Christianity and the social crisis

Front matter

BY

WALTER RAUSCHENBUSCH

PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY IN ROCHESTER THEOLOGICAL

CHAPTER I The Historical Roots of Christianity: The Hebrew

Prophets

Historical importance of the prophets. Their religion ethical and therefore social. Their morality public and not private. Their sympathy with the oppressed. The effect of their social interest on their religious development. Later religious indi¬ vidualism a triumph of faith, but not pure gain. The prophetic hope of social perfection. The “ pessimism” of the prophets. Summary . I

Chapter II

The new social interpretation of the gospel. Jesus not a social reformer, but a religious initiator. Significance of his relations to John the Baptist. The kingdom of God his aim; its pre¬ vious meaning ; his changes in the ideal ; the persistence of its social essence. The ethics of the new society. Christ’s indifference to ritual and his insistence on social morality.

His teachings on wealth. His social affinities. His revolu¬ tionary consciousness . 44

CHAPTER III The Social Impetus of Primitive Christianity

The probability of a gap between Jesus and his followers. The limitations of our information. The hope of the coming of

vii

Vlll

CONTENTS the Lord. The revolutionary character of the millennial hope. The political consciousness of Christians. The society-mak¬ ing force of primitive Christianity. The so-called communism at Jerusalem. The primitive churches as fraternal communi¬ ties. The leaven of Christian democracy. The outcome of the discussion .

Chapter IV

Why has Christianity never Undertaken the Work of Social Reconstruction ?

The problem stated. Impossibility of any social propaganda in the first centuries. Postponement to the Lord’s coming. Hostility to the Empire and its civilization. The limitations of primitive Christianity and their perpetuation. The other¬ worldliness of Christianity. The ascetic tendency. Monasticism. Sacramentalism. The dogmatic interest. The churchliness of Christianity. Subservience to the State. The disappearance of church democracy. The lack of sci¬ entific comprehension of social development. Results of the discussion. The passing of these causes in modern life. Conclusion .

Chapter V

A prelude. The industrial revolution. The land and the people. Work and wages. The morale of the workers. The physi¬ cal decline of the people. The wedge of inequality. The crumbling of political democracy. The tainting of the moral atmosphere. The undermining of the family. The fall or the rise of Christian civilization .

CHAPTER VI The Stake of the Church in the Social Movement

PAGE

The purpose of this chapter. The Church and its real estate. The Church and its income. The volunteer workers of the

CONTENTS ix

Church. The supply and spirit of the ministry. The Church and poverty. The Church and its human material. The hostile ethics of commercialism. Christian civilization and foreign missions. The Church and the working class. The forward call to the Church .

Chapter VII

“ No thoroughfare.” Social repentance and faith. Social evan¬ gelization. The pulpit and the social question. The Chris¬ tian conception of life and property. The creation of customs and institutions. Stewardship and ownership. Solidarity and communism. The upward movement of the working class. Summary of the argument. The new apostolate ...........

PAGE

Western civilization is passing through a social revolu¬ tion unparalleled in history for scope and power. Its com¬ ing was inevitable. The religious, political, and intellectual revolutions of the past five centuries, which together created the modern world, necessarily had to culminate in an economic and social revolution such as is now upon us.

By universal consent, this social crisis is the overshad¬ owing problem of our generation. The industrial and commercial life of the advanced nations are in the throes of it. In politics all issues and methods are undergoing upheaval and re-alignment as the social movement ad¬ vances. In the world of thought all the young and serious minds are absorbed in the solution of the social problems. Even literature and art point like compass-needles to this magnetic pole of all our thought.

The social revolution has been slow in reaching our country. We have been exempt, not because we had solved the problems, but because we had not yet confronted them. We have now arrived, and all the characteristic conditions of American life will henceforth combine to make the social struggle here more intense than anywhere else. 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

XI

XU the other side, promise a long-drawn grapple of contesting forces which may well make the heart of every American patriot sink within him.

It is realized by friend and foe that religion can play, and must play, a momentous part in this irrepressible conflict.

The Church, the organized expression of the religious life of the past, is one of the most potent institutions and forces in Western civilization. Its favor and moral influ¬ ence are wooed by all parties. 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.

