Ties That Bind: Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Quest for Economic Justice
In 1934, Reinhold Niebuhr delivered the annual "Rauschenbusch Lectures" at Colgate Rochester Divinity School. These lectures would form the basis for his 1935 work, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics. In the preface to the 1956 edition of that book, Niebuhr noted that this volume "was meant to express both the author's general adhesion to the purposes of the 'Social Gospel' of which Rauschenbusch was the most celebrated exponent, and to spell out some of the growing differences between the original social gospel and the newer form of social Christianity" ([1935] 1956, 8). When one reads this book, however, it is far easier to see the gap between Niebuhr and the early twentieth-century social gospel than the continuity between the two.Important studies by scholars like Harlan Beckley and Gary Dorrien point to the continuities and distinctions between the social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) and the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971).1 As Dorrien notes in the second volume of his work The Making of American Liberal Theology, Niebuhr had far more in common with social gospelers like Rauschenbusch than with continental neoorthodox theologians like Karl Barth. While many of Niebuhr's disciples strayed into neoconservatism, which repudiated the liberalism of the social gospel, Niebuhr did not "and he never doubted the social gospel assumption that Christians have a social mission to secure the just ordering of the world" (Dorrien 2003, 435).By the same token, despite Niebuhr's assertion of his "general adhesion" to the heritage of the social gospel, one is hard-pressed to find an organic connection between his thought and Rauschenbusch's. There is little evidence to suggest that Niebuhr, unlike his brother H. Richard, ever engaged in a thorough examination of Rauschenbusch's writings, even though at several points he did exempt Rauschenbusch from his most vitriolic critiques of liberalism.2It has been the verdict of many scholars that Niebuhr's version of Christian realism eclipsed Rauschenbusch's social gospel, a verdict given credence by the very different trajectories of their careers. Yet there are aspects of their lives that make a comparison between the two difficult. For one thing, Niebuhr enjoyed an advantage of historical longevity. From his first publications in the mid-1910s until his final missives in the late 1960s, Niebuhr covered a broader range of issues and produced a wider corpus of writing, as opposed to Rauschenbusch, who was less prolific and whose major writings appeared during the final ten years of his life. While one can see a clear theological progression in Rauschenbusch, we can only speculate how his thought might have developed if he had lived into the 1920s or 1930s (and how he would have responded to the ascending theological star, Niebuhr). Further, in analyzing Niebuhr the question always arises: Which Niebuhr? Does one focus primarily on Niebuhr's Marxist turn during the 1930s, the World War II interventionism of the early 1940s, or the Cold War and liberal democratic phase of Niebuhr's career in the late 1940s and 1950s?However, one of the biggest problems in interpreting Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr is the simple fact that one is talking about individuals whose theologies engaged radically different historical contexts. When Rauschenbusch was forty years old in 1901, he was a few years into his teaching career at Rochester Theological Seminary, having completed an eleven-year pastorate of a German Baptist Church in the Hell's Kitchen section of New York. At the turn of the twentieth century, Rauschenbusch was grappling with the realities of late nineteenth-century industrialization, immigration, and unregulated capitalism in a nation on the cusp of becoming a global economic and military power. Although theological liberalism was starting to gain traction within American Protestantism, those who adhered to what later became known as "the social gospel" were a small minority who, in Rauschenbusch's words, "shouted in the wilderness" ([1912] 2010, 9). When Niebuhr was forty in 1932, he too had completed a long-term pastorate of a German immigrant church in an urban context (Detroit), and was a few years into his teaching career at Union Theological Seminary, New York. However, he was dealing with the political fallout from a world war, the specter of the worst economic depression in American history, and an international context that revealed signs of what a later generation would call "globalization." Unlike Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr found himself surrounded by many like-minded colleagues who in various ways were deeply committed to carrying forward the legacy of the social gospel.3 While Rauschenbusch's context evokes images of an Old Testament prophet crying in the wilderness, Niebuhr was surrounded by "a cloud of witnesses" actively committed to building on this earlier legacy of social Christianity.Despite their differences, I believe the task of bringing these two men into conversation with each other in the early twenty-first century is vital. As perhaps the two most important figures to come out of the American tradition of Christian social ethics in the first half of the twentieth century, Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr were united in the belief that central to the social mission of Christianity were issues of economic justice. As was the case in each of their lifetimes, the early twenty-first century still echoes with voices that see questions of economic wealth as fundamentally private matters—questions that Christianity, and religion in general, have no business addressing. However, Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr believed that an engagement with questions of economic justice was an essential component for understanding Christian theology. Here, I concentrate on one formative work for each person: Rauschenbusch's Christianizing the Social Order (1912), a book that provides Rauschenbusch's most detailed analysis of the relationship between Christianity and economic justice, and Niebuhr's An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (1935), a