October quickly rushes by, and at the end comes the Christian celebration of All Hallows Eve, followed in succession by All Saints Day and All Souls Day. In my own reformed tradition, there is no designation of separate individuals as saints; rather, all believers are regarded as being “the holy ones”. That noted, there are those who stand out in my mind as having made significant contributions to the realm of God, who have been exemplary Christian witnesses in their deeds or in their words. My own additions to those whom we might celebrate would include recent Catholics such as Mother Theresa and Dorothy Day, and Protestant figures from the past such as John Wesley, William Wilberforce, George Fox (the founder of the Religious Society of Friends), and Toyohiko Kagawa (a Japanese Presbyterian who worked as a reformer, pacifist, and labour activist among the poor of Osaka in the 1920s and 1930s). Among many other notables, I would also include the name of Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist pastor and theologian. Born in the month of October (and so a good excuse to raise his name) in the year 1861, Rauschenbusch represented a branch of Baptist thought that was in the minority in his day, and yet the impact of his thought his been far-reaching.
Born into a German Baptist family in New York State, Rauschenbusch early abandoned a traditional Baptist teaching of the substitutionary atonement theory of the crucifixion; in this view, the death of Jesus, was an intentional and willing death on the cross as a propitiation, or substitute, for sinners in order that they might be reconciled to God. Rauschenbusch argued – along with many other liberal scholars of the late nineteenth century – that the death of Jesus could not be held as a substitutionary atonement; such a view would make salvation dependent upon a divine transaction remote from human experience, implying a notion of divine justice that Rauschenbusch found repugnant to human rational thought. Rather, he wrote, the crucifixion symbolized he replacement of “love for selfishness as the basis of human society”. In his final work of a significant trilogy, Theology for the Social Gospel, Rauschenbusch wrote that “Jesus did not in any real sense bear the sin of some ancient Briton who beat up his wife in 56 BC, or of some mountaineer in Tennessee who got drunk in 1917. But he did in a very real sense bear the weight of the public sins of organized society, and they in turn are causally connected with all private sins”.
It was a revised understanding of the theology of the cross, and his own experiences as a Baptist pastor in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, that led Rauschenbusch to enunciate a new theology. Working among a poor and largely immigrant population, he reflected in a letter to his family, “I saw how men toiled all their long, hard, toilsome lives, and at the end had almost nothing to show for it; how strong men begged for work, and could not get it in hard times.” The plight of his parishioners raised in him the question of how the Christians should understand the relationship of faith to wealth and economic classes. By the early 1890s, even as America was poised on the brink of a newfound love of evangelical faith and pietistic understanding of an individual’s relationship with God, Rauschenbusch was finding a growing clarity of social vision that emerged later in his writings, which laid the foundation for a new understanding of Christianity, the social gospel.
This theology, later known as the social gospel, was enunciated in three works written over two decades: Christianity and the Social Crisis, published in 1907; Christianizing the Social Order, published in 1912; and Theology for the Social Gospel, published in 1917 at the height of the First World War, where Rauschenbusch saw the European conflict as the worst extension of the battle for wealth to the detriment of the marginalized. The essence of his theology was formed in the crucible of the practice of ministry in the 1880s, and developed as a professor of theology in subsequent decades. At the heart of his theology was the idea that true Christianity meant social concern, and social obligation; to see otherwise was to miss the heart of the message of Jesus. Christianity, in the vision of the social gospel, was in its nature revolutionary, and held as its aim the transformation of society on principles of equity and justice. Among the social gospel tenets in the early twentieth century, as adopted by some liberal Baptists in Canada as early as 1913, were calls to remember that the resources of the earth, being the heritage of the people, should not be monopolized by the few to the disadvantage of the many; women who toil with men should have equal pay for equal work with men; employers and employees are to be partners in industry and should be partners in the enterprise; that there should be a living wage as a minimum in every industry.
Heirs to the vision of Rauschenbusch include Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, and Canadians J.S Woodsworth, Salem Bland, and of course, Tommy Douglas, who further developed Rauschenbusch’s theology in application - the words of Douglas echo those of Christianizing the Social Order: “The religion of tomorrow will be less concerned with dogmas of theology and more concerned with the social welfare of humanity....We have come to see that the Kingdom of God is in our midst if have the vision to build it.”
The movement towards the Americanization of Baptist churches in Canada have shifted the focus of the gospel to the individual confession of faith in a relationship with God, and is in danger of losing this social vision. The God who cares for the repentant sinner has replaced the social gospel vision of God who cares for the poor and the marginalized, and who demands that justice be done by those with wealth and power. It is not charity that is sought, but societal transformation. In a world where the child poverty rate in Canada is still increasing, and the basic millennium goals of the UN are no closer to being realized, we would do well to remember the vision of Rauschenbusch, a world in which all people are given dignity, where the hungry are fed, and the rights of all are protected.
So in the month of October, I pay homage to Rauschenbusch, and to the Baptist vision of the social gospel, needed today as much as ever before. If I were to put images of saints into church windows, I would have the light of social reform, set out by Rauschenbusch and shining in his image, through stained glass.