What I learned in Baptist Heritage this semester

The most interesting person that I studied this semester was Walter Rauschenbusch. Before reading about the pioneer of the Social Gospel movement, I was content in my fundamentalist dogma—including my disregard for all things liberal. I quickly realized how much people are a product of their surroundings. Had I grown up in the time and the place of Rauschenbusch, would not I have had similar beliefs? I see now that in order to understand why people believed the way that they did, I have to study what was going on in their lives, especially the academic, political and social climate of their day.

Rauschenbusch lived during a time of great theological and social unrest. The liberal theology heavily influenced by higher criticism of his day and the deplorable conditions of the immigrants of New York were major influences on him. While I do not agree with some of his basic presuppositions, such as a postmillennial eschatology, I found truth to some of his arguments that Baptists today ignore at their own peril.

One such truth is the need for the gospel to affect the social concerns of our day. We look back and cringe at the thought that one of the reasons the Southern Baptist Convention was formed was so that Southerners could be missionaries and still own slaves. How could our ancestors of the faith have been so blind? Rauschenbusch asked similar questions about the horrible conditions of the workplace and how children were allowed to work in dangerous factories. What social concerns are Baptists of today neglecting that our descendants will learn about and cringe? At the Apologetics conference in January, David Platt said that he believes that they will see how much stuff we have, all stored in great big houses, while the rest of the world starves. They will look back and say of us, “How could they have been so blind?”

So this is what I have learned from a liberal. First, before criticizing the opposition, see if there is any truth to their claims and learn from them. Second, look for the “plank” in your own eye so that you can see the speck if your brother’s. We can easily become blind to our own sins of omission. Therefore, we need to always be aware of “the least of these,” the widows and the orphans of our days, and practice religion that can be referred to as “pure and faultless.”