by Walter Rauschenbusch
(New York: Macmillan, 1917)
It is the religious reaction on the historic advent of democracy. It seeks to put the democratic spirit, which the Church inherited from Jesus and the prophets, once more in control of the institutions and teachings of the Church.
(page 5)
The social gospel seeks to bring men under repentance for their collective sins and to create a more sensitive and more modern conscience.
(page 5)
Theology is not superior to the gospel. It exists to aid the preaching of salvation.
(page 6)
Religion wants wholeness of life. We need a rounded system of doctrine large enough to take in all our spiritual interests.
(page 9)
The social gospel calls for an expansion in the scope of salvation and for more religious dynamic to do the work of God. It requires more faith and not less. It offers a more thorough and durable salvation. It is able to crate a more searching sense of sin and to preach repentance to the respectable and mighty who have ridden humanity to the mouth of hell.
(page 11)
...power in religion comes only through the consciousness of a great elementary need which compels men to lay hold of God anew.
(page 11)
Theology needs periodical rejuvenation. Its greatest danger is not mutilation but senility. ... When people have to be indoctrinated laboriously in order to understand theology at all, it becomes a dead burden.
(pages 12-13)
The grat religious thinkers who created theology were always leaders who were shaping ideas to meet actual situations.
(page 13)
Every forward step in the historical evolution of religion has been marked by a closer union of religion and ethics and by the elimination of non-ethical religious performances.
(page 14)
The more the social gospel engages and inspires theological thought, the more will religion be concentrated on ethical righteousness.
(page 15)
Jesus and his followers were laymen. The people felt that his teaching was different from the arguments of their theologians, less ponderous and more moving.
(page 15)
The working creed of the common man is usually very brief. A man may tote a large load of theology and liveon a small part of it.
(page 16)
The social gospel approximates lay religion. It deals with the ethical problems of the present life with which the
common man is familiar and which pres upon his conscience.
(page 16)
An unawakened person does not inquire on whose life juices his big dividends ad fattening.
(page 19)
Those who to-day are still without a consciousness of collective wrong must be classified as men of darkened mind.
(page 19)
Theology always needs rejuvenation. Most of all in a great epoch of change like ours.
(page 21)
As soon as the desire for salvation beomes strong and intelligent enough to look beyond the personal sins of the individual, and to discern how hour personality in its intake and output is connected with the social groups to which we belong, the problem of social redemption is before us and we can never again forget it.
(page 24)
It is concerned with the eradication of sin and the fulfillment of the mission of redemption.
(page 31)
To lack the consciousness of sin is a symptom of moral immaturity...
(page 32)
One of the culminating accusations of Jesus against the theological teachers of his time was that the strained out gnats and swallowed camels, judiciously laying the emphasis on the minor sins and keeping silence on the profitable major wrongs.
(page 35)
It may well be that with some individuals there is a loss of seriousness in the sense of sin as a result of the social gospel. But on the whole the result consists chiefly in shifting the emphasis and assigning a new valuation to different classes of sins. Attention is concentrated on questions of public morality....
(page 36)
The prophets were deeply conscious of the sins of men, but they did not base their teachings on the doctrine of the fall. Not till we reach post-biblical Jewish theology is there any general interest in the story of Adam’s fall.
(page 40)
The social gospel is above all things practical. It needs religious ideas which will release energy for heroic opposition
against organized evil and for the building or a righteous social life.
(page 42)
One of the greatest tasks in religious education reserved for the social gospel is to spread in society a sense of the solidarity of successive generations and a sense of responsibility for those who are to come after us and whom we are now outfitting with the fundamental conditions of existence.
(page 43)
The three forms of sin, - sensuousness, selfishness, and godlessness, - are ascending and expanding stages, in which we sin against our higher self, against the god of men, and against the universal good.
(page 47)
The definition of sin as selfishness furnishes an excellent theological basis for a social conception of sin and salvation.
(page 47)
Sin is not a private transaction between the sinner and God. Humanity always crowds the audience-room when God holds court. We must democratize the conception of God; and then the definition of sin will become more realistic.
We love and serve God when we love and serve our fellows, whom he loves and in whom he lives. We rebel against God and repudiate his will when we set our profit and ambition above the welfare of our fellows and above the Kingdom of God which binds them together.
We rarely sin against God alone.
(page 48)
... covetousness is the moral basis of our civilization.
