Affirming the Social Gospel: In Appreciation of Walter Rauschenbusch

He was born 160 years ago on October 4, 1861, the first year of the Civil War, and died in 1918, a few months before the end of World War I, but Walter Rauschenbusch hated militarism and other societal problems that cause human suffering and the degradation of human life.

Acknowledgment of Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel

In all three of my “theological” books, I wrote about Rauschenbusch. In Fed Up with Fundamentalism (2007, 2020) I wrote that the Social Gospel was “the third factor [after Darwinism and biblical criticism] which helped instigate the fundamentalist movement.”

And I explained, “The most significant leader of the Social Gospel was the prominent Baptist historian Walter Rauschenbusch” (p. 30).

In The Limits of Liberalism (2010, 2020), one sub-section is “The Liberalism of Rauschenbusch” (pp. 31~35), and later I wrote that for many “the main religious appeal of liberalism is found in its ethical stance, which has often been shaped by the emphasis of Walter Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel” (p. 109).

Then in #5 of Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now (2018), I wrote about Rauschenbusch’s “strong emphasis on the idea that the kingdom of God is both here now and also coming in the future” (p. 36).

In his book Christianizing the Social Order (1912), Rauschenbusch used the phrase “the kingdom is always but coming,” and that became the title of the superb 2004 biography of Rauschenbusch by Christopher H. Evans.

Formation of Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel

Walter Rauschenbusch was the son of German parents who had immigrated to New York. After graduating from Rochester Theological Seminary, from 1886 to 1897 he served as the pastor of the Second German Baptist Church, located in the slum section of New York City known as Hell’s Kitchen.

That was at the apex of the Gilded Age when there was great and growing inequality between the upper and lower classes. For example, at the time when so many lived in crowded, vermin-infested tenements in Hell’s Kitchen, rich industrialists lived in luxury on 5^th Avenue and Madison Avenue.

John D. Rockefeller’s NYC home was less than a mile from Second German Baptist Church, and J.P. Morgan as well as William K. Vanderbilt and his flamboyant wife Alva lived only 1.2 miles from Rauschenbusch’s church. Here is a picture of the Vanderbilt mansion, completed in 1882. 

Rauschenbusch said that he went to his new pastorate “to save souls in the ordinarily accepted religious sense.” But in the area where his church was located, unemployment, poverty, malnutrition, disease, and crime were rampant.

He came to understand that Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount spoke more about how to live in the present rather than how to prepare for life after death. Further, he came to realize that Jesus’ key teaching about the Kingdom of God was also for the here and now, not just about the “sweet by and by.”

Affirmation of Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel

Even though I have remained critical of some aspects of Rauschenbusch’s “liberal” theology, such as his being overly optimistic about the possibility of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth by human effort, through the years I have increasingly come to affirm his basic theological ideas.

Here are some of the most important emphases in Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel.

    * Jesus’ core teachings are found in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5~7) and in his parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25:31-46).

    * The basis of Jesus’ teachings was his understanding of the Kingdom of God, which Rauschenbusch rightly understood as “always but coming.”

    * In addition to the reality and seriousness of “personal” sins, the pervasiveness and destructiveness of social sin and sinful social structures must be recognized and adamantly opposed.

The crux of Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel is still sorely needed now as it was in the 1890s and in 1917 when he published his last book, A Theology for the Social Gospel.

Can we and will we affirm, accept, and implement that Gospel? It is truly good news for the multitude of people who are suffering deprivation, discrimination, and destructive social structures right now.

For the Living of These Days

October 5, 1930, was a big day for Harry Emerson Fosdick, pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City. It was the first worship service in Riverside’s new church building, one of the most magnificent structures in the United States. 

Although I have attended a Sunday service at Riverside only once, and that was probably around 30 years ago, I still remember being greatly impressed by the size and beauty of the building—as well as by the service itself.

(Sometime I’d like to tell you the story of how I rented a bicycle and peddled through Central Park and then through Harlem on my way to Riverside, near the bank of the beautiful Hudson River.)

Pastor Fosdick wrote a hymn for that dedication service, which was 85 years ago today. Here is the second verse of that hymn, “God of Grace and God of Glory,” which I assume many of you have sung:

Lo! the hosts of evil round us

scorn the Christ, assail his ways!

From the fears that long have bound us

free our hearts to faith and praise.

Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,

for the living of these days,

for the living of these days.

Fosdick, who was born on May 24, 1878, was one of the most influential pastors of the first half of the 1900s. Martin Luther King, Jr., characterized him as “the greatest preacher of the twentieth century.”

