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Kingdom Is Always but Coming: A Life of Walter Rauschenbusch, The

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Schweitzer, Don

The Kingdom Is Always but Coming: A Life of Walter Rauschenbusch. By Christopher H. Evans. Library of Religious Biography. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004. xxx + 348 pp. $25.00 (paper).

The Kingdom Is Always but Coming is an accessible and informative biography of Walter Rauschenbusch by Christopher Evans, associate professor of church history at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School. It portrays Rauschenbusch as the foremost theologian of the social gospel movement in America, showing why his name became synonymous with socially engaged Christian faith and how his thought remains a benchmark for socially critical theologies today.

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Evans begins his book with an overview of the main themes and contributions of Rauschenbusch as a theologian. Next he recounts the influences Rauschenbusch was exposed to in his early years and traces his formation, arguing that by the time he graduated from Rochester Theological Seminary in May of 1886, the central convictions of his mature thought were already present as a nascent liberalism that troubled his professors.

Evans recounts how Rauschenbusch s awakening to the evils of modern industrial society resulted from his experiences as pastor of second German Baptist Church in New York's Bowery district. Rauschenbusch s exposure here to the sufferings of the poor, and in particular to the preventable deaths of many young children, moved him from being a pietistic liberal towards becoming a prophetic voice intent upon mobilizing the church to effect social change. Evans maps this transformation against the backdrop of the developing social gospel movement as a whole. He also describes Rauschenbuschs courtship with and eventual marriage to Pauline Rother, which took place at this time.

Evans next chronicles Rauschenbusch s career as a faculty member of Rochester Theological Seminary, to which he moved in 1897. He describes how the publication of Christianity and the Social Crisis rocketed Rauschenbusch to prominence as an intellectual leader of the social gospel movement in America and made him a much sought-after public speaker. Evans also attends to aspects of Rauschenbusch s private life: his close relationship to Pauline, his somewhat strained relations with his older children, the loss of his hearing, and his struggle to balance the demands of work and public speaking with being a husband and helping raise a family. The result is a sympathetic portrait of a gifted individual who articulated and gave intellectual shape to the theological vision of the social gospel.

Particularly interesting are Evans's analysis of how Rauschenbusch described the social crisis of early industrial America in terms similar to Tillich's notion of kairos, as representing scandalous suffering, moral evil, and oppression, but also unprecedented opportunity for overcoming the same (p. 244); how he utilized the symbol of the kingdom of God as a concrete utopia, how he looked to the middle class and wealthy industrialists as agents of social change and sought to mobilize them by moral appeal, how he envisaged this change in terms of reform rather than revolution, and how he remained rather conflicted in his views on gender. Evans portrays Rauschenbusch as maintaining continuity with his Baptist, Germanic, and pietistic origins, even as he pioneered a vastly enlarged and different vision of Christian social commitment in the new context of a modern industrial society.

This biography is useful as an account of Rauschenbusch s life and as an introduction to his thought. It shows him wrestling with questions that remain central to socially critical theologies today: What can Christians hope for in the present in terms of the common good? How can social change be effected? And how are sin and grace to be understood in industrialized societies? It will benefit advanced scholars, as well as provide a good starting point for the study of Rauschenbusch s thought and/or the social gospel in the United States.

DON SCHWEITZER

St. Andrew's College

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

Kingdom Is Always but Coming: A Life of Walter Rauschenbusch, The

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Schweitzer, Don

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