Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918)

Walter Rauschenbusch was an American theologian and Baptist pastor who taught at the Rochester Theological Seminary. He was a key figure in the Social Gospel and single tax movement that flourished during the end of the 19th/early 20th century.

He was the son of a Lutheran missionary to German immigrants in the USA.

He went through a youthful rebellious period but aged 17 he experienced a personal religious conversion which influenced his soul down to the depths.
*I came to my father and I began to pray for help and got it *

• he compared it to the Prodigal son parable.

After high school he went to a prep school in Germany, Gutersloh. Back in the USA he graduated from the University of Rochester in 1884 and Rochester Theological Seminary (RTS) of American Baptist Churches in 1886.

1886 he began his pastorate in the Second German Baptist Church in ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ , New York. Urban poverty and children’s funerals, led him to social activism

In August 1892, with some friends, he formed a group of leading pastors, thinkers and advocates of the Social Gospel movement. They were initially called Society of Jesus, later called Brotherhood of the Kingdom. They met annually until 1915.
(See notes on ‘Social Gospel’ and ‘Brotherhood of the Kingdom’)

In 1897 he began teaching the New Testament at RTS in Rochester, New York. In 1902 he became professor of Church History.

In 1907 he published *Christianity and the Social Crisis *

which gained him recognition as a major spokesman of the Social Gospel movement in the USA. and which would influence the actions of several pastors of the Social Gospel. ( Read ‘The American Yawp Reader’)
In 1917 he published A Theology for the Social Gospel which would rally the cause of the social gospel of many Protestant and evangelical churches.
The doctrine of the Kingdom of God was crucial to his proposed theology of the social gospel.

Walter died in Rochester on 25th July , 1918, aged 56.

He is honored together with Washington Gladdon and Jacob Rus with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on 2nd July.

Sources used
Brtannica
The Ameican Yawp Reader
Wikipedia