Walter Rauschenbusch

Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist minister trained at Rochester Theological Seminary – also funded by the Rockefellers – became a socialist and was known as “Father of the Social Gospel.” In 1893 – about the time Charles Augustus Briggs was initiating the U.S. Modernist movement – Rauschenbusch declared that “the only power that can make socialism succeed, if it is established, is religion.” He said that “Christianity is in its nature revolutionary,” denied that Christ died in substitutionary atonement for our sins, and said the Kingdom of God “is not a matter of getting individuals to heaven, but of transforming the life on earth into the harmony of heaven.”³