Words From Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918)
By Al Staggs,
Performing Artist, Santa Fe, NM
Note: This article is adapted from a dramatic monologue presented on September 16, 2008, at the “Red-Letter Christians” conference at Truett Seminary, sponsored by CET and funded by the Piper Foundation.
What I would like to speak about this evening is a subject that is near and dear to my heart. This issue, this concept has been the centerpiece of my career as a theologian, pastor, and activist. That concept is “The Kingdom of God.” As I have written and spoken about this concept and its societal applications, I have often been roundly criticized and severely castigated by quite a number of pastors and religious leaders for not giving more of an emphasis on personal conversion or to personal piety and spirituality.
At this point, I would like to share a word of personal testimony about my faith and my spiritual journey. It was at my mother’s knee that I first learned to pray. I was deeply influenced by my father Augustus, who was in his own right a godly religious scholar, missionary, and pastor. Whatever I am today, spiritually, is as a direct result of the guidance and influence of my devout and loving parents.
As a young man, I began to feel the seriousness of life. I was very young when I first heard the call of God on my life. I struggled with God’s call for several years until I finally accepted his will and purpose for my career and for my future. From that time forth I have felt God’s presence through all of my endeavors and experiences.
During the time of my theological education I was confronted with the choice between the imposing authority of human customs and traditions and the self-evident power of God’s word. I chose God’s word.
I began to realize that God hates injustice and that I would be quenching God’s spirit within me if I kept silent with all of the social sin of the world around me. Early in my life, I became convinced that it was the duty of all Christians to help bring in the kingdom of God. Do you recall the part of the Lord’s Prayer that says, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven?”
Now my views on the kingdom of God or the social gospel did not come primarily from my theological training. However, my convictions on this subject came from my work as a pastor in a horribly depressed area of New York City, a place appropriately called “Hell’s Kitchen.” Alcoholics and prostitutes were in abundance. Domestic violence was far too common in the families who lived in their overcrowded tenements. The unemployment rate was unbelievably high and so was the rate of child mortality.
In fact, in one year the number of deaths of children from age five and under in that area of New York City came to sixty per cent of all deaths. That death rate was largely due to malnutrition because of the level and magnitude of the dire poverty of the people within this depressed region.
I buried hundreds of children. At each funeral I would find myself crying out to God, “Why do the children have to suffer in this manner?” I recall on one occasion one of the church members, a single father who worked at a factory for 12 hours each day. His daughter was dying at home and calling out for her daddy. The employer refused to allow the father to go home to be with his daughter in her last hours.
It was not uncommon to see grown men near our church just begging for work, just so they and their families could survive.
It was in this context that I began to understand sin in a new and radical way. Baptists had always been known as railing and condemning the sins of alcoholism, smoking, gambling, and sexual promiscuity, such as were exemplified in the lives of the many prostitutes who lived and worked very close to our church.
Baptists have tended to equate sin with personal sins and personal behavior. But as the church historian Tolbert said, “Baptists have an abysmal record in addressing social sins and working to change the structures of society to make them more just for all.”
The German lyricist, Berthodt Brecht, has this remarkable quote in his Threepenny Opera. Brecht has the main character Macheith saying that “even saintly folk will act like sinners when they haven’t had their customary dinners.” What that implies is that if one becomes hungry enough or deprived enough, one is capable of doing robbery or cheating or even violence in order to merely survive.
The radical conclusion that I came to was this: all of these personal sins which were so obvious to everyone were somehow connected to the sin of structural injustice. So many people saw no hope, no way to extricate themselves from their living hell, their dead-end street. So many would resort to alcoholism. Women would feel compelled to become a prostitute so they could feed themselves and their families. Charles Dickens in his writings helped us see and somewhat feel the environment that could ensnare anyone who was trapped in a world of deprivation and desperation.
The less obvious sins to most Baptists and other conservative leaders were those that were represented by the vast gulf between those who were extremely opulent, you might say “filthy rich,” and the vast majority of people who were barely able (and oftentimes not able) to get by.
We must recognize that the concept of violence is not only the form of violence that is characterized by carrying a pistol or a rifle. There is the violence which is carried out in society that is actually a legalized violence which makes it possible and legal for the wealthy to greatly increase their riches, while depriving the poor. That is violence and is tantamount to slow torture to those who are victims of the structures of business practices where the bottom line, the profit margin, becomes the only concern for business leaders.
