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

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.²

It 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...