(page 49)
God is not only the spiritual representative of humanity; he is identified with it. In him we liveand move and have our being. In us he lives and moves, though his being transcends ours. He is the life and light in every man and the mystic bond that unites us all. ... He works through humanity to realize his purposes, and our sins block and destroy the Reign of God in which he might fully reveal and realize himself. ... Therefore when we retard the progress of mankind, we retard the revelation of the glory of God. (page 49)
Sin is essentially selfishness. ... The sinful mind, then, is the unsocial and anti-social mind. To find the climax of sin we must not linger over a man who swears, or sneers at religion, or denies the mystery of the trinity, but put our hands on social groups who have turned the patrimony of a nation into the private property of a small class .... .
(page 50)
... we do not know whether Adam was as perfect as he is portrayed. Theology has ante-dated conceptions of human perfection which we have derived from Jesus Christ and has converted Adam into a perfect Christian.
(page 51)
The spiritual perfection of Jesus consists in the fact that he was so simply and completely filled with the love of God and man that he gave himself to the task of the Kingdom of God without any reservation or backsliding. This is the true standard of holiness. The fact that a man is too respectable to get drunk or to swear is no proof of his righteousness. Hs moral and religious quality must be measured by the intelligence and single-heartedness with which he merges his will and life in the divine purpose of the Kingdom of God.
(page 52)
This is the chief significance of the social gospel for the doctrine of sin: it revives the vision of the Kingdom of God.
(page 53)
... the reign of God would be the reign of love. It is not enough to think of the Kingdom as a prevalence of good will. The institutions of life must be fundamentally fraternal and co-operative if they are to train men to love their fellowmen as co-workers. Sin, being selfish, is covetous and grasping. It favours institutions and laws with permit unrestricted exploitation and accumulation.
(page 54)
Idleness is active selfishness; it is not only unethical, but a sin against the Kingdom of God. To lay a heavy burden of support on our fellows, usually on the weakest classes, and to do no productive labour in return, is so crude a manifestation of sinful selfishness ... .
(page 55)
We shall not be doing our thinking in a Christian way until we agree that productive labour according to the ability of each is one of “the conditions of salvation.”
(page 56)
The permanent vices and crimes of adults are hot transmitted by heredity but by being socialized ... .
(page 60)
That sin is lodged in social customs and institutions and is absorbed by the individual from his social group is so plain that any person with common sense can observe it ...
(page 60)
A theology for the social gospel would have to say that original sin is partly social. It runs down the generations not only by biological propagation but also by social assimilation.
(page 61)
... if a group practices evil, it will excuse or idealize it, and resent any private judgment which condemns it. Evil then becomes part of the standards of morality sanctioned by the authority of society.
(page 61)
Sin in the individual is shame-faced and cowardly except where society backs and protects it.
(page 62)
Social institutions always generate the theories adapted to them.
(page 66)
The idealization of evil is an indispensable means for its perpetuation and transmission. But the most potent motive for its protection is its profitableness. ... When fed with money, sin grows wings and claws. ... The rise of the money system enlarged the limits of acquisition. Money could be bread from money.
(page 66)
... theology has done considerable harm in concentrating the attention of religious minds on the biological transmission of evil.
It has diverted our minds form the power of social transmission, from the authority of the social group in justifying, urging, and idealizing wrong, and from the decisive influence of economic profit in the defense and propagation of evil.
(page 67)
Individualistic theology has not rained the spiritual intelligence of Christian men and women to recognize and observe spiritual entities beyond the individual. Our religious interest has been so focused on the soul of the individual and its struggles that we have remained uneducated as to the more complex units of spiritual life.
(page 69)
Organizations are rarely formed for avowedly evil ends. They drift into evil under sinister leadership, or under the pressure of need or temptation.
(page 72)
History should be re-written to explain the nature of human parasitism. It would be a revelation.
(page 73)
The higher the institution, the worse it is when it goes wrong. The most disastrous backsliding in history was the deterioration of the Church. Long before the Reformation the condition of the Church had become the most serious social question of the age. It weighed on all good men. The Church, which was founded on democracy and brotherhood, had, in its higher levels, become an organization controlled by the upper classes for parasitic ends, a religious duplicate of the coercive State, and a chief check on the advance of democracy and brotherhood. Its duty was to bring love, unity and freedom to mankind; instead it created division, fomented hatred, and stifled intellectual and social liberty.
