Ties That Bind: Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Quest for Economic Justice

Abstract

In 1934, Reinhold Niebuhr delivered the annual “Rauschenbusch Lectures” at Colgate Rochester Divinity School. These lectures would form the basis for his 1935 work, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics. In the preface to the 1956 edition of that book, Niebuhr noted that this volume “was meant to express both the author's general adhesion to the purposes of the ‘Social Gospel’ of which Rauschenbusch was the most celebrated exponent, and to spell out some of the growing differences between the original social gospel and the newer form of social Christianity” ([1935] 1956, 8). When one reads this book, however, it is far easier to see the gap between Niebuhr and the early twentieth-century social gospel than the continuity between the two.Important studies by scholars like Harlan Beckley and Gary Dorrien point to the continuities and distinctions between the social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) and the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971).1 As Dorrien notes in the second volume of his work The Making of American Liberal Theology, Niebuhr had far more in common with social gospelers like Rauschenbusch than with continental neoorthodox theologians like Karl Barth. While many of Niebuhr's disciples strayed into neoconservatism, which repudiated the liberalism of the social gospel, Niebuhr did not “and he never doubted the social gospel assumption that Christians have a social mission to secure the just ordering of the world” (Dorrien 2003, 435).By the same token, despite Niebuhr's assertion of his “general adhesion” to the heritage of the social gospel, one is hard-pressed to find an organic connection between his thought and Rauschenbusch's. There is little evidence to suggest that Niebuhr, unlike his brother H. Richard, ever engaged in a thorough examination of Rauschenbusch's writings, even though at several points he did exempt Rauschenbusch from his most vitriolic critiques of liberalism.2It has been the verdict of many scholars that Niebuhr's version of Christian realism eclipsed Rauschenbusch's social gospel, a verdict given credence by the very different trajectories of their careers. Yet there are aspects of their lives that make a comparison between the two difficult. For one thing, Niebuhr enjoyed an advantage of historical longevity. From his first publications in the mid-1910s until his final missives in the late 1960s, Niebuhr covered a broader range of issues and produced a wider corpus of writing, as opposed to Rauschenbusch, who was less prolific and whose major writings appeared during the final ten years of his life. While one can see a clear theological progression in Rauschenbusch, we can only speculate how his thought might have developed if he had lived into the 1920s or 1930s (and how he would have responded to the ascending theological star, Niebuhr). Further, in analyzing Niebuhr the question always arises: Which Niebuhr? Does one focus primarily on Niebuhr's Marxist turn during the 1930s, the World War II interventionism of the early 1940s, or the Cold War and liberal democratic phase of Niebuhr's career in the late 1940s and 1950s?However, one of the biggest problems in interpreting Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr is the simple fact that one is talking about individuals whose theologies engaged radically different historical contexts. When Rauschenbusch was forty years old in 1901, he was a few years into his teaching career at Rochester Theological Seminary, having completed an eleven-year pastorate of a German Baptist Church in the Hell's Kitchen section of New York. At the turn of the twentieth century, Rauschenbusch was grappling with the realities of late nineteenth-century industrialization, immigration, and unregulated capitalism in a nation on the cusp of becoming a global economic and military power. Although theological liberalism was starting to gain traction within American Protestantism, those who adhered to what later became known as “the social gospel” were a small minority who, in Rauschenbusch's words, “shouted in the wilderness” ([1912] 2010, 9). When Niebuhr was forty in 1932, he too had completed a long-term pastorate of a German immigrant church in an urban context (Detroit), and was a few years into his teaching career at Union Theological Seminary, New York. However, he was dealing with the political fallout from a world war, the specter of the worst economic depression in American history, and an international context that revealed signs of what a later generation would call “globalization.” Unlike Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr found himself surrounded by many like-minded colleagues who in various ways were deeply committed to carrying forward the legacy of the social gospel.3 While Rauschenbusch's context evokes images of an Old Testament prophet crying in the wilderness, Niebuhr was surrounded by “a cloud of witnesses” actively committed to building on this earlier legacy of social Christianity.Despite their differences, I believe the task of bringing these two men into conversation with each other in the early twenty-first century is vital. As perhaps the two most important figures to come out of the American tradition of Christian social ethics in the first half of the twentieth century, Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr were united in the belief that central to the social mission of Christianity were issues of economic justice. As was the case in each of their lifetimes, the early twenty-first century still echoes with voices that see questions of economic wealth as fundamentally private matters—questions that Christianity, and religion in general, have no business addressing. However, Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr believed that an engagement with questions of economic justice was an essential component for understanding Christian theology. Here, I concentrate