The Social Gospel vs. Personal Salvation: A Late Nineteenth-Century Case Study— Walter Rauschenbusch and A.B. Simpson
Daniel J. Evearitt
Toward the end of the nineteenth century two clergymen served churches in the same neighborhood of New York City. They each interpreted “salvation” differently. While there is no evidence that they were personally acquainted, each displayed familiarity with the other’s basic position. They represent an interesting case study in the contrast between personal and social salvation.
An American attempt to redefine Christianity along social lines was undertaken in the late nineteenth century. It became known as the social gospel movement. Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918) was the movement’s chief theologian. In delineating his theology Rauschenbusch tried to deal with the disparity between the emphasis of traditional Christianity on personal salvation and the divergent emphasis of the social gospel movement on social salvation. He struggled to hold onto central Christian beliefs while, at the same time, setting forth a new message which was at odds with the older theology.
Walter Rauschenbusch was born in Rochester, New York into a German Baptist family in 1861. His father taught in Rochester Theological Seminary’s German Department for many years. Walter was raised in the church and participated in family Bible discussions. However, in his teenage years he struggled with personal conversion. After a period of waywardness, he turned to God. As he later recalled, “I got my own religious experience. . . . It was a tender, mysterious experience. It influenced my soul down to its depths.” He made a public confession of faith and was baptized in March of 1879. Almost immediately he became overwhelmed by the idea that he “ought to be a preacher, and help save souls.” He even thought he might go out as a foreign missionary.1 Rauschenbusch never became a missionary but, after university study in Germany and theological education at Rochester Theological Seminary, he became pastor of the Second German Baptist Church in New York City in 1886. He served there for eleven years, until 1897, when he began a teaching career at Rochester Theological Seminary, which lasted until his death in 1918.
Second German Baptist Church was in the Hell’s Kitchen area of New York City. During his pastorate the neighborhood was teeming with immigrants who were crowded into tenement housing as they struggled to survive in industrial America. While serving this community Rauschenbusch came face-to-face with poverty, hunger and social misery. This experience was to profoundly affect the direction of his theological thinking. One of his biographers noted that his “Pietist-Evangelical tradition had cultivated instincts that told him something was wrong” but offered him no solution.2
Rauschenbusch’s social awakening was to come through reading Henry George’s writings and hearing him speak. George’s bid to become mayor of New York, though unsuccessful, succeeded in inspiring Rauschenbusch to see that the poverty and misery he had experienced in Hell’s Kitchen was not inevitable, but that the world could be improved through concerted human effort. He was also strongly influenced by economist Richard Ely who was urging the church to actively criticize America’s capitalistic system and apply Christianity to all of society.3 The impact of ministering in poverty-stricken Hell’s Kitchen, George’s political crusade to better the worker’s lot in life and Ely’s admonition that the church speak to social issues all coalesced to turn Rauschenbusch’s attention to the social aspects of the Christian gospel.
When called upon to write a two-year series of Sunday school lessons for publication commencing in 1888, he began to reflect upon the social implications of Christ’s message. He reportedly avoided Bible commentaries when writing the lessons because “they were steeped in the old orthodoxy and seemed irrelevant to contemporary issues.”4 Beginning in 1889 he occasionally preached to his congregation on the theme of the “salvation of society.”5
Apparently Rauschenbusch formulated much of his social conception of the gospel during the late 1880’s, although the full expression of his theological thinking did not begin to appear in print until 1907, with the publication of his first book, Christianity and the Social Crisis. By then he had been away from the scene of his social awakening, New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, for ten years, teaching at Rochester Theological Seminary. Although he wrote several more books on the social gospel, the most systematic expression of his theology was his last book, A Theology for the Social Gospel, published in 1917.