We can see evidence of our view of business and level of income as we talk about how much a person is worth. We say that so and so is worth $200 million and this implies that the beggar on the street who has only three pennies in his or her pocket is of far less worth. We should not view children of God in this manner.
Now I’m quite sure that many of you are saying to yourselves, “Walter, you have lost your mind. You’re espousing something that sounds like socialism. What you are teaching appears to be a threat to capitalism!”
Capitalism can only work when it is compassionate, just, and considers the welfare of all citizens of this nation. If capitalism is only concerned about the bottom line or the profit margin, it turns into cruel servitude for many, and left to its own sin of avarice, it is no better than any other economic system. For capitalism must have as its foundation the principle of justice.
I take as the primary basis for my view, my beliefs and convictions, the teachings of scripture and my eleven-year pastorate in Hell’s Kitchen. That din of poverty forced me to reread the entire Bible with a radical new perspective. I often felt, that despite all of my prior theological training, as though I were reading the scriptures for the first time.
We all read the Bible with a certain bias, we can’t help that. We read the Bible from the perspective and biases of our own race, our national origin, our gender. We read the Bible, if you will, with our own pair of eye glasses. And we also tend to embrace and espouse a theological view that agrees with our own lifestyle. Does that make sense?
If I’m extremely wealthy I’m prone to read and understand the Bible in a completely different way than a person who is impoverished. If I’m a black person, I am truly likely to read and understand the scriptures quite differently from a southern white Christian. For instance, a black person’s understanding of the story of the exodus will likely have a very real impact on their understanding and concern for God’s oppressed people than would a southern white person who has never been denied the right to vote, or to stay in any hotel, or eat in any restaurant, or to receive a quality education.
Let us consider now the teachings of scripture that are particularly relevant to the concept of the necessity of working for the kingdom of God on earth. Beginning with the Hebrew Scriptures, “Do not exploit the poor because they are poor and do not crush the needy in the court, for they Lord will take up their cause and will plunder those who plunder them.” And, “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute, speak up and judge fairly, defend the rights of the poor and needy” (Proverbs).
The prophet Amos wrote, “Let justice roll on like a river and righteousness like a never-ending stream.”
Micah proclaims, “He has showed you, O man, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”
As we consider the Christian Scriptures we would do well to take a long, long look at the powerful passage found in Matthew 25:31-46. If Matthew 28:19-20 can be labeled “the Great Commission, then the Matthew 25 passage should be called “the Great Omission.” I recall precious few sermons in my life which have been based on this text. This section of scripture is central to the message of Jesus and it should be central in the understanding of our work as Christians and of the mission of the church.
Let us not forget that when Jesus preached his first sermon in his hometown of Nazareth, he quoted a passage from Isaiah: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
In Luke we find the story of the rich young ruler who inquired of Jesus how he might enter the kingdom of heaven, whereupon Jesus challenged him to give up his possessions for the sake of the poor.
Our philosophical and economic individualism has affected our religious thought so deeply that we hardly comprehend these biblical views about our national life and our national sin.
The prophets demanded right moral conduct as the sole test and fruit of religion, and the morality they had in mind was not the private morality of detached pious souls but the social morality of the nation. This they preached, and they backed their preaching by active participation in public action and discussion.
These prophets were almost indifferent, if not contemptuous, of the ceremonial side of customary religion, but turned with passionate enthusiasm to moral righteousness as the true domain of religion. Where would their interest lie if they lived today? Their religious concern was not restricted to private religion and morality, but dealt pre-eminently with the social and political life of their nation. Would they limit its range today?
Like the prophets of old, present day ministers must apply the teaching functions of the pulpit to the pressing questions of public morality. They must not yield to political partisanship, but must deal with moral questions before they become political issues and with those questions of public welfare which never do become political issues.
The force of the religious spirit should be bent toward asserting the supremacy of life over property. Property exists to maintain and develop life. It is unchristian to regard human life as a mere instrument for the production of wealth. If anyone holds that religion is essentially ritual and sacramental, or that it is purely personal, or that God is on the side of the rich, or that social interest is likely to lead preachers astray—that person must prove their case with their eye on the Hebrew prophets, and the burden of proof is on them.
The chief goal of the Christian church in the past has been the salvation of individuals, but the most pressing task of the present is not individualistic. Our business is to transform an antiquated and immoral system and to get rid of laws, customs, maxims, and philosophies inherited from an evil and despotic past and to create just and humane relations between groups and classes of society: thus to lay a social foundation in which people can live and work in a fashion that will not outrage all the better elements in them.
