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Walter Rauschenbusch Quotes
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Throughout the Middle Ages the sway of the Church over the moral and spiritual life of the people, her power to inspire and direct their enthusiasms and energies, her chance for molding their conceptions of life, were amazing and unparalleled by any other force.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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Christianity has been one of the most powerful causes of democracy, but the conscious influence of the Church has more widely been exerted against democracy than for it.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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The real joy of life is in its play. Play is anything we do for the joy and love of doing it, apart from any profit, compulsion, or sense of duty. It is the real joy of living.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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The influence of Christianity in taming selfishness and stimulating the sympathetic affections, in creating a resolute sense of duty, a stanch love of liberty and independence, an irrepressible hunger for justice and a belief in the rights of the poor, has been so subtle and penetrating that no one can possibly trace its effects.... And yet human society has not been reconstituted in accordance with the principles of Jesus Christ.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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The better we know Jesus, the more social do his thoughts and aims become.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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The essential purpose of Christianity was to transform human society into the kingdom of God by regenerating all human relations and reconstituting them in accordance with the will of God.... I have never met with any previous attempt to give a satisfactory historical explanation of this failure.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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Christianity was rising when the ancient world was breaking down. By the time the Church had gained sufficient power to exercise a controlling influence, the process of social decay, like the breakdown of a physical organism in a wasting disease, was beyond remedy.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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We never live so intensely as when we love strongly. We never realize ourselves so vividly as when we are in full glow of love for others.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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It is this diffused spirit of Christianity rather than the conscious purpose of organized Christianity which has been the chief moral force in social changes. It has often taken its finest form in heretics and free-thinkers, and in non-Christian movements. The Church has often been indifferent or hostile to the effects which it had itself produced. The mother has refused to acknowledge her own children.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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The landed wealth of the Church alone sufficed to make it a power of the highest rank in the feudal system of the Middle Ages, in which all power finally rested on the possession of the land. Bishops and abbots became feudal dignitaries, sometimes almost sovereign princes in their own domains, and always with a potent voice in the government of their nations.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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The sympathy of the prophets, even of the most aristocratic among them, was entirely on the side of the poorer classes.... The edge of their invectives was turned against the land-hunger of the landed aristocracy who "joined house to house and laid field to field," till a country of sturdy peasants was turned into a series of great estates; against the capitalistic ruthlessness that "sold the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes," thrusting the poor free-man into slavery to collect a trifling debt; against the venality of the judges who took bribes and had a double standard of law for the rich and the poor.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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Under the warm breath of religious faith all social institutions become plastic.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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Like all great minds that do not merely imagine Utopias, but actually advance humanity to a new epoch, he [Jesus] took the situation and material furnished to him by the past and molded that into a fuller approximation to the divine conception within him.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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The most important effects of Christianity went out from it without the intention of the Church, or even against its will.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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The Church, the organized expression of the religious life of the past, is one of the most potent institutions and forces in Western civilization.... It cannot help throwing its immense weight on one side or the other. If it tries not to act, it thereby acts; and in any case its choice will be decisive for its own future.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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We shall confine this brief study of the Old Testament to the prophets, because they are the beating heart of the Old Testament.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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The social effects which are usually enumerated do not constitute a reconstruction of society on a Christian basis, but were mainly a suppression of some of the most glaring evils in the social system of the time.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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The Book of Isaiah begins with a description of the disasters which had overtaken the nation and then in impassioned words the prophet spurns the means taken to appease Jehovah's anger. "... Cease to do evil! Learn to do right! Seek justice! Relieve the oppressed! Secure justice for the orphaned and plead for the widow." (Isaiah I. 10-17.)
Walter Rauschenbusch
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We have to harmonize the two facts, that wealth is good and necessary, and that wealth is a danger to its possessor and to society. On the one hand property is indispensable to personal freedom, to all higher individuality, and to self-realization; the right to property is a corollary of the right to life; without property men are at the mercy of nature and in bondage to those who have property. On the other hand property is used as a means of collecting tribute and private taxes, as a club with which to extort unearned gain from laborers and consumers, and as the fundamental tool of oppression.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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The twin-evil against which the prophets launched the condemnation of Jehovah was injustice and oppression.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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We are apt... to forget that the moral force of Christianity was usually only one factor in producing such a change as the abolition of slavery or piracy, and that over against the benign influences of the Church must be set the malign and divisive influences which she created by persecuting zeal, intellectual intolerance, or religious wars. In short, we must soberly face the fact that a good many deductions have to be made from the popular panegyrics, and that the Church has not accomplished all that is often claimed for her.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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The fundamental purpose of Jesus was the establishment of the kingdom of God, which involved a thorough regeneration and reconstitution of social life.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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To the more judicial and scientific temper of our day their invective would seem overdrawn and their sympathy would seem partisanship. In Jeremiah and in the prophetic psalms the poor as a class are made identical with the meek and godly, and "rich" and "wicked" are almost synonymous terms.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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The vastness and the free sweep of our concentrated wealth on the one side, the independence, intelligence, moral vigor, and political power of the common people on the other side, promise a long-drawn grapple of contesting forces which may well make the heart of every American patriot sink within him.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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There is no question on which side the sympathy of the prophets was enlisted. Their protest against injustice and oppression, to the neglect of all other social evils, is almost monotonous.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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Quote of the day
Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.
Ignazio Silone
Walter Rauschenbusch
Creative Commons
Born:
October 4, 1861
Died:
July 25, 1918
(aged 56)
Bio:
Walter Rauschenbusch was a Christian theologian and Baptist pastor who taught at the Rochester Theological Seminary.
Known for:
Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)
A theology for the social gospel (1917)
The Social Principles Of Jesus (1916)
Christianizing the social order (1912)
Prayers of the social awakening (1910)
Most used words:
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prophets
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christianity
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religion
jesus
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men
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spirit
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