How, Walter Rauschenbush asked in his Theology for a Social Gospel, does Jesus bear our sins? Unsatisfied with “imputation” as an explanation, he turned to a “social” explanation. Jesus was in solidarity with humanity, and human history is a history of sin. Humanity is bound in a enslaving network of social sin: “this race life of ours is pervaded by sin; not only by sporadic acts of folly, waywardness, vice or crime which spring spontaneously from human life, but by organized forces and institutions of evil which have stabilized the power of sin and made it effective. . . . Every personal act of sin, however isolated it may seem, is connected with racial sin. Evil social customs and ideas stimulate or facilitate it ; in turn it strengthens the social suggestion to evil for others” (246).
It’s in this sense that Jesus bears sin: “These public evils so pervade the social life of humanity in all times and all places that no one can share the common life of our race without coming under the effect of these collective sins. He will either sin by consenting in them, or he will suffer by resisting them. Jesus did not in any real sense bear the sin of some ancient Briton who beat up his wife in B. C. 56, or of some mountaineer in Tennessee who got drunk in A. D. 191 7. But he did in a very real sense bear the weight of the public sins of organized society, and they in turn are causally connected with all private sins” (247).
How does this make Jesus different from any other human being who shares the common life of humanity? For Rauschenbusch, it doesn’t except that Jesus suffers these evils willingly refuses to cooperate. To explain how the social evils of the race collide in first-century Palestine, he gives a vivid description of six particular sins that led to the death of Jesus.
The first was religious bigotry, the zeal of the teachers of Judaism. Such bigotry “has been one of the permanent evils of mankind, the cause of untold social division, bitterness, persecution, and religious wars. It is always a social sin.” What killed Jesus was “ecclesiastical religion,” and this didn’t need to be “imputed” to Jesus He bore it by “direct experience” (249-50).
“Graft and political power” was a second factor, since “the prophetic leadership of Jesus endangered the power of the ruling class. There is always an oligarchy, wherever you look; monarchial and republican forms of government are both protective devices for the-group-that-controls-things” (251). Jesus was also a victim of the corruption of justice, mob spirit, militarism (a stretch, but Jesus was beat about by soldiers), and class contempt (“class” is out of place here, but Rauschenbusch has a point; as he says: “In Roman law crucifixion was a punishment reserved for offenders of the lowest classes,” 257).
This is a decent summary of the historical reasons for Jesus’ death. But where does Rauschenbusch go from here? How does Jesus’ bearing these social sins by direct experience save anyone? Rauschenbusch rightly emphasizes that the death of Jesus needs to be seen in the light of His life: “The life of Jesus was a life of love and service. At every moment his life was going out toward God and men. His death, then, had the same significance. It was the culmination of his life, its most luminous point, the most dramatic expression of his personality, the consistent assertion of the purpose and law which had ruled him and formed him.” What made His death significant was not simply that He suffered these social evils; many do. It was that He accepted the suffering in loving service (261). Jesus does what God has done: “God has always borne the brunt of human sin while loving us. He too has been gagged and cast out by men. He has borne our sins with a resistance which never yields and yet is always patient. Within human limits Jesus acted as God acts” (262-3).
Jesus is the first man to live in complete consciousness of God, and He draws others into that same consciousness, and in that way He begins to lift His followers up to a higher spiritual level of life. This altered the relationship between God and humanity: “When men would learn to understand and love God ; and when God could by anticipation see his own life appropriated by men, God and men would enter into spiritual solidarity, and this would be the only effective reconciliation” (265).
On this account, Jesus’ death has no different significance than His life: “Men were coming into fellowship with the Father before his death happened, and before they knew that it was to happen. Jesus labored to unite men with God without referring to his death. If he had lived for thirty years longer, he would have formed a great society of those who shared his conception and religious realization of God, and this would have been that nucleus of a new humanity which would change the relation of God to humanity. Indeed, we can conceive that in thirty years of additional life Jesus could have put the imprint of his mind much more clearly on the movement of Christianity, and protected it from the profound distortions to which it was subjected” (266). His death was the result of human wickedness, the convergence of the social evils enumerated above. This doesn’t make His death pointless: His death was His supreme act of “opposition to sin,” His supreme obedience which even threats of death could not deter, and His death greatly expanded “his power to assimilate others to his God-consciousness and to gather a new humanity” (266).
His death also had a decisive impact on human beings: It exposed the great evils of sin, and so breaks sin’s spell over us and encourages moral reform. It was the supreme revelation of love. And it reinforced the stature of prophetic religion over against priestly bigotry.
There are multiple problems here. Rauschenbusch is pretty explicit about rejecting some of the ways the New Testament itself describes the atonement. It is not at all clear how the cure is sufficient to the disease. Rauschenbusch sees a cancer in the social evils of mankind, quite accurately and incisively; his prescription looks like a placebo by comparison. Perhaps the most decisive problem is that the judgment of sin in the atonement isn’t carried out by God, but by us. Rauschenbusch’s atonement makes exposes sin to us, so that we’ll turn from it. God is not judging sin at the cross. The error in the formulation is clearest when we see it in the light of Barth’s insight that the human desire to play the role of judge is the essence of original sin: Rauschenbusch’s theory not only leaves that original sin intact, but makes that original sin integral to the act of salvation.