Walter Rauschenbusch's Ideals Of Social Gospel

Walter Rauschenbusch’s ideals of Social Gospel: Walter Rauschenbusch wrote during the time of the social gospel movement. The phrase “social gospel” is used to describe a movement that applies to Christian ethics to social problems. “These things were emphasized while the doctrines of sin, salvation, heaven and hell, and the future kingdom of God were downplayed.” Walter Rauschenbusch served as pastor to a Baptist congregation of German immigrants in New York. In Rauschenbusch’s writing “The Fall of Man/The Nature of Sin” from A Theology of the Social Gospel he goes on to describe and search to seek what sin exactly is. Rauschenbusch is scornful of Christianity’s traditional emphasis on Original Sin and the fall of Adam and Eve rather than on Jesus and the prophets. To him, sin is selfishness, and selfishness is a major source of social evils. In the …show more content…
(45)” As before, he replaces the theological role of Adam with the Kingdom of God. We should not contrast ourselves with Adam in order to realize our sins. Not only because this promotes an individualistic and personal understanding of sin which is not conducive to social reform, but also because the perfection that Adam represents is not valid for the social gospel. Theologians, he suggests, learned a conception of perfect from Jesus Christ and super imposed it on Adam. Furthermore, because “Adam’s situation gave very limited opportunities for selfishness, which is the essence of sin,” Adam’s state of being will never give us a contrast by which to measure and be conscious of our social sins (51). As a community, our conception of the Kingdom of God as a “realm of love… and a commonwealth of labour” allows us to comprehend the extent of our social imperfection (54). By replacing Adam with Jesus our understanding of sin must propel us towards action, according to the model of