on one formative work for each person: Rauschenbusch's Christianizing the Social Order (1912), a book that provides Rauschenbusch's most detailed analysis of the relationship between Christianity and economic justice, and Niebuhr's An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (1935), a book that offers one of Niebuhr's most penetrating critiques of the social gospel.In my judgment the most critical theme for understanding the differences between Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr revealed in these works, and in their other writings, is not so much their different views toward classical doctrines like original sin or the meaning of justice. Rather, their differences emerge from their distinctive understandings of the use of history in the interpretation of Christian theology and ethics. For Rauschenbusch, discerning the process of God in history was a means to ascertain how Christians could address the problems caused by modern capitalism. For Niebuhr, faith in the redemptive possibilities of history represented one of the central faults of liberal Christianity, even as Christians were called not to give up on the possibilities of economic justice.Previous discussions on the distinctions between Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr revolve around their differing understandings of sin and the ability of humans to approximate a just social order. Yet I believe that the core of their theological differences is their very different views regarding the role of history. It became fashionable in Niebuhrian circles to see the social gospel's greatest failure as its alleged myopic optimism in a coming kingdom of God, expressed chiefly in the belief that God worked directly through morally righteous men and women who would labor to bring about the conditions of a just society. However, seeing Rauschenbusch's thought solely through the kingdom-of-God lens misses what was for him the underlying foundation of his theology and social ethics: his understanding of history. It is impossible to understand Rauschenbusch without recognizing the way that he approached theology and ethics with the methodological tools of an early twentieth-century historian, who took seriously a liberal tradition that stressed the activity of God working in history to transform the world. Rauschenbusch's historiography connects him to a legacy of influential German historians such as Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack. Yet Rauschenbusch's view of history was very practical in that he was primarily concerned with how American social institutions, especially churches, were able to approximate in history the theological and ethical ideals of a just society.4 For Rauschenbusch, the chief means to approximate these ends was economic reform.More so than any of his other books, Christianizing the Social Order shows the relationship between Rauschenbusch's theology and a model of economic justice. When this book was published in 1912, the social gospel was nearing its peak of national influence, and the first few chapters of this book read as a hopeful summary of how the social teachings of Christianity were transforming the nation. Christianizing the Social Order reflects the idealism of many Progressive-era reformers who believed they were witnessing a unique historical moment when the rise of social righteousness would create the conditions in which a new economic order might be possible.It was his stress on God's active involvement in history, whereby people of faith labored for a just society, which gave Rauschenbusch's theology much of its power, but this idea also exposed him to later charges that his understanding of social progress was naïve. Building on his analysis in his 1907 book, Christianity and the Social Crisis, Rauschenbusch saw the moral failure of Christianity largely as a result of its radical message having been co-opted by powerful economic interests committed to promoting the church's status and wealth. Not only did this pattern fossilize the church's theological development, but it created a context in which individual greed superseded the need of Christians to see a just economic order as one of the goals of the Christian life. While conceding that self-interest was at times an essential aspect of individual development, Rauschenbusch contended that it was a disaster for the nation's economic future. “We want free, strong, self-reliant men with elbow room for action,” he asserted: “But when a theory of so-called economic individualism has resulted in turning the property of a nation over to a limited group; … in pitting the self-interest of the most resourceful men against the public welfare; in giving them power to hold up the progress of humanity by extorting monopoly profits; … then that theory has gone to seed and it is time to plow the ground for a new crop” ([1912] 2010, 290). In many ways, Rauschenbusch's rhetorical fallback was to note that the modern theological iterations of the social gospel provided the means for changing moral behaviors: With unanimous moral judgment mankind has always loved and exalted those who sacrificed their self-interest to the common welfare, and despised those who sold out the common good for private profit. The cross of Christ stands for the one principle of action; the bag of Judas stands for the other…. I submit the proposition that the overgrowth of private interests has institutionalized an unchristian principle, and that we must reverse the line of movement if we want to establish the law of Christ. ([1912] 2010, 290)Rauschenbusch was always clear that the achievement of a just social-political order was never a foregone conclusion; the assertion by some that he believed in the “inevitable progress” of humanity is a clear misreading of his theology.5 Yet the achievement of a just society largely rested on the forces of history that he believed provided opportune moments for social change. In 1914, he noted: “We all realize the immense opportunities for action in the present