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, en¬ larges hope, unfetters daring, evokes the willingness to sacrifice, and gives coherence in the fight. Under the warm breath of religious faith, all social institutions become plastic. The religious spirit removes mountains and tramples on impossibilities. Unless the economic and intellectual factors are strongly reenforced by religious enthusiasm, the whole social movement may prove abor¬ tive, and the New Era may die before it comes to birth.

It follows that the relation between Christianity and the social crisis is one of the most pressing questions for all intelligent men who realize the power of religion, and most of all for the religious leaders of the people who give direction to the forces of religion.

The question has, in fact, been discussed frequently and earnestly, but it is plain to any thoughtful observer that xiii the common mind of the Christian Church in America has not begun to arrive at any solid convictions or any perma¬ nent basis of action. The conscience of Christendom is halting and groping, perplexed by contradicting voices, still poorly informed on essential questions, justly reluctant to part with the treasured maxims of the past, and yet conscious of the imperious call of the future.

This book is to serve as a contribution to this discussion. Its first chapters are historical, for nothing is more needed than a true comprehension of past history if we are to forecast the future correctly and act wisely in the present. I have tried to set forth the religious development of the prophets of Israel, the life and teachings of Jesus, and the dominant tendencies of primitive Christianity, in order to ascertain what was the original and fundamental pur¬ pose of the great Christian movement in history. Every discussion of the question which appeals to history has to cover this ground, but usually only detached fragments of the material are handled at all, and often without insight adequate to give their true meaning even to these frag¬ ments. I am in hopes that these chapters will contribute some facts and points of view that have not yet become common property.

The outcome of these first historical chapters is that the essential purpose of Christianity was to transform human society into the kingdom of God by regenerating all human relations and reconstituting them in accord¬ ance with the will of God. The fourth chapter raises the question why the Christian Church has never undertaken to carry out this fundamental purpose of its existence. I have never met with any previous attempt to give a satisfactory historical explanation of this failure, and I

XIV regard this chapter as one of the most important in the book.

The fifth chapter sets forth the conditions which con¬ stitute the present social crisis and which imperatively demand of Christianity that contribution of moral and religious power which it was destined to furnish.

The sixth chapter points out that the Church, as such, has a stake in the social movement. The Church owns property, needs income, employs men, works on human material, and banks on its moral prestige. Its present efficiency and future standing are bound up for weal or woe with the social welfare of the people and with the outcome of the present struggle.

The last chapter suggests what contributions Christianity can make and in what main directions the religious spirit should exert its force.

In covering so vast a field of history and in touching on such a multitude of questions, error and incompleteness are certain, and the writer can claim only that he has tried to do honest work. Moreover, it is impossible to handle questions so vital to the economic, the social, and the moral standing of great and antagonistic classes of men, without jarring precious interests and convictions, and without giving men the choice between the bitterness of social repentance and the bitterness of moral resentment. I can frankly affirm that I have written with malice toward none and with charity for all. Even where I judge men to have done wrong, I find it easy to sympathize with them in the temptations which made the wrong almost inevitable, and in the points of view in which they intrench themselves to save their self-respect. I have tried — so far as err¬ ing human judgment permits — to lift the issues out of the

XV plane of personal selfishness and hate, and to put them where the white light of the just and pitying spirit of Jesus can play upon them. If I have failed in that effort, it is my sin. If others in reading fail to respond in the same spirit, it is their sin. 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. 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.

I have written this book to discharge a debt. For eleven years I was pastor among the working people on the West Side of New York City. I shared their life as well as I then knew, and used up the early strength of my life in their service. In recent years my work has been turned into other channels, but I have never ceased to feel that I owe help to the plain people who were my friends. If this book in some far-off way helps to ease the pressure that bears them down and increases the forces that bear them up, I shall meet the Master of my life with better confidence.

CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL

CRISIS

Chapter I The Historical Roots Of Christianity: The Hebrew

PROPHETS

It seems a long start to approach the most modem problems by talking of men who lived before Lycurgus and Solon gave laws to Sparta and Athens. What light can we get on the troubles of the great capitalistic republic of the West from men who tended sheep in Judea or meddled in the petty politics of the Semitic tribes ?

