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Walter Rauschenbusch

78 quotes

“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 (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Under the warm breath of religious faith all social institutions become plastic.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I can frankly affirm that I have written with malice toward none and with charity for all. ...I have tried—so far as erring human judgment permits—to lift the issues out of the 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.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 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.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In so far as men have attempted to 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.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 axiomatic. ...The real meaning of his life and the real direction of his purposes can be understood only in that historical connection.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Primitive religions consisted mainly in the worship of the powers of nature. ...the essential thing in religion was not morality, but the ceremonial method of placating the god, securing his gifts, and ascertaining 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.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 substitute and a hindrance for ethical religion.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The twin-evil against which the prophets launched the condemnation of Jehovah was injustice and oppression.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The prophets were not religious individualists. ...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. ...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.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It became one of the fundamental attributes of their God that he was the husband of the widow, the father of the orphan, and the protector of the stranger. The widows and the fatherless were those who had no concrete power to back their claims, no "influence," no "financial interest," no "pull" with the police, judges and aldermen of that time. The "stranger" was the immigrant who had no part in the blood-kinship of the clan, and hence no share in the land and no voice in the common affairs of the village.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When the prophets conceived Jehovah as the special vindicator of these voiceless classes it was another way of saying that it is the chief duty in religious morality to stand for the rights of the helpless.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are to-day in the midst of a revolutionary epoch fully as thorough as that of the Renaissance and Reformation. It is accompanied by a reinterpretation of nature and of history. The social movement has helped to create the modern study of history. Where we used to see a panorama of wars and strutting kings and court harlots, we now see the struggle of the people to wrest a living from nature and to shake off their oppressors. The new present has created a new past. The French Revolution was the birth of modern democracy, and also of the modern school of history.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Eminent theologians, like other eminent thinkers, live in the social environment of wealth and to that extent are slow to see. The individualistic conception of religion is so strongly fortified in theological literature and ecclesiastical institutions that its monopoly cannot be broken in a hurry. It will take a generation or two for the new social comprehension of religion to become common property.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The better we know Jesus, the more social do his thoughts and aims become.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men are seizing on Jesus as the exponent of their own social convictions. They all claim him. ...But in truth Jesus was not a social reformer of the modern type... he approached these facts purely from the moral, and not from the economic or historical point of view.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the question of the distribution of wealth were solved for all society and all lived in average comfort and without urgent anxiety, the question would still be how many would be at peace with their own souls and have that enduring joy and contentment which alone can make the outward things fair and sweet and rise victorious over change.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus. Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Greek world cherished no such national religious hope as the prophets had ingrained in Jewish thought; on the other hand it was intensely interested in the future life for the individual, and in the ascetic triumph over flesh and matter. Thus the idea which had been the centre of Christ's thought was not at all the centre of the Church's thought, and even the comprehension of his meaning was lost and overlaid.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ascetic Christianity called the world evil and left it. Humanity is waiting for a revolutionary Christianity which will call the world evil and change it.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Primitive Christianity cherished an ardent hope of a radically new era, and within its limits sought to realize a social life on a new moral basis. Thus Christianity as an historical movement was launched with all the purpose and hope, all the impetus and power, of a great revolutionary movement, pledged to change the world-as-it-is into the world-as-it-ought-to-be.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The organization in which this movement was embodied, after three centuries of obscurity and oppression, rose triumphant to be the dominant power of the civilized world. Christian churches were scattered broadcast over the Roman Empire. ...Its churches were endowed with the ancient properties and rights of the temples. Its clergy were given immunity from the taxes and exactions which crushed all other classes. Its members filled the civil service. Its great bishops had the ear of the men in power.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When the machinery of [Roman] imperial administration broke down in the provinces under the invasion of the barbarians in the fifth century the machinery of the Church remained unbroken. ...Ancient families became extinct and the Church became the heir of their lands and slaves and serfs. Small proprietors sought security by committing their lands to the Church and becoming its tenants.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Church had its own law code and its own courts of law which were supreme over the clergy, and had large rights of jurisdiction even over the laity, so that it could develop and give effect to its own ideas of law and right.”
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) said by 1918 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source