book that offers one of Niebuhr's most penetrating critiques of the social gospel.In my judgment the most critical theme for understanding the differences between Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr revealed in these works, and in their other writings, is not so much their different views toward classical doctrines like original sin or the meaning of justice. Rather, their differences emerge from their distinctive understandings of the use of history in the interpretation of Christian theology and ethics. For Rauschenbusch, discerning the process of God in history was a means to ascertain how Christians could address the problems caused by modern capitalism. For Niebuhr, faith in the redemptive possibilities of history represented one of the central faults of liberal Christianity, even as Christians were called not to give up on the possibilities of economic justice.Previous discussions on the distinctions between Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr revolve around their differing understandings of sin and the ability of humans to approximate a just social order. Yet I believe that the core of their theological differences is their very different views regarding the role of history. It became fashionable in Niebuhrian circles to see the social gospel's greatest failure as its alleged myopic optimism in a coming kingdom of God, expressed chiefly in the belief that God worked directly through morally righteous men and women who would labor to bring about the conditions of a just society. However, seeing Rauschenbusch's thought solely through the kingdom-of-God lens misses what was for him the underlying foundation of his theology and social ethics: his understanding of history. It is impossible to understand Rauschenbusch without recognizing the way that he approached theology and ethics with the methodological tools of an early twentieth-century historian, who took seriously a liberal tradition that stressed the activity of God working in history to transform the world. Rauschenbusch's historiography connects him to a legacy of influential German historians such as Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack. Yet Rauschenbusch's view of history was very practical in that he was primarily concerned with how American social institutions, especially churches, were able to approximate in history the theological and ethical ideals of a just society.4 For Rauschenbusch, the chief means to approximate these ends was economic reform.More so than any of his other books, Christianizing the Social Order shows the relationship between Rauschenbusch's theology and a model of economic justice. When this book was published in 1912, the social gospel was nearing its peak of national influence, and the first few chapters of this book read as a hopeful summary of how the social teachings of Christianity were transforming the nation. Christianizing the Social Order reflects the idealism of many Progressive-era reformers who believed they were witnessing a unique historical moment when the rise of social righteousness would create the conditions in which a new economic order might be possible.It was his stress on God's active involvement in history, whereby people of faith labored for a just society, which gave Rauschenbusch's theology much of its power, but this idea also exposed him to later charges that his understanding of social progress was naïve. Building on his analysis in his 1907 book, Christianity and the Social Crisis, Rauschenbusch saw the moral failure of Christianity largely as a result of its radical message having been co-opted by powerful economic interests committed to promoting the church's status and wealth. Not only did this pattern fossilize the church's theological development, but it created a context in which individual greed superseded the need of Christians to see a just economic order as one of the goals of the Christian life. While conceding that self-interest was at times an essential aspect of individual development, Rauschenbusch contended that it was a disaster for the nation's economic future. "We want free, strong, self-reliant men with elbow room for action," he asserted: "But when a theory of so-called economic individualism has resulted in turning the property of a nation over to a limited group; … in pitting the self-interest of the most resourceful men against the public welfare; in giving them power to hold up the progress of humanity by extorting monopoly profits; … then that theory has gone to seed and it is time to plow the ground for a new crop" ([1912] 2010, 290). In many ways, Rauschenbusch's rhetorical fallback was to note that the modern theological iterations of the social gospel provided the means for changing moral behaviors: With unanimous moral judgment mankind has always loved and exalted those who sacrificed their self-interest to the common welfare, and despised those who sold out the common good for private profit. The cross of Christ stands for the one principle of action; the bag of Judas stands for the other…. I submit the proposition that the overgrowth of private interests has institutionalized an unchristian principle, and that we must reverse the line of movement if we want to establish the law of Christ. ([1912] 2010, 290)Rauschenbusch was always clear that the achievement of a just social-political order was never a foregone conclusion; the assertion by some that he believed in the "inevitable progress" of humanity is a clear misreading of his theology.5 Yet the achievement of a just society largely rested on the forces of history that he believed provided opportune moments for social change. In 1914, he noted: "We all realize the immense opportunities for action in the present state of the public mind. But historical opportunities rarely last long. The red iron blackens even as it lies on the anvil. Therefore strike now" (quoted in Evans 2004, 258).Rauschenbusch was typical of a generation of liberals who came of age believing that the study of history was tantamount to a form of scientific inquiry to interpret the development of Christianity. Like other liberals of his generation, he saw Christianity's historical development as an ongoing struggle for humans to discern the essence of their God-given purpose to work for a just world: "All history