History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same. It is always hungry for bread, sweaty with labor, struggling to wrest from nature and hostile men enough to feed its children. The welfare of the mass is always at odds with the selfish force of the strong. The exodus of the Roman plebeians and the Pennsylvania coal strike, the agrarian agitation of the Gracchi and the rising of the Russian peasants, — it is all the same tragic human life. And in all history it would be hard to find any chapter so profoundly instructive, and dignified by such sublime passion and ability, as that in which the prophets took the leading part.

B

I

Moreover, the life and thought of the Old Testament prophets are more to us than classical illustrations and side¬ lights. They are an integral part of the thought-life of Christianity. From the beginning the Christian Church appropriated the Bible of Israel as its own book and thereby made the history of Israel part of the history of Christen¬ dom. That history lives in the heart of the Christian na¬ tions with a very real spiritual force. The average American knows more about David than about King Arthur, and more about the exodus from Egypt than about the emigra¬ tion of the Puritans. Throughout the Christian centuries the historical material embodied in the Old Testament has been regarded as not merely instructive, but as authorita¬ tive. The social ideas drawn from it have been powerful factors in all attempts of Christianity to influence social and political life. In so far as men have attempted tP use the Old Testament as a code of model laws and institutions and have applied these to modern conditions, regardless of the historical connections, these attempts have left a trail of blunder and disaster. In so far as they have caught the spirit that burned in the hearts of the prophets and breathed in gentle humanity through the Mosaic Law, the influence of the Old Testament has been one of the great permanent forces making for democracy and social justice. However our views of the Bible may change, every religious man will continue to recognize that to the elect minds of the Jewish people God gave so vivid a consciousness of the divine will that, in its main tendencies at least, their life and thought carries a permanent authority for all who wish to know the higher right of God. Their writings are like channel-buoys anchored by God, and we shall do well to heed them now that the roar of an angry surf is in our ears.

We shall confine this brief study of the Old Testament to the prophets, because they are the beating heart of the Old Testament. Modern study has shown that they were the real makers of the unique religious life of Israel. If all that proceeded from them, directly or indirectly, were eliminated from the Old Testament, there would be little left to appeal to the moral and religious judgment of the modern world. Moreover, a comprehension of the essential purpose and spirit of the prophets is necessary for a comprehension, of the purpose and spirit of Jesus and of genuine Christianity. In Jesus and the primitive Church the prophetic spirit rose from the dead. To the ceremonial aspects of Jewish religion Jesus was either indifferent or hostile; the thought of the prophets was the spiritual food that he assimilated in his own process of growth. With them he linked his points of view, the convictions which he regarded as axio¬ matic. Their spirit was to him what the soil and climate of a country are to its flora. The real meaning of his life and the real direction of his purposes can be understood only in that historical connection.

Thus a study of the prophets is not only an interest¬ ing part in the history of social movements but it is indis¬ pensable for any full comprehension of the social influence exerted by historical Christianity, and for any true com¬ prehension of the mind of Jesus Christ.

For the purposes of this book it is not necessary to follow the work of the prophets in their historical sequence. We shall simply try to lay bare those large and permanent characteristics which are common to that remarkable series of men and which bear on the question in hand.

Religion ethical and therefore social.

The fundamental conviction of the prophets, which dis¬ tinguished them from the ordinary religious life of their day, was the conviction that God demands righteousness and demands nothing but righteousness.

Primitive religions consisted mainly in the worship of the powers of nature. Each tribe worshipped its local tribal god, who dwelt in some gloomy ravine or on some mountaintop and sent rain and fertility to his people when he was pleased, or drought and pestilence on crops and herds when he was offended. Like every other despot, the god must be kept in good humor by valuable gifts and prayers, offered in the right places, in the right manner, and by the duly qualified persons. If the sacrifices were neglected, the god was sure to be angry and then had to be propitiated by redoubled offerings, incantations, and dances. There was always some connection between religion and morality. It was always un¬ derstood that the tribal god had instituted the tribal customs and was displeased with any violation of them. But the essential thing in religion was not morality, but the ceremonial method of placating the god, securing his gifts, and ascertain¬ ing his wishes. He might even be pleased best by immoral actions, by the immolation of human victims, by the sacrifice of woman’s chastity, or by the burning of the first-born.

