Driving home from Christmas vacation, I listened as my computer read me a few chapters of Christianity and the Social Crisis in the 21st Century. Something in Rauschenbusch’s digital voice melded with the inching across the globe as fast as our wheels could take us to engender a feeling of insignificance in me. In his exploration of the social aims of the church throughout its history I got the sense of my part in something global, gargantuan and staid. That part seemed small and insignificant, and the social agenda of the Christian machine, though broken down for centuries seemed so impersonal. I felt the sting of Rauschenbusch implicating the mystical and personal as well as the avarice and perfidy in the church as corrupting forces in the mechanism for salvation.
Rauschenbusch also seems to fall in with theologians who suggest that Jesus failed in his primary mission, and the cross is the symbol of that failure. What can an appreciation for the atonement bring to the discussion about social justice?
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