by Bruce Bawer
Because the individualistic conception of personal salvation has pushed out of sight the collective idea of a Kingdom of God on earth, Christian men seek for the salvation of individuals and are comparatively indifferent to the spread of the spirit of Christ in the political, industrial, social, scientific and artistic life of humanity, and have left these as the undisturbed possession of the spirit of the world.
Because the Kingdom of God has been understood as a state to be inherited in a future life rather than as something to be realized here and now, therefore Christians have been contented with a low plane of life here and have postponed holiness to the future.
From the Social Gospel's very beginning, legalistic Christians have accused its proponents of abandoning the rigor of "traditional Christianity." The truth is absolutely the other way around: The Social Gospel sought to return Christianity beyond its "traditions" to its beginnings, to the real message of the real Jesus, which was and is too radical and challenging for many Christians to embrace:
As he was starting out on a journey, a stranger ran up, and, kneeling before him, asked, "Good Teacher, what must I do to win eternal life?"
Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments. ..."
"But Teacher," he replied, "I have kept all these since I was a boy."
As Jesus looked at him, his heart warmed to him. "One thing you lack," he said. "Go, sell everything you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come and follow me." (Mark 10:17-21)
For seeking to put this injunction into practice (however incompletely), Rauschenbusch was widely condemned as heretical, Romish, socialist. Leading the attacks was Dr. James Willmarth, a Philadelphia Baptist preacher and premillennialist, who claimed that Rauschenbusch's views had no scriptural warrant. This was an outrageous charge, given that Rauschenbusch had found his theology in the gospel, whereas Willmarth's theology represented a perverse interpretation of a few cryptic and obviously symbolic biblical passages.
During the generation after the founding of the Brotherhood, the Social Gospel gained a broad influence and Rauschenbusch published several books. Most important was Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), in which he wrote that "no man shares his life with God whose religion does not flow out, naturally and without effort, into all relations of his life and reconstructs everything that it touches. Whoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus. Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master."
Christianity and the Social Crisis represented a total repudiation of the Church of Law. Yet it did something more, which many nonlegalistic Christians today may find problematic: It emphasized society's responsibility rather than the individual's. Rauschenbusch traced this emphasis through the entire Bible. The Old Testament prophets, he argued, were "less about the pure heart for the individual than of just institutions for the nation"; for them, "personal religion was chiefly a means" to a social end. Rauschenbusch argued in a later book, Theology for the Social Gospel, that baptism was, for John the Baptist, "not a ritual act of individual salvation but an act of dedication to a religious and social movement." Jesus, in a similar way, was less concerned with transforming individuals than with reforming Jewish society as a whole. "The better we know Jesus," Rauschenbusch wrote, "the more social do his thoughts and aims become." As for the kingdom of God, it "is not a matter of getting individuals to heaven, but of transforming the life on earth into the harmony of heaven." If "the fundamental virtue in the ethics of Jesus was love," it is because "love is the society-making quality. . . . Love creates fellowship."
Well, yes, it does—but many Christians today may recoil at this almost coldly pragmatic characterization of the value of love. Many, indeed, may dismiss Rauschenbusch's concept of the sinfulness of society as meaningless: What, they may ask, does it mean for a society to be sinful? Many may also consider Rauschenbusch's societal approach to Christianity inapplicable to a pluralistic culture of the sort we live in today. But his most problematic trait of all, for Christians today, may be one he shares with Jefferson: namely, his insufficient attention to the cultivation of individual spiritual experience. Almost invariably, his references to spiritual experience feel grudging, obligatory, pro forma. Though his heart was indubitably in the right place, he seems to have drastically underestimated the human need for a church that emphasizes action in the horizontal dimension without slighting the vertical dimension—for a church that brings the two dimensions together in a truly Christian way, making people feel to the core of their souls the profound truth that a love for one's neighbor is implicit in, is demanded by, and flows directly from, one's love for God. (It comes as no surprise to learn that Rauschenbusch was impatient with religious ceremony, which is, after all, an attempt to lift the minds and hearts of worshippers beyond the horizontal plane and into communion with their Maker.)
