Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918)

The author's final work; a systematic exploration of the "social gospel" as formulated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and its relationship to "traditional" formulations of faith and doctrine prevalent in churches of the time.

I was going in and expecting to find much disagreement. The author was very much enraptured with positivist postmillennial progressivism, and most of my criticism derives from those assumptions. But Rauschenbusch is not easily or glibly dismissible; his critiques of the institutionalized Christendom of his time are generally apt, and the deficiencies he finds in them very real. He is certainly correct to see what we would call Evangelical Christendom as way overinvested in the individual and the exaltation thereof to the detriment of the collective and the common good. He was not wrong to see a complete lack of Kingdom values and ethic, and was absolutely right to want to bring the Lordship of Jesus to bear in societal domains. He did well at exposing the overemphasis on individual and personal sin/transgressions and intentional ignorance regarding systemic (he spoke of them as "super-personal") sin and deficiencies. His critiques of capitalism prove extremely relevant; his praise of co-operatives sounds like something you could read from one of Elizabeth Warren's many plans. While I think his motivations for disassociating the Kingdom from the church are misguided, I can appreciate the effort: the church ought to be the church and do what the church is given to do, and Christians do well to participate in that and also maintain the perspective that the Reign of Jesus is to be brought to bear in other domains of their existence. The "secular/sacred" binary was always a lie.

And yet. His progressivism and postmillennialism leads him to prove too dismissive of how Jesus and the Apostles actually worked and on what they focused as it related to social change. Postmillennial optimism was literally bleeding away on the killing fields of Europe as Rauschenbusch wrote; the promise of socialism, at least in its extreme form, would prove to be a horror not long afterward. All nations are corrupt, and while some things change for the better, other things change for the worse. It would be interesting to see what Rauschenbusch would think of America a century after his treatise: he would be able to see the many very concrete ways in which his type of thinking has led to societal change for the better, and yet the foundations of his positivist postmillennialism have been entirely dashed on the rocks of the trials of the 20th century. Few eschatological postures lead to such terrible dead ends as postmillennialism in any of its forms, and this should be a warning to any Christian Reconstructionists out there.

Theologically he is a bit too enraptured with Continental scholarship of the 19th century; his portrayal of Jesus is as ahistorical as those he would critique. The various reasons for the death of Jesus he gives are not wrong, and they are worth considering as reflections of the works of the powers and principalities over this present darkness; but they do not justify the abandonment of other atonement postures. He is right to see that churches tend to elevate "priests" and have nothing to do with "prophets," but his disassociation of Kingdom and church goes too far; he very much remains a creature of Christendom, and the cognitive dissonance between what should be and what has been was too much for him. His dismissal of baptism is a bit much. His progressivism gets the better of him in his dismissal of Satan and the demonic, leaving the New Testament's foundational ground for his "super-personal" forces. And those who think they understand Jesus better than the Apostles generally get their comeuppance.

One can perceive the strong impact of Rauschenbusch's theology on a lot of the social movements of the 20th century. And yet, just over a century later, most of what Rauschenbusch wrote in critique of American Christendom and capitalism are just as valid, if not more so, even though untold amounts of money and effort have been expended in various pursuits related to the "social gospel." Read this book for its critiques, and grapple with them; understand that salvation in Christ is to the end of relational unity between God and His people, not merely individual salvation; hear the clarion call to bring Jesus' lordship to bear in society, and to imagine a better conditions of relations among mankind. But understand that the powers and principalities over this present darkness are great in their power and working, and there remains wisdom in how Jesus and the Apostles went about turning the world upside down.… (meer)