“Christianity and the Social Crisis”
The Rev. David C. Bloom
Director Emeritus, Rauschenbusch Center
Seattle First Baptist Church, Seattle, WA
November 23, 2014
Matthew 25: 31-40
Walter Rauschenbusch, who lived from 1861 to 1918, was a Baptist minister and seminary
professor who had a profound impact on the mission of the church in America, an impact that has
reverberated to this day. Harry Emerson Fosdick, the famous liberal pastor of the Riverside
Church in New York City once said that Rauschenbusch was “often the lonely voice of a new era,
but after his death, ministers, churches, denominations and councils of churches began speaking
out vigorously on social issues, as they never had before. The essence of his message—that social
and economic transformation is involved in the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth—is an
integral part of the Christian gospel,” or as Jesus taught us to pray: “Your kingdom come on earth
as it is in heaven.”
I can attest to the fact that Rauschenbusch has had a direct impact on my life and ministry
and no doubt on untold thousands of my lay and clergy colleagues over the past century, including
Elmer Fridell, Harold Jensen, Alice Franklin Bryant, Charles Z. Smith, Gus Hintz, Rod Romney,
Tim Phillips, and many others, who have committed themselves to lives of social activism in the
name of Jesus Christ by standing in their places exhorting their people to the difficult work of
social justice, human rights, and peace-making. This is one of our great legacies as Baptists!
While his name is little known today, Rauschenbusch’s impact is critical to any
understanding of the church in 20th and 21st Century America. While not alone in his efforts,
Rauschenbusch reshaped the thinking and theology of the American Protestant Church from its
overbearing emphasis on individual salvation to a much more comprehensive view of communal
salvation that became known as the social gospel.
And the bedrock of Rauschenbusch’s theology was his concept of the Kingdom of God, a
vision he said that was specifically articulated by Jesus in the Gospels of how God intended the
world to work. The Kingdom of God—or what we might call today the reign or realm of God—
became a living reality for Rauschenbusch, a reality that while it was not yet realized, could still
be experienced as already present. “The Kingdom is always but coming,” he would say. Here and
yet not here, a vision and a reality that we are constantly seeking. It could only be revealed, but in
its revelation, it could also be realized in loving contact between human beings—in our
relationships—particularly in loving contact with human beings in abject need of what it takes to
survive and to thrive in God’s creation. Such need certainly includes food, shelter, clothing, and
healthcare. But it must also address the basic human longing for dignity, respect, and opportunities
to grow in body, heart, and mind. And it was clear to Rauschenbusch in his day, as it is clear to us
in our day, that the world does not work in that way. We only need to look at the nightly news:
Instead of peace, there is war. Instead of abundance for all, there is grinding poverty. Instead of
compassion there is violence. Instead of community there is human disintegration.
“The spirit of God has chosen me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to the
captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free the oppressed and proclaim the year of
God’s favor. Today these words have been fulfilled in your hearing.” This is what Jesus said in
what has been described as his mission statement in Luke 4. This is a very specific expression of
God’s concern for the welfare of God’s people and of the mission of the church. And in reading
these words from Isaiah, Jesus identified himself that day with the Hebrew prophetic tradition, a
tradition that emphasized the ethical demands of the Jewish faith. The Hebrew prophets’ message,
Rauschenbusch said, was that “God demanded justice and nothing but justice.”
Reading Walter Rauschenbusch in 2014, more than 100 years since his 1907 seminal work,
Christianity and the Social Crisis, is like reading a contemporary critique of American society.
The poor are too numerous, working people do not make a living wage, and the dominant
American religion of Christianity is too fixated on personal morality and the fate of a person’s
immortal soul than on the all too frequent social, economic, and political conditions that stifle their
hopes and dreams. Rauschenbusch writes that despite all the progress of the 19th Century, ordinary
humankind was still suffering under the weight of oppression. Has the redemption of man come at
last, he asks, ironically, with the following questions, and think about this in terms of the realities
of our city and nation today:
Is none in pain with hunger.…do children grow up trained for thought and action…do
none die before their time…have people learned to restrain their bodily passions…have
they learned to deal with their fellows in justice and love…are there none who toil for
others against their will…are there no barriers to class…do they no longer spill blood for
their ambition?
