Theopedia

Social Gospel

The Social Gospel was a theological movement, rooted in Albrecht Ritschl’s redefinition of the kingdom of God as a “moral community” built by human value judgments rather than a supernatural gift, that found its principal American expression in Walter Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) and Christianizing the Social Order (1912).1 It read the kingdom of God chiefly as a this-worldly social order to be built through gradual reform rather than an eschatological hope inaugurated by Christ’s own return, and by Rauschenbusch’s own account traded catastrophic divine intervention for “development.”2

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession predates the term “Social Gospel” by two centuries and names no such movement directly. Its chapter on good works states the order the movement inverted: good works “are only such as God hath commanded in his Holy Word,” and they are “the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith,” not its substitute or its substance. Believers do them “having their fruit unto holiness” so that they “may have the end eternal life,” not in order to build that life themselves.3 Where the confession makes social obedience the fruit of a supernaturally wrought faith, the Social Gospel’s own founding theologian made the “Christian ideal of society” itself the object of Christian hope, arrived at by human development rather than given by God’s own catastrophic act.2

Historical Development

Ritschlian origins

Albrecht Ritschl treated theology as a matter of value judgments and recast the kingdom of God as a moral community rather than a supernatural reality; this “Ritschlian social gospel theology had a profound influence beyond Germany itself, especially in America.”1 That influence reached America chiefly through Walter Rauschenbusch, whose three major works, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Christianizing the Social Order (1912), and A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917), carried Ritschl’s kingdom-as-moral-community idea into American Protestantism.1

Rauschenbusch’s eschatology

Rauschenbusch described his own version of the Christian hope:

Our chief interest in any millennium is the desire for a social order in which the worth and freedom of every least human being will be honored and protected; in which the brotherhood of man will be expressed in the common possession of the economic resources of society; and in which the spiritual good of humanity will be set high above the private profit interests of all materialistic groups…. As to the way in which the Christian ideal of society is to come, — we must shift from catastrophe to development.2

Berkhof groups this with the similar evolutionary optimism of Shirley Jackson Case, who held that “the ills of life are to be cured by a gradual process of remedial treatment rather than by a sudden annihilation,” as characteristic of “a great deal of present day Postmillennialism” that “concerns itself very little about the teachings of Scripture, except as a historical indication of what people once believed.”2 On this account, the millennium is not ushered in “by the preaching of the gospel and the accompanying work of the Holy Spirit,” nor by “a cataclysmic change,” but by human “world-betterment,” whether through gradual evolution or through deliberate social reform.2

Christology

Berkhof places Rauschenbusch within the same modern liberal theology that “ruled out all the supernatural in the life of the Saviour,” noting that Rauschenbusch “closes his Theology for the Social Gospel with a discussion of the death of Christ” that, like the other liberal theologians treated alongside him in that section, leaves no place for a supernatural state of exaltation.4

Objections and Responses

The Social Gospel’s emphasis on justice and human welfare is simply Christian ethics applied, and any Reformed objection to it is an objection to caring for the poor and oppressed. The Reformed objection is not to social concern as such but to the movement’s own redefinition of the kingdom of God as a this-worldly social order achieved by human development rather than the fruit of a supernatural work of grace. The 1689 LBCF already requires good works “commanded in [God’s] Holy Word” as “the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith”;3 the objection is to treating those fruits as the substance of the kingdom itself, and to Rauschenbusch’s own explicit preference for “development” over the “catastrophe” of Christ’s own return.2

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology”: “Theology, according to Ritschl, is thus about value judgments; the kingdom of God is a moral community. Ritschlian social gospel theology had a profound influence beyond Germany itself, especially in America.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 703. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 16, “Of Good Works,” paras. 1-2. ↩ ↩2

  4. Berkhof, 330. ↩