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Between the Lausanne Covenant, Vatican II and the Purpose Driven Church with Rick Warren at the helm, the church is indeed going through a Reformation as Rick pointed out, but not like Martin Luther's Reformation that set many free from bondage to the Popes, but back to yoking us with the world no matter what they believe. Rick Warren was trained by Robert Schuller and Schuller's motto is "find a need and fill it and get rich." According to Warren, Christians are stewards of Affluance and Influence.
From the late 1960s to the end of the 1980s, Latin American Liberation theology enunciated a comprehensive vision of Christian theology based on the biblical prophetic tradition and an understanding of redemption centered on social justice. Its watchword was the "preferential option for the poor." This was understood, first of all, as God's preferential option, which Christians should follow by converting their own lives to solidarity with the poor, together with a disaffiliation from and critique of the systems that made people poor. To get this Catholic, 4 page report in .html format, by Rosemary
Radford Ruether, National Catholic Reporter, February 7, 2003
Vol. 39 Issue 14 page: 16 go to Amazon and ask for it in search
engine. Jeffrey Tucker reviewed the book "Capitalism and Christians: Tough Gospel Challenges in a Troubled World Economy" Arthur Jones, Catholic Press, 1992 In general Arthur Jones is not in favor of Capitalism for many reasons and concludes his book by assuring us that "We have to become ascetics. We have to learn to deliberately do without." That’s a condition likely to be imposed by the state if Jones’ message prevails. Arthur Jones is an editor-at-large of the National Catholic Reporter and "an economist by training." Jones seeks to define the relationship between capitalism and Christianity but begins with a .. description of capitalism. It is a system, he says, in which finding "new ways of making a buck" quickly "conditions the world around it so it can extract for itself the maximum for the minimum." .. If there’s a problem in modern American life, Jones blames it on capitalism. This includes "adulterated baby foods," "any toxic-waste site," "Marlboro men with emphysema," "coupons inside the packet" that "distract from the price on the packet," and, inexplicably, "Rawlings baseballs in Haiti." All represent "the drive for profits for their own sake" that is alleged to lie at the heart of capitalism. Yet some of his examples constitute the very fraud that capitalist contract law discourages. Others require additional elaboration (toxic-waste sites usually appear on public property, for example)... At least one of his critiques of capitalism, in addition, suggests wholesale ignorance of economics: Prices are "based not on value but on what the market will bear." What could this possibly mean? If water sells at a higher price than diamonds in a desert, that says something of the relative value of each, given existing conditions. The economic value of anything is best expressed in the price a good or service bears on the market. The chief virtue of capitalism, economists have rightly argued, is that it recasts individual preferences and values into market prices so they can be exchanged in agreed-upon terms. It’s true that exchange is not central to a social order (consider family, church, and charity). But economic life without prices and exchanges would simply be chaos... Jones does not like about capitalism include rich people like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky. I’m not here to defend corporate buyouts and junk bonds. These are complex topics, and his objections to markets run much deeper: to wealth itself, because it seems to be taken from the poor... Socialist theorists can despise corporate fat cats, but in a market economy, cats only get fat by providing goods and services that are valued by others. The result of the complex economic relations created through the private-property, free-enterprise order is unequal holdings of wealth... Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Centesimus Annus identifies with the business economy and warns that an attempt to curb it unnecessarily expands the state. [Source: Religion & Liberty Archives, Jeffrey A. Tucker, a fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the editor of The Free Market.] A Mormon View of Capitalism and the Gospel
We often say that cultural systems like capitalism and democracy are neutral on gospel issues. Neither one cares about your religion. You can be Catholic or Mormon under capitalism without suffering any handicaps in the pursuit of wealth. What I wish to challenge is precisely this sense of neutrality. Capitalism may not care about your religion (it is essentially godless itself), but it cares deeply about certain things: about savings, investment, and hard work. The capitalist system offers fabulous rewards to those who save and invest, who prove skillful in corporate management, and who work hard. The best of these people receive immense salaries and considerable notoriety. They are promoted, given perks, honored, awarded authority and power, confirmed in their masculine identities, counted as important. The capitalist system does not denigrate others who play more lowly