But then individuality itself gets short shrift from Rauschenbusch, who in his enthusiasm to reform society often seemed to neglect the individual's integrity as a moral and spiritual being and even to forget that loving others means loving them not as members of society but as individuals, each of whom is precious in God's sight. Especially in the wake of twentieth-century mass movements such as Nazism and Communism, Rauschenbusch's enthusiasm for a religion that views people less as individuals than as parts of a social organism can make one very uncomfortable. Nonetheless, Rauschenbusch's legalistic contemporaries were unfair to accuse the Social Gospelers of exchanging religion for social work. Not so: For them, working to improve socioeconomic conditions was literally the building up of the kingdom of God. They were drawn to that work by a love of Jesus, and the work itself brought them closer to Jesus—and they recognized that it was that love and intimacy, and not adherence to any law or doctrine, that was the essence of Christianity. "True Christianity," wrote Rauschenbusch, "puts a man face to face with Christ and bids him see what he can find there." Rejecting the kind of scriptural literalism that demanded obedience to even the most uncompassionate laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, Rauschenbusch proclaimed that "Jesus Christ is the standard of judgment about the Bible, as about all things," meaning that every doctrine and law must be interpreted through the prism of Jesus' life and teachings. This is, as we have seen, classic Baptist theology; but by Rauschenbusch's time this view had been so widely abandoned in practice that his insistence upon it seemed, to many, heretical.
The Social Gospel had its moment in the sun—actually, several years. But by the time of World War I, legalistic Christianity had begun to reassert itself, this time heavily dominated by dispensational premillennialism, and the Social Gospel was on the wane. Increasingly, American Christianity had become an open battleground between modernism, mostly in the form of the Social Gospel, and antimodernism, mostly in the form of dispensational premillennialism. A key reason for dispensationalism's rise was an amazing 1909 document called the Scofield Reference Bible, the work of a Texas preacher named C. I. Scofield (1843-1921).
One mark of the continuing distance between fundamentalist culture and that of mainstream America is how difficult it can be to get your hands on a copy of this seminal work in a place like midtown Manhattan. There are major metropolitan library systems that don't own a single copy; there are huge general bookstores that don't keep it in stock. Another mark of that distance is the fact that most histories of America and many religious reference books don't even mention it. Yet go into almost any small Southern town and you'll find a "Christian bookstore" that carries not only the Scofield Reference Bible but the New Scofield Reference Bible, a revision that appeared in 1967.
The Scofield Reference Bible looks like a lot of Bibles: Each page contains two columns of scripture separated by a narrower column of cross-references. What distinguishes it from most Bibles is that it also contains extensive footnote
s. These footnotes add up to a highly tendentious dispensationalist interpretation of the Bible. There are whole books of Scofield's Bible in which the annotation is minimal, almost absent; but in other books there are pages on which the annotation takes up far more space than the text. Like Jefferson's Bible, then, Scofield's Bible is an extraordinary act of audacity. But the two men came at Scripture from utterly opposite directions. Jefferson sought to preserve Jesus' moral teachings and to remove materials (including accounts of miracles and prophecies) that seemed to him ahistorical and thus, as Jaroslav Pelikan has written, to "find the essence of true religion in the Gospels." Scofield also sought "the essence of true religion," but he located this essence not in the moral teachings of the Gospels but in the miracles and prophecies, most of them located outside the Gospels. Jefferson's chaff, in short, was Scofield's wheat.
The Scofield Reference Bible was a brilliant idea. Over the centuries, countless theologians had written learned books in which they grappled with the complex, ambiguous, often contradictory meanings of scripture. But Scofield plainly knew two important things about the people he wanted to reach. One: They didn't read books of theology, but they did look at their Bibles (if only occasionally). Two: They didn't want to grapple with complexities and ambiguities and contradictions; they wanted certitude, orthodoxy.