state of the public mind. But historical opportunities rarely last long. The red iron blackens even as it lies on the anvil. Therefore strike now” (quoted in Evans 2004, 258).Rauschenbusch was typical of a generation of liberals who came of age believing that the study of history was tantamount to a form of scientific inquiry to interpret the development of Christianity. Like other liberals of his generation, he saw Christianity's historical development as an ongoing struggle for humans to discern the essence of their God-given purpose to work for a just world: “All history becomes the unfolding of the purpose of the immanent God who is working in the race toward the commonwealth of spiritual liberty and righteousness. History is the sacred workshop of God” ([1912] 2010, 121).For Reinhold Niebuhr, this view of history was anathema. Niebuhr's theological education at Yale Divinity School exposed him to some of this historical idealism (in particular, from the prominent liberal historian and theologian Douglas Clyde Macintosh; see Fox 1985, esp. chap. 2). For much of the 1920s and through the first half of the 1930s, Niebuhr embraced aspects of the social gospel legacy that advocated for economic reform along socialist lines (and Niebuhr's involvement in the American Socialist Party from the late 1920s to the late 1930s is well documented). By the early 1930s, however, Niebuhr disparaged this progressive view of history. For Niebuhr, optimistic assertions about a coming kingdom of God showed the inability of the social gospelers to face the hard facts of history—namely, that sin could never be overcome by Christian morality, and that justice, while representing a necessary goal of the Christian life, could never be fully actualized. Niebuhr accepted many of the social gospel arguments about the religious and ethical significance of the Hebrew prophets and their calls to change society. Yet unlike Rauschenbusch, who believed that much of the problem with the modern world was that Christians did not properly interpret Christianity, Niebuhr saw the problems of history and theology cutting much deeper.Here is where Niebuhr's Augustinian view of human sinfulness reflects his belief that history can never reveal the full extent of God's purposes for humanity: “Historic Christianity is in the position of having the materials for the foundation and the roof of the structure of an adequate morality. But it is unable to complete the structure” ([1935] 1956, 149). In part, Niebuhr's stature as a social ethicist was rooted in attacking what he saw (and often caricatured) as the social gospel tendency to see socioeconomic reform as something that could be achieved through the power of Christian ideals of love and brotherhood. Yet behind these critiques lay Niebuhr's strong doubt about the redemptive nature of history. “Christianity, in other words, is interpreted as the preaching of a moral ideal, which men do not follow, but which they ought to. The Church must continue to hope for something that has never happened” (158). As he moved into the 1940s, Niebuhr grew more strident in his belief that historical processes only made the task of building a just world even more difficult. “There is indeed progress in history in the sense that it presents us with continually larger responsibilities and tasks,” he wrote in 1944. But “modern history is an almost perfect refutation of modern faith in a redemptive history. History is creative but not redemptive” (1944, 132). This pessimism toward historical progressivism became even more pronounced in many of Niebuhr's later works such as The Irony of American History (1952) and Faith and History (1949). Influenced by the emerging context of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, Niebuhr warned that the efforts of modern democratic nations to create the conditions for a just world more often than not led nations to commit greater evils in the name of justice.Both Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr saw a just society as a goal to be approximated but never fully achieved. Yet while Rauschenbusch carried the seeds of an earlier nineteenth-century evangelical faith that Christians could build a morally righteous society (analogous to the same evangelical fervor that led to the passing of the Prohibition Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920), Niebuhr consistently affirmed that moral fortitude alone could not achieve a morally perfected society. Consistent with Augustine, Niebuhr held that the ultimate perfection of humanity lay outside of history: The truth of the Gospel must be preached today to a generation which hoped that historical development would gradually emancipate man from the ambiguity of his position of strength and weakness and would save him from the sin into which he falls by trying to evade or deny the contradiction in which he lives…. But a Gospel which can penetrate through this illusion and save men from the idolatrous confidence in history as a redeemer will also shake the false islands of security which men have sought to establish in history in the name of the Gospel. (1949, 243)This different orientation toward historical processes nuanced the way that both thinkers thought of economic and political reform. For Rauschenbusch, the quest for economic justice was a moral necessity predicated on a need for Christians to both model the precepts of just relationships and push churches to advocate for sweeping socioeconomic reform. Although Niebuhr in the mid-1930s would likely have agreed with many of Rauschenbusch's ideas regarding the pervasive decadence of modern capitalism, and the need for strong government regulation of the private sector, Niebuhr would also have claimed that persons needed more than powerful moral convictions to change a nation's collective economic behavior.One reason why many contemporary scholars, public intellectuals, and politicians revere Niebuhr is that from an early twenty-first century perspective, Niebuhr's language of human tragedy and sin has