Theology for the Social Gospel, rauschenbusch.

Historical criticism has performed an inestimable service to true religion by clearing up the historical antagon- Xism between priest and prophet in the Old Testament, and labeling the literary documents of Jewish religion according to

The love notion of God is the indispensable tool for accessing the mammalian soul for its moral Brilliance, discernment, courage, joy.

If you do not make it Bernie by a landslide there is no chance of this nightmare ever ending now.

There is an escape from this unfolding hell of evil globally. And it is our duty to go there to show the way. It is the infinite Joy and infinite suffering of lsgiabeing.com, by whatever name, or none. Hurry.

www.lsgiabeing.com

Chris Hedges: Stringfellow repeatedly warned Christians, as well as Christian institutions, not to allow the fear of death to diminish the power of Christian witness. Faith becomes real o....

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.truthdig.com/articles/the-suicide-of-the-liberal-church/%3famp

Stringfellow repeatedly warned Christians, as well as Christian institutions, not to allow the fear of death to diminish the power of... Christian witness. Faith becomes real on the edge of the abyss. “In the face of death,” he wrote, “live humanly. In the middle of chaos, celebrate the Word. Amidst Babel, speak the truth. Confront the noise and verbiage and falsehood of death with the truth and potency and efficacy of the Word of God.”

Video log update

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We need to keep our expectations and needs in check. Nearly everyone is suffering and it is only getting worse. We must be experts in finding our joy in serving not having.

I can't stand life on earth anymore. But I can every breath in the will of loving creation No matter what for joy.

The great Jedi Purge has been brought to my mind.

Those not friends in deed should not pretend friendship on Facebook.

The only thing I can control regarding Trump and his goons is whether I let them destroy my Humanity, my soul.

Fun fact: You might be a saint if higher-than-average is your quality of life & life expectancy, w/ a 40% chance of martyrdome.

Tornado risk today popped out of nowhere. We are in the yellow at the last.

When your dearest soul is in dire need is it a friend that at best gives a thumbs-up to the opportunity to help?

Is it clinical criminal insanity to willfully destroy all life on Earth As Trump and the billionaires supporting him

I know an individual worthy of all of the help that I can muster. And that won't be enough. Please thoroughly read this and see what if anything your soul prompts you to do. If we can't help in such a situation We are really really lost.

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Email or message me if you would like the link to the documentation. Start underscore loving at yahoo.com

Trump is some sort of Manchurian Candidate. Who is orchestrating it, Russia, Koch brothers, what?

Not because he can win and create change, too unlikely, but because he is an extraordinary teacher of goodness, I back Sanders.

Oh, that Pearl worth any price? Your soul, and any other, that you can redeem from the tyranny of head and flesh.

Jesus: I died to lead you to build our father's Kingdom on Earth of universal loving. Church has been embezzling all that resource for itself two thousand years now, to fatten itself on some snake oil real estate in the sky deal.

Hedges is our greatest living Prophet, as many times James has said. Tragically....

Hedges is our greatest living Prophet, as many times James has said. Tragically.... he is a little bit too addicted to his depression tho that is completely understandable. He is 1% wrong in this article, and that 1% is important. It is not without material hope. The Senate could be overturned. A general strike could force him out of office when Sanders wins. Greta could lead the world's children to hunger strike to death unless the world wakes up. No, seriously. Young children willing to die in the Civil Rights Movement were a decisive factor. And more importantly he is 100% wrong in concluding

James, you've been quiet. Where Have You Been these last few days? Your help is needed.