(pages 73-74)
The social gospel needs above all a restoration of religious faith in the Reign of God in order to create an adequate sense of guilt for public sins ... .
(page 77)
The life of humanity is infinitely interwoven, always renewing itself, yet always perpetuating what has been. The evils of one generation are caused by the wrongs of the generations that preceded, and will in turn condition the sufferings and temptations of those who come after.
(page 79)
The apparently free and unrelated acts of individuals are also the acts of the social group. When the social group is evil, evil is over all.
(page 81)
After the Exile the religion of the Jews was filled with angels and devils, each side built up in a great hierarchy, rank above rank. Evidently this systematized and theological belief in a satanic kingdom was observed form the Eastern religions with which the Jews came into close contact during the Exile. The monotheism of the Hebrew faith held its own against the dualism of the East, but the belief in Satan is a modified dualism compatible with the reign of Jehovah. The apocalyptic system is a theology built up on this semi-dualistic conception, describing the conflict of the Kingdom of Satan against God and his angels and his holy nation and the final triumph of God.
The belief in the Satanic Kingdom and the apocalyptic theology were transferred from Judaism to Christianity was part of the initial inheritance of the new religion form the old ... .
(pages 82-83)
The belief in a Satanic kingdom, in so far as it was not merely theology but vital religious faith, has always drawn its vitality from
political and social realities.
(page 87)
... a great malign power was needed as the religious backing of the oppressive international forces in whose talons the Jewish race was writhing. Satan first got his vitality as an international political concept.
(page 88)
... a salvation confined to the soul and its personal interests is an imperfect and only partly effective salvation.
(page 95)
The form which the process of redemption takes in a given personality will be determined by the historical and social spiritual environment of the man. At any rate any religious experience in which our fellow-men have no part or thought, does not seem to be a distinctively Christian experience. If sin is selfishness, salvation must be a change which turns a man from self to God and humanity.
(page 97)
Complete salvation, therefore, would consist in an attitude of love in which he would freely co-ordinate his life with the life of his fellows in obedience to the living impulses of the spirit of God ... .
(page 98)
When we submit to god, we submit to the supremacy of the common good. Salvation is the voluntary socializing of the soul.
(page 99)
Conversion has usually been conceived as a break with our own sinful past. But in many cases it is also a break with the sinful past of a social group.
(page 99)
In primitive Christianity baptism stood for a conscious break with pagan society. This gave it a powerful spiritual reaction. Conversion is most valuable if it throws a revealing light not only across our own past, but across the social life of which we are part, and makes our repentance a vicarious sorrow for all.
(page 99)
Faith once more means prophetic vision. It is faith to assume that this is a good world and that life is worth living. It is faith to assert the feasibility of a fairly righteous and fraternal social order. In the midst of a despotic and predatory industrial life it is faith to stake our business future on the proposition that fairness, kindness, and fraternity will work. ... It is faith to see God at work in the world and to claim a share in his job. Faith is an energetic act of the will, affirming our fellowship with god and man, declaring our solidarity with the Kingdom of God, and repudiating selfish isolation.
(page 102)
Those who believe in the social gospel can share in any methods for the cultivation of the spiritual life, if only they have an ethical outcome. ... Sanctification is through increased fellowship with God and man.
(page 102)
Sanctification ... can not be attained in an unproductive life, unless it is unproductive through necessity. In the long run the only true way to gain moral insight, self-discipline, humility, love, and a consciousness of coherence and dependence, is to take our place among those who serve one another by useful labor.
(page 103)
The mystic way to holiness is not through humanity but above it. We can not set aside the fundamental law of God that way. He made us for one another, and our highest perfection comes not by isolation but by love. The way of holiness through human fellowship and service is slower and lowlier, but its results are more essentially Christian.
(page 104)
Personal sanctification must serve the Kingdom of God. Any mystic experience which makes our fellow-men less real and our daily labour less noble, is dangerous religion. A religious experience is not Christian unless it binds u closer to men and commits us more deeply to
the Kingdom of God.
(page 105)
A Christian regeneration must have an outlook toward humanity and result in a higher social consciousness.
(page 108)
The more we approach pure Christianity, the more will the Christian signify a man who loves mankind with a religious passion and excludes none. ... The sense of solidarity is one of the distinctive marks of the true followers of Jesus.