Walter’s words offered a ringing critique of the grim realities that faced too many
Americans in early 20th Century America, a critique that many in religion and government and
industry did not want to hear then, nor do many of them want to hear it today.
How did a Baptist minister, who grew up in the German pietistic tradition, a tradition that
emphasized personal conversion and a literal reading of the Bible, become one of the main
exponents of what has become known as social Christianity? Walter Rauschenbusch was the son
of a Baptist minister and professor at Rochester Theological Seminary in New York State, now
known as Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, where he himself taught the last twenty years
of his life. His father, Augustus Rauschenbusch, had converted from Lutheranism when he had
emigrated from Germany to America in the mid-19th Century, but he remained a steadfastly
orthodox Christian. And that’s how Walter grew up and began his ministry, as he followed in his
father’s footsteps. But then he went to Hell’s Kitchen in lower Manhattan in the 1880’s to pastor
the Second German Baptist Church.
Experience can be a marvelous teacher, if we pay attention, and Walter was a good student.
As he ministered in the crowded and disease and vermin infested tenements where thousands of
immigrant families were trying to eke out a living with their meager resources and where he found
himself conducting funerals for babies on a regular basis, he had what he described as a second
conversion. His first, in his youth, was typical of the personal conversion and commitment to
Christ that was common in 19th Century evangelical Christianity. But he quickly came to realize as
a pastor that his personal faith could not stand up to the social oppression that he witnessed on a
daily basis. As he came face to face with the horrors of poverty and economic insecurity in the
community he served, he discovered, he said, “How ineffectual was pious, individualistic
philanthropy in solving major social problems.” If I serve a God of love, he asked himself, how
can I minister in the midst of such massive human suffering without confronting the source of that
suffering? And that drove him back to the Hebrew prophets where he began to see his own
religion in an entirely new way.
Rauschenbusch focused especially on Amos and Hosea and Isaiah and Jeremiah, the
disturbers of the peace of Israel in the eighth to sixth centuries before the Common Era. These
were the Hebrew prophets who took both the religious and political authorities to task for their
oppression of the poor and for their luxurious living at the expense of the common people. “I
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desire goodness and not sacrifice,” said Hosea. “Cease to do evil! Learn to do right! Relieve the
oppressed! Secure justice for the orphaned and plead for the widow,” said Isaiah.
As we think about the 1% today and the political system that enables them to grow richer,
and the large portion of the 99%, who live increasingly on the financial and social margins, we can
see a resonance between the concerns of the Hebrew prophets, Rauschenbusch’s critique of the
oppression of early 20th Century America, and the current descent of the middle class and the
growing poverty and homelessness of the lower classes of our own time, including here in Seattle.
The prophets are “the beating heart of the Old Testament,” Rauschenbusch wrote, not
because they could predict the future, but because they demanded, as Amos said, that “justice roll
down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
“The morality which the prophets had in mind,” Rauschenbusch wrote, “was not merely
the private morality of the home, but the public morality on which national life is founded. They
said less about the pure heart for the individual than of just institutions for the nation….The
prophets were the heralds of the fundamental truth that religion and ethics are inseparable and that
ethical conduct is the supreme and sufficient religious act. If that principle had been fully adopted
in our religious life, it would have turned the full force of the religious impulse into the creation of
right moral conduct and would have made the unchecked growth and accumulation of injustice
impossible.
“We are accustomed,” he continued, “to connect piety with the thought of private virtues: the
pious man is the quiet, temperate, sober, kindly man. The evils against which we contend in the
churches are intemperance, unchastity, the sins of the tongue….(On the other hand) The twin-evil
against which the prophets launched the condemnation of Jehovah was injustice and oppression.”
The more immediate influence on my theology came from Martin Luther King, Jr. who
was assassinated during the spring of my second year of seminary in 1968. While I knew little of
Rauschenbusch at the time, I considered Dr. King to be a spiritual mentor and model, as did many
of my contemporaries. And here is where we can see a direct link from King in the 1960’s back to
Rauschenbusch in 1907 and forward over the next century influencing generations of church
leaders until today.
