The Social Principles of Jesus - Walter Rauschenbusch

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same fundamental adjustment exists in industry. It is not an expression of the worth of the working people if they have no right to organize or to share in governing the conditions under which they work, and if years of good work earn a man no ownership or equity, no legal standing or even tenure of employment in a business. Is the right to petition for a redress of grievances an adequate industrial expression of the Christian doctrine of the worth and sacredness of personality? Is not property essential to the real freedom and self-expression of a human personality?

      War and prostitution are the most flagrant offenses against this social principle. War is a wholesale waster of life. Prostitution is the worst form of contempt for personality.

      Does our intellectual and scientific work ever tend to chill the warm sense of human values? Do we acquire something of the impassiveness of Nature in studying her enormous waste of life? Do we transfer to human affairs her readiness [pg 013] to use up the masses in order to produce a higher type? Jesus did not talk about eliminating the unfit. He talked about saving them, which requires greater constructive energy if it is really to be done. It also requires a higher faith in the latent recuperative capacities of human nature. The detached attitude of scientific study may combine with our plentiful natural egotism to create a cold indifference toward the less attractive masses of humanity. We need the glow of Christ's feeling for men to come unharmed out of this intellectual temptation.

      IV

      Doubtless the objection has arisen in our minds that it is not in the interest of the future of the race that religious pity shall coddle and multiply the weak, or put them in control of society.

      But did Jesus want the weak to stay weak? Was his social feeling ever maudlin? He was himself a powerful and free personality, who refused to be suppressed or conformed to the dominant type. He challenged the existing authorities, one against the field. Even in the slender record we have of him we can see him running the gamut of emotions from wrath and invective to tenderness and humor. It was precisely his own powerful individuality which made him demand for others the right to become free and strong souls. Other powerful individuals have used up the rest as means to their end. What human life or character did Jesus weaken or break down? He was an emancipator, a creator of strong men. His followers in later times did lay a new yoke on the spirits of men and denied them the right to think their own thoughts and be themselves. But the spirit of Jesus is an awakening force. Even the down-and-out brace up when they come in contact with him, and feel that they are still good for something.

      “Jesus Christ was the first to bring the value of every human soul to light, and what he did no one can any more [pg 014] undo” (Harnack). But it remains for every individual to accept and reaffirm that religious faith as his own guiding principle according to which he proposes to live. We shall be at one with the spirit of Christianity and of modern civilization if we approach all men with the expectation of finding beneath commonplace, sordid, or even repulsive externals some qualities of love, loyalty, heroism, aspiration, or repentance, which prove the divine in man. Kant expressed that reverence for personality in his doctrine that we must never treat a man as a means only, but always as an end in himself. So far as our civilization treats men merely as labor force, fit to produce wealth for the few, it is not yet Christian. Any man who treats his fellows in that way, blunts his higher nature; as Fichte says, whoever treats another as a slave, becomes a slave. We might add, whoever treats him as a child of God, becomes a child of God and learns to know God.

      “The principle of reverence for personality is the ruling principle in ethics, and in religion; it constitutes, therefore, the truest and highest test of either an individual or a civilization; it has been, even unconsciously, the guiding and determining principle in all human progress; and in its religious interpretation, it is, indeed, the one faith that keeps meaning and value for life” (President Henry C. King).

      Suggestions for Thought and Discussion

       Table of Contents

      I. The Ordinary Estimate of Men

      1. How much do we care for a man if he is of no practical use to us?

      2. On what basis do we ordinarily value men?

      II. Jesus' Estimate of Men

      1. Which source passages in the daily readings seemed to put the feeling of Jesus in the clearest light?

      [pg 015]

      2. How did the religious insight of Jesus reenforce his social feeling?

      3. To what extent is it possible to duplicate his sense of humanity without his consciousness of God?

      III. The Valuation of the Individual in Modern Life

      1. List the evidences that modern society values men as such apart from economic utility or standing, or show that it does not so value them.

      2. Is the tendency in modern life toward a lower or higher valuation of the individual? To what extent is this due to the influence of Christianity?

      3. How do the statistics of industrial accidents agree with our Christian valuation of life?

      IV. The Test of History

      1. What widespread and successful movements for social justice have there been outside the territory influenced by Christianity?

      2. How do modern missions serve as an experiment station for the problem of this chapter?

      3. What connection was there between the Wesleyan revival and the rise of the trade union movement in England?

      V. For Special Discussion

      1. Do permanent class differences necessarily result in a slighter social feeling for the inferior class?

      2. Describe the class lines drawn in your home town.

      3. Did you feel these lines more or less when you entered college?

      4. Does college life tend to make us callous or sympathetic?

      5. Does life in social settlements seem to increase or [pg 016] decrease respect for human nature in college men and women?

      6. How would you preserve your self-respect if you were a working man placed in degrading labor conditions?

      7. Does an honor system build up self-respect?

      8. Have your scientific studies, and especially evolutionary teachings, increased your regard for humanity in the mass?

      9. According to your observation, does religion make a man a stronger or weaker personality?

      [pg 017]

       Table of Contents

      Every man has worth and sacredness as a man. We fixed on that as the simplest and most fundamental social principle of Jesus. The second question is, What relation do men bear to each other?

      Daily Readings

      First Day: The Social Impulse and the Law of Christ

       Table of Contents

       And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, trying him: Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law? And he said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second like unto it is this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments the whole law hangeth, and the prophets.—Matt. 22:35–40.

      Which among the multitudinous prescriptions of the Jewish law ought to take precedence of the rest? It was a fine

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