  critique of these excesses was part and parcel of Christian discipleship. Perhaps it could be argued that the problems that Rauschenbusch addressed in the early 20th century such as child labor, minimum wage legislation, and worker protection from unsafe working conditions, represent problems that have been “solved” through the ministrations of various 20th-century social reform efforts. Yet casting an eye to a landscape defined increasingly by the rhetoric of globalization, and its pleas for competitive markets, then one recognizes that the causes  Rauschenbusch fought for are still very much a part of our landscape today.  In looking at this unsettled landscape, we need church leaders who can reclaim Rauschenbusch’s emphasis that critiques current economic practices (whether from the “left” or “right’), through incisive theological world views.  

     Rauschenbusch’s legacy provides a powerful example of a theology of Christian political dissent, looking beyond America as a sign of the kingdom of God.  Rauschenbusch was always clear that his political allegiances lay within the United States.  Despite his love for the cultural and theological heritage of his German ancestral roots, he loved the democratic history of America, and at times became carried away in his praise for the uniqueness of the American democratic experiment (and as a professor of church history, he tended to equate signs of the kingdom with those church movements that did the best job of promoting democratic precepts in their theology and ecclesiology).  Early  in his career, Rauschenbusch echoed a rhetoric of American manifest destiny that faded as he matured.  While never a pacifist, his later theology emphasized the tenants of nonviolence that characterized numerous social reform movements throughout the 20th century.   Amidst the current tumult surrounding American military actions associated with the war on terrorism, we would do well to remember these words that Rauschenbusch used in a 1910 prayer.

Grant to the rulers of nations faith in the possibility of peace through justice and grant to the common people a new and stern enthusiasm for the cause of peace. Bless our soldiers and sailors for their swift obedience and their willingness to answer to the call of duty, but inspire them none the less with a hatred of war, and may they never for love of private glory or advancement provoke its coming. May our young men still rejoice to die for their country with the valor of their fathers, but teach our age nobler methods of matching our strength and more effective ways of giving our life for the flag.  

The sentiment of this prayer is as true today as it was almost a hundred years ago. It is a reminder to us that social action by the church should never be divorced from a deeply-planted faith  that cares for the spirituality of every person.
    Many have criticized Rauschenbusch for the ease with which he formed relationships with politically conservative, big-money capitalists (including a long-term friendship with the Rockefeller family). Yet the core of Rauschenbusch’s theology emphasized that the quest for justice was inseparable from the importance of personal relationships that were predicated on friendship, pastoral care, and mutual accountability. Rauschenbusch’s core belief that every person was of inherent sacred worth in the eyes of their creator served as a historical model for the liberal Protestant pulpit in the 20th century, and I believe that this paradigm still has much to teach pastors interested in reconciling pastoral care and social ministry.

A Social Gospel Theology for the 21st Century
When Rauschenbusch died of cancer in July 1918, World War I was at its climax and America and the west were on the verge of entering a new period of social and economic uncertainty that triggered a reaction against the social gospel. Today, heirs to the legacy of Walter Rauschenbusch and the social gospel face similar resistance. We find ourselves in a culture defined by the quest of Americans for economic and spiritual prosperity, often surrounded by people who see little relevance to the message of the so-called “social gospel.”  Yet there is no better time for us to be thankful for the prophetic heritage of Christian faith that Walter Rauschenbusch bestows upon us.  Such a heritage will not lead to a realization of a permanent kingdom on earth, but, God willing, it will build upon a legacy of Christian social thought that is evangelical to the core, inclusive of all God’s people, and not afraid to wrestle with the complex social and cultural ambiguities that define our particular era of religious history.
   

                                      Bibliography

Evans, Christopher H.  The Kingdom is Always but Coming: A Life of Walter Rauschenbusch . Grand Rapids:   
    William Eerdmans, 2004.

Evans, ed. The Social Gospel Today . Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001.

Hudson, Winthrop, ed. Walter Rauschenbusch: Selected Writings. New York: Paulist Press, 1984.

King, Jr. Martin Luther. Stride Toward Freedom. New York: Harper & Row, 1958.

Rauschenbusch, Walter,  Christianity and the Social Crisis (New York: Macmillan, 1907).

__________________, Prayers of the Social Awakening (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1910).

__________________, A Theology for the Social Gospel  (New York:  Macmillan, 1917).