Updating the Social Gospel for the 21st Century

In 1997, Bill Phipps, the Moderator of the United Church of Canada caused an uproar when he was quoted by the Ottawa Citizen as saying that Jesus was not God. His intention was to outline his views on economic justice but his interviewer insisted on asking him questions about theology. The whole episode illustrates the challenge of articulating the Social Gospel in today's context of a right wing evangelical revival. Social Gospellers want to talk about the crises of our globalized economy and right wing journalists want to talk about the deity of Christ. In a later interview with Peter Emberley, Phipps situated himself within the Social Gospel tradition of Walter Rauschenbusch, arguing that a restoration of Social Gospel is decidedly overdue. Emberley summarizes Phipps' views as follows,

Social Gospel offers a sound theology: Recognize the fallenness of human institutions. Acknowledge the perfectibility of humanity. Lessen the occasion for sin and evil. Walk humbly and modestly with God. But Social Gospel, Phipps admits, is also in need of a “fresh articulation.” One way is through the Jesus Seminar. “The Jesus Seminar lets people appreciate the authority of Jesus,” Phipps acknowledges.[1]

Interpretations of Jesus and his preaching of the Kingdom of God was always an important part of the articulation of the Social Gospel. In terms of method, the Social Gospel inherited the classical liberal approach, “the need to rethink the fundamental vision and values of traditional Christianity in harmony with the fundamental vision and values of modernity.”[3] The Social Gospel was the practicing of a correlation model of bringing together into dialogue the Christian heritage and the contemporary situation. Walter Rauschenbusch was clear on this. He stated that even though he was brought up in a religious way, it was his experience living in New York among working people which made him realize that his previous religious ideas did not fit. He said. “I had to revise my whole study of the Bible...[4]

Walter Rauschenbusch's 1907 book, Christianity and the Social Crisis is a classic of the Social Gospel genre. Charles Strain lists the characteristics of this genre as including: theory geared sharply to the interest of praxis; not sermons but a unique fusion of social and historical analysis, argumentation and emotional pleading; a focus on confronting the church in a new age; an attempt to define the crisis of the age, both the crisis of Western Civilization and the crisis of the Church; and the appeal to the Church to play a decisive role in the crisis to bring about change. The Social Gospel genre brought together, to use Geertz's language, “maps of problematic reality” and “matrices for the creation of collective conscience.”[5] In the first half of Christianity and the Social Crisis, Rauschenbusch explores maps of reality, arguing that nothing more is needed than a comprehension of past history to forecast the future correctly. The study of the prophets of Israel and the primitive church, but especially the life and teachings of Jesus reveal 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 accordance with the will of God.”[6] In the second half of his book, he suggests models for action, the contributions which the church can make, in the face of urban decay, the failures of capitalism etc.

The central concept for the Biblical foundation for the Social Gospel was the concept of the “Kingdom of God.” It is clear that while it was important to affirm the continuity of the Hebrew prophets with the social aims of Jesus and the early church, the most important scriptural base for the Social Gospel was the teachings of Jesus concerning the Kingdom of God. What fascinated the Social Gospellers the most was the 19th century retrieval of the historical Jesus and their conviction that interpretations of Jesus' understanding of the Kingdom combined with modern scientific conceptions of social process would provide maps of reality and models for action.

In their interpretation of the center of Jesus' teaching, the Kingdom of God, Rauschenbusch and his colleagues did not adopt Albert Schweitzer's critique of the 19th century Quest for the Historical Jesus. This, of course, brings us to the heart of the Neo-orthodox criticism of the Social Gospel by for example Reinhold Niebuhr and his brother, H. Richard Niebuhr, namely, that the Social Gospel was just “culture Protestantism,” comprising a naïve belief in progress, pantheistic utopianism which failed to take seriously both the transcendence of God and the reality of evil, and a naïve conviction that the kingdom of God could be “institutionalized” here and now. For the Niebuhrs and Neo-orthodoxy, Schweitzer's view of an apocalyptic Jesus was the only acceptable interpretation of the New Testament. Given their acceptance of the Schweitzer consensus, they could make their assessment of the Social Gospel in this classic sketch by Visser't Hooft:

It (i.e., the Kingdom) is the ideal set before humanity by Jesus. It is essentially a new social order in which His principles will become supreme and which will be established on this earth through the gradual Christianization of all human relationships. Both the apocalyptic conception according to which the Kingdom does not belong to this dispensation at all but will come as a catastrophic act of God Himself and the individualistic conception of a purely inward Kingdom are, from this point of view, distortions of Jesus' real teaching. The Kingdom is not interpreted from its background in the Old Testament prophets or from its relationship with the Jewish eschatological hope in the days of Jesus.[7]

This “received tradition about the social gospel” no longer reads as a devastating critique today, but in our post-neoorthodox context it reads more as a commendation of the social gospel.

