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To: Colofornian

In practice the social gospel inevitably ends up violating the commandments against stealing and coveting.


50 posted on 03/15/2010 1:16:28 PM PDT by circlecity
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To: circlecity

Christianity Without Salvation

http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110010062

Within a few years of its publication in 1907, “Christianity and the Social Crisis” swept through America’s Protestant churches like a nor’easter, selling more than 50,000 copies to ministers and laypeople alike. In an age of social upheaval, Walter Rauschenbusch’s jeremiad was meant to rouse the church from its pietistic slumber. “If society continues to disintegrate and decay, the Church will be carried down with it,” he warned. “If the Church can rally such moral forces that injustice will be overcome . . . it will itself rise to higher liberty and life.”

The summons found many converts. Reflecting on the mood a few decades later, preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick gushed with nostalgia: It “struck home so poignantly,” he said, that it “ushered in a new era in Christian thought and action.” The era of Rauschenbusch is far from over: His “Social Gospel” message continues to inspire activists and theologians of all stripes. The question now, though, is whether its influence is a desirable thing—or a distraction of the Christian church from its deepest objectives.

Many praise the reform efforts stirred in part by Rauschenbusch’s appeal: the founding of settlement houses, literacy campaigns, help for refugees, and food and health care for the destitute. Politically, Rauschenbusch’s book helped along Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive agenda, notably his antitrust crusades. Social-gospel activists would later hail the creation of Social Security under the New Deal.

(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...


Just about any books in Torah or Bible can be opened to nearly any section and within just a few verses,values and commands will be found that advocates of social justice, for the most part, reject.


115 posted on 03/15/2010 4:29:28 PM PDT by WOBBLY BOB (ACORN:American Corruption for Obama Right Now)
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