Prohibitionists. Good guys or bad guys?

[AnthonyMartin]

To be sure, I'm generalizing and eliding disagreements the various Social Gospelers may have had amongst themselves. Rauschenbusch in that same entry is quoted as saying: "the individualistic gospel has made sinfulness of the individual clear, but it has not shed light on institutionalized sinfulness: It has not evoked faith in the will and power of God to redeem the permanent institutions of human society from their inherited guilt of oppression and extortion."
In the main though, they [the Progressives/Social Gospelers] located the sinfulness of the world in systems and maintained a fairly optimistic view of human nature. That kind of goes without saying right? - if you're of a progressive bent you tend to think that humans are generally good and able to progress - to build a kind of Heaven on Earth.

Makes sense. Do you think current Kingdom Christians who promote social movements are much like the Progressives in this way? Or is it possible to also believe that it is God redeeming the individuals that also impacts these social systems.

On a bit of a different thought. How is the practical outcome of the Social Gospel Progressives different from the society and church envisioned by the Puritans?

Jonathan Edwards, Works of, Vol 1

SECT. II.

The latter-day glory, is probably to begin in America.

It is not unlikely that this work of God’s Spirit, so extraordinary and wonderful, is the dawning, or, at least, a prelude of that glorious work of God, so often foretold in Scripture, which, in the progress and issue of it, shall renew the world of mankind. If we consider how long since the things foretold as what should precede this great event, have been accomplished; and how long this event has been expected by the church of God, and thought to be nigh by the most eminent men of God in the church; and withal consider what the state of things now is, and has for a considerable time been, in the church of God, and the world of mankind; we cannot reasonably think otherwise, than that the beginning of this great work of God must be near. And there are many things that make it probable that this work will begin in America.—It is signified that it shall begin in some very remote part of the world, with which other parts have no communication but by navigation, in Isa. lx. 9. “Surely the isles shall wait for me, and the ships of Tarshish first, to bring my sons from far.” It is exceeding manifest that this chapter is a prophecy of the prosperity of the church, in its most glorious state on earth, in the latter days; and I cannot think that any thing else can be here intended but America by the isles that are far off, from whence the first-born sons of that glorious day shall be brought.

[HondurasKeiser]

To be sure, I'm generalizing and eliding disagreements the various Social Gospelers may have had amongst themselves. Rauschenbusch in that same entry is quoted as saying: "the individualistic gospel has made sinfulness of the individual clear, but it has not shed light on institutionalized sinfulness: It has not evoked faith in the will and power of God to redeem the permanent institutions of human society from their inherited guilt of oppression and extortion."
In the main though, they [the Progressives/Social Gospelers] located the sinfulness of the world in systems and maintained a fairly optimistic view of human nature. That kind of goes without saying right? - if you're of a progressive bent you tend to think that humans are generally good and able to progress - to build a kind of Heaven on Earth.

Makes sense. Do you think current Kingdom Christians who promote social movements are much like the Progressives in this way? Or is it possible to also believe that it is God redeeming the individuals that also impacts these social systems.

On a bit of a different thought. How is the practical outcome of the Social Gospel Progressives different from the society and church envisioned by the Puritans?

Jonathan Edwards, Works of, Vol 1

SECT. II.

The latter-day glory, is probably to begin in America.

It is not unlikely that this work of God’s Spirit, so extraordinary and wonderful, is the dawning, or, at least, a prelude of that glorious work of God, so often foretold in Scripture, which, in the progress and issue of it, shall renew the world of mankind. If we consider how long since the things foretold as what should precede this great event, have been accomplished; and how long this event has been expected by the church of God, and thought to be nigh by the most eminent men of God in the church; and withal consider what the state of things now is, and has for a considerable time been, in the church of God, and the world of mankind; we cannot reasonably think otherwise, than that the beginning of this great work of God must be near. And there are many things that make it probable that this work will begin in America.—It is signified that it shall begin in some very remote part of the world, with which other parts have no communication but by navigation, in Isa. lx. 9. “Surely the isles shall wait for me, and the ships of Tarshish first, to bring my sons from far.” It is exceeding manifest that this chapter is a prophecy of the prosperity of the church, in its most glorious state on earth, in the latter days; and I cannot think that any thing else can be here intended but America by the isles that are far off, from whence the first-born sons of that glorious day shall be brought.

It strikes me that the "children" of the Puritans/Yankee-do-gooders - were and are the Progressives (and also not a few leaders of the New Right).

