On the event of the centennial republication of Walter Raushcenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis (with accompanying essays by such commentators as Jim Wallis, Tony Campolo, and Stanley Hauerwas), the Wall Street Journal has seen fit to publish an editorial critical of Rauschebusch, which can be found here, entitled "Christianity Without Salvation", written by Joseph Loconte. The blurb at the bottom identifies Loconte as a member of The Ethics and Public Policy Institute, a right-wing think tank.
Rauschenbusch was a pastor in New York's Hell's Kitchen, and his work among destitute immigrants spurred his realization that something was desperately out of whack with the Christianity of his day. Drowning in sentimental pietism, awash in class prejudice, burdened with the phony idea that the church served to uphold society and its social institutions, mores, and unspoken assumptions, Rauschenbusch demanded that the Church return to the serious work of being a body of people dedicated to living for others. He lived this out in his pastoral work, and a few years after the book's publication, and its rousing success, he was rewarded with a teaching position at Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, where he always felt out of place. He was a pastor first, a prophet second, and an academic almost never (at least in the commonly understood meaning of the term).
Rauschebusch's thesis was simple as it was provocative: The over-emphasis on privatizing the religious experience has created a situation where the church, once at the forefront of social protest and change, no longer had the vocabulary, let alone the spiritual, financial, or emotional resources to address the searing social problems the country faced as a result of rapid industrialization and a flood of immigrants the society had chosen not to work at integrating into the society at large. While burdened with much of the vocabulary of the infant social sciences of his time (when are we not burdened by the vocabularies of our own time?), Rauschenbusch demanded the church forego discussion of matters of ultimate concern - death, the end times - and regain a vocabulary that would serve as the tool for working for social justice. Hardly a radical, Rauschenbusch was a Christian example of the Progressive Movement of the early 20th century, and much of his book echoes things one can read in Lincoln Steffens, Sinclair Lewis, and other reformers.
Yet, even today, the feelings aroused by Rauschenbusch's book are ambivalent. Loconte's article, just from the title alone, brings the main criticism of Rauschenbusch right to the front (his criticism is not new, by the way). It is all very well to want to alleviate the stresses and strains of modern life, these critics say, but Christian faith is about ultimate things - death, salvation, the eternal soul - and a concern over the vagaries of our temporal existence distracts us from these vastly more important and central facets of the Christian faith and life.
We are in the process, in the mainline churches, of emerging from a struggle against conservative and fundamentalist forces that would (a) dilute the message of the church, returning it to its pietistic sentimentalities, and ignore questions of social justice (except, of course for fetuses and gays); and (b) simply toss away centuries of serious struggle, in America in particular, over our growing understanding of the depth and diversity of Christian teaching, and the central place social and political struggle has always had in the Church's existence, both for good and ill. The best example of this - and he is often called a liberal, but I doubt that for a number of reasons; he is just an honest, thorough scholar - is British scripture scholar and Anglican Bishop Thomas Wright, whose series of books on the emergence of early Christianity is revolutionizing the way we think of the early church. By forcing us to really see what the early church looked like, not what we might want it to look like, or perhaps wish it were like, most of our assumptions and conclusions are tossed out the window.
The criticism Loconte tosses at Rauschebusch (whose influence extended through Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr to Martin Luther King, the aforementioned Hauerwas, and others), that he ignores questions of ultimate concern is dead on, and itself begs the question of the relevance of such issues. As the epistle of James points out, if we see someone naked and cold, and all we do is say, "God Bless You," and don't offer this person our coat, the blessing is meaningless. It is all well and good to be concerned over the ultimate state of our relationship with God, but to my mind, this is something that God will take care of without any assistance from us. The Church is a medium, not the mechanism for salvation. Rauschenbusch was not interested in worrying over the final state of those for whom he cared because he heard God's call to serve them. Stuck in the ridiculous, unbiblical, and vaguely unorthodox position that the Church needs to be first and foremost about whether or not we go to heaven or hell when we die (apparently the idea that we just die is never considered; for myself, if the end is, indeed, the end, well you know what, so what?) Loconte cannot understand that the position from which he views Rauschenbusch, even from the remove of one hundred years, is exactly the position the Rauschenbusch rejects as inadequate to serve the needs of those suffering in our world.
Rauschenbusch was hardly perfect, but even today his book is a definite must-read for those interested in the development of liberal Christianity in America. Most of Loconte's criticisms are juvenile, myopic, and question-begging, and should spur one to read Rauschenbusch rather than ignore him. In that sense, Loconte's article is a good example of why people who don't know a whole lot shouldn't criticize people who do.
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