(pages 108-109)
Capitalistic joint stock companies work on the plan of “one share, one vote.” Therewith power is located in money. One crafty person who has a hundred shares can outvote ninety-nine men who have a share apiece, and a small minority can outvote all the rest if it holds a majority of stock. Money is stronger than life, character, and personality.
Co-operatives work on the plan of “one man, one vote.” A man who holds one share has as much voting power as a man with ten
shares; his personality counts.
(pages 111-112)
Luther’s theses on indulgences got their popularity not by their new and daring theology, for they were a hesitating and wavering statement of a groping mind, - but by the fact that they touched one of the chief sources of papal income. Seve4ral of the great doctrines of the Reformation got their vitality by their internal connection with the question of church property.
(page 116)
If we listen to the Church’s own estimate of itself it is worth as much as oxygen is to animal life. It is indispensable. “Outside of the Church there is no salvation.” Very early in its history the Church began to take a deep interest in itself and to assert high things about itself. ...
It is important to remember that when its high claims were first developed, they were really largely true. Christianity was in sharp opposition not only to the State but to the whole social life surrounding it. It created a Christian duplicate of the social order for its members, as far as it could. ... If the individual was to be impregnated with the saving power of Christianity, the Church had to do it. There was actually no salvation outside of the Church. But the statements in which men of the first generations expressed their genuine experience of what the church meant to them, were turned into a theological formula and repeated in later times when the situation had changed, and when, for a time, the Church was not the supreme help but a great hindrance.
(pages 118-119)
Nothing lasts unless it is organized, and if it is organized of human life, we must put up with the qualities of human life in it.
(page 120)
If the Church is to have saving power, it must embody Christ. He is the revolutionary force within it. The saving qualities of the
Church depend on the question whether it has translated the personal life of Jesus Christ into the social life of its group and thus brings it to bear on the individual.
(page 128)
The social gospel ... tests the claims and powers of any church by the continuity of the apostolic faith within it and by its possession of the law and spirit of Jesus.
The saving power of the Church does not rest on its institutional character, on its continuity, its ordination, its ministry, or its
doctrine. It rests on the presence of the Kingdom of God within her.
(page 129)
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 former disappeared from ethics.
(pages 133-134)
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.
(page 134)
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.
(page 135)
Whenever the Kingdom of God is a living reality in Christian thought, any advance of social righteousness is seen as a part of redemption and arouses inward joy and the triumphant sense of salvation.
(pages 136-137)
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.
(page 137)
The Kingdom of Godbreeds prophets; the church breeds priests and theologians.
(page 137)
The Kingdom of Godis 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.
(page 137)
... any systematic conception of Christianity must be not only defective but incorrect if the idea of the Kingdom of God does not govern it.
(page 138)
When our moral actions are consciously related to the Kingdom of God they gain religious quality.
(page 140)
As long as organized sin is in the world, the Kingdom of God is characterized by conflict with evil.
(page 140)
Since God is in it, the Kingdom of God is always both present and future. ... It is the energy of God realizing itself in human life.
(pages 140-141)
The Kingdom of Godis humanity organized according to the will go God.
(page 142)
... the Kingdom of God ... tends towards a social order which will best guarantee to al personalities their freest and highest development.
(page 142)
Since the Kingdom is the supreme end of God, it must be the purpose for which the Church exists. ... The institutions of the Church, its activities, its worship, and its theology must in the long run be tested by its effectiveness in creating the Kingdom of God.
(page 143)
The Church has the power to save in so far as the Kingdom of God is present in it.
(page 144)
Early Greek theology saw salvation chiefly as the redemption form ignorance by the revelation of God and from earthliness by the impartation of immortality. It interpreted the work of Christ accordingly, and laid stress on his incarnation and resurrection. Western theology saw salvation mainly as forgiveness of guilt and freedom from punishment. It interpreted the work of Christ accordingly, and laid stress on the death and atonement.
(page 144)
The Kingdom of Godis not confined within the limits of the Church and its activities. It embraces the whole of human life.
(pages 144-145)
... the social gospel is less concerned in the metaphysical problems involved in the Trinitarian and Christological doctrines. The speculative problem of Christological dogma was how the divine and human natures united in the one person of Christ; the problem of the social gospel is how the divine life of Christ can get control of human society. The social gospel is concerned about a progressive social incarnation of God.
