Walter Rauschenbusch



Walter Rauschenbusch

Introduction

Walter Rauschenbusch was a Baptist minster that later turned into seminary professor. He was one of the most renounced and famous Protestant during his days. His writing on the social gospel provided that movement with its most articulate expression.

He was born on 4 October 1861 in a German family of immigrants, Rauschenbusch descended from several generations of Lutheran pastors, although his father became a Baptist early in life and eventually a professor at New York's Rochester Theological Seminary. Walter Rauschenbusch grew up in a home that supported connections to German culture that proved to be significant for his own theological development. He spent his teenager years in Germany including early education, and an intense religious experience at this time motivated him toward the ministry and evangelism.

He completed his graduation and seminary education from Rochester in 1889. Later he went New York as a preacher of the Second Baptist Church in Hell's Kitchen, which was truly insolvent vicinity. Subsequently, he began to question the assumptions that had guided his own seminary education, which had focused on providing rural worshippers with personal redemption. He became involved in economic reformer Henry George's campaign for mayor in 1886 when faced with glaring city neediness. He turned to authors like Tolstoy and Edward Bellamy for awareness and became a devoted socialist. A holiday at the German universities of Marburg, Berlin, and Kiel supported him to examine such German academic resources as the historical and critical approach to the Bible, including the theology of Albrecht Ritschl, and the work of various socialist thinkers. Leaving his congregation in 1897, he accepted a position in New Testament at Rochester Theological Seminary. In 1902, he became professor of church history, a position he retained until his death by cancer on July 25, 1918.

Opposed with the negative side of the massive social changes carried by the rise of industrial capitalism, Rauschenbusch found most Christians weirdly quiet at a time when he thought religion needed to offer the nation kind guidance on social policy. In Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), he pursued to provide his classmates with an understanding of why Christianity was silent on issues of wealth and poverty. He compared the original motivation of the biblical prophets and Jesus to establish a moral "Kingdom of God" with a church that had become influenced by foreigner (bourgeois) social forces, and "clogging" its "revolutionary moral power." For Rauschenbusch, the history of the church revealed a risky split of religious and moral commitment.

Rauschenbusch saw the present historical moment as offering Christians an opportunity to reconnect with their biblical inheritance and at the same time encourage those modern developments in science, politics, and economics that could lead to the "social redemption of humanity." His arguments reflected a form of optimistic thinking in America that saw the kingdom of God as something human beings could help bring about. But his positivity was stressed by the occurrence of World War I. In his final book, A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917), ...