Walter Rauschenbusch quotes - page 4

We are to-day in the midst of a revolutionary epoch fully as thorough as that of the Renaissance and Reformation. (Walter Rauschenbusch)
The familiar text is followed by the very material promise of economic prosperity and the threat of continued war. View quote
Walter Rauschenbusch
The prophets were the heralds of the fundamental truth that religion and ethics are inseparable, and that ethical conduct is the supreme and sufficient religious act. If that principle had been fully adopted. View quote
Walter Rauschenbusch
Let us do our thinking on these great questions. View quote
Walter Rauschenbusch
Throughout the Middle Ages the sway of the Church over the moral and spiritual life of the people. View quote
Walter Rauschenbusch
The welfare of the mass is always at odds with the selfish force of the strong. View quote
Walter Rauschenbusch
I have never ceased to feel that I owe help to the plain people who were my friends. If this book. View quote
Walter Rauschenbusch
In so far as men believed that the traditional ceremonial was what God wanted of them, they would be indifferent to the reformation of social ethics. View quote
Walter Rauschenbusch
Jesus accepted John as the forerunner of his own work. View quote
Walter Rauschenbusch
With them he linked his points of view, the convictions which he regarded as axiomatic. View quote
Walter Rauschenbusch
Their protest against injustice and oppression, to the neglect of all other social evils, is almost monotonous. (Walter Rauschenbusch)
Western civilization is passing through a social revolution unparalleled in history for scope and power. Its coming was inevitable. ...By universal consent this social crisis is the overshadowing problem of our generation. View quote
Walter Rauschenbusch
History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same. It is always hungry for bread, sweaty with labor, struggling to wrest from nature and hostile men enough to feed its children. The welfare of the mass is always at odds with the selfish force of the strong. View quote
Walter Rauschenbusch
The prophets were the heralds of the fundamental truth that religion and ethics are inseparable, and that ethical conduct is the supreme and sufficient religious act. If that principle had been fully adopted in our religious life, it would have turned the full force of the religious impulse into the creation of right moral conduct and would have made the unchecked growth and accumulation of injustice impossible. View quote
Walter Rauschenbusch
There is no question on which side the sympathy of the prophets was enlisted. Their protest against injustice and oppression, to the neglect of all other social evils, is almost monotonous. View quote
Walter Rauschenbusch
Men are seizing on Jesus as the exponent of their own social convictions. They all claim him. ...But in truth Jesus was not a social reformer of the modern type... he approached these facts purely from the moral, and not from the economic or historical point of view. View quote
Walter Rauschenbusch
When the machinery of [Roman] imperial administration broke down in the provinces under the invasion of the barbarians in the fifth century the machinery of the Church remained unbroken. ...Ancient families became extinct and the Church became the heir of their lands and slaves and serfs. Small proprietors sought security by committing their lands to the Church and becoming its tenants. View quote
Walter Rauschenbusch
Christianity was rising when the ancient world was breaking down. By the time the Church had gained sufficient power to exercise a controlling influence, the process of social decay, like the breakdown of a physical organism in a wasting disease, was beyond remedy. View quote
Walter Rauschenbusch