(pages 147-148)
The fundamental first step in the salvation of mankind was the achievement of the personality of Jesus. Within him the Kingdom of Godgot its first foothold inhumanity. It was by virtue of his personality that he became the initiator of the Kingdom.
His personality was an achievement, not an effortless inheritance. His temptations and struggles were not state-combats. At every point of his life he had to see his way through the tangle of moral questions which invited to errors and misjudgments; his clarity of judgment was an achievement.
(page 151)
... the Kingdom of God means battle.
(page 151)
How can we claim high ethical value for the personality and character of Jesus if no effort of will was necessary to achieve it?
(page 152)
An overpowering consciousness of God is needed in order to offset and overcome the tyranny of the sensuous life and its temptations.
(page 154)
The Reign of God came to mean the organized fellowship of humanity acting under the impulse of love.
(page 155)
Jesus was not a pessimist. Since God was love, this world was to him fundamentally good. He realized not only evil but the Kingdom of Evil; but he launched the Kingdom of God against it, and staked his life on its triumph. His faith in God and in the Kingdom of God constituted him a religious optimist.
(page 156)
Ceremonial acts were not the proper expression of his consciousness of God. He realized religion in acts expressing love and fellowship.
(page 160)
He bowed to law and order. He paid his taxes, and advised others to do it. He sent a leper to the proper officer to get his sanitary
certificate. But he had no spiritual awe for the exponents of the present social order. He challenged its moral basis. He dropped into the silence of a passive resister when he faced a typical court, and he was felt then and ever since as a force against despotism.
(page 162)
Jesus not only achieved the kind of religious personality which we have tried to bring before our memory and imagination, but he succeeded in perpetuating his spirit. What was personal with him became social within the group of the disciples. His life became a collective and assimilating force and a current of historic tradition.
(page 164)
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.
(page 164)
... any teaching on the sinful condition of the race and on its redemption from evil which fails to do justice to the social factors and processes in sin and redemption, must be incomplete, unreal, and misleading.
(page 167)
The conception of God held by a social group is a social product. Even if it originated in the mind of a solitary thinker or prophet, as soon as it becomes the property of a social group, it takes on the qualities of that group.
(page 167)
... in time the Church came under the control and spiritual influence of the upper classes, and finally of the RomanState. We know that the effects of this social environment were wrought into the constitutional structure of the Church. The Roman Catholic Church is still the religious replica of the Roman imperial organization.
(page 169)
Feudalism was a social order in which the military, judicial, and executive powers were under the control of the same class which controlled the one great source of wealth at that time, the agricultural land.
(page 170)
Our imagination has only a short reach. ... As long as kings and governors were the greatest human beings in the public eye, it was inevitable that their image should be superimposed on the idea of God. Court language and obeisances were used in worship and when men reasoned about God, they took their illustrations and analogies form those who were a close second to God.
(page 170)
The sense of fear which has pervaded religion has doubtless been, at least in part, a psychological result of the despotic attitude of parents, of school-masters, of priests, and of officials all the way from the town beadle to the king.
(page 173)
The mediaeval methods of earning religious merit and of securing intercession were the product of fear and a close duplicate of the conditions existing under economic and political despotism. God was a feudal lord, holding his tenants in a grip from which there was no escape, exacting what was due to him, and putting the delinquent in a hot prison which was even worse than the terrible holes underneath the duke’s castle.
(page 173)
... the social relations in which men lived, affected their conceptions about God and his relations to men. Under tyrannous conditions the idea of God was necessarily tainted with the cruel harness of society.
(page 174)
The conflict of the religion of Jesus with autocratic conceptions of God is therefore part of the struggle of humanity with autocratic economic and political conditions.
(page 174)
The worst form of leaving the naked unclothed, the hungry unfed, and the prisoners uncomforted, is to leave men under a despotic conception of God and the universe.
(page 174)
... one of the highest redemptive services of Jesus to the human race. When he took God by the hand and called him “our Father,” he democratized the conception of God. He disconnected the idea from the coercive and predatory State, and transferred it to the realm of family life, the chief social embodiment of solidarity and love. He not only saved humanity; he saved god. He gave God his first chance of being loved and of escaping from the worse misunderstandings conceivable.
(pages 174-175)
We have classified theology as Greek and Latin, as Catholic and Protestant. It is time to classify it as despotic and democratic. From a Christian point of view that is a more decisive distinction.