In the primitive life of the Israelitish tribes the religion of the common folk was probably much of this kind. Jehovah was the tribal god of Israel. Fortunately he was stronger and more terrible than the gods of the neighboring tribes, so that he was able to drive them out and give their land to his own people, but he was not fundamentally different from them and they were believed to be quite as real as Jehovah. There were certain forms of moral evil which he hated and certain social duties which he loved and blessed, but the surest way of remaining in his favor was to sacrifice duly and plentifully. If a man had offended against his fellow or his tribe, Jehovah would forgive when the rich smell of burnt meat filled his nostrils.

Against this current conception of religion the prophets insisted on a right life as the true worship of God. Morality to them was not merely a prerequisite of effective ceremonial worship. They brushed sacrificial ritual aside altogether as trifling compared with righteousness, nay, as a harmful sub¬ stitute and a hindrance for ethical religion. “I desire good¬ ness and not sacrifice,” said Hosea,1 and Jesus was fond of quoting the words. The Book of Isaiah begins with a de¬ scription of the disasters which had overtaken the nation, and then in impassioned words the prophet spurns the means taken to appease Jehovah’s anger. He said the herds of beasts trampling his temple-court, the burning fat, the reek of blood, the clouds of incense, were a weariness and an abomination to the God whom they were meant to please. Their festivals and solemn meetings, their prayers and pros¬ trations, were iniquity from which he averted his face. What he wanted was a right life and the righting of social wrongs : “Your hands are full of blood. Wash you ! Make you clean ! Put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes ! Cease to do evil ! Learn to do right ! Seek justice ! Re¬ lieve the oppressed ! Secure justice for the orphaned and plead for the widow.” 2

Perhaps the simplest and most beautiful expression of that reformatory conception of true religion is contained in the words of Micah: “Wherewith shall I come before Jehovah,

1 Hosea 6. 6.

and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings, with calves a year old ? Will Jehovah be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my trans¬ gression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God?” 1

Amos and Jeremiah even tried to cut away the foundation of antiquity on which the sacrificial system rested, by deny¬ ing that God had commanded sacrifices at all when he con¬ stituted the nation after the exodus from Egypt. Obedience was all that he had required.2

This insistence on religious morality as the only thing God cares about is of fundamental importance for the question before us. The social problems are moral problems on a large scale. Religion is a tremendous generator of self-sacrificing action. Under its impulse men have burned up the animals they had laboriously raised ; they have sacrificed their first-born whom they loved and prized ; they have tapped their own veins and died with a shout of triumph. But this unparalleled force has been largely diverted to ceremonial actions which wasted property and labor, and were either useless to social health or injurious to it. In so far as men believed that the traditional ceremonial was what God wanted of them, they would be indifferent to the reformation of social ethics. If the hydraulic force of religion could be turned toward conduct, there is nothing which it could not accomplish.

This is still a living question. Under the influence of non- Christian customs and conceptions Christianity early devel¬ oped its own ceremonial system. It is, of course, far more refined. Our places of worship have no stench of blood and en¬ trails ; our priests are not expert butchers. But the immense majority of people in Christendom have holy places, where they recite a sacred ritual and go through sacred motions. They receive holy food and submit to washings that cleanse from sin. They have a priesthood with magic powers which offers a bloodless sacrifice. This Christian ritual grew up, not as the appropriate and aesthetic expression of spiritual emotions, but as the indispensable means of pleasing and appeasing God, and of securing his favors, temporal and eternal, for those who put their heart into these processes. This Christian ceremonial system does not differ essentially from that against which the prophets protested ; with a few verbal changes their invectives would still apply. But the point that here concerns us is that a very large part of the fervor of willing devotion which religion always generates in human hearts has spent itself on these religious acts. The force that would have been competent to “seek justice and relieve the oppressed ” has been consumed in weaving the tinsel fringes for the garment of religion.

The prophets were the heralds of the fundamental truth that religion and ethics are inseparable, and that ethical conduct is the supreme and sufficient religious act. If that principle had been fully adopted in our religious life, it would have turned the full force of the religious impulse into the creation of right moral conduct and would have made the unchecked growth and accumulation of injustice impossible. This assertion can be verified by history. The Calvinistic

Public and not private morality.

Reformation stripped off a large part of the traditional cere¬ monial of the Church and it turned religious energy into political and intellectual channels. As a consequence the Calvinistic peoples at once leaped forward in the direction of democracy and education, and received such an increment of social efficiency that in spite of terrible handicaps they out¬ stripped the stronger nations which failed to make this fuller connection between religion and social morality.