Rauschenbusch found in the Bible a consistent social reconstructive theology based on the theme of the kingdom of God. In Christianity and the Social Crisis, he presented his argument. Modern biblical study, he noted, was opening man’s eyes to what the Bible really said, as the Bible underwent a “new social reinterpretation.”6 He charged that the traditional individualistic reading of previous generations had prevented Christians from seeing that the Old Testament prophets had highlighted “national sin and salvation” in their writings. Isaiah, he claimed, was not speaking of personal sin that could be made as white as snow (Isaiah 1:18), but of a “new start” available if social wrongs were righted. The prophets, he wrote, were not interested in the “private morality of detached pious souls but the social morality of the nation.”7 Belief in a future life and future reward or punishment, he pointed out, were “almost absent in Hebrew religion.”8 Only when loss of nationhood, during the Exile, ended the social religion of Judaism did Jeremiah turn toward individual piety; “the death-pangs of the national life were the birth-pangs of personal religious life.” This turn toward personal religion was forced by the Exile. Personal holiness was not the goal of religion but the means that would bring national restoration. While individualistic in focus, even this personal religion was a means to a social end. Personal religion first “developed under the abnormal conditions of foreign domination and national prostration,” Rauschenbusch argued, and “religion developed under abnormal conditions is likely itself to be abnormal.”9 Prophetic religion was a social and not an individualistic religion. Social religion was normal; individualistic religion was an aberration. Rauschenbusch clearly saw the antecedents for a new social Christianity in the religion of the Hebrew prophets.
Turning to the New Testament, Rauschenbusch found that Jesus’ life and ministry was consumed with building the kingdom of God on earth, not in “teaching the individual the way of emancipation from the world,” as a Greek philosopher, but in “preparing men for the righteous social order,” as a Hebrew prophet. The goodness Jesus sought to create in men would enable them to rightly relate to their fellowmen. “All human goodness must be social goodness,” wrote Rauschenbusch. “A man is moral when he is social; he is immoral when he is anti-social.” Jesus preached love because “love is the society-making quality.”10
Jesus was not looking for a cataclysmic event that would bring the kingdom of God “ready-made from heaven.” As Rauschenbusch saw it, Jesus had the “nobler prophetic view that the future was to grow out of the present by divine help”; the kingdom would “grow up among them.” Jesus grasped the “finer,” “saner” view of the “law of organic development in nature and history,” which modern thinkers were only now coming to. Jesus believed in an “organic growth of the new society” brought about by a cell by cell addition as individual humans were brought under the control of the “new spirit” of selfless love, which He Himself “embodied and revealed.” Progress meant the spread of the spirit of Jesus and the kingdom of God’s “right life” among men.11
Although Jesus worked with a small nucleus of men, His goal was not individualistic but social. His disciples and close followers would be the seeds from which would spring the kingdom of God on earth. Jesus’ goal, Rauschenbusch noted, was not the “new soul” of individual men but a “new society for Man.” The Jewish national hope was universalized by Jesus, whose conception of salvation was social, “saving the social organism.”12 It was the early Jewish-Christian churches which kept alive the social message of Jesus. Rauschenbusch labeled them the “radical social wing” of the church. They recorded the purest form of Jesus’ social message in the Synoptic Gospels, although not all the socially-oriented material was included in the canon.13
Early Jewish-influenced Christianity was social in orientation, communal, caring for its needy and not, like later Christianity, concerned with buildings and church officers.14 From the second century onward, individualistic hope of eternal life and desire to escape this world replaced the kingdom of God which Jesus had intended to transform humanity. Rauschenbusch linked this desire to escape earthly life by going to heaven to Platonic and Gnostic thought, not to the teaching of Jesus. When the Church should have been Christianizing social life it was turning instead toward otherworldliness.15
Catholic Christianity replaced the original social and ethical message of Jesus with “pagan superstition and Greek intellectualism.”16 Throughout Church history Rauschenbusch found that these “alien influences” had caused the Church repeatedly to miss its “greatest mission,” the social reconstruction of human life.17 Although the Reformation marked a turn toward social reformation, it failed to be social enough because it still “spiritualized” the social content of the Bible.18
Rauschenbusch felt that the Church in his day had reached the state where it was finally prepared to take on the task of the social reconstruction of humanity envisioned by its Founder. Otherworldliness was diminishing. While immortality was still a belief, he asserted, “The hope of personal salvation after death no longer monopolizes the Christian hope. There is room beside it for social hope.” Asceticism had disappeared almost completely. Ceremonialism had been broken by the Reformation, with prophet replacing priest. Christianity was “less dogmatic,” “less speculative” and would now be free to devote thought to social problems. Christianity was “less churchly” and was, therefore, “fitter to regenerate the common life.” The state was more open to the “moral and humanizing influence of Christianity.” Church hierarchy had been broken so that the laity, now more involved, could increasingly influence secular life. Intellectually and scientifically the world was ready with the new sciences of political economy and sociology guiding men toward brotherhood. The biblical sciences, using the “historical method,” were putting readers in touch with the original “social” meaning of the Bible. Rauschenbusch concluded, “For the first time in religious history we have the possibility of so directing religious energy by scientific knowledge that a comprehensive and continuous reconstruction of social life in the name of God is within the bounds of human possibility.”19