(page 175)
The triumph of the Christian idea of God will never be complete as long as economic and political despotism prevail.
(page 176)
As long as religion borrows its terms form the procedure of law-courts, the spirit of coercion and terror leaks in. Legal ideas are not congruous with the Christian consciousness of salvation.
(page 177)
The social gospel is God’s predestined agent to continue what the Reformation began. It arouses intelligent hatred of oppression and the reign of fear, and teaches us to prize liberty and to love love. Therefore those whose religious life has been influenced by the social gospel are instinctively out of sympathy with autocratic conceptions of God.
(page 177)
The worst thing that could happen to God would be to remain an autocrat while the world is moving toward democracy. He would be dethroned with the rest.
(page 178)
The Kingdom of god is the necessary background for the Christian idea of God.
(page 178)
A theological God who has no interest in the conquest of justice and fraternity is not a Christian.
(page 178)
The old conception that God dwells on high and is distinct from our human life was the natural basis for autocratic and arbitrary ideas about him. On the other hand the religious belief that he is immanent in humanity is the natural basis for democratic ideas about him.
(pages 178-179)
Our solidarity is a beneficent part of human life. It is the basis for our greatest good. If our community life is righteous and fraternal, we are enriched and enlarged by being bound up with it. But, by the same law, if our community is organized in a way that permits, encourages, or defends predatory practices, then the larger part of its members are through solidarity caged to be eaten by the rest, and to suffer what is both unjust and useless.
(pages 182-183)
The fact that a careless boy falls down stairs does not condemn gravitation, nor does the existence of evil community life condemn God who constituted us social beings.
(page 184)
... the tolerance of social injustice is an intolerable evil. The great sin of men is to resist the reformation of predatory society.
(page 184)
Both the Old Testament and the New Testament characterizations of God’s righteousness assure us that he hates with steadfast hatred just such practices as modern communities tolerate and promote. If we can trust the Bible, God is against capitalism, its methods, spirit, and results.
(page 184)
... it is one of the most universal and important characteristics of religion that it constitutes the spiritual bond of social groups.
(page 184)
The spread of a monotheistic faith and the recognition of a single God of all mankind is a condition of an ethical union of mankind in the future.
(page 185)
If we invite men to come under the same spiritual roof of monotheism with us and to abandon their ancient shelters, let us make sure that this will not be exploited as a trick of subjugation by the Empires. As long as there are great colonizing imperialisms in the world, the propaganda of Christianity has a political significance.
(page 186)
The consciousness of solidarity ... is of the essence of religion.
(page 186)
The Christian God has been a breaker of barriers from the first. All who have a distinctively Christian experience of God are committed to the expansion of human fellowship and to the overthrow of barriers.
(pages 186-187)
The great men of whom we think as solitary miracles of religious power were surrounded and upborne in their day by religious groups which have now melted back into oblivion. Their prophetic consciousness was awakened and challenged by historic events affecting the social group to which they belonged. ... Their religious experiences were moments of intense social consciousness.
(pages 188-189)
The Christian Church began its history as a community of inspiration. The new thing in the story of Pentecost is not only the number of those who received the tongue of fire but the fact that the Holy Spirit had become the common property of a group. What had seemed to some extent the privilege of aristocratic souls was now democratized.
(page 189)
The process of inspiration was formerly conceived as a transaction between God and the individual. The higher the doctrine of inspiration, the more solitary was the inspired individual. It would have defeated the purpose of the doctrine to admit the presence of outside influences.
(page 189)
The modern conception of inspiration not only recognizes the free operation and the contributions of the distinctive psychical equipment of the inspired person, but seeks in every way to get beyond the individual to the social group which produced him, to the spiritual predecessors who inspired him, and to the audience which moved him because he hoped to move it.
(page 190)
... to be conscious of the divine light, to listen to the inner voice, to read the inspired words of the Bible with an answering glow of fire, is part of the consciousness of God to which we are entitled.
(page 193)
The power of the regenerate individual for the advancement of the Kingdom of Godconsists largely in his prophetic quality.
(page 194)
Individualistic religion has bread saints, missionaries, pastors, and scholars, but few prophets.
(page 194)
When the act of baptism was initiated by John the Baptist and continued for a time by Jesus, it was not a ritual act of individual salvation, but an act of dedication to a religious and social movement.