It is important to note, further, that the morality which the prophets had in mind in their strenuous insistence on right¬ eousness 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. We are accustomed to con¬ nect piety with the thought of private virtues ; the pious man is the quiet, temperate, sober, kindly man. The evils against which we contend in the churches are intemperance, un¬ chastity, the sins of the tongue. The twin-evil against which the prophets launched the condemnation of Jehovah was injustice and oppression.

The religious ideal of Israel was the theocracy. But the theocracy meant the complete penetration of the national life by religious morality. It meant politics in the name of God. That line by which we have tacitly separated the domain of public affairs and the domain of Christian life was unknown to them.

The prophets were not religious individualists. During the classical times of prophetism they always dealt with Israel and Judah as organic totalities. They conceived of their people as a gigantic personality which sinned as one and ought to repent as one. When they speak of their nation as a virgin, as a city, as a vine, they are attempting by these figures of speech to express this organic and corporate social life. In this respect they anticipated a modern conception which now underlies our scientific comprehension of social development and on which modern historical studies are based. We shall see that it was only when the national life of Israel was crushed by foreign invaders that the prophets began to address themselves to the individual life and lost the large horizon of public life.

The prophets were public men and their interest was in public affairs. Some of them were statesmen of the highest type. All of them interpreted past history, shaped present history, and foretold future history on the basis of the con¬ viction 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. Samuel was the creator of two dynasties. Nathan and Gad were the political advisers of David. Nathan determined the succession of Solomon. The seed of revolutionary aspirations against the dynasty of David was dropped into the heart of Jeroboam by the prophet Ahijah of Shiloh. Some of the prophets would get short shrift in a European State as religious demagogues. The overthrow of the dynasty of Omri in the Northern Kingdom was the result of a conspiracy between the prophetic party under Elisha and General Jehu, and resulted in a massacre so fearful that it staggered even the Oriental political con¬ science. On the other hand the insight of Isaiah into the international situation of his day saved his people for a long time from being embroiled in the destructive upheavals that buried other peoples, and gave it thirty years of peace amid

IO almost universal war. The sufferings of Jeremiah came upon him chiefly because he took the unpopular side in national politics. If he and others had confined themselves to “reli¬ gion,” they could have said what they liked.

Our modern religious horizon and our conception of the character of a religious leader and teacher are so different that it is not easy to understand men who saw the province of religion chiefly in the broad reaches of civic affairs and international relations. Our philosophical and economic individualism has affected our religious thought so deeply that we hardly comprehend the prophetic views of an organic national life and of national sin and salvation. We usually conceive of the community as a loose sand-heap of indi¬ viduals and this difference in the fundamental point of view distorts the utterances of the prophets as soon as we handle them. For instance, one of our most beautiful revival texts is the invitation: “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” The words are part of the first chapter of Isaiah, to which reference has been made. The prophet throughout the chapter deals with the national condition of the kingdom of Judah and its capital. He describes its dev¬ astation; he ridicules the attempts to appease the national God by redoubled sacrifices; he urges instead the abolition of social oppression and injustice as the only way of regain¬ ing God’s favor for the nation. If they would vindicate the cause of the helpless and oppressed, then he would freely pardon ; then their scarlet and crimson guilt would be washed away. The familiar text is followed by the very material promise of economic prosperity, and the threat of continued war: “If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good

II of the land ; but if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword.” Of course the text is nobly true when it is made to express God’s willingness to pardon the repentant individual, but that was not the thought in the mind of the writer. He offered a new start to his nation on condition that it righted social wrongs. We offer free pardon to in¬ dividuals and rarely mention social wrongs.

We have seen that the prophets demanded right moral conduct as the sole test and fruit of religion, and that the morality which 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.

We advance another step in our study when we emphasize that the sympathy of the prophets, even of the most aristo¬ cratic among them, was entirely on the side of the poorer classes. Professor Kautzsch says: “Since Amos it was the alpha and omega of prophetic preaching to insist on right and justice, to warn against the oppression of the poor and help¬ less.” 1 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 ; 2 against the capitalis¬ tic 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 ; 3 against the venality of the judges who took bribes and had a double standard of law