[HondurasKeiser]

Two related but not identical theses about the Puritan/Yankee roots of Progressivism:

The Revenge of the Yankees: How Social Gospel became Social Justice

THE PROBLEM OF THE NEW RIGHT

It is in the face of arguments like these that the second theme in David Hackett Fischer’s work must be considered. Fischer does not study the folkway of the American people but the folkways of the American peoples. His central thesis is that America is, and always has been, a pastiche of nations. Four very separate cultures, with distinct and separate folkways, settled in America. To this day, Fischer maintains, these folkways (though somewhat changed by time and circumstance) shape American politics and society.

One of these four founding cultures were the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay. As my editor friend intuited, the “politics of the common good” that the New Right strives for aligns warmly with the Puritan’s communitarian conceptions of ordered liberty.

When I read New Right writings and meet with New Righters in person I cannot help but notice how Northeastern their vision of politics is. They do not like to admit this, but it is true. They are the spiritual heirs of the New England Whigs; when they find anything sympathetic at all in the American tradition, it is in the Boston Brahmins’ lost aristocracy.

In sociological terms, I suppose the best way to understand the New Right is as Puritan heretics. The Puritans were the most communitarian of Fischer’s four founding nations; their cultural descendants (found in places like Boston and Portland) are the Americans most willing to live for the Holy Cause today. Like the New Right, the left’s modern-day Puritans also lionize the Federalists and Whigs.[19] It makes sense, in a way. Most of the New Right’s leaders either come from or immersed themselves in Puritan milieus. The number of Ivy League degrees claimed by New Right thinkers is one proof of this. That Claremont is based in California—instead of, say, Texas—is another example of the phenomena. Yankee thinking seeps into the thought of those who long swim through it.

[HondurasKeiser]

Makes sense. Do you think current Kingdom Christians who promote social movements are much like the Progressives in this way? Or is it possible to also believe that it is God redeeming the individuals that also impacts these social systems.

Inasmuch as they believe in the redeemability of sinful social systems of the world - I don't see there being much light between themselves and the Social Gospelers our Great-Grandparents rejected a century ago. However, I'm not sure the "Kingdom Christians" believe in the redeemabilty of sinful social systems. They (the few that I've encountered) accept/dabble in Critical analyses of systems - those analyses themselves are sources of deconstruction but not necessarily builders of new institutions/systems. In that way the Kingdom Christians are much more like the statue-toppling "woke" Progressives than they are like the Social Gospelers that believed they were bringing Christ's Kingdom to bear at the local YMCA. Perhaps I am misreading them - perhaps in the end they really are the 2nd typology that DanZ lays out in his "3 types of Anabaptists thread" - which, if that's the case, I'm not sure how they're demonstrably different from historical Anabaptism.

[AnthonyMartin]

Sin was found in structures, institutions and society-at-large, not in the person. Their mission then was not to evangelize people so that they might be freed from sin but to remake society so that people might be freed from oppressive systems.

This seems a bit problematic to me, and possibly leaning toward a false dichotomy? I’m not so sure Progressives seeing sin problems in structures, institutions, and society-at-large, necessarily requires a movement away from sin in the individual person.

I agree with you though that an acknowledgment of the sinfulness of one does not "require" a movement away from the acknowledgement of sin in the other. Indeed, I think Anabaptists in our rejection of worldly systems are uniquely positioned to hold those two ideas in our heads at once. My point though was that Progressives particularly, by dint of their belief in man's ability to progress and through the influence of the social sciences/Darwinism that seemed to unmoor Christianity from its traditional doctrines regarding the supernatural - by and large, moved away from the conception of the sinful individual and embraced a social program to redeem the sinful institutions in a quest to establish God's Kingdom in the here and now. A very different way of viewing "Thy Kingdom Come" than even JBG/DanZ/other "Kingdom Christians" have elucidated as far as I can tell.

I would be interested in hearing you explore the connection of rejecting the "supernatural" aspects of traditional Christian doctrines and the change in the view of individual sinfulness. Wasn't the movement away from the supernatural aspect of traditional doctrine already solidified by the Deists in the late 17th Century? How did that impact the view of the natural bent of man?

[HondurasKeiser]

This seems a bit problematic to me, and possibly leaning toward a false dichotomy? I’m not so sure Progressives seeing sin problems in structures, institutions, and society-at-large, necessarily requires a movement away from sin in the individual person.

I agree with you though that an acknowledgment of the sinfulness of one does not "require" a movement away from the acknowledgement of sin in the other. Indeed, I think Anabaptists in our rejection of worldly systems are uniquely positioned to hold those two ideas in our heads at once. My point though was that Progressives particularly, by dint of their belief in man's ability to progress and through the influence of the social sciences/Darwinism that seemed to unmoor Christianity from its traditional doctrines regarding the supernatural - by and large, moved away from the conception of the sinful individual and embraced a social program to redeem the sinful institutions in a quest to establish God's Kingdom in the here and now. A very different way of viewing "Thy Kingdom Come" than even JBG/DanZ/other "Kingdom Christians" have elucidated as far as I can tell.