“I came early to Walter Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis,” Dr. King
once wrote, “which left an indelible imprint on my thinking by giving me a theological basis for
the social concern which had already grown up in me. Rauschenbusch had done a great service for
the Christian Church by insisting that the gospel deals with the whole man, not only his soul but
his body; not only his spiritual well-being but his material well-being. It has been my conviction
ever since reading Rauschenbusch that any religion that professes concern for the souls of men
and is not equally concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that
strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion,
waiting to be buried.”
And if anyone understood this and lived it out more thoroughly and authentically and paid
for it with his life, it was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We know of his heroic and historic
leadership of the civil rights movement from the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 to the
sanitation workers strike in Memphis in 1968, which cost his life. Throughout his ministry, Dr.
King moved increasingly toward advocacy for economic justice for low-wage workers, which was
what brought him to Memphis. In the spirit of Rauschenbusch, he understood that for religion to
have any relevance for the masses of working people, it had to speak to their social and economic
conditions. This led him to proclaim what he said was God’s call for the church to build “the
beloved community,” a living reality of justice and peace and reconciliation. It was a reality that
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was directly influenced by Rauschenbusch’s emphasis on the Kingdom of God, a reality that can
be both experienced, but never quite fully realized in our lifetimes.
It is the church, more than any other institution in our society, I believe both
Rauschenbusch and King would say, that has the moral imperative to set forth the vision of the
Kingdom of God and the Beloved Community. In so doing it is also the church’s duty to proclaim
that something is terribly wrong when women and children in this city and in this most abundant
of nations do not have a home of their own to go to at night; when 2½ million school children in
America—one out of every thirty—were homeless at some time last year, when men and women
work full time and cannot support their families; when our nation spends $800 billion dollars on
the military every year while neglecting education and housing and health care.
While the emphasis on personal salvation has been prominent in the history of the
American Protestant Church, theologians in the late 19th Century, including Horace Bushnell and
Washington Gladden, the author of this morning’s closing hymn, were beginning to re-examine
the Hebrew prophets’ emphasis on God’s concern for the social and political conditions of the
Jewish people, and they began to see Jesus’ ministry in that context. So when Rauschenbusch
encountered the social and economic degradation of the residents of Hell’s Kitchen in the 1880’s
and ‘90’s, he was confronted in a new way by the ethical demands of the Jewish religion as they
applied to his world, and which were articulated by Jesus in the Gospels. Jesus mission statement
in Luke 4: “I have come to bring good news to the poor and liberty to the oppressed and sight to
the blind,” should not be spiritualized. “His healing power was for social help,” Rauschenbusch
said, “for the alleviation of human suffering.”
And how else can we understand today’s reading of the Parable of the Last Judgment from
Matthew 25 as anything other than God’s very clear command that the attributes of the Kingdom
of God are realized when we feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, visit the sick and
imprisoned, and welcome the stranger, for example today’s millions of immigrants in our midst?
“Just as you did to the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me,” Jesus said.
And the Franciscan Priest Richard Rohr reminds us that Jesus wasn’t just talking about personal
acts of charity, as important as they may be, but that God is calling the Nations to account for their
treatment of the poor and the hungry and the thirsty and the naked and the lonely and the
imprisoned and the stranger. And Jesus repeats the litany of who is to receive our compassion in
his name four different times in Matthew 25, as if to make sure that we get it. Why has this not
been the center of the Church’s ministry for the past 2,000 years?
It is also important to be clear that while Rauschenbusch said individual salvation was an
incomplete expression of the gospel because it was essentially based on selfishness, he
emphasized the importance of a personal spiritual relationship with God that was expressed
through prayer and worship and participation in a religious community. This provided the spiritual
energy for living a Christian–or I would say any authentic religious life. “Walter was not simply a
social activist,” Rod Romney once wrote. “His activism sprang from a deep and genuine
spirituality. By making service to others an inseparable part of the Christian life, he laid the
foundations for a healthy new form of spirituality to emerge that combined social activism with
the contemplative life. His scholarship, his passion, his prophecy and his deep spirituality remain
alive today.”
Finally, Walter Rauschenbusch insisted that the Church does not exist for itself, but rather
for the transformation of the world. It is a lesson that we are still trying to learn, for “the kingdom
is always but coming!”
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