My friend, the heroic by every measure, mom two autistic boys with medical complications, herself with medical complications, and I are three or four days into fairly intense collaboration, mostly, she responded to my question so that I can get up to speed regarding the following.  No offense to anyone, there are few people I personally know  set the world is much better for having, and this incredible soul is one. I have invested and will invest as much of my life limb and treasure and keeping her Among Us, serving us, as I can but it is not enough. I am hoping that a network of six or seven or eight people including several from her family Network it seems quite able and a good heart to begin working on this each finding small pieces they can work on. This is the note I shared with her this morning and you now she's located in Michigan currently by the way: What I am working toward is trying to provide a way of understanding the situation for you and the boys that can enable us to, us being, maybe a small group of us networking online, to see individual pieces that we can begin to work on to understand and maybe to improve. Structurally and functionally it is being formed as a folder with subfolders and items in Google Drive that can easily be shared and collaborated on, findings noted, updates made, Etc. Although, side note, I am finding Google Drive a primitive collaborative tool compared to the word environment I used to be in. And most certainly to research to the point that we know that Improvement is just not going to happen or how it might. It might not be too early to cut and paste this into an email and send it to people that you think might be interested?

The church hates Jesus. Every time he pops up they crucify him again. No s***. As excited I am about rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel, as I am about Tolstoy in giving me the Clarity and confidence to believe in the man Jesus, his teachings and example, that I have always known. And rauschenbusch, the unvarnished truth that he shared, and the Social Gospel, has been culturally destroyed just as Jesus has been by the church.

As soon as the Church moved out into the Greek world, a process of assimilation began which left little of the real Jesus in sight. The......

As soon as the Church moved out into the Greek world, a process of assimilation began which left little of the real Jesus in sight. The......

historical research of the last forty years has written a new chapter about the sufferings of Jesus. Imagine him coming into a Gnostic

I say this in Goodwill, anyone whose consumption is Beyond Bare necessity does not care about the future. Example is everything.

Just as it can take a thousand years to grow a tree, so it can take hundreds or thousands of years to liberate the human Souls from the prison of civilization. Let's get on with it.

True wealth is only, only... the childlike soul in every human being, all but dead under the tyranny of head and flesh. Let's devote Our Lives to liberate it, for joy.

Here's the history. Civilization has been destroyed by Christianity, by destroying what might have saved the species, the truths distilled by the man Jesus.

This is the Theologian and theology that sparked young Martin Luther King jr. back toward the pulpit having decided he was not going to follow his father there.

Tolstoy despised the church, He adored the man Jesus for what he represented and taught. Same with Jesus James.  Gandhi said, there would be no Hindus if Christians would practice their faith. And, I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians, they are so unlike your Christ.

James, why are you harping on this? For the same reason that Tolstoy did. For the same reasons that if I craved the truth about physics and yet all history had very distorted perverted contorted the discoveries of Einstein I would with my last breath try to discover, uncover, what Einstein really had to say. And also, because Christianity is a gigantic historical fact and ongoing Force. A horribly perverting force the profoundly rare exception proves the rule.  James has so often stated and written and Lived he finds the idea of reforming Christianity an ultimate death trap. He has personally seen it destroyed the most promising Souls. Wiza care deeply about the few and Humanities that can be brought to joyful life or have that choice protected, that child's likeness, we can ill afford two things, ignorance of what the moral Einstein really had to say, and Ignorance of the force, the church, that continues to pervert burry destroye cripples that.

This young turn of the century Theologian finally give James the authoritative Clarity, understanding, history of the atrocity that is the church from the beginning, along with a even much richer understanding of what it was Jesus was showing and telling us. this finally after James has spent thousands and thousands of hours with other scholarship which was helpful but not nearly so complete, historical, clear. That Einstein of morality.