Rauschenbusch called upon Christian people to use their “moral forces” and “religious faith” to work for social change. The choice was clear, having reached a point of social crisis in modern society: “It was either a revival of social religion or the deluge.”20 He urged the Church to “lay consecrating hands on those who undertake social redemption.” Whereas the “older conception of religion” ministered to the “souls of men,” a new outreach into the world was needed because “God saves not only the soul but the human life.”21
The greatest contribution a person could make to the social movement, according to Rauschenbusch, would be to be a “regenerating influence” by becoming “men of faith,” “living spirits” and “channels by which the truth and power from God could enter humanity.” These members of society would have faith in the “possibility and reality of a divine life in humanity” and be submissive to the purposes of the kingdom of God as they helped to build the “Messianic era of mankind.”22
The kingdom of God was now, not at some future point in time inaugurated by the return of Christ. Social regeneration must not be postponed. Rauschenbusch charged those who were awaiting Christ’s return to bring social reconstruction with a “lack of faith in the present power of Christ.” They were “paralyzing” the religious initiative. He firmly believed that the regeneration of society could only come about through an act of God and the presence of Christ in society. Human effort alone would be insufficient. He was confident that “God is now acting and Christ is here now.” This belief called for more faith than the “mistaken” view of those who were expecting a cataclysmic resolution of all social problems when Christ returned.23
Those who were awaiting Christ’s return as the answer to human society’s social problems came under harsh criticism from Rauschenbusch. Noting that some Christian groups and individuals had “systematized the apocalyptic ideas of later Judaism and early Christianity,” he charged that they were engaging in evangelism and foreign missions because Christ will not return “until the gospel has been preached to all nations.” They were taking an active interest in “destructive tendencies” in life seeing them as “signs of the times.” But they did not want to try to correct any situation because they believed that the present world was doomed and would become increasingly corrupt, to be saved only by the coming of Christ. Their “historical pessimism” was neutralizing any thought of moral reformation, thus making them a “dead weight against any effort to mobilize the moral forces of Christianity to share in the modern social movement.” While he admired their zeal, he was thankful that they represented only one segment of Christianity. The bulk of Christianity had no hope of an immediate millennium ushered in by Christ’s return and would be willing to work for social change.24
Trying to maintain some continuity between traditional Christian theology and the social gospel in A Theology for the Social Gospel, Rauschenbusch wrote:
The social gospel is the old message of salvation, but enlarged and intensified. The individualistic gospel has taught us to see the sinfulness of every human heart and has inspired us with faith in the willingness and power of God to save every soul that comes to him. But it has not given us an adequate under- standing of the sinfulness of the social order and its share in the sins of all individuals within it. It has not evoked faith in the will and power of God to redeem the permanent institutions of human society from the inherited guilt of oppression and extortion. . . . The social gospel seeks to bring men under repentance for their collective sins and to create a more sensitive and more modern conscience. It calls on us for the faith of the old prophets who believed in the salvation of nations.25
Clearly his theology was vastly different from traditional theology. However, he felt that he was merely returning to the purer faith of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets, whose views on the kingdom of God had been distorted by subsequent theological speculation.
Calling on prophetic sources and the prophetic message of Jesus to buttress his theology, Rauschenbusch defined sin as “essentially selfishness,” and as an “anti-social” mind, not as a transaction between an individual and God.26 Personal salvation was submission to the common good, the “voluntary socializing of the soul.”27 The kingdom of God initiated by Christ was the “organized fellowship of humanity acting under the impulse of love.”28 The death of Christ was the “supreme revelation of love” and the “clearest and most conspicuous case of prophetic suffering,” which atoned for humanity’s individual and collective social sins.29 The millennium, which would come about through development and not catastrophe, would be “a social order in which the worth and freedom of every last human being will be honoured and protected; in which the brotherhood of man will be expressed in the common possession of the economic resources of society; and in which the spiritual good of humanity will be set above the private profit interests of all materialistic groups.”30 The church was to be the social force that would bring social salvation to the world order by working against evil and toward the realization of the kingdom of God on earth.31 The future was pictured as an unending period of “historic development” knowing “no final consummation,” with the kingdom of God never fully attained, the kingdom always but coming.32
Rauschenbusch’s social salvation contrasts sharply with a fellow-clergyman who ministered nearby; a clergyman quite unwilling to see Christian theology made subservient to the social movement; a clergyman who attempted to aid the victims of the social crisis while preaching personal salvation.
