.... 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, 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.
No comprehension of Jesus is even approximately
true which fails to understand that the heart of his heart was
religion. No man is a follower of Jesus in the
full sense who has not through him entered into the same life with
God. But on the other hand.....
What Jesus meant by the kingdom of God. Nothing nothing nothing like what is found in the Abomination called Christianity....... Whatever
aspect
any man emphasized, it was still a national and collective idea. It
involved the restoration of Israel as a nation to outward
independence, security, and power, such as it had under the Davidic
kings. It involved that social justice, prosperity, and happiness
for which the Law and the prophets called, and for which the common
people always long. It involved that religious purity and holiness
of which the nation had always fallen short. And all this was to
come in an ideal degree, such as God alone by direct intervention
could bestow.
When Jesus used the phrase “the kingdom of God,” it
inevitably evoked that whole sphere of thought in the minds
of his
hearers. If he did not mean by it the substance of what they meant
by it, it was a mistake to use the term. If he did not mean the
consummation of the theocratic hope, but merely an internal
blessedness for individuals with the hope of getting to heaven, why
did he use the words around which all the collective hopes
clustered?...But it is very possible that he seriously modified and
corrected the popular conception. That is in fact the process with
every great, creative religious mind: the connection with the past
is maintained and the old terms are used, but they are set in new
connections and filled with new qualities. In the teaching of Jesus
we find that he consciously opposed some features of the popular
hope and sought to make it truer.
For one thing he would have nothing to do with
bloodshed and violence. When the crowds that were on their way to
the Passover gathered around him in the solitude on the eastern
shore of the lake and wanted to make him king and march on the
capital, he eluded them by sending his inflammable disciples away in
the boat, and himself going up among the rocks to pray till the
darkness dispersed the crowd (Matthew 14:22–23; John 6:14–15).
Alliance with the Messianic force-revolution was one of the
temptations which he confronted at the outset and repudiated
(Matthew 4:8–10); he would not set up God’s kingdom by using the
devil’s means of hatred and blood. With the glorious idealism of
faith and love Jesus threw away the sword and advanced on the
entrenchments of wrong with hand outstretched and heart
exposed.
He repudiated not only human violence, he even put
aside the force which the common hope expected from
heaven. He refused to summon the twelve legions
of angels either to save his life or to set up the kingdom by
slaying the wicked. John the Baptist had expected the activity of
the Messiah to begin with the judgment. The fruitless tree would be
hewn down; the chaff would be winnowed out and burned; and there
was barely time to escape this (Matthew 3:10–12). Jesus felt no
call to that sort of Messiah-ship. He reversed the program; the
judgment would come at the end and not at the beginning. First the
blade, then the ear, and then the full corn in the ear, and at the
very last the harvest. Only at the end would the tares be
collected; only when the net got to shore would the good fish be
separated from the useless creatures of the sea. Thus the
divine finale of the judgment was relegated to the distance;
the only task calling for present action was to sow the
seed.9... The
higher spiritual insight of Jesus reverted to the earlier and
nobler prophetic view that the future was to grow out of the
present by divine help. While they were waiting for the Messianic
cataclysm that would bring the kingdom of God ready-made from
heaven, he saw it growing up among them. He took his illustrations
of its coming from organic life. It was like the seed scattered by
the peasant, growing slowly and silently, night and day, by its own
germinating force and the food furnished by the earth. The people
had the impatience of the uneducated mind which does not see
processes, but clamors for results, big, thunderous,
miraculous results. Jesus had the scientific
insight which comes to most men only by training, but to the elect
few by divine gift. He grasped the substance of that law of organic
development in nature and history which our own day at last has
begun to elaborate systematically. His parables of the sower, the
tares, the net, the mustardseed, and the leaven are all polemical
in character. He was seeking to displace the crude and misleading
catastrophic conceptions by a saner theory about the coming of the
kingdom. This conception of growth demanded not only a finer
insight, but a higher faith. It takes more faith to see God in the
little beginnings than in the completed results; more faith
to say
that God is now working than to say that he will someday work.