becomes the unfolding of the purpose of the immanent God who is working in the race toward the commonwealth of spiritual liberty and righteousness. History is the sacred workshop of God" ([1912] 2010, 121).For Reinhold Niebuhr, this view of history was anathema. Niebuhr's theological education at Yale Divinity School exposed him to some of this historical idealism (in particular, from the prominent liberal historian and theologian Douglas Clyde Macintosh; see Fox 1985, esp. chap. 2). For much of the 1920s and through the first half of the 1930s, Niebuhr embraced aspects of the social gospel legacy that advocated for economic reform along socialist lines (and Niebuhr's involvement in the American Socialist Party from the late 1920s to the late 1930s is well documented). By the early 1930s, however, Niebuhr disparaged this progressive view of history. For Niebuhr, optimistic assertions about a coming kingdom of God showed the inability of the social gospelers to face the hard facts of history—namely, that sin could never be overcome by Christian morality, and that justice, while representing a necessary goal of the Christian life, could never be fully actualized. Niebuhr accepted many of the social gospel arguments about the religious and ethical significance of the Hebrew prophets and their calls to change society. Yet unlike Rauschenbusch, who believed that much of the problem with the modern world was that Christians did not properly interpret Christianity, Niebuhr saw the problems of history and theology cutting much deeper.Here is where Niebuhr's Augustinian view of human sinfulness reflects his belief that history can never reveal the full extent of God's purposes for humanity: "Historic Christianity is in the position of having the materials for the foundation and the roof of the structure of an adequate morality. But it is unable to complete the structure" ([1935] 1956, 149). In part, Niebuhr's stature as a social ethicist was rooted in attacking what he saw (and often caricatured) as the social gospel tendency to see socioeconomic reform as something that could be achieved through the power of Christian ideals of love and brotherhood. Yet behind these critiques lay Niebuhr's strong doubt about the redemptive nature of history. "Christianity, in other words, is interpreted as the preaching of a moral ideal, which men do not follow, but which they ought to. The Church must continue to hope for something that has never happened" (158). As he moved into the 1940s, Niebuhr grew more strident in his belief that historical processes only made the task of building a just world even more difficult. "There is indeed progress in history in the sense that it presents us with continually larger responsibilities and tasks," he wrote in 1944. But "modern history is an almost perfect refutation of modern faith in a redemptive history. History is creative but not redemptive" (1944, 132). This pessimism toward historical progressivism became even more pronounced in many of Niebuhr's later works such as The Irony of American History (1952) and Faith and History (1949). Influenced by the emerging context of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, Niebuhr warned that the efforts of modern democratic nations to create the conditions for a just world more often than not led nations to commit greater evils in the name of justice.Both Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr saw a just society as a goal to be approximated but never fully achieved. Yet while Rauschenbusch carried the seeds of an earlier nineteenth-century evangelical faith that Christians could build a morally righteous society (analogous to the same evangelical fervor that led to the passing of the Prohibition Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920), Niebuhr consistently affirmed that moral fortitude alone could not achieve a morally perfected society. Consistent with Augustine, Niebuhr held that the ultimate perfection of humanity lay outside of history: The truth of the Gospel must be preached today to a generation which hoped that historical development would gradually emancipate man from the ambiguity of his position of strength and weakness and would save him from the sin into which he falls by trying to evade or deny the contradiction in which he lives…. But a Gospel which can penetrate through this illusion and save men from the idolatrous confidence in history as a redeemer will also shake the false islands of security which men have sought to establish in history in the name of the Gospel. (1949, 243)This different orientation toward historical processes nuanced the way that both thinkers thought of economic and political reform. For Rauschenbusch, the quest for economic justice was a moral necessity predicated on a need for Christians to both model the precepts of just relationships and push churches to advocate for sweeping socioeconomic reform. Although Niebuhr in the mid-1930s would likely have agreed with many of Rauschenbusch's ideas regarding the pervasive decadence of modern capitalism, and the need for strong government regulation of the private sector, Niebuhr would also have claimed that persons needed more than powerful moral convictions to change a nation's collective economic behavior.One reason why many contemporary scholars, public intellectuals, and politicians revere Niebuhr is that from an early twenty-first century perspective, Niebuhr's language of human tragedy and sin has aged quite well. While parts of Rauschenbusch also sound contemporary, one senses in reading him that he was speaking to an early twentieth-century Progressive-era context. At Rauschenbusch to the United States in a way that the nation at the of God's for the of the reason why many contemporary to Niebuhr is that his Christian realism to both progressive and political Niebuhr's in many have him not only as a prophet who against the of Soviet but as a of capitalism. The of this view is that while much of his later was as an Niebuhr's early came as a of who in like and and An Interpretation of Christian Ethics a strong for political find little in Rauschenbusch's theology. However, Rauschenbusch largely took a critical toward seeing Marxist of struggle as to the of other social Rauschenbusch's to the problem of economic was to that the teachings of