Rauschenbusch, Walter
RAUSCHENBUSCH, WALTER (1861–1918), Baptist clergyman and intellectual leader of the Social Gospel movement in American Protestantism. Rauschenbusch was born in Rochester, New York, received most of his schooling there, and taught at the Rochester Theological Seminary from 1897 to 1918. His father, August, a highly educated Westphalian Lutheran pastor, had gone to Missouri in 1846 as a missionary to German immigrants. After becoming a Baptist, August Rauschenbusch headed the Rochester seminary's program for German-speaking clergy. He bequeathed to his son an enduring appreciation of both evangelical piety and the Western cultural tradition.
Following his graduation from the Rochester Theological Seminary in 1886, young Rauschenbusch became pastor of the Second German Baptist Church in a tenement section of New York City. Here he was stirred by the hardships of the people: "I saw how men toiled all their life … and at the end had almost nothing to show for it; how strong men begged for work and could not get it in the hard times; how little children died" (The Social Gospel in America, 1870–1920, p. 265). He realized that his training had not equipped him to understand the powerful social, economic, and intellectual currents sweeping through American life; nor had his conservative seminary professors offered him a religious perspective adequate to cope with those currents. During his eleven-year pastorate in New York City he undertook an intense schedule of reading, discussion, and writing, much of it in collaboration with colleagues in two new organizations he helped to direct, the Baptist Congress and the Brotherhood of the Kingdom. Rauschenbusch received intellectual stimulation from a variety of authors, notably the American economist Henry George, the English theologians Frederick D. Maurice and Frederick W. Robertson, the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoi, the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, and the German sociologist Albert Schäffle.
Rauschenbusch returned to the Rochester Theological Seminary in 1897 as professor of New Testament; from 1902 until his death he was professor of church history. More than any other person in the United States, he provided a theological undergirding for the growing numbers of laity and clergy who sought to mold social and economic institutions according to Christian principles. His chief books were Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Prayers of the Social Awakening (1910), Christianizing the Social Order (1912), The Social Principles of Jesus (1916), and A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917).
Central in Rauschenbusch's message were the affirmations that the churches must recognize afresh that the kingdom of God had been Jesus' key teaching, that God intends this kingdom to reach into every realm of life, and that the competitiveness and selfishness fostered by capitalism must be opposed by persons committed to fulfilling God's beneficent will for humanity.
In the decades following Rauschenbusch's death many churches continued to address the tasks of social criticism and reconstruction, albeit not with the single-mindedness and effect for which he and other Social Gospel leaders had wished. Some influential religious thinkers in the middle third of the twentieth century judged Rauschenbusch's theological perspective to have been colored excessively by the optimism of his era. Recently, his thought has been viewed more appreciatively by persons who find richly provocative such Rauschenbuschian themes as the centering of Christianity in Jesus' proclamation of God's reign, the historical and social character of sin and salvation, and the complementarity of personal piety and social activism.
Bibliography
The information contained in Dores R. Sharpe's Walter Rauschenbusch (New York, 1942) makes this an indispensable volume. However, it offers little historical and theological perspective, and significant gaps exist in Sharpe's presentation of Rauschenbusch's life. A more recent biography is Paul M. Minus, Walter Rauschenbusch: American Reformer (New York, 1988). Perceptive analyses and important portions of Rauschenbusch's writings can be found in The Social Gospel in America, 1870–1920, edited by Robert T. Handy (New York, 1966); "Sources of American Spirituality," in Walter Rauschenbusch: Selected Writings, edited by Winthrop S. Hudson (Mahwah, N. J., 1984); and Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (New York, 1917), "Library of Theological Ethics" (Louisville, 1997), with introduction by Donald W. Shriver, Jr.
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