(pages 197-198)
The immediate cause for the baptism of young children was the belief that baptism is necessary for salvation, combined with the ever urgent facts of infant mortality. ... The practical necessities of the case created a social backing for the young candidate. ... Since the faith of the child was still undeveloped, theology taught that the sponsors and the Church were to supply it.
(page 199)
In the early Church, discipline consisted largely in barring offenders from communion. ... Reconciliation among the members preceded communion. None could share in the Lord’s Supper who were in a state of enmity with other Christians.
(page 203)
All religions of higher development have some mythology about the future. ... To be satisfying to the Christian consciousness any teaching concerning the future life of the individual must express that high valuation of the eternal worth of the soul which we have learned from Christ ... .
(page 208)
During the formative centuries the Oriental and Greek religious life, which deeply influenced Christianity, was dualistic, and whatever influences have come from that source are not only historically but essentially unchristian.
(page 209)
In primitive Christianity eschatology was in the centre of religious interest and thought. Today it is on the circumference, and with some Christians it lies outside the circumference.
(page 210)
The idea of a resurrection of the dead did not come into eschatology through growing individualism, but out of the feeling that the righteous who had died before the inauguration of the new order were entitled to a share in the common happiness.
(page 212)
... eschatology has all along been influenced by social causes ... The Jewish people under social and political oppression, and the primitive Church under persecution wept and prayed our eschatology into existence.
(page 215)
The more original and spiritual a teacher is, the larger will be the inevitable ratio of misunderstanding.
(page 219)
We see the whole situation incorrectly when we tacitly assume that the ideas of Jesus were uniform through his teaching ministry. If we take the doctrine of his real humanity seriously, he was a growing personality, and his ideas were in the making. A man’s ideas are developed by reacting on the ideas of his fellow men by assent or dissent.
(pages 219-220)
The ethics of Jesus would have remained the same if the range of time had lengthened before him. His mind did push impetuously forward, but not toward a scheme of distant events, but toward the immediate saving acts of God. To him the Kingdom of Godwas both future and present.
(page 220)
History is a revelation of God’s will. God thinks in action, and speaks in events. His historical realities are a surer word of God than any prophecy. The least of us today knows things which would have revolutionized the eschatology of the apostles.
(page 221)
The future development of the race should have a larger place in practical Christian teaching.
(page 223)
All Christian discussions of the past and the future must be religious, and filled with the consciousness of God in human affairs. ... Where others see blind forces working dumb agony, we must see moral will working towards redemption and education. A religious view of history involves a profound sense of the importance of moral issues in social life.
(pages 223-224)
An outlook toward the future in which the “spiritual life” is saved and the economic life is left unsaved is both unchristian and stupid.
(page 224)
Our chief interest in any millennium is the desire for a social order in which the worth and freedom of every least human being will be honoured and protected; in which the brotherhood of man will be expressed in the common possession of the economic resources of society; and in which the spiritual good of humanity will be set high above the private profit interests of all materialistic groups.
(page 224)
It is the untaught and pagan mind which sees God’s presence only in miraculous and thundering action; the more Christian our intellect becomes, the more we see God in growth.
(page 225)
It is more religious to believe in a present than in an absent and future Christ.
(page 225)
The coming of the Kingdom of God will be the regeneration of the super-personal life of the race, and will work out a social expression of what was contained in the personality of Christ.
(page 226)
A progressive Kingdom of righteousness happens all the time in instalments, like our own sanctification.
(page 227)
Belief in a future life is not essential to religious faith.
(page 228)
We want the possibility of growth. We can not conceive of finite existence or of human happiness except in terms of growth. It would be more satisfactory for modern minds and for Christian minds to think of an unlimited scale of ascent toward God, reaching from the lowest to the highest, within which ever spirit would hold the place for which it was fitted, and each could advance as it grow.
(page 233)
... no man, in any human sense of justice, has deserved an eternity of hell.
(page 233)
In this ascending scale of beings none would be so high that he could not be drawn still closer to God, and none so low that he would be beyond the love of God.
(page 233)
... we can not rejoice in hell. It can’t be done. At least by Christians. The more Christian Christ has made a soul, the more it would mourn for the lost brothers. The conception of a permanent hell was tolerable only while God was conceived as an autocratic sovereign dealing with his subjects; it becomes intolerable when the Father deals with his children.
(page 234)
How can we become more Christ-like on earth or in heaven except by love and service?
(page 235)
... personality energized by god is ever growing ... .