roles like artists, or school teachers, or mothers. They are acknowledged and even applauded but they are not honored and rewarded with the high impact labels and responsibilities that go to corporate executives and useful talent and certainly not with the wages. The players outside the corporate system are marginal to capitalism as producers of wealth but also marginal as figures of note. This may not undermine the gospel in farm economy or in other systems where capitalism is only one system among many. But when it attains the immense power that it possesses in the United States, it can come to control human values and to pervade the entire cultural system. When we ask what do you do, we want to know what place you have in this vast, interlocking corporate system that includes universities, museums, and charities, as well as business corporations. If you are not part of that network you are in danger of having a null identity. “Slipping into irrelevance,” is the way one mother put it to me. That is what I think the Conference speaker was getting at. She was trying to reinforce the family cultural system against the onslaught of the corporate system that has its roots in corporate capitalism. It is a pitiful effort, though many influential voices are being raised in this cause. Kim Clark at the Harvard Business School has been preaching the doctrine of family and community ever since being made Dean. Words for the family are spoken frequently at law school and business school commencements. Family is rudimentary enough and compelling enough to have many allies. But despite all this, there is a danger that these will be words flung in the teeth of the gale. The corporate system is too entrenched, too powerful, too pervasive. Our young women will embrace family values, to be sure, but they will continue to go to law school and medical school in increasing numbers. Reading the handwriting on the wall, they will go for careers. Heroically, they will do their mothering tasks as well, with the help of cooperative husbands, but they won’t defy the mandates of the corporate world. They will demand a part in the vast cultural system that dominates the nation. They will indeed have hearts of mothers but they will own a tailored business suit. With so little to protect them in this demanding culture, the pure mothers, those with no careers, are in danger of becoming increasingly bitter and defensive. [ Source: A Mormon website : 4/12/2004 http://www.timesandseasons.org/archives/000661.html
by Todd F. Eklof - March 7, 2004 Before beginning a discussion of the Social Gospel it seems necessary to understand both the historical setting and the cultural perspective from which it emerged during the early 1900’s (1900-1914). In brief, the Social Gospel might best be defined as the antithesis to the culture of distributive injustice culminating in what financial giant Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) called The Gospel of Wealth in his 1889 essay by the same title. Carnegie argued the government should do nothing to impede the accumulation of wealth by individuals because, as trustees of the public good, the wealthy use their fortunes to benefit the less privileged in society. Unlike many of his class, however, Carnegie actually put his beliefs into practice and spent his final years giving his fortune away and is attributed with saying, "The man who dies rich dies disgraced."1 Since the dawn of human history, however, the age old ideas which eventually led to Carnegie’s gospel of wealth were and are much more concerned about the acquisition of personal wealth and power than with caring for those who are less fortunate. Perhaps there’s no way to know for certain when and where the seeds of the gospel of wealth were planted. The idea that prosperity is a sign of Divine blessing may simply be the extreme end of the gratitude each of us feels when our essential needs are met. Thanksgiving for our daily bread implies God has blessed us, and the more bread we have the more blessed we must be. In this line of reasoning the converse must also be true; those who have too little have not been blessed by God and may even be considered cursed. The gospel of wealth preaches that we each get exactly what we deserve. If we’re wealthy, it’s because God has blessed us. Poverty, furthermore, must be the fault of the poor; the result of their own sin, or simply their failure to take advantage of divine opportunities. Of course we need only compare rich and powerful tyrants like Saddam Hussein to impoverished saints like Mother Teresa before we begin to question the validity of assuming the just distribution of wealth is entirely in the hands of God (assuming God is just and benevolent). Horatio Alger (1834-199) is another significant background figure. A contemporary of Andrew Carnegie, he was the son of a Unitarian minister, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Divinity School and one of the most popular and successful writers of the late 1800’s, having sold more than 100 million books. Most of his books, such as Ragged Dick and Tattered Tom, were rags-to-riches stories about poor Americans who became huge successes by taking full advantage of this land of golden opportunity. So, at the same time the gospel of wealth permitted the pious a good excuse to accumulate