Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only €10,99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Dare We Be Christians
    Dare We Be Christians
    Dare We Be Christians
    Ebook53 pages36 minutes

    Dare We Be Christians

    By Walter Rauschenbusch

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

















    GOD’S world is great; too great for a little mind like mine to hold.
    I have traveled over thousands of miles of it, but for the most part my memory
    holds only a blur of space and movement.



    But there are a few places which my memory has made all my own. I know
    a place, just above Little Mud Turtle Lake, where the Gull River tilts around
    the rocks and sweeps in a curling crescent of foam around the wooded basin
    below the rapids. That place is mine because I swam in it with my boys; the
    river carried us down the rapids and around the whirlpool, shouting and
    laughing. ’Way up on the Ox Tongue River is a high, straight fall, and above it
    a platform of rock. I lay there one night in the open, while the cool night
    wind moved the treetops, and watched the constellations march across the spaces
    between them. That place is mine by the emotions and prayers it inspired.



    The world of the Bible, too, is a great world. I have wandered
    through it all, but I have never made it all my own. But some friendly hills
    and valleys in it are mine by right of experience. Some chapters have comforted
    me; some have made me homesick; some have braced me like a bugle call; and some
    always enlarge me within by a sense of unutterable fellowship with a great,
    quiet Power that pervades all things and fills me.



    Such passages make up for each of us his Bible within the Bible, and
    the extent and variety of these claims he has staked out in it measure how much
    of the great Book has really entered into the substance of his life.



    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCrossReach Publications
    Release dateDec 27, 2017
    Dare We Be Christians
    Author

    Walter Rauschenbusch

    Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918) was the leading proponent of the Social Gospel Movement whose mission was to reform society to meet the social needs of the poor through the ministrations of the institutional church. PBS recently called him "one of the most influential American religious leaders of the last 100 years."

    Read more from Walter Rauschenbusch

    Related to Dare We Be Christians

    Related ebooks

    Christianity For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related categories

    Reviews for Dare We Be Christians

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Dare We Be Christians - Walter Rauschenbusch

      DARE WE BE CHRISTIANS?

      GOD’S world