(page 238)
All true joys on earth come from partial realizations of the Kingdom of God... Our labour for the Kingdom here will be our preparation for our participation hereafter. ... Spiritual influences come to us; spiritual personalities go out from us. When our life is in God it has continuity.
(pages 238-239)
Every personal act of sin, however isolated it may seem, is connected with racial sin. Evil social customs and ideas stimulate or facilitate it; in turn it strengthens the social suggestion to evil for others.
(page 246)
The most persistent force which pushed Jesus toward death ... was religious bigotry.
(page 248)
The second social evil which contributed to kill him was the combination of graft and political power.
(page 250)
A third historic evil is the corruption of justice.
(page 252)
A fourth permanent social sin which participated in the death of Jesus was the mob spirit and mob action.
(page 254)
The fifth universal sin of organized society which co-operated in the death of Christ was militarism.
(page 255)
The last of this group of racial sins is class contempt.
(page 256)
His thought is that by repeating the sins of the past we are involved in the guilt of the past. We are linked in a solidarity of evil and guilt withal who have done the same before us, and all who will do the same after us. In so far then as we, b our conscious actions or our passive consent, have repeated the sins which killed Jesus, we have made ourselves guilty of his death. If those who actually killed him stood before us, we could not wholly condemn them, but would have to range ourselves with them as men of their own kind.
(page 259)
... our own free and personal acts constitute us partakers of the guilt of others.
(page 259)
The spiritual and redemptive value of his death was not in the quantity of his mental or physical suffering ... it was in the willingness with which he took on himself this highest and hardest part of his life-work.
(page 261)
God’s attitude is combines of opposition and love. God has always borne the burnt of human sin while loving us. ... Within human limits Jesus acted as God acts. The non-resistance of Jesus, so far from being a strange or erratic part of his
teaching, is an essential part of his conception of life and of his god-consciousness.
(page 262-263)
Christ was the first to live fully within the consciousness of God and to share his holy and loving will. He drew others into his realization of God so that they too freely loved God and appropriated his will as their own. Thus he set in motion a new beginning of spiritual life within the organized total of the race, and this henceforth pervaded the common life.
(page 265)
If Jesus had died a natural death, posterity would still treasure his teaching, coupled with the commentary of his life, as the most beautiful exposition of love. But its effectiveness was greatly increased by his death. ... His death underscored all he said on love. It put the red seal of sincerity of his words. “Greater love hath no man than that he give his life for his friends.” Unless he gives it for his enemies too.”
(pages 270-271)
... love has been written into the character of God and into the ethical duty of man; not only common love, but self-sacrificing love.
(page 271)
We do not have to earn all we get by producing merit. We live on grace and what we do is slight compared with what is done for us.
(page 272)
The great religious characters are those who escaped from themselves and learned to depend on god ... .
(page 272)
Humility is the capacity to realize that we count for little in ourselves and must take our place in a larger fellowship of life.
Therefore humility and dependence on grace are social virtues.
(page 273)
The social gospel is based on the belief that love is the only true working principle of human society. ... love will support only a fraternal distribution of property and power, while force will support exploitation and oppression.
(page 273)
The priest is the religious professional. He performs religious functions which others are not allowed to perform. It is therefore to his interest to deny the right of free access to God, and to interpose himself and his ceremonial between the common man and God. He has an interest in representing God as remote, liable to anger, jealous of his rights, and quick to punish, because this gives importance ot the ritual methods of placating God which the priest along can handle. It is essential to the priestly interst to establish a monopoly of rights and functions for his group. ... He is the middle man of religion, and like other middlemen he is sincerely convinced that he is necessary for the good of humanity and that religion would perish without him.
(pages 274-275)
The prophet becomes a prophet by some personal experience of God, which henceforth is the dominant reality of his life. ... As a result of his own experience he usually becomes the constitutional enemy of priestly religion, the scorner of sacrificial and ritual doings, a voice of doubt about the doctrines and the literature which shelter the priest. He too is a middle-man, but he wants no monopoly. His highest desire is to have all men share what he has experienced.
(page 275)
The prophet is always more or less cast out by society and profoundly lonely and homeless; consequently he reaches out for companionship, for a tribal solidarity of his own, and a chieftainship of the spirit to which he can give his loyalty and from which he can gather strength.
(page 279)
... the social gospel is the voice of prophecy in modern life.
(page 279)