(1836-1918)

The father of the New Theology movement. He published the first of his many books on the Social Gospel in 1876. A transplanted New Englander, he spent his most influential years at the First Congregational Church of Columbus, Ohio. In the Ohio capital he encountered the labor struggle first hand.

In his congregation were both employers and employees, so during times of industrial strife Gladden witnessed with alarm "the widening of the breach between these classes." In a number of evening addresses he focused on the labor problem and expressed his conviction that the teachings of Jesus contained the principles for the right ordering of society.

[tags]BlogRodent, church-history, ChurchRodent, history, Jesus, Social-Gospel, Washington-Gladden[/tags]

(1861-1918)

As a young German Baptist pastor in a tenement section of New York City called Hell's Kitchen, he struggled with the Christian response to urban problems. The books that made him nationally prominent came during his years as professor of Church History at Rochester Theological Seminary. His three major works were Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Christianizing the Social Order (1912), and A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917). Rauschenbusch anchored his appeal to social responsibility in the concept of the kingdom of God.

[tags]BlogRodent, church-history, ChurchRodent, history, Social-Gospel, Walter-Rauschenbusch[/tags]

The major movement for social justice in the U.S. was called the Social Gospel, a movement among liberal Protestant pastors and theological professors. The crux of the social gospel was the belief that God's saving work included corporate structures as well as personal lives. If it is true that social good and evil are collective in nature, not simply the total of good and evil individuals, then Christians are obliged to work for the reconstruction of the social order. It is part of their religious responsibility.

While Christian movements for social concerns faced the danger of losing the church's true mission, they left an important reminder that Christians cannot show their concern for people's eternal destiny unless they also demonstrate their concern for people's earthly needs.

[tags]BlogRodent, church-history, ChurchRodent, history, Social-Gospel[/tags]