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Walter Rauschenbusch -
Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)
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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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Apart from the organized Church, the religious spirit is a factor of incalculable power in the making of history. In the idealistic spirits that lead and in the masses that follow, the religious spirit always intensifies thought, enlarges hope, unfetters daring, evokes the willingness to sacrifice, and gives coherence in the fight.
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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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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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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Let us do our thinking on these great questions, not with our eyes fixed on our bank account, but with a wise outlook on the fields of the future and with the consciousness that the spirit of the Eternal is seeking to distil from our lives, some essence of righteousness, before they pass away.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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The Church was the preserver of the remnants of intellectual culture, the sole schoolmistress of the raw peoples. Her clergy long had almost a monopoly of education, and were the secretaries of the nobles, the chancellors and prime ministers of kings.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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In a few years all our restless and angry hearts will be quiet in death, but those who come after us will live in the world which our sins have blighted or which our love of right has redeemed.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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Theologians have felt no hesitation in founding a system of speculative thought on the teachings of Jesus; and yet Jesus was never an inhabitant of the realm of speculative thought.
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 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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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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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 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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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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It is important to note, further, that the morality which the prophets had in mind in their strenuous insistence on righteousness was not merely the private morality of the home, but the public morality on which national life is founded. They said less about the pure heart for the individual than of just institutions for the nation.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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The prophets... interpreted past history, shaped present history, and foretold future history on the basis of the conviction that God rules with righteousness in the affairs of nations, and that only what is just, and not what is expedient and profitable, shall endure.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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Western civilization is passing through a social revolution unparalleled in history for scope and power. Its coming was inevitable.... By universal consent this social crisis is the overshadowing problem of our generation.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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The greatest of all prophets was still one of the prophets, and that large interest in the national and social life which had been inseparable from the religion of the prophets was part of his life too. The presumption is that Jesus shared the fundamental religious purpose of the prophets.
Walter Rauschenbusch
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Quote of the day
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
George Santayana
Walter Rauschenbusch
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Born:
October 4, 1861
Died:
July 25, 1918
(aged 56)
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