In 1922 Fosdick preached a sermon for which he is still widely known: “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” He was one of the first vocal opponents of Christian fundamentalism—and was a primary target of the fundamentalists.

But Fosdick was also an opponent of liberalism, back when it was called “modernism.” In 1935 one of the most significant sermons he preached at Riverside Church was “The Church Must Go Beyond Modernism.”

While rejecting both fundamentalism and extreme liberalism, Fosdick was an advocate of the Social Gospel. Two years before the dedication of the new church building, Fosdick declared that a church

"that pretends to care for the souls of people but is not interested in the slums that damn them, the city government that corrupts them, the economic order that cripples them, and international relationships that, leading to peace or war, determine the spiritual destiny of innumerable souls’’ would receive divine condemnation (Hope of the World, p. 25).

Fosdick died on October 5, 1969, on the 39th anniversary of that notable first Sunday at Riverside Church, where he served as pastor until 1946.

One of Fosdick’s successors was William Sloane Coffin, who was the Senior Minister at Riverside from 1977 to 1987. (See my blog article about him here.) On Oct. 5, 1980, Coffin preached at the 50th anniversary of Riverside Church. Near the end of that sermon he declared, 

“Dearly beloved parishioners, we have no choice, we must work for the redistribution of wealth. We must abridge our luxuries for the sake of others’ necessities, in this city, in this land, and in the world” (The Collected Sermons of William Sloan Coffin: The Riverside Years, 2008, I:358).

Wealth had long been an issue at Riverside, for the new edifice, whose construction began in 1927, was largely funded by business magnate John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The dedication of that magnificent building, though, was almost a year following the beginning of the Great Depression.

So the powerful words of prayer in Fosdick’s hymn had great meaning in 1930: “Give us courage, give us wisdom, for the living of these days.” 

That’s still a good prayer for us today.

“Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes”

Richard Rorty was an American philosopher who is not well known outside of academic circles. I certainly have not read him extensively and do not know a lot about him. But I have recently read, and have been impressed with, his 1998 essay titled “Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes.”

Rorty, who died six years ago this month (in 6/07) at the age of 75, was the grandson of the noted German-American theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, the son of the latter’s oldest child. But unlike his grandfather and mother, Rorty was a secular humanist rather than a Christian believer.

Still, Rorty had great appreciation for his grandfather. That is evident from the afterword he wrote for “Christianity and the Social Crisis in the 21^st Century,” the centennial re-issue of Rauschenbusch’s classic work “Christianity and the Social Crisis” (1907).

From his secular humanist viewpoint, Rorty compares the New Testament and the Communist Manifesto in the 1998 essay. He avers that

both documents are expressions of the same hope: that some day we shall be willing and able to treat the needs of all human beings with the respect and consideration with which we treat the needs of those closest to us, those whom we love.

That glorious “hope for social justice,” says Rorty, is “the only basis for a worthwhile human life.” And, according to Rorty, the idea of social justice includes the hope that “the world might be changed so as to ensure that no one goes hungry while others have a surfeit.”

Rorty realized that if social justice is to be achieved there will have to be some redistribution of wealth. Echoing the emphasis of his grandfather on the “social gospel,” non-Christian Rorty declares, “There is no way to take the New Testament seriously as a moral imperative . . . without taking the need for such redistribution equally seriously.”

Then, alluding to the Communist Manifesto, Rorty writes,

To say that history is the history of class struggle is still true, if it is interpreted to mean that in every culture, under every form of government, and in every imaginable situation . . . the people who have already got their hands on money and power will lie, cheat and steal in order to make sure that they and their descendants monopolize both for ever.

But, alas, both the New Testament and the Manifesto of Marx and Engels have to this point been “failed prophecies.” We in the United States have no trouble seeing the miserable failure of Marxism in most of the countries where it became dominant.

Cambodia is a good example. The Khmer Rouge was the Communist Party of Cambodia under the despotic rule of Pol Pot. It may have embraced a glorious hope for social justice in the beginning, but it is hard to imagine a more dismal failure. More than 2,000,000 Cambodians were killed by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s.

Certainly the New Testament has not failed so miserably, especially in recent decades. And yet, from the time of Charlemagne through the era of European colonialism to rather recently, political and military rulers who have claimed to be Christians have led to the slaughter, enslavement, and oppression of people around the world.

I am not as pessimistic as Rorty was. Many Christians are still seeking social justice based on the teachings of Jesus Christ and the New Testament. But, sadly, there are many others who are not. Rorty’s pessimism was not completely unfounded.

Things would have been much different, though, if the ideas of Rorty’s grandfather had been implemented more widely, rather than being largely rejected by the fundamentalists of the 1920s and afterward.