I would be interested in hearing you explore the connection of rejecting the "supernatural" aspects of traditional Christian doctrines and the change in the view of individual sinfulness. Wasn't the movement away from the supernatural aspect of traditional doctrine already solidified by the Deists in the late 17th Century? How did that impact the view of the natural bent of man?

Perhaps for some. Speaking of the Puritans - I read a longish essay 15 years ago about the reasons that many of the children of the Puritans became Unitarians in the late 1700's & early 1800's but I'll be darned if I can't find it or remember much of its conclusions. Deists though were a different breed as far as I can tell. Deism, flowing out of Enlightenment thinking, was a rationalist rejection of traditional doctrine regarding God's intervention in human affairs - remember the Deists held on to a notion of God because they needed a non-positivistic grounding for Natural Rights and thus the very rationale for the existence of the Social Contract. It seems to me to have been a purely philosophical affair and one that seems to have died off by the mid-1800's. The Progressives of the late 1800's were influenced by the Higher Criticism in Germany, the social sciences that exploded on to the scene in late 19th Century Germany and advances in the hard sciences. While there may be some overlap in their rejection of the supernatural - the one doesn't really seem to inform the other and indeed, more generally, the Progressives tended to reject the hyper-rationalist thinking and Social Contract theory that the elite Deists of the 1700's espoused. Both seem to be products of their particular moment.

[HondurasKeiser]

Peter j. Leithart (no Progressive) has a good essay on Social Sin and the hope of the Advent Season. It sounds like something JBG could have written.

Advent commemorates, celebrates, and kindles hope for the justice of God. King Jesus has come and his Father has raised him to Zion’s throne to reign with a rod of iron until his enemies are made his footstool (1 Cor. 15:25; cf. Ps. 110). The promise of Advent is the promise of public justice. Advent announces the coming of the Lord who breaks the arms of the sex traffickers, the drug lords, the arms dealers, and all their respectable collaborators. It’s the hope that God will overturn worlds built on oppression and violence, and will rescue and raise up their victims.

The only good news that meets the needs of the world is the good news of God’s judgment. That’s the gospel of Advent, the joy to which the angels of Advent summon us: Rejoice! Shout joyfully! For the Lord comes to judge the earth. He has come; he will come; he will judge the world in justice and all the peoples with equity.

[PetrChelcicky]

The interesting aspect for me is that prohibition has so much in common with other Christian progressive activities - like abolition, the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement or modern anti-racism or, most obviously the anti-gun movement. There's only the one great exception that prohibitionism was finished officially some ten years after, and from then on publically treated as an error.
But this has some similarity to the age of reconciliation in which the "reconstruction" was finished and the Civil War treated as an error.
On the other hand: In that case the historical judgment of the public has (been) changed again completely, and it has even been said that now is the time to restart and accomplish the "reconstruction" of the South. So, historical judgment is not eternal, and the author can quite rightly try to change our judgment. (Mark that the Scandinavian countries have preserved their prohibition laws over one hundred years.)

[PetrChelcicky]

The history of ideas as given by Honduras Keiser is certainly sound. The Christian progressivism of today is in a lot of ways a successor of the Social Gospel theology. Not at least in his central interest to reform "structures" and change laws.

I have for a while pondered why a whole generation of theologians (including Guy F. Hershberger) was so critical about "Social Gospel" when in the end they caved in to the Civil Rights Movement. (Well, the most often reproduced argument was that the Social Gospellers had been too optimistic - seemingly this could also serve as an argument to use even more state power in order to arrive at one's poltical goals.)

I personally tend to draw a historical picture which is even broader. Jacob Talmon, in his histories of "totalitarian democracy", regards Calvinism/Puritanism as the starting point of modern totalitarianism at all,from Geneva via Rousseau to the French Jacobins (and their Soviet successors), with the Cromwell dictatorship (with its interesting early attempts of a "guided" democracy) as an outlier. In this sense I draw a continuous line from the Hussite and Calvinist origins to Christian progressive politics in the 19th and 20th century.

My answer to all of that is that Christians (or Anabaptists) ought not use laws, power or force for to control the behaviour of non-Christians (non-Anabaptists). For which I rely to the "letter to Diognetus" and its description of Christian "otherness". Or the explanation of the same idea by one of the early monks: "I am like a dog. If they want me to help, I come and help. If they want me to leave, I leave."

[nett]

I would just like to say. HondurasKeiser has completely wrecked my to-read list. I have three printed out articles that he linked sitting on my table that are all at least 15 pages.

My millennial attention span can't handle that many words!!!