"Jesus always spoke of the Kingdom of God. Only two of his reported sayings contain the word " Church," and both passages are of questionable authenticity. It is safe to say that he never thought of founding the kind 131 132 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL of institution which afterward claimed to be acting for him. Yet immediately after his death, groups of disciples joined and consolidated by inward necessity. Each local group knew that it was part of a divinely founded fellowship mysteriously spreading through humanity, and awaiting the return of the Lord and the establishing of his Kingdom. This universal Church was loved with the same religious faith and reverence with which Jesus had loved the Kingdom of God. It was the partial and earthly realization of the divine Society, and at the Parousia the Church and the Kingdom would merge. But the Kingdom was merely a hope, the Church a present reality. The chief interest and affection flowed toward the Church. Soon, through a combination of causes, the name and idea of " the Kingdom " began to be displaced by the name and idea of " the Church " in the preaching, literature, and theological thought of the Church. Augustine completed this process in his De Civitate Dei. The Kingdom of God which has, throughout human history, opposed the Kingdom of Sin, is today embodied in the Church. The millennium began when the Church was founded. This practically substituted the actual, not the ideal Church for the Kingdom of God. The beloved ideal of Jesus became a vague phrase which kept intruding from the New Testament. Like Cinderella in the kitchen, it saw the other great dogmas furbished up for the ball, but no prince of theology restored it to its rightful place. The Reformation, too, brought no renascence of the doctrine of the Kingdom; it had only eschatological value, or was defined in THE KINGDOM OF GOD 1 33 blurred phrases borrowed from the Church. The present revival of the Kingdom idea is due to the combined influence of the historical study of the Bible and of the social gospel. When the doctrine of the Kingdom of God shriveled to an undeveloped and pathetic remnant in Christian thought, this loss was bound to have far-reaching consequences. We are told that the loss of a single tooth from the arch of the mouth in childhood may spoil the symmetrical development of the skull and produce malformations affecting the mind and character. The atrophy of that idea which had occupied the chief place in the mind of Jesus, necessarily affected the conception of Christianity, the life of the Church, the progress of humanity, and the structure of theology. I shall briefly enumerate some of the consequences affecting theology. This list, however, is by no means complete. 1. Theology lost its contact with the synoptic thought of Jesus. Its problems were not at all the same which had occupied his mind. It lost his point of view and became to some extent incapable of understanding him. His ideas had to be rediscovered in our time. Traditional theology and the mind of Jesus Christ became incommensurable quantities. It claimed to regard his revelation and the substance of his thought as divine, and yet did not learn to think like him. The loss of the Kingdom idea is one key to this situation. 2. The distinctive ethical principles of Jesus were the direct outgrowth of his conception of the Kingdom of God. When the latter disappeared from theology, the 134 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL former disappeared from ethics. Only persons having the substance of the Kingdom ideal in their minds, seem to be able to get relish out of the ethics of Jesus. Only those church bodies which have been in opposition to organized society and have looked for a better city with its foundations in heaven, have taken the Sermon on the Mount seriously. 3. The Church is primarily a fellowship for worship ; the Kingdom is a fellowship of righteousness. When the latter was neglected in theology, the ethical force of Christianity was weakened; when the former was emphasized in theology, the importance of worship was exaggerated. The prophets and Jesus had cried down sacrifices and ceremonial performances, and cried up righteousness, mercy, solidarity. Theology now reversed this, and by its theoretical discussions did its best to stimulate sacramental actions and priestly importance. Thus the religious energy and enthusiasm which might have saved mankind from its great sins, were used up in hearing and endowing masses, or in maintaining competitive church organizations, while mankind is still stuck in the mud. There are nations in which the ethical condition of the masses is the reverse of the frequency of the masses in the churches. 4. When the Kingdom ceased to be the dominating religious reality, the Church moved up into the position of the supreme good. To promote the power of the Church and its control over all rival political forces was equivalent to promoting the supreme ends of Christianity. This increased the arrogance of churchmen and took the moral check off their policies. For the King- THE KINGDOM OF GOD I35 dom of God can never be promoted by lies, craft, crime or war, but the wealth and power of the Church have often been promoted by these means. The medieval ideal of the supremacy of the Church over the State was the logical consequence of making the Church the highest good with no superior ethical standard by which to test it. The medieval doctrines concerning the Church and the Papacy were the direct theological outcome of the struggles for Church supremacy, and were meant to be weapons in that struggle. 