aged quite well. While parts of Rauschenbusch also sound contemporary, one senses in reading him that he was speaking to an early twentieth-century Progressive-era context. At points, Rauschenbusch comes close to sanctifying the United States in a way that places the nation at the center of God's plans for the redemption of the world.However, another reason why many contemporary intellectuals look to Niebuhr is that his Christian realism appeals to both progressive and conservative political perspectives. Since Niebuhr's death in 1971, many conservatives have seen him not only as a prophet who stood firmly against the misguided utopian illusions of Soviet Communism, but as a defender of free-market capitalism. The irony of this view is that while much of his later fame was as an anti-Communist crusader, Niebuhr's early reputation came as a promoter of socialism who in books like Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) and An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (1935) displayed a strong empathy for Marxism. Today, political conservatives find little value in Rauschenbusch's “leftist” theology. However, Rauschenbusch largely took a critical stance toward Marxism, seeing Marxist doctrine of violent class struggle as anathema to the true spirit of Christianity.Like other social gospelers, Rauschenbusch's solution to the problem of economic inequality was to assert that the teachings of Christianity provided the basis for a new economic order. He believed that historical developments during the nineteenth century challenged Christians to develop new interpretations of theology that addressed problems of industrialization, business monopolies, and the parasitic tendencies of modern capitalism. The idea that capitalism creates a parasitic class of the wealthy is one of the most persistent themes in Rauschenbusch's writings, dating back to his ministry in Hell's Kitchen. Heavily influenced by the late nineteenth-century economist and reformer Henry George, Rauschenbusch frequently returned to the idea that much of the nation's economic resources, especially land, were held by a small group of wealthy people who exploited these resources without providing adequate compensation to those who actually used and developed the land: The moral problem to be solved by us is how to safeguard the rights of the individual holder of the land who has increased its value by his labor and intelligence, and yet to extract for the community the value which the community creates. The latter right is now obscured and disregarded, and many of the most destructive and menacing evils of our civilization are directly or indirectly traceable to this legalized method of disinheriting the community. (1907, 229) What Christianity offered was a means by which the economic playing field could be leveled in ways that promoted a just redistribution of the nation's wealth.For Rauschenbusch, the logical solution to address the nation's economic disparities was for Americans to embrace democratic socialism: Socialism is one of the chief powers of the coming age. Its fundamental aims are righteous, not because they are socialistic, but because they are human. They were part of the mission of Christianity before the name of Socialism had been spoken. God had to raise up Socialism because the organized Church was too blind, or too slow, to realize God's ends. ([1912] 2010, 405) Yet for all of the ways Rauschenbusch preached the need for America to embrace an economic system predicated on democratic socialism, he shied away from joining the American Socialist Party. This decision reflects Rauschenbusch's desire to see Christian ethics as transcending specific political-economic systems, but it also manifests his faith (not shared by Niebuhr) in the inseparable link between political democracy and Christianity. Rauschenbusch asserted that “[d]emocracy has become a spiritual hope and a religious force. It stands for the sanitation of our moral relations, and for the development of the human soul in freedom and self-control…. In our present social order it necessarily stands for more equality between man and man” ([1912] 2010, 363). Like other social gospelers, Rauschenbusch's solution to the problems of economic inequality was manifested in the belief that Christianity could serve as a means leading to the social perfection of democracy. In this regard, he advocated for measures such as the single-tax proposed by Henry George and extensive government regulation and control of corporations that were “essential” to the larger public welfare (such as public utilities and railroads).6 While Rauschenbusch had great faith in a socialist doctrine of equality, he never believed that the goal of a political system was to create an across-the-board system of economics in which every person derived the same share. “Men are unequal in their capacities, and always will be, and this inherent inequality of talent will inevitably be registered in some inequality of possessions” (363). While many persons today might see Rauschenbusch's politics as radical, his socialism was largely tempered by a belief that a healthy democracy needed a combination of free markets and government regulation to protect individual rights.When Niebuhr published An Interpretation of Christian Ethics in 1935, he had reached the high-water mark in his equating Christianity with Marxist principles of class struggle. Niebuhr was never a Communist and did not embrace Marx's utopian economic and political vision. However, Niebuhr saw in Marxist analysis an assessment of political and economic power that he believed could challenge the economic abuses of capitalism, something liberalism was unable to do. As he put it, “The insights into human nature which Marxism has fortunately added to modern culture belong to the forgotten insights of prophetic religion” ([1935] 1956, 114). What Niebuhr liked about Marxist theory was that it took seriously capitalism's proclivity to control economic resources. Furthermore, Marxist analysis