Because Jesus believed in the organic growth of the
new society, he patiently fostered its growth, cell by cell. Every
human life brought under control of the new spirit which he himself
embodied and revealed was an advance of the kingdom of God. Every
time the new thought of the Father and of the right life among men
gained firmer hold of a human mind and brought it to the point of
action, it meant progress. It is just as when human tissues have
been broken down by disease or external force, and new tissue is
silently forming under the old and weaving a new web of life. Jesus
incarnated a new type of human life and he was conscious of that. By
living with men and thinking and feeling in their presence, he
reproduced his own life in others and they gained faith to risk
this new way of living. This process of assimilation went on by the
natural capacities inherent in the social organism, just as fresh
blood will flow along the established arteries and capillaries.
When a nucleus of likeminded men was gathered about him, the
assimilating power was greatly reinforced. Jesus joyously felt that
the most insignificant man in his company who shared in this new
social spirit was superior to the grandest exemplification of the
old era, John the Baptist (Matthew 11:11). Thus Jesus worked on
individuals and through individuals, but his real
end was not individualistic, but social, and in his method he
employed strong social forces. He knew that a new view of life
would have to be implanted before the new life could be lived and
that the new society would have to nucleate around personal centers
of renewal. But his end was not the new soul, but the new society;
not man, but Man.
The popular hope was a Jewish national hope. Under
....
.... That such an evil turn could be given to an event
that held such a power for good is a crushing demonstration that
the moral forces in humanity failed to keep pace with its
intellectual and economic development. Men learned to make wealth
much faster than they learned to distribute it justly. Their eye for
profit was keener than their ear for the voice of God and humanity.
That is the great sin of modern humanity, and unless we repent, we
shall perish by that sin. But the first call to repentance comes to
all those who have had this defective moral insight of humanity
under their training, and whose duty it was to give a voice to the
instincts of righteousness and brotherhood.
The first dire effects of the...
.... ” If the celebrated saying of John Stuart Mill is true,
that “it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made
have lightened the day’s toil of any human being,” it means that
the achievements of the human mind have been thwarted by human
injustice. Our blessings have failed to bless us because they were
not based on justice and solidarity.
THE MORALE OF THE WORKERS The existence of a large
class...
... To secure special concessions and privileges and to
evade public burdens have always been the objects for which
dominant classes used their political power. For instance, the
feu...
... Progress slackens when a single class
appropriates the social results of the common labor, fortifies its
evil rights by unfair laws, throttles the masses by political
centralization and suppression, and consumes in luxury what it has
taken in covetousness. Then there is a gradual loss of productive
energy, an increasing bitterness and distrust, a waning sense of
duty and devotion to country, a paralysis of the moral springs of
noble action. Men no longer love the Commonwealth, because it does
not stand for the common wealth. Force has to supply the cohesive
power which love fails to furnish.
Exploitation creates poverty, and poverty is
followed by phy...
..... Competitive industry and commerce are based on
selfishness as the dominant instinct and duty, just as Christianity
is based on love. It will outbuy and outsell its neighbor if it
can. It tries to take his trade and grasp all visible sources of
income in its own hand. The rule of trade, to buy in the cheapest
market and sell in the dearest, simply means that a man must
give as little to the other man and get as much from him as
possible. This rule makes even honest competitive trade—to say
nothing of the immense volume of more or less dishonest and
rapacious trade—antagonistic to Christian principles. The law of
Christ, wherever it finds expression, reverses the law of trade. It
bids us demand little for ourselves and give much service. A mother
does not try to make as rich a living as possible, and to give a
minimum of service to her children. It would be a sorry teacher who
would lie awake thinking how he could corner the market in
education and give his students as small a chunk of information as
possible from the pedagogic ice-wagon. The
relation between a minister and a chur....
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