This Scofield gave them in spades. His footnotes never offer up different possible interpretations of a given text; instead, they set forth, with an air of total authority, a detailed, elaborate, and consistent set of interpretations that add up to a theological system that few Christians before Darby could have conceived of-—and that, indeed, marked a radical departure from the ways in which most Christians had always believed. Yet Scofield brazenly proffered his theology as if it were beyond question. And he presented it as if it were traditional, and as if every other way of understanding the nature of Christian belief marked a radical departure from the true faith. His notes refer only implicitly to opposing theological views: In a footnote to a passage in the Book of Acts, for example, Scofield tacitly alludes to symbolic interpretations of the Second Coming (such as Fosdick's) by declaring that Christ's promised return "is an event, not a process, and is personal and corporeal." The chutzpah here is mind-boggling.
At the center of Scofield's theology is his version of Darby's schematic vision of human history, which is broken down into seven successive dispensations—into periods, that is, during each of which man's life on earth is governed by a different set of laws—and eight successive covenants between God and humankind. The dispensations are as follows: the Dispensation of Innocency, which obtained in the Garden of Eden; the Dispensation of Conscience, which began with the expulsion from the garden; the Dispensation of Human Government, which was established after the flood; the Dispensation of Promise, which was instituted by God's promise to Abraham to "make of thee a great nation"; the Dispensation of Law, which was founded on Mosaic law; the Dispensation of Grace, which Christ made possible through his Incarnation and sacrifice; and the Dispensation of the Kingdom, which will begin after the Second Coming with the founding of Christ's millennial kingdom.
One way to begin to form a picture of the mental landscape of Scofield's followers is to peruse a 1972 book entitled A Companion to the Scofield Reference Bible. The very fact that such a book was published sixty-three years after the first appearance of the Scofield Reference Bible testifies to that volume's enduring significance. In the early pages of the Companion, its author, a dispensationalist named E. Schuyler English, denies that there are contradictions in the Bible and insists that dispensational theology is unequivocally true and must be embraced by believers in order for them to earn salvation. English then proceeds to outline that theology as presented in Scofield's footnotes. First he covers such doctrines as the virgin birth and baptism, and the nature of temptation, sin, and death. Then he discusses Christ's various "messages": his "Kingdom Message," his "Redemptive Message," and his "Many Other Words." Ignoring Jesus' own assurance that the kingdom is among us, English maintains that Christ's "Kingdom Message" concerns a totally future event, the "Kingdom Age" that will follow the present "Church Age." The category entitled "Christ's Many Other Words" is a grab bag that divides those words into "comforting words," "stern words," "prophetic words," and "words of wisdom."
English makes it clear, by the way he apportions his attention among these various matters, that for him and other dispensationalists, Christ's words are nowhere near as important as the End Times theology that can be gleaned from the Bible if one reads it according to their prescriptions. For the bulk of this book consists of the closing chapters on Christ's transfiguration, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension (all of which are given extensive treatment) and, especially, on the matters considered under the general heading of "Last Things": "The Rapture," "The Judgment Seat of Christ," "The Marriage of the Lamb," "The 'Tribulation,'" "The Second Coming of Christ," "The Four Judicial Acts," "The Millennium," "The Final Judgment: The Great White Throne," and "Eternity." Several of these chapters are in turn divided into subchapters.
The End Times theology as presented by English in these pages is, in its essentials, identical to that subscribed to by most Protestant fundamentalists in America today, and represents, for the most part, a free interpretation of the extremely obscure symbolic account of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation. "At a time not known precisely," English writes, "the Lord Jesus Christ will descend from heaven and meet His Church in the air." (This prophecy derives from Rev. 1:7: "Look, he is coming with the clouds; everyone shall see him, including those who pierced him.") It is important to recognize that English does not mean this metaphorically: He wants it to be understood that Jesus will descend bodily from heaven, and that saved Christians will rise into the air bodily to meet him. "When this occurs," English writes, "all who have died in Christ will be raised and, together with a living generation of believers, will be translated into His presence, to be with Him forever." This event is referred to as the Rapture. (Many fundamentalists today have conducted sober theological inquiries into the question of what will happen, say, to passengers on an airplane whose pilot has been "raptured.")
