The Gospel of the Rauschmonstrum by Nick LaTorre

Walter began at age fourteen, thus he was quite far behind at the outset. Usually boys would enter at age nine, & graduate at age eighteen. German prep schools were so rigorous that graduation was considered equivalent to a bachelor’s degree in America. When he finished high school, his father took him to Germany to The Gymnasium at Gutersloh. At age sixteen he became quite serious about his faith in God, & from then on it was assumed he was headed for the ministry. Walter was a really smart kid, creative & curious. They returned when Walter was eight years old, so that he could begin school.By that time he was already comfortable speaking & reading both German and English. In fact, when Walter was four years old his mother took the kids to Germany without her husband, where they stayed for four years. His mother and father were living in what was, by all accounts, an extremely unhappy marriage. His father was a professor at the Baptist Seminary. Walter was the first Rauschenbusch to be born in America (1861), and he grew up in Rochester, NY. Six generations of Rauschenbusch men before him had been pastors including his father August, who moved to America & converted to the Baptist Denomination (not exactly pleasing his German Lutheran family). Walter Rauschenbusch’s family came from Germany in the mid 1800s.

I even wrote my first book, in part, as an attempt to reinterpret Rauschenbusch from a post-liberal point of view. But, the book so captured my imagination that I read everything of Rauschenbusch I could get my hands on. I had never heard of Rauschenbusch, so my plan was to hurry through it so I could get on to Karl Barth or Reinhold Niebuhr, guys I cared about. In one of my favorite seminary courses we were assigned the book A Theology for the Social Gospel, by Walter Rauschenbusch.

The Gospel of the Rauschmonstrum by Nick LaTorre