Albert B. Simpson (1843-1919) was born in Canada and raised by devout Presbyterian parents. After a personal conversion experience while in his teens, he trained for the ministry at Knox College, Toronto. He too, like Rauschenbusch, felt called to become a missionary. Apparently his wife’s opposition to his call to China, as well as health problems, led him to turn his attention instead to publishing a missionary magazine.33 As an ordained Presbyterian he served successful pastorates in Hamilton, Ontario; Louisville, Kentucky; and New York City before leaving the Presbyterians to found an independent work in 1881. While known mainly as the founder of The Christian and Missionary Alliance and for his passion for foreign missions, Simpson also pastored a church. After meeting at several different locations, his church, the Gospel Tabernacle, constructed facilities in 1889 in the Hell’s Kitchen area of New York City. He served the church until his death in 1919.
Simpson, like Rauschenbusch, saw the overcrowded tenement houses of that neighborhood teeming with the immigrant poor struggling to keep body and soul together. However, his response was decidedly different.
Simpson represented the type of individualistic Christianity that Rauschenbusch struggled against. While the new theology was urging men to live by a higher principle through imitating Christ, Simpson was urging a personal relationship with Christ, personal salvation, as an internal change of heart that would alter the way a person related to others. “The Christian life is not an imitation of Christ, but a direct new creation in Christ,” he wrote in 1894, “and the union with Christ is so complete that He imparts His own nature to us and lives His own life in us and then it is not imitation, but simply the out-growth of the nature implanted within. We live Christ-like because we have the Christ-life.”34 In answer to the claim of social gospel theologians that all we need to do is to imitate the life and practice the social principles of Jesus in order to live better lives, he wrote, “But we need more than teaching, ideals and examples. We need motive power. . . . I need Jesus of Nazareth Himself within me to walk in His footsteps.”35
What would it take to save this lost world? Simpson dismissed “mere sentiment” or good intentions: “The tenderest love and most self-denying sacrifices cannot lift our lost humanity from the fearful effects of the fall.” What was needed was a divine compassion and a “gospel of superhuman power.” Only this could elevate humans to a higher level of living. “Human nature is helpless and the very essence of the Gospel is that it gives the power to choose and do right,” he wrote. “It has the power to cleanse, purify and uplift human nature.”36
Simpson firmly believed in the power of Christ to regenerate individuals, but what of the physical and social needs of humanity? “Am I my brother’s keeper?” was the text of Simpson’s sermon “Mutual Responsibility,” delivered in the summer of 1894. Mutual responsibility was described as an essential of human society. Men live in mutual dependence in order to survive. Simpson stated, “If your neighbor is left in ignorance and vice, you cannot escape contact and contagion in some form or measure. We are, therefore, bound to each other by obligations and relations as real and strong as the constitution of nature and the character of God.” Explaining what it meant to be our brother’s keeper, he said, “It means most obviously that we should keep from doing our brother any harm, either in his material, physical, social or spiritual interests.” Conversely it meant that “we should do good to our brother as we have opportunity. It is not enough to avoid injuring another, but God is constantly giving us opportunities of helping and benefiting one another.” The special obligation of the Christian is to “seek to save the soul of our brother.”37
Simpson laid down the principle of love as the motivation for relating to others. He called on Christians to be concerned about all of humanity and to avoid cloistering themselves away into tight-knit little religious communities. He urged them to know about the needs of their “brother” wherever he may be. He published missionary magazines to make the needs of the world known. He charged Christians in America with the awesome responsibility of sharing Christianity with the entire world and not to keep all of its benefits for themselves. By calling attention to wars, floods, famines and social problems, he attempted to shake a selfish Church into thinking about the needs of others. He wrote, “We need to know the needs of our perishing brethren and the fearful conditions of the heathen world. You would have no business to plead ignorance if a neighbor were starving next door. You ought to know.”38 Speaking once again on the theme of being our brother’s keeper in 1899, Simpson pointed to Christianity as the only true remedy for the problems plaguing humanity. He cited opium addiction, intemperance, the degradation of women, the “blight” of childhood, slavery and slave trading, cannibalism, illiteracy, neglect of the sick and a host of other social ills as needs to be addressed by Christians.39