as much wealth for themselves as possible, Americans in general were latching on to a heroic rags-to-riches myth that said anyone can become filthy rich—a myth contemporary satirist, if not social prophet, Michael Moore says still dominates our culture. In his best selling book, Dude, Where’s My Country?, Moore actually has a full chapter entitled, "Horatio Alger Must Die." In it he suggests the modern version of the myth was most recently played out during the 1990’s when millions of average working Americans became investors in the stock market. Instead of always being paid in cash, they were happy to let their employers put much of their hard earned money in 401(k) programs, and allowed their unions to invest their pensions in stock. Many watched their investments double, even triple, or more, over just a few years as the stock market boomed. But eventually the boom went bust and, all too often, it seems, average working class Americans lost their entire financial futures while corporate executives made off like bandits. "…it was a sham." Moore writes, "It was all a ruse concocted by the corporate powers-that-be who never had any intention of letting you into their club. They just needed your money to take them to the next level, the one that insulates them from ever having to actually work for a living. They knew the Big Boom of the 1990s couldn’t last, so they needed your money to artificially inflate the value of their companies so their stocks would reach such a phantasmal price that, when it was time to cash out, they would be set for life, no matter how bad the economy got."2 But the national obsession with becoming excessively rich and it’s justification via the gospel of wealth didn’t begin in the 1900’s or in the United States. Nor does it appear to have even come close to ending as a result of the recent stock market crash. Rather, the sort of Capitalism which emphasizes the personal accumulation of capital, rather than spreading the wealth by creating more successful capitalists, dates back, at least, to the origins of Protestant Christianity in the 1500’s. As professor of comparative religion, David Chidester has noted, "Many historians have linked Christianity, especially the Protestant Christianity of Lutherans, Calvinists, and Methodists, with the rise of capitalism."3 He goes on to outline Capitalism’s distinctive characteristics as, "the private ownership of property; the rational calculation of costs and profits; the accumulation of capital in the form of money and material assets; the borrowing, lending, and investment of money and interest; and the employment of laborers for wages in a labor market."4 Although Protestant Christianity doesn’t outwardly promote these characteristics, certain doctrines derived from Luther and Calvin, as Chidester explains, seem to predispose Protestants, "to regard disciplined enterprise in the world as a virtue and thereby to participate in the kinds of economic activity that emerged as capitalism."5 Until the rise of Protestantism, for example, work was almost universally viewed as something reserved for those who were accursed by God... In fact, the Greek word ponos is the word for both "work" and "pain." Similarly, in the Hebrew tradition, hard work is considered humanity’s curse because of the sin of Adam and Eve. "Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life… by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground…"6 So, historically, particularly in western tradition, hard work was looked down upon, reserved for slaves and the accursed, and rarely occurred without some sort of force. This negative view of work began to change a little with the rise of monasticism which saw labor as an opportunity to practice Christian charity. When Martin Luther came on the scene about 500 years ago, he too suggested people can serve God through their work. "To work is to pray,"7 he said, although he did not believe people should step outside the occupation they were born into. At this point work was no longer a curse but a religious duty. A short time later John Calvin began promoting his doctrine of Predestination, suggesting people were elected for salvation or condemnation long before they were ever born. Although we have no way of knowing who is among the few chosen for salvation, Calvinism suggested prosperity might be a sign of God’s favor. From then on even common people were free to actively pursue wealth; advancing beyond the social circumstances they were born into if possible; hoping their successes might denote God’s blessing upon them; arriving at the psychological point in western history where prosperity became viewed as God’s blessing and poverty as a curse. If this Protestant calling to prosperity eventually led to the gospel of wealth, it was the accompanying positive attitude toward labor that led to what has been called the gospel of work. The 18th century Presbyterian missionary, James Stewart, for example, once said, "Lazy races die or decay. Races that work prosper on earth. The British race, in all its greatest branches, is noted for its restless activity. Its life motto is Work! Work! Work!"8 Unfortunately for many, this view went hand in hand with British colonization. As Chidester explains, "For people all over the world, colonization marked their entry into both a Christian