The Rapture, English explains, will be followed by the seven-year Tribulation, an "era of divine wrath upon the earth" in which "judgments will fall upon people everywhere." English writes that "sometimes God will employ wicked instruments to accomplish His judgments. He will, for example, allow the dragon (i.e., the devil) to persecute Israel. . . . One of the divine purposes of these judgments is to recognize the Lord Jesus Christ as their Messiah, so that they will turn to Him. Another reason for God's wrath is to judge the nations for their lawlessness and rebellion against Him." English outlines several specific events of the Tribulation, during which, he says, Jesus "will destroy His enemies." For one thing, he says that two people called witnesses will "bear testimony to the Lord Jesus until they are slain by the beast. Their dead bodies will lie in Jerusalem's streets for three and a half days. Then God will raise and translate them to heaven while their enemies view their ascension." Also, a woman "clothed with the sun" (presumably English reads this, at least, symbolically) who "represents Israel" will be targeted by Satan "but God will guard her among the nations for 1260 days, the latter half of the 'tribulation.'"
The climactic events of the Tribulation, English explains, will be triggered when a "political messiah" who heads a "ten-kingdom federation" makes "a seven-year covenant with the Jews" and "exalt's himself above God." This messiah, or "beast," will then break his covenant and persecute the Jews. "It is at this time," writes English, "that the ascended Christ arises from His Father's right hand and comes to earth in power to destroy His enemies and put them under His feet. . . . What begins with a false messiah riding a white horse on earth ends with Christ the Lord descending on a white horse from heaven to earth as the Faithful and True, the Word of God, King of kings and Lord of lords."
Christ's return "will be a spectacular even
t. Nature will announce it—the sun and moon will be darkened, stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken." He will descend to earth to the Mount of Olives in Israel, accompanied by "all the holy angels" as well as "the armies of heaven," and "every eye will see Him." He will then proceed to "destroy the armies of the beast" and "consign the beast and the false prophet [another villain in this drama] to the lake of fire." Also, "the devil will be bound with a chain, cast into the abyss, and sealed there for 1000 years." Jesus will then assume "His glorious throne on earth" and will separate the saved from the unsaved: "He will place the sheep, composed of those Gentiles who have been saved during the 'tribulation,' on His right hand. On His left hand He will assemble the goats, composed of all the Gentiles who have rejected Him during the same period." The goats will be tossed into everlasting fire, while the sheep will remain on earth to enjoy Christ's thousand-year reign over the earth, which is known as the Millennium or the Kingdom Age. Indeed, the sheep "will rule with Him."
This will, make no mistake, be a literal reign, a "theocratic rule" marked by righteousness and peace. During this period, people will journey to "a temple on a high mountain in Jerusalem ... to offer praise to God." Yet "sin and rebellion" will also occur, and at the end of the thousand years Satan will emerge from his bonds and make war against Jerusalem. "But fire and heaven will devour his hosts," writes English. "It is then that the execution of God's long-standing judgment of the devil will be consummated. He will be cast into the lake of fire to 'be tormented day and night forever and ever.'" (This last scriptural quotation, like most of those cited to support the dispensationalist vision of the End Times, is from the Book of Revelation.) After the Devil has been thus dealt with, "the wicked and unregenerate dead . .. will be raised and brought before the great white throne for judgment" by Christ. One by one, they will face Christ and offer up to him the record of their good works. Yet because they refused in life to accept Christ as their savior, "every one of them will be cast into the lake of fire" where they, like the Devil, will burn forever. This sentence having been pronounced, saved Christians will dwell with God for eternity in Jerusalem. The only matter in the whole book on which English admits some degree of uncertainty is the question of whether this Jerusalem will be the actual city of Jerusalem on earth or whether it will be located somewhere else. For English, this doesn't really matter, for "wherever He is, is heaven." In this heaven,