Here I take up the next chapter in Walter Rauschenbusch’s The Social Principles of Jesus. It is title simply “The Kingdom” and is the first chapter in Part II: The Social Ideal of Jesus. If you have read it, feel free to comment. If not, you may ask a question. In any case, be sure to follow the rules stated at the end here.
According to Rauschenbusch, Jesus’s main purpose in coming among us was to teach and inaugurate the Kingdom of God—a concept already understood by his Jewish contemporaries. However, according to the Baptist social reformer and theologian, Jesus’s expanded and internalized the concept. For him it became a new social order organized according to love. (This will become clearer in later chapters. It is made absolutely clear in Rauchenbusch’s books.)
The Kingdom of God, Rauschenbusch argues, goes beyond mere human natural conscience to a higher concept. However, it builds on the first three principles including especially human solidarity. It elevates nature with grace, but nature is open to grace. In other words, according to him, there is no conflict between the Kingdom of God concept and humanity’s natural inclinations. The conflict lies between the Kingdom of God and distorted human natural inclinations—especially sin which is in essence selfishness.
Rauschenbusch does not lay out in this chapter specific features of the Kingdom of God, but he does argue that Jesus did not think of it as coming with apocalyptic violence and disruption. Like many of his Christian contemporaries, Rauschenbusch was a postmillennialist. He believed it is possible for the church to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth or at least something approximating it.
One must remember that in Rauschenbusch’s time Christianity could be taken for granted as the “glue” holding Western society together. What he envisioned was the churches moving forward with activism to transform society into a brotherhood of love made visible in cooperation rather than competition and conflict.
Without doubt, he was what today would be called a democratic socialist. There were many, very many, democratic socialists among especially Protestant Christians when Rauschenbusch wrote this. However as any American historian can tell you, it was the rise of totalitarianism communism in the Soviet Union that caused many Christians and others to turn away from democratic socialism. Even today, most lay people (non-experts in political science) cannot tell the difference between socialism and communism.
I recently saw an interview with the co-president of the American Communist Party in which he rejected socialism as inadequate. He rightly distinguished socialism from communism by saying that socialism thinks capitalism can be reformed whereas communism does not; it totally rejects capitalism.
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