of class struggle reflected a realistic assessment of how powerful economic interests would not willingly concede their wealth for the sake of adhering to vague notions of the Golden Rule of Christ. As Gary Dorrien noted, “like Christianity at its best, Marxism was both realistic and utopian; it had a tragic view of history that was tempered by its hope for the transformation of history” (2011, 238). Yet even as An Interpretation of Christian Ethics reflected a Marxist language of class struggle and revolution, Niebuhr's disenchantment with the ideological dogmatism of the Soviet Union led him increasingly to reject Marxist theory and embrace more of a Rauschenbuschian economic model akin to democratic socialism and, ultimately, to liberal capitalism.Rauschenbusch's and Niebuhr's understandings of Marxism reflect their different theological orientations. For Rauschenbusch, the failure of Marxism was that it did not understand that the true nature of democracy was not the exploitation of wealth, but the promotion of human freedom. Personal freedom and economic equality came not through the nineteenth-century dialectics of Karl Marx, but through the first-century democratic ethos embodied by Jesus. In this regard, Rauschenbusch did not share Niebuhr's mid-1930s faith in Marxism's ability to approximate the conditions of a just society (although we can only speculate how Rauschenbusch would have responded to the rise of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s).Yet as Niebuhr wrote positively about aspects of Marxism, one senses in reading An Interpretation of Christian Ethics that his belief in human sinfulness and tragedy took precedence over any faith he may have had in any political model's ability to achieve a just society. Even as he saw a Marxist model as America's best hope for economic reform, there is also a sense that the mid-1930s Niebuhr already had his doubts. “The most grievous mistake of Marxism is its assumption that an adequate mechanism of social justice will inevitably create individuals who will be disciplined enough to ‘give according to their ability and take according to their need.’ The highest achievements of social good will and human kindness can be guaranteed by no political system” ([1935] 1956, 181–82). In the end, Marxism, like social gospel liberalism, would fail because each put too much faith in human capacity to evolve to a point where the welfare of humanity would supersede the wants and desires of human nature.Rauschenbusch and ultimately Niebuhr (by the time of World War II) affirmed the value of American democracy, but from very different theological perspectives. While it could be argued that Rauschenbusch put too much faith in a particular vision of Progressive-era democracy, Niebuhr (at least in the mid-1930s) put too little faith in the possibilities for the reform of democracy. Even as Niebuhr turned away from Marxist models, there was always the sense that the quest for sustainable economic models would be hampered by the limitations imposed by human sinfulness. Despite Niebuhr's later embrace of liberal democracy, he lacked the optimistic language of Rauschenbusch. This lack is manifested most famously in Niebuhr's assertion in Children of Light and the Children of Darkness that “[m]an's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary” (1944, xiii). These words starkly represent the theological gulf that existed between Rauschenbusch's social gospel idealism and Niebuhr's Christian realism.For all of their differences, Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr concluded many of their major works on the same theme—that a just social order could only be approximated, never fully achieved. Yet the way they understood the attainment of this approximate justice underscores other significant differences between them.The most frequent critique of the social gospel made by Christian realists like Niebuhr was that the social gospel embraced an ethic of love at the expense of an ethic of justice (see, for example, Bennett 1976). There is no doubt that many early pioneers of the social gospel, like Washington Gladden, expressed repeated faith in the implementation of “the Golden Rule of Christ” as the key factor to achieve economic and political reform. Perhaps it was this legacy that Niebuhr had in mind when he wrote that “liberal Christianity adopted the simple expedient of denying, in effect, the reality of evil in order to maintain its hope in the triumph of the ideal of love in the world” ([1935] 1956, 131).Yet I think the real difference between Niebuhr and Rauschenbusch is not the absence of an ethic of justice in Rauschenbusch (or in the social gospel in general), but rather how the concept of justice took on a different nature for the two. For Rauschenbusch, justice was the realization of divine love within social relationships and social institutions. For all of the changes that Niebuhr went through as a public theologian, he never escaped the idea that the role of justice was often to constrain the sinful elements of human nature, making a social ethic of unselfish love impossible. Three of Niebuhr's favorite liberal targets during the 1930s were Charles Clayton Morrison, editor of the Christian Century; John Haynes Holmes, a prominent New York City Unitarian clergyman (and a good friend of Rauschenbusch); and Shailer Mathews, one of the pioneers of “Chicago School” liberalism (and another close colleague of Rauschenbusch). Morrison, Holmes, and especially Mathews were easy targets for Niebuhr, especially in terms of the way they seemed to embody an ethic of love that dismissed the need for political coercion to achieve justice. Niebuhr wrote: The sum total of the liberal Church's effort to apply the law of love to politics without qualification is really a curious medley of hopes and regrets…. If the liberal Church had had less moral idealism and more religious realism its approach to the political problem would have been less inept and fatuous. ([1935] 1956, 160–61) However, it is inter