and a capitalist world system… Although European capitalist interests—mercantile, agricultural, and eventually industrial—were advanced by military conquest, dispossession of land, restrictions on trade, and forced labor, the entire enterprise was often justified as a providential extension to the rest of the world of ‘Christian Civilization.’"9 This belief in the inherent goodness of hard work and prosperity serves as the backdrop that led to the widely embraced views of people like Andrew Carnegie and Horatio Alger, and, possibly, accounts for the rapid growth of American industry after the Civil War. Unfortunately, this was also the point in U.S. history that millions of Americans were finding out that no matter how hard they worked, they somehow prospered very little. By 1890, just one year after Carnegie published his essay on The Gospel of Wealth, the wealth of the nation had already become so concentrated that one percent of the families in America controlled more than half of it. As Terry Matthews, professor of Church History at Wake Forest University goes on to explain, "This industrial machine left individuals feeling insignificant and powerless. Labor tried unsuccessfully to create a counterbalance to concentrated capital. This led to bloody strikes in 1877, 1886, 1892, and 1894. While these strikes did little to alleviate the conditions of labor, they did serve to alert churches to the underlying moral aspects of the problems faced by working men and women."10 Unfortunately, most church leaders were not yet ready to take an active role in helping to alleviate the many social problems arising from what had become a economic system of increasingly concentrated wealth. Their lack of response, according to professor Matthews, was a result of laissez-faire economics which he refers to as, "the ghost of the doctrine of God’s providence dressed in the ill-fitting clothes of eighteenth century scientific law."11 Religious leaders at the time continued to believe social circumstances were a result of divine providence and so long as human beings didn’t interfere, everything would work out entirely on its own. "The appeal of this idea," Matthews continues, "was only intensified with the rise of Social Darwinism which argued for the survival of the fittest, giving an additional justification to allow the market to eliminate the weak."12 Ironically, more so than altruism, it may have been the capitalist spirit of competition that eventually forced churches to begin addressing the needs of those suffering from the unjust distribution of wealth. As immigrants continued flowing in mass into American cities, the Catholics, who had previously accepted laissez-faire Capitalism, began focusing their work on the inner cities where human need seemed most compressed. The Protestants countered by launching the Salvation Army which "combined revivalistic preaching with physical relief."13 In addition, Methodists and Lutherans developed their own version of the Catholic nun by ordaining women deacons to care for those in need. At the same time, churches began "providing social, educational, and recreational services to its communities,"14 which became a precursor to the YMCA. By this time it was also common practice for seminaries to teach sociology, a term first used by Auguste Comte back in 1837. By now, socialism had also emerged on the world scene as a counter to the extravagances of Capitalism. The Socialist Labor Party was organized in 1877, just a few years after the Civil War, followed by the organization of the Social Democratic Party in 1898. According to Matthews, American clergy unanimously rejected Socialism in the 1880’s, but many changed to adopt Socialist views, a few even becoming avowed socialists, just a decade later. Still later, according to a survey of 20,000 clergy in 1934, only 5 percent favored capitalism, 28 percent favored some form of socialism, and 75 percent supported Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party candidate for President.15 The term Social Gospel became the term used to describe these views, which, at times, have also been referred to as Social Christianity or Christian Socialism. Among the early and leading proponents of the Social Gospel was William Dwight Porter Bliss (1856-1926), an Episcopalian clergyman who helped organize the Society of Christian Socialists in 1889. Although the organization did poorly, Bliss’ book entitled The Encyclopedia of Social Reform did much to unite a diverse group of reform movements, including women’s suffrage and the Zionist movement, which, in turn, helped to unite the overall Socialist movement within the United States. Another key figure in the movement was Washington Gladden (1836-1918), a Congregational minister, widely regarded as the founder of the Social Gospel movement, who criticized capitalism in general and publicly denounced John D. Rockefeller. Gladden also authored more than 30 books describing what he considered biblical solutions for the problems created by industrial Capitalism. In applying biblical principles to social problems, Gladden helped shift the emphasis of Christianity from the purely spiritual realm, to include the practical as well. Perhaps the most influential figure in the movement, however, was the boisterous Baptist minister from the Hell’s Kitchen