.... Six decades after the
book’s original release, Martin Luther King Jr. would write, “In
the early 50’s I read Walter Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and
the Social Crisis, a book which left an indelible imprint on my
thinking.” I am Walter Raus...
.... The belief in a future life and
future reward and punishment was almost absent in Hebrew religion.
To live to an honored old age, to see his children and children’s
children, to enjoy the fruit of his labor in peace under his own
vine and fig tree—that was all the heaven to which the pious Israelite
looked for.....
.... As long as
the people were falsely optimistic, the prophets persisted in
destroying their illusions. When the people were despairing, the...
.... Beyond
the question of economic distribution lies the question of moral
relations; and beyond the moral relations to men lies the question
of the religious communion with that spiritual reality in which we
live and move and have our deepest being—with God, the Father of
our spirits. Jesus had realized the life of God in the soul of man
and the life of man in the love of God. That was the real secret of
his life, the well-spring of his purity, his compassion, his
unwearied courage, his unquenchable idealism: he knew the Father.
But if he had that greatest of all possessions, the real key to the
secret of life, it was his highest social duty to share it and help
others
to gain what he had. He had to teach men to live as children in the
presence of their Father, and no longer as slaves cringing before a
despot. He had to show them that the ordinary life of selfishness
and hate and anxiety and chafing ambition and covetousness is no
life at all, and that they must enter into a new world of love and
solidarity and inward contentment. There was no service that he
could render to men which would equal that. All other help lay in
concentric circles about that redemption of the spirit and flowed
out from it....
.... Jesus had realized the life of God in the soul of man
and the life of man in the love of God. That was the real secret of
his life, the well-spring of his purity, his compassion, his
unwearied courage, his unquenchable idealism: he knew the Father.
But if he had that greatest of all possessions,
