{"id":194,"date":"2007-09-11T17:05:10","date_gmt":"2007-09-12T01:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/poptheology\/?p=194"},"modified":"2007-09-11T17:05:10","modified_gmt":"2007-09-12T01:05:10","slug":"responses-to-christianity-and-the-social-crisis-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/poptheology\/2007\/09\/responses-to-christianity-and-the-social-crisis-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Responses to Christianity and the Social Crisis: Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Corbin Boekhaus, also a recent graduate of the Wake Forest University Divinity School, begins the Rauschenbusch discussion with a response to the first chapter, \u201cThe Historical Roots of Christianity: The Hebrew Prophets\u201d and Phyllis Trible<\/a>\u2018s reflections.
\nWhat can I say, I love the prophets.\u00a0 John Hagee, Perry Stone, Hal Lindsey, you name it.\u00a0\u00a0 I flip on the TV and I\u2019m treated to the twenty-first century equivalent of Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah.\u00a0 Or so they would like to believe, but then again, one must understand that 99% of Christians are more likely to associate the prophets with \u201cfuture-seeing\u201d than with addressing issues of justice and inequity.\u00a0 In reading Rauschenbusch\u2019s Christianity and the Social Crisis<\/em>, it would seem that this was clearly not the case in his day, for myriad of reasons.\u00a0 Certainly the rise of dispensationalism, though present in Rauschenbusch\u2019s day, was not widely popularized until Hal Lindsey\u2019s The Late, Great Planet Earth<\/em> in 1970.\u00a0 And of course by the time that Lahaye and Jenkins get a hold of it, it is popularized, novelized, and dramatized like crack cocaine for quick diffusion into the Christian mainstream.<\/p>\n

So already, we American readers of Christianity and the Social Crisis<\/em> find ourselves at a historical disadvantage.\u00a0 It is certainly worthy of note that Rauschenbusch\u2019s work was the best-selling religious publication from 1907 to 1910, highlighting its mainstream, not purely academic, appeal.\u00a0 But today we have the Prayer of Jabez<\/em>, Wild at Heart<\/em>, and the Case for Christ<\/em>.\u00a0 What was once accessible to the layperson is now \u201cpeering through the glass darkly,\u201d to borrow just a little irony from the apostle Paul.\u00a0 Rauschenbusch offers some insight, however, into this crisis of meaning; people turn to Hagee, Stone, and Lindsey, because \u201cthose modern preachers who act as eulogists of existing conditions\u2026 are really so charmed with things as they are and have never had a vision from God to shake their illusion\u201d(28).\u00a0 Historian Bill Leonard pointed to similar hypocrisy in Jerry Falwell\u2019s Liberty University, that \u201cwhile he believed that Jesus\u2019 return was just around the corner, the buildings at Liberty University were constructed in brick\u2014a fundamentalist paradox extraordinaire.\u201d It is a paradox\u2014nay hypocrisy\u2014much like the religious developments Rauschenbusch points out in the Hebrew tradition.<\/p>\n

Rauschenbusch flatly asserts that emphasis on personal holiness, even among the prophets of the exile, was always rooted to its pragmatic and decidedly social application of \u201cnational restoration.\u201d Where that personal holiness becomes detached, it degrades into perfunctory \u201cceremonial correctness\u201d(22).\u00a0 Perhaps a different translation would read \u201cmodern-day Evangelicalism,\u201d given its affinity for this detachment.\u00a0 It is no surprise that Rauschenbusch identifies a Christian apocalypticism that \u201cstill rival[s] the rabbis in learned calculations,\u201d (referring most certainly towards Hasidic forms of gematria) and which can lead to little but social paralysis.\u00a0 To this end, the Hebrew prophets are an ideal starting point for Rauschenbusch\u2019s commentary on the liquidation of the unity of justice and holiness in Hebrew thought.<\/p>\n

But to another end, highlighting the prophets as the basis for \u201csocial justice\u201d can engender certain difficulties.\u00a0 I would suggest that the singular word association of \u201csocial justice\u201d and \u201cthe prophets\u201d is fused in the minds of most moderate\/progressive\/liberal Christians, with deleterious effects.\u00a0 Perhaps this is a historical artifact of Rauschenbusch\u2019s method, or perhaps his method echoes prevailing cultural and religious sentiments; in any case, the idea of the prophets as the basis of socially conditioned justice and holiness is only one such connection in the biblical traditions.\u00a0 In the book Preaching Justice<\/em>, Justo Gonzalez mirrors this sentiment with this contribution, \u201cIf I insist on preaching on Amos and James\u2026they would be justified in turning me off\u2026.justice is so central to the biblical message that it appears everywhere, and if we see it only in the most explicit passages, it is because we have ruled it out of our theology to such a point that it is now a marginal and occasional subject\u201d(87). Every text is a justice text; perhaps we are just a bit too lazy as homeliticians to discover the justice that \u201cflows down like a river\u201d (how many times have you heard that canonized little idiom?).\u00a0 So in our quest to address the social holism of justice and holiness, we must voice a \u201cgood news\u201d beyond soundbytes and the book of Amos.<\/p>\n

But perhaps Rauschenbusch\u2019s quip, \u201cno true prophet will copy a prophet\u201d offers a bit of corrective clarity on the point.\u00a0 Those preachers who ascend the pulpit on \u201cjustice Sunday\u201d to preach on the same passage out of the book of Amos are pretenders to the tradition, and they do a great disservice to their congregations\u2014and the gospel. Regardless of the problematic nature of Rauschenbusch\u2019s methodology, he is certainly a prophet by any account.\u00a0 So let us leave the subject of prophets with a word of prophecy from the man himself:<\/p>\n

How would we feel if a preacher should use a public gathering on Decoration Day or Thanksgiving Day to predict that our country for its mammonism and oppression was cast off by God and was to be parceled out to the Mexicans, the Chinese, and the negroes?\u00a0 In the sense of our security and strength we should probably simply laugh at him.\u00a0 But suppose that our country was bleeding through disastrous foreign wars and invasions, shaken by internal anarchy, terrified and angry at blows too powerful to avert, and in that condition a preacher should \u201cweaken public confidence\u201d still further by such a message? (27)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One hundred years later, one man\u2019s supposition is now reality: immigration, xenophobia, \u201csecurity and strength,\u201d and disastrous foreign wars are just the beginning.\u00a0 On the sixth anniversary of the events of 9\/11\u2014still \u201cterrified and angry at blows too powerful to avert\u201d\u2014perhaps we need to relearn how to speak truth to power?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Corbin Boekhaus, also a recent graduate of the Wake Forest University Divinity School, begins the Rauschenbusch discussion with a response to the first chapter, \u201cThe Historical Roots of Christianity: The Hebrew Prophets\u201d and Phyllis Trible\u2018s reflections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":288,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-print"],"yoast_head":"\nResponses to Christianity and the Social Crisis: Part 1<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Corbin Boekhaus, also a recent graduate of the Wake Forest University Divinity School, begins the Rauschenbusch discussion with a response to the first\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/poptheology\/2007\/09\/responses-to-christianity-and-the-social-crisis-part-1\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Responses to Christianity and the Social Crisis: Part 1\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Corbin Boekhaus, also a recent graduate of the Wake Forest University Divinity School, begins the Rauschenbusch discussion with a response to the first\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/poptheology\/2007\/09\/responses-to-christianity-and-the-social-crisis-part-1\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Pop Theology\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2007-09-12T01:05:10+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"J. 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