Temporal needs were to be met with the expectation that Christ could be shared with each person who was helped. Food was to be given in the name of the Lord, not only so that the hungry would be fed, but so that they might see Christ and His love in the act and be drawn to the gospel of Christ for salvation from sin. “Our acts of love and help,” he wrote in 1901, “may be His links in bringing them to see the attraction of His love and listen to the Gospel of His Grace.”40 This was the focus of Simpson and other evangelicals involved in gospel social work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The rescue mission work, the work in hospitals and prisons, the preaching to the poor, the orphanages, the medical clinics, the industrial training classes, the missionary activities and the outreach ministries started or influenced by Simpson, all had as their goal the personal conversion of individuals to Christ.41
Individual salvation logically preceded the transformation of society. Simpson saw Christianity as the force in history that had changed nations by changing individuals through conversion to Christ. The power of the gospel message was “. . . of infinite value even in improving the material condition of the poor, and leading to prosperity and success in temporal things.”42 He called Christianity “a religion that remedies the wrongs of society by not making society good, but individual men good, which takes them up one by one and then reforms society by reforming the individual.”43 Would human society then be perfected by the universal spread of Christianity? No. Simpson expected no “spiritual millennium” apart from the kingdom to be established by Christ Himself upon His return. Rather than any spiritual and social betterment for human society, Simpson predicted that world conditions would get steadily worse.44 The personal return of Christ would inaugurate the millennial age: “It is not an evolution from the forces of civilization but a revolution bursting upon an astonished world, not a blending with man’s selfish and imperfect achievements, but superseding all earthly sovereignties with His own supreme everlasting domain.” Christ’s kingdom would entail the end of sickness, suffering, oppression, poverty, injustice and wrong.45
Ultimately the role of the Church, according to Simpson, was to rescue souls from the sinking ship of humanity, not to reform society. Though the Church should lovingly attempt to meet the temporal needs of the people to whom it ministered, personal salvation, rather than social salvation, was Simpson’s message. However, social action was within the sphere of the Church of Christ. He clearly asserted this in an 1893 sermon entitled “The Ministering Church:”
There is room not only for the worship of God, the teaching of sacred truth and the evangelization of the lost, but also every phase of practical philanthropy and usefulness. There may be, in perfect keeping with the simple order and dignity of the Church of God, the most aggressive work for the masses and the widest welcome for every class of sinful men; the ministry of healing for the sick and suffering administered in the name of Jesus; the most complete provision for charitable relief; industrial training and social elevation for the degraded classes, workshops for the unemployed, homes for the orphaned, shelters for the homeless, refuges for the inebriates, the fallen and the helpless; missions for the heathen; Christian literature for the instruction of people, and every agency needed to make the Church of God the light of the world and the mothering of the suffering and lost. And there is no work that will be more glorifying to God than a church that will embrace just such features and completeness.46
Rauschenbusch and Simpson were both responding to the dire social conditions of the immigrant neighborhood that surrounded their churches. Simpson dealt with the root cause of the problem, sin. He and his early followers worked to evangelize New York City and the world, not by ignoring social needs but by meeting temporal needs as an avenue to meeting the eternal need of personal salvation through Jesus Christ. Interestingly, Simpson was the one who actively stayed on the front line of evangelism and social action while Rauschenbusch retreated to the security of the seminary cloister to write about social Christianity, but not to actively work in the world that spawned his social awareness. Simpson, along with other evangelicals of the late-nineteenth century, actively met the physical and social needs of the people to whom they ministered.
Diagnosing the problem differently, the social gospelers advocated government involvement in solving social need. Ultimately, the changes Rauschenbusch and other churchmen were seeking became the agenda of progressive politicians. Social Christianity was enacted into law in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and later in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. What began as a spiritualized response to a social crisis has now found its home in liberal political action. The social vision of liberal politicians reverberates with the religious overtones of man’s ability to solve his own problems and usher in his own “kingdom” of peace and prosperity. Political groups have taken on the social reform efforts that Rauschenbusch advocated for churches. Echoes of this socialized gospel are also found in Liberation Theology which has recently developed in Latin America.
