Reformation Seminary Lecture - Social Gospel Movement - Part 1

 

Walter Rauschenbusch, liberal Baptist minister, was the most famous Social Gospel advocate. He gave the 1917 Yale Divinity lectures, and died soon after. The Social Gospel Movement dropped the name, but lives on in the mainline denominations, like ELCA. The Kingdom of God  of the Bible was altered to be used as the Brotherhood of the Kingdom, a favorite alternative (double-talk).

Rauschenbusch studied in Europe, which Americans considered the higher level of learning. Europe was also more involved with Socialism. 

1. Rauschenbusch graduated from Rochester Seminary, which was merged into Colgate Rochester Crozer. Martin Luther King Jr graduated from the seminary. 
2. The school and Rauschenbusch were considered liberal because they rejected the miracles of Jesus and His Atonement.
3. His was not the first or the only re-imagining of the Bible. He became famous in Hell's Kitchen and famous for his activism. The Social Gospel Movement faded but that remains the backbone of the mainline denominations today.
4. When A. D. Mattson attended Yale Divinity, he was influenced by a number of sainted Rauschenbusch fans on the faculty. Mattson in turn influenced Augustana Lutheran Seminary with A. D. teaching the required seminary students for decades.
5. Augustana College and Waterloo Lutheran Seminary were aligned with the liberal rationalism and social radicalism in the 1960s. Yale Divinity had the best Biblical scholars in the 1970s, but that only lasted a short time.

 Gladden was a Congregationalist and union activist.

Washington Gladden (died 1918) was a Congregationalist minister and a labor organizer. [famous in Columbus, Ohio] Leader of the Progressives.

Our two political parties are mixed up, but the Democrats are definitely the Progressives with the Republicans leaning to Conservatives. 

The mainline Protestant denominations have had mixed results in their advocacy, downplaying the Two Natures of Christ and using Biblical words without their actual meaning. The LCA was saturated with double-talk in their periodical (The Lutheran, started by Passavant the conservative. The magazine was almost dead and is  now called Living Lutheran). I knew the last two editors of The Lutheran and wrote for them. The last one was supported by Lutherans out East.