section of New York City at the turn of the 20th century, Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918). He was convinced all social ills resulted from the poverty caused by unrestrained Capitalism, and, working with labor organizations and the Socialist Party, urged everyone to achieve a democratic cooperative society through non-violent means. "Wealth…" he wrote, "is to a nation what manure is to a farm. If the farmer spreads it evenly over the soil, it will enrich the whole. If he should leave it in heaps, the land would be impoverished and under the rich heaps the vegetation would be killed."16 Although we can see from this all too brief history that the Social Gospel emerged primarily in response to the unjust distribution of wealth within Capitalism during the industrial age, we might look at this period as merely the flood gate through which organized religion began actively addressing many social issues. The fact that various churches and denominations finally began addressing matters of poverty, labor and injustice may indeed be pleasing to many, but since that time, religion has stuck its influential nose into an increasing number of social causes, some of which may seem less endearing. Early on, for example, Josiah Strong, a leading exponent of the Social Gospel, wrote a best selling book entitled Our Country, supporting American expansionism by combining Darwin’s "survival of the fittest" with the doctrine of Divine Providence, claiming that the Anglo-Saxon race was superior among others and is destined to control the world. In short, Strong considered expansionism a form of missionary work. "It seems to me," he wrote, "that God, with infinite wisdom and skill, is training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour sure to come in the world's future."17 Terry Matthews also cites the example of J. William Jones, a Southern Baptist minister who was a close friend of Robert E. Lee and "offered his sermons as a potent mix of Christianity and the Confederacy."18 In his books Christ in the Camp and Religion in Lee’s Army, Jones suggested the Southern cause had been the defense of Christianity and those in the Confederate army were religious exemplars. When, in the late 19th century, Andrew Sledd, countered the views of Strong and Jones, by speaking out against segregation and lynching in the South, he was fired from his position at Emory University and forced to leave the South. He was specifically fired as a traitor to his race for claiming the only reason the "Negro" could be considered inferior to whites was because of the ill effects of segregation and slavery.
Many Christians who lived in the cities and witnessed the squalor of squalor of the poor were outraged that men could treat one another as those who controlled industry controlled their workers. For those with a liberalist impulse, the desire to bring about God’s Kingdom in the context of temporal human relationships proved an important foundation for a religious social ethic. They began to believe that "industrial capitalism" was inherently unjust, and that its particular institutions and economic situations set individuals up for failure and consequently sinful lifestyles. A man’s own hard work could no longer prosper him in the world of the twentieth century, and the unrestrained capitalism that allowed the privileged to own the labor and production of others seemed to be responsible. Men who owned the means of production did not seem to be constrained by either morality or government regulation to be fair to their employees, so Social Gospellers and Progressivists alike were more inclined to favor bigger government, the rights of labor, and a number of socialist ideas.[1]
Liberals saw this need as an excellent niche for their form of Christianity that sought to be more relevant to men and women of the new century. The Church as an transformational institution would stand up for those who had no voice and provide for those who could not do enough to help their own families. Christians in the Social Gospel movement emphasized the immanence of God’s Kingdom on earth and the responsibility of a Christian society to bring it about. Victorian Protestantism and its emphases on individual salvation and holiness were not alleviating industrial conditions, but their vision of government as a brotherhood of service would. Individuals were given the responsibility to transform society, not deny themselves as such or evangelize people only. Community betterment became the focus of liberal evangelicalism as Social Gospellers worked to improve education, health care and sanitation in cities. Christians were called to create an environment conducive to tapping full individual and community potential in a relational context. Herein was a new measure of success: being appreciated by others as making a difference in society. Curtis suggests that this ethic can be seen in Charles Sheldon’s novels In His Steps (1897) and The Reformer (1902), among other writings of the period. . She also argues that the political actions of Christian reformers created the required atmosphere for progressivism, as they charged government with the task of enforcing moral reforms. Voters believed that such "policies…would usher in the kingdom of God."[2]
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