Our inherited Christian faith dealt primarily with individuals; our present task is to deal with society.
The historical church in the past taught us to do our work with our eyes fixed on another world and a life to come.
Here is the problem for all religious minds. We need a great faith to serve as a spiritual basis for the tremendous social task before us. The religion in the form in which it has come down to us is silent or stammers where we most need a ringing message. It has no adequate answers to the great moral questions and challenges of our day. Its hymns, its ritual, its prayers, its books of devotion, are so devoid of social thought.
We need a new foundation for Christian thought.
Our hymns lack social content. What we hear in our musical theology is only about a personal God that cares only about me. Have you ever given thought to the hymns we most frequently sing: Love Lifted Me, Just As I Am, and I Walk Through the Garden Alone for example. What we are missing is more hymns with a message for society.
To become fully Christian and to do their duty by society, the churches must change. Protestant Christians in America are simply perpetuating trivial dissensions in which scarcely any present-day religious values are at stake.
To become fully Christian the church must come out of its spiritual isolation. In theory and practice the church has long constituted a world unto itself. It has been governed by ecclesiastical motives and interests which are often remote from the real interests of humanity, and it has almost uniformly set church questions ahead of social questions.
Churches today have often built a sound-proof habitation in which people could live for years without becoming conscious of the existence of prostitution, child labor, or tenement slums. Like all the rest of us, the church will obtain its salvation by finding the purpose of its existence outside of itself, namely, in the kingdom of God.
To become fully Christian the church must still further emancipate itself from the dominating forces of the present era. In an age of political despotism our forbearers cut the church loose from state control and state support, and therewith released the moral forces of progress.
I have always argued that the reformation did not go far enough. If we read, interpret, and preach only a portion of the Bible, it remains a half-truth or even a lie. What can we say about the present state of affairs with the outrageous disparity between the rich and the poor of our nation?
We have wrongfully assumed that the way things are is the way God intended. Let us not be naïve. Wherever there is great wealth in the face of widespread poverty, there is injustice which creates, perpetuates, and exacerbates that disparity. In other words, we can’t say “God willed this.”
I have been told by certain evangelical pastors that if we could just get everyone converted then all of our social problems and evils would be rectified. It does not appear to be so, for even after all of the revivals in the South over many generations, the slaves were not freed. And when they were freed, it was not the church who freed them. And even after slavery was ended, southern churches continued racial segregation for generations. The amazing, truly amazing paradox about this phenomena is that segregation and racism continued unabated for generations in the Bible belt.
The church has every right to inquire as to who is increasing this burden of poverty and suffering by underpaying and exhausting the people.
The “Good Samaritan” did not go after the robbers with a shotgun, but looked after the wounded and helpless man by the wayside. But if hundreds of “Good Samaritans” traveling the same road should find thousands of bruised men and women groaning to them, they would not be such very “Good Samaritans” if they did not organize a vigilance committee to stop the robbers that wounded people.
I wear this black patch of cloth on the lapel of my coat as a sign of mourning and protest over this present war. We, as a nation, have demonized the German people, my people. I did not favor our nation’s involvement in this war. And I say this as a patriotic American, who are also my people.
I have warned in several of my books of the conditions that breed war. “Ever the pride of kings and the covetousness of the strong has driven peaceful nations to slaughter. Ever the songs of the past and pomp of the armies has been used to inflame the passions of the people.”
To bring me comfort and to bring comfort to my children, I would often sing this wonderful song to them at bedtime: Commit whatever grieves thee into the gracious hands of him who never leaves thee who heav’n and earth commands. Who points the clouds their courses whom winds and waves obey he will direct thy footsteps and find for thee a way.
I conclude with a prayer:
From the sins that divide us, from all class bitterness and race hatred—-good Lord, deliver us. From the corruption of business practices and of government, from greed and from the arbitrary love of power—good Lord, deliver us.
From the fear of unemployment and the evils of overwork, from the curse of child labor and the ill-paid toil of women—good Lord, deliver us. That thy followers may be strong to achieve industrial justice, and to bid the oppressed go free. That it may please thee to unite the inhabitants of every city, state, and nation in the bonds of peace and concord.
Good Lord, we beseech thee to hear us. Now in the name of the one who identified himself with the downtrodden and the one who came to preach good news to the poor and liberate the oppressed, we pray, Amen and Amen.