Simpson and other premillennialists of the last century have proven to be correct in their assessment of the direction mankind was headed. Things have indeed grown worse rather than better. The optimism of the social gospelers has not proven to be well-founded. Society, for all of its wealth, education and technological advances, still is not on the verge of a man-made era of peace and social well-being. Churches following a socialized Christianity, the so-called mainline denominations, find themselves struggling for survival today. Their message of love and universal brotherhood is indistinguishable from political liberalism. On the other hand, evangelical churches, those remaining true to the traditional theology of personal salvation through Christ, are the growing denominations. They offer a radical solution to the radical problem of human sin. They stand for something distinct, something that has proven itself over time. Personal salvation in Christ dramatically changes human lives.
Unfortunately, the social work coupled with evangelism advocated and practiced by Simpson and other evangelicals was side-tracked during the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the 1920s and 30s. There are hints of a shift away from social action in Simpson’s writings and work toward the end of his life. Fortunately, evangelicals have rediscovered what Simpson and his allies a hundred years ago knew; it is impossible to preach the gospel and totally ignore the physical and social needs of the people being ministered to. Unfortunately liberal Protestants have not discovered that social action alone will never meet man’s deepest need or that human peace and global justice will only be realized on this earth when Jesus Christ physically reappears to set up His kingdom.
Endnotes
1 Paul M. Minus, Walter Rauschenbusch: American Reformer (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 16-17.
2 Ibid., 61.
3 Ibid., 61-64.
4 Ibid., 68-69.
5 Ibid., 56.
6 Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 45.
7 Ibid., 10-11.
8 Ibid., 17.
9 Ibid., 27-30.
10 Ibid., 67.
11 Ibid., 59-60.
12 Ibid., 60-61.
13 Ibid., 98-101.
14 Ibid., 126-127.
15 Ibid., 162-164.
16 Ibid., 179.
17 Ibid., 200-201.
18 Ibid., 197.
19 Ibid., 204-209.
20 Ibid., 286.
21 Ibid., 355.
22 Ibid., 351-352.
23 Ibid., 346.
24 Ibid., 202-203.
25 Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 5-6.
26 Ibid., 48-50.
27 Ibid., 99.
28 Ibid., 155.
29 Ibid., 170, 179.
30 Ibid., 224-225.
31 Ibid., 119.
32 Ibid., 227.
33 A.E. Thompson, A.B. Simpson: His Life and Work (Harrisburg, PA: Christian Publications, 1920), 121-122.
34 A.B. Simpson, “The Highest Christian Life,” The Christian Alliance (August 1894): 101.
35 A.B. Simpson, The Old Faith and the New Gospels (New York: Christian Alliance Publishing Co., 1911), 90-91.
36 A.B. Simpson, Missionary Messages (New York: Christian Alliance Publishing Co., 1925), 14.
37 A.B. Simpson, “Mutual Responsibility,” The Christian Alliance (August 1894): 148-149.
38 Simpson, Missionary Messages, 91.
39 A.B. Simpson, “Look on the Fields,” The Christian and Missionary Alliance (October 1899): 344-346.
40 A.B. Simpson, Practical Christianity (New York: Christian Alliance Publishing Co., 1901), 80.
41 For a discussion of evangelical social work see Norris Magnuson, Salvation in the Slums (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1977), for material on Simpson only see John V. Dahms, “The Social Interest and Concern of A.B. Simpson,” in The Birth of a Vision ed. David F. Hartzfeld and Charles Nienkirchen (Beaverlodge, Alberta, Canada: Buena Book Ser-vices, 1986).
42 A.B. Simpson, “The Parables of the Son of Man,” The Christian and Missionary Alliance (December 1905): 110.
43Simpson, Missionary Messages, 110.
44 A.B. Simpson, “The Pre-Millennial Coming of the Lord,” The Christian Alliance (August 1894): 130.
45 Simpson, The Old Faith and the New Gospels, 136-140.
46 A.B. Simpson, “The Ministering Church,” The Christian and Missionary Alliance (March 1894): 165.
Source of Information: The Social Gospel vs Personal Salvation: A Late Nineteenth-Centuray Case Study- Walter Rauschenbusch and A.B. Simpson