It is interesting that when Rauschenbusch defines Jesus' conception of the Kingdom of God, he turns to the work of the New Testament scholar Shailer Mathews. Mathews' classic 1897 book, The Social Teaching of Jesus, lists a variety of possible meanings of the Kingdom of God, such as being saved, going to heaven, the millennium, the organized church, the invisible church or the hidden life with God and concludes that “by the kingdom of God Jesus meant an ideal social order in which the relation of men to God is that of sons, and to each other, that of brothers.”[8] (echoes of Ritschl's emphasis on the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man!) Rauschenbusch affirms this view, arguing that even in the midst of apocalyptic thinking which was part of the Jewish age, Jesus took his illustrations from organic life (the mustard-seed, the sower, the leaven, etc.) and made it clear that his aim was a new society. He admits that on the issue of whether the Kingdom is already here or its consummation is in the future, “this is the point on which scholars are most at odds,” but he agrees with Shailer Mathews over against Schweitzer that “it is exceedingly probable that the Church spilled a little of the lurid colors of its own apocalypticism over the loftier conceptions of its Master...”[9] Rauschenbusch was familiar with the Schweitzer position but rejected it:

My own conviction is that the professional theologians of Europe, who all belong by kinship and sympathy to the bourgeois classes and are constitutionally incapacitated for understanding any revolutionary ideas, past or present, have overemphasized the ascetic and eschatological elements in the teachings of Jesus. They have classed as ascetic or apocalyptical the radical sayings about property and non-resistance which seems to them unpractical or visionary. If the present chastisement of God purges our intellects of capitalistic and upper-class iniquities, we shall no longer damn these sayings by calling them eschatological, but shall exhibit them as anticipations of the fraternal ethics of democracy and prophecies of social common sense.[10]

In 1990 James M. Robinson, assessing the state of historical Jesus research stated that nothing less than a revolution had taken place in the way scholars had come to view Jesus. It can no longer be assumed that Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher. Marcus Borg has pointed out that the majority of scholars in the Jesus Seminar and in the SBL Historical Jesus Section have abandoned the century-old consensus made popular by Schweitzer that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet. Steven Patterson names the following as key factors in the undermining of the old consensus: the emphasis of the New Questers of the 1950's that Jesus was different from John the Baptist, focusing on the reign of God as already present; the research on the parables in the 1960's, emphasizing that the parables are not allegories but narrative metaphors of the presencing of the Kingdom; Q Studies, in which for example John Kloppenborg identifies an earlier layer of Q as wisdom sayings and later laters as apocalyptic; the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas in which apocalyptic sayings are absent. Paterson concludes that both Q and Thomas have a corpus of wisdom sayings and as the traditions developed Q moved in an apocalyptic direction and Thomas in a Gnostic direction. As in Rauschenbusch's day scholars are still in disagreement on this issue, as the recent book The Apocalyptic Jesus Debate, edited by Robert J. Miller indicates. But because of the work of the Jesus Seminar it is now possible to isolate the authentic sayings of Jesus and conclude on the basis of an analysis of the “present kingdom” sayings that the Apocalyptic Paradigm has collapsed.

You won't be able to observe the coming of God's kindom, People are not going to be able to say, “Look, here it is!” or “Over there!” On the contrary, God's kingdom is right there in your presence. (Luke 17:20-21)

It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, “Look, here!” or “Look, there!” Rather, the Father's imperial rule is spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it. (Thomas 113:2)

In our present modern and post-modern context in which the grand narratives have collapsed (no more supernatural theism and no more absolutistic metaphysics), the retrieval of the historical Jesus recommends itself for a renewed articulation of the Social Gospel. An updating of Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis would include an updating of both parts: a reinterpretation of Jesus' life and teaching and a reinterpretation of the social issues of our contemporary context. I have focused on the first part, the updating of our interpretation of the teachings of Jesus. I have argued that the reinterpretation of Jesus would draw on the Jesus Seminar and the emerging consensus of New Testament research to outline the “wisdom” of Jesus in contrast to the apocalypticism of the first century and its continuing prominence today among conservative churches. As Steven Patterson argues, we are dealing here with two different kinds of religion. In apocalyptic, God as the Sovereign Creator, the God of the Apocalypse will come in the future, and God's coming will be marked by violent upheaval. In wisdom religion, God is already present, although seldom noticed. “God is present in insight and wisdom, and is made known through acts of wisdom, justice and mercy.”[12] In apocalyptic ethics one waits and prays for God's intervention. In wisdom ethics, God becomes present in and through our own resolute action of seeking that which is good and just. Apocalyptic religion is mythology based, with the overarching narrative of the myth of the external redeemer. Wisdom religion is living without myth. It is not preoccupied with peering behind the veil of the cosmos but it is focused on the divine, which is disseminated and spread out everywhere. The wisdom religion of Jesus is this-worldy, focused on the here and now, and the possibilities of justice and peace in this world, the only world that we know. In our contemporary context of a right wing revival the voices of the Social Gospel seem to be muted, but recent research on the historical Jesus promises the possibility of a rejuvenation of the Social Gospel as new work on a re-articulation of the Social Gospel continues to be developed.

Notes