5. The Kingdom ideal is the test and corrective of the influence of the Church. When the Kingdom ideal disappeared, the conscience of the Church was muffled. It became possible for the missionary expansion of Christianity to halt for centuries without creating any sense of shortcoming. It became possible for the most unjust social conditions to fasten themselves on Christian nations without awakening any consciousness that the purpose of Christ was being defied and beaten back. The practical undertakings of the Church remained within narrow lines, and the theological thought of the Church was necessarily confined in a similar way. The claims of the Church were allowed to stand in theology with no conditions and obligations to test and balance them. If the Kingdom had stood as the purpose for which the Church exists, the Church could not have fallen into such corruption and sloth. Theology bears part of the guilt for the pride, the greed, and the ambition of the Church. 6. The Kingdom ideal contains the revolutionary force of Christianity. When this ideal faded out of 136 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL the systematic thought of the Church, it became a conservative social influence and increased the weight of the other stationary forces in society. If the Kingdom of God had remained part of the theological and Christian consciousness, the Church could not, down to our times, have been salaried by autocratic class governments to keep the democratic and economic impulses of the people under check. 7. Reversely, the movements for democracy and social justice were left without a religious backing for lack of the Kingdom idea. The Kingdom of God as the fellowship of righteousness, would be advanced by the abolition of industrial slavery and the disappearance of the slums of civilization; the Church would only indirectly gain through such social changes. Even today many Christians can not see any religious importance in social justice and fraternity because it does not increase the number of conversions nor fill the churches. Thus the practical conception of salvation, which is the effective theology of the common man and minister, has been cut back and crippled for lack of the Kingdom ideal. 8. Secular life is belittled as compared with church life. Services rendered to the Church get a higher religious rating than services rendered to the community.-^ Thus the religious value is taken out of the activities of the common man and the prophetic services to society. Wherever the Kingdom of God is a living reality in 1 After the death of Susan B. Anthony a minister commented on her life, regretting that she was not orthodox in her beliefs. In the same address he spoke glowingly about a new linoleum laid in the church kitchen. THE KINGDOM OF GOD 1 37 Christian thought, any advance of social righteousness is seen as a part of redemption and arouses inward joy and the triumphant sense of salvation. When the Church absorbs interest, a subtle asceticism creeps back into our theology and the world looks different. 9. When the doctrine of the Kingdom of God is lacking in theology, the salvation of the individual is seen in its relation to the Church and to the future life, but not in its relation to the task of saving the social order. Theology has left this important point in a condition so hazy and muddled that it has taken us almost a generation to see that the salvation of the individual and the redemption of the social order are closely related, and how. 10. Finally, theology has been deprived of the inspiration of great ideas contained in the idea of the Kingdom and in labor for it. The Kingdom of God breeds prophets; the Church breeds priests and theologians. The Church runs to tradition and dogma; the Kingdom of God rejoices in forecasts and boundless horizons. The men who have contributed the most fruitful impulses to Christian thought have been men of prophetic vision, and their theology has proved most effective for future times where it has been most concerned with past history, with present social problems, and with the future of human society. The Kingdom of God is to theology what outdoor colour and light are to art. It is impossible to estimate what inspirational impulses have been lost to theology and to the Church, because it did not develop the doctrine of the Kingdom of God and see the world and its redemption from that point of view. 138 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL These are some of the historical effects which the loss of the doctrine of the Kingdom of God has inflicted on systematic theology. The chief contribution which the social gospel has made and will make to theology is to give new vitality and importance to that doctrine. In doing so it will be a reformatory force of the highest importance in the field of doctrinal theology, for any systematic conception of Christianity must be not only defective but incorrect if the idea of the Kingdom of God does not govern it. The restoration of the doctrine of the Kingdom has already made progress. Some of the ablest and most voluminous works of the old theology in their thousands of pages gave the Kingdom of God but a scanty mention, usually in connection with eschatology, and saw no connection between it and the Calvinistic doctrines of personal redemption. The newer manuals not only make constant reference to it in connection with various doctrines, but they arrange their entire subject matter so that the Kingdom of God becomes the governing idea.