Word: rauschenbusch
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...away from their fascination with other worlds-astrological, metaphysical or religious-and summoned to confront the concrete issues of this one," wrote Cox, a professor of religion at Harvard Divinity School. His call for social involvement was a capstone to decades of religious this-worldliness. Ever since Theologian Walter Rauschenbusch began to preach his social gospel at the end of the 19th century, there had been a growing feeling in U.S. Protestantism that religion was not a thing of pious Sundays but of vigorous, shirtsleeve weekdays. Many Roman Catholics and Jews were also trying to involve their churches and synagogues...
...back as the late 19th century, when Walter Rauschenbusch worked out his Social Gospel in the slums of New York, the urban ministry has been the classic ordination-of-fire for young clerical zealots. But despite the problems, opportunities for white ministers are fading. For one thing, many black communities no longer want white clergymen, friendly or not. For another, there are more and more radicalized seminarians competing for ghetto ministries. Now, as interest in parish assignments begins to go up again, seminary graduates are being forced to look to the suburbs, where many innovative ministers have proved that there...
...oppressed workingman and limit the power of his boss, to drive out the corrupt politician and put the vast natural resources of the New World into the public domain. Clergymen and laymen took up the cry 'for this challenging new way of interpreting ,the New Testament. Behind Rauschenbusch a new generation of militant ministers, such as Baptist Harry Emerson Fosdick, the late Methodist Bishop Francis J. McConnell and a young Midwesterner named Reinhold Niebuhr, were ready to step out of their pulpits and into the machine shops and marketplaces...
...Social? Walter Rauschenbusch died of cancer in 1918 at the age of 56, broken in spirit by World War 1, rejected by many Americans because of his German background and his attempts to keep the U.S. from fighting. Later his Social Gospel became so powerful that it took U.S. Protestantism to opposite extremes: churches sometimes seemed to be turning into sanctified civic-betterment societies...
Today the churchman's complaint is no longer that the bodies of the workers are being sweated, but more likely that their souls are being stifled in too much benevolent prosperity. Where Rauschenbusch preached the need for social organization, his successors deplore Organization Man. It is not so much that the Social Gospel is dead, but that it has been assimilated. The light Rauschenbusch lit half a century ago still burns in the activist, cause-conscious heart of U.S. Protestantism...