Christianity provided the basis for a new economic order. believed that historical during the century Christians to new of theology that problems of industrialization, business and the of modern capitalism. The idea that capitalism a of the is one of the most in Rauschenbusch's writings, to his in Hell's by the late nineteenth-century and Rauschenbusch to the idea that much of the nation's economic especially were held by a small of people who these without adequate to those who and developed the The moral problem to be by us is how to the of the individual of the who has its by his labor and and to for the the which the The is and and many of the most and evils of are directly or to this of the Christianity was a means by which the economic could be in ways that a just of the nation's Rauschenbusch, the to address the nation's economic was for to democratic is one of the chief of the coming are not they are but they are were of the mission of Christianity the name of had been God had to up the Church was too or too to realize God's ([1912] 2010, Yet for all of the ways Rauschenbusch preached the need for to an economic predicated on democratic he from the American Socialist This reflects Rauschenbusch's to see Christian ethics as but it also his faith by in the between political and Christianity. Rauschenbusch that has a spiritual hope and a religious It stands for the of moral and for the development of the human in and In present social order it stands for more between man and ([1912] 2010, Like other social Rauschenbusch's to the problems of economic was in the belief that Christianity could as a means to the social perfection of In this he advocated for such as the by and government regulation and of that were to the larger public as public and While Rauschenbusch had faith in a socialist of he never believed that the goal of a political was to create an of in which the same are in their and always will and this of will be in some of While many persons today might see Rauschenbusch's as his was largely by a belief that a needed a of and government regulation to individual Niebuhr published An Interpretation of Christian Ethics in he had the in his Christianity with Marxist of Niebuhr was never a and did not economic and political However, Niebuhr saw in Marxist analysis an of political and economic power that he believed could the economic of capitalism, something liberalism was unable to As he into human nature which has to modern to the of ([1935] 1956, Niebuhr about Marxist theory was that it took seriously to economic Marxist analysis of struggle a of how powerful economic interests would not their wealth for the of to of the of Christ. As Gary Dorrien Christianity at its was both and it had a view of history that was by its hope for the of Yet even as An Interpretation of Christian Ethics a Marxist language of struggle and Niebuhr's with the of the Soviet Union led him to Marxist theory and more of a economic model to democratic to liberal and Niebuhr's understandings of their different theological For Rauschenbusch, the failure of was that it did not understand that the nature of was not the of but the of human and economic came not through the nineteenth-century of Karl but through the democratic by In this Rauschenbusch did not Niebuhr's mid-1930s faith in ability to approximate the conditions of a just society we can only speculate how Rauschenbusch would have responded to the rise of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and as Niebuhr wrote about aspects of one senses in reading An Interpretation of Christian Ethics that his belief in human sinfulness and tragedy took over any faith he have had in any political ability to achieve a just society. as he saw a Marxist model as hope for economic there is also a sense that the mid-1930s Niebuhr had his most of is its assumption that an adequate of social justice will create individuals who will be to to their ability and to their The of social good will and human can be by no political ([1935] 1956, In the like social gospel would each too much faith in human to to a point where the of humanity would the and of human and Niebuhr the time of World War affirmed the of American but from very different theological While it could be that Rauschenbusch too much faith in a of Progressive-era Niebuhr in the too little faith in the possibilities for the reform of as Niebuhr from Marxist there was always the sense that the quest for economic would be by the by human Niebuhr's later of liberal he the optimistic language of This is most in Niebuhr's assertion in of and the of that for justice but to (1944, These the theological that between Rauschenbusch's social gospel idealism and Niebuhr's Christian all of their differences, Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr many of their major works on the same a just social order could only be never fully achieved. Yet the way they the of this approximate justice other differences between most of the social gospel made by Christian like Niebuhr was that the social gospel embraced an of love at the of an of justice for There is no doubt that many early of the social gospel, like expressed faith in the of "the of as the to achieve economic and political reform. it was this legacy that Niebuhr had in when he wrote that Christianity the simple of in the of in order to its hope in the of the of love in the world" ([1935] 1956, I the between Niebuhr and Rauschenbusch is not the of an of justice in Rauschenbusch in the social gospel in but how the of justice took on a different nature for the For Rauschenbusch, justice was the of love within social relationships and social For all of the that Niebuhr through as a public he never the idea that the role of justice was often to the of human a social of love of Niebuhr's liberal during the 1930s were of the Christian a prominent New (and a good of and one of the of liberalism (and of and especially were for Niebuhr, especially in of the way they to an of love that the need for political to achieve justice. Niebuhr The of the liberal to the law of love to without is a of and the liberal Church had had less moral idealism and more religious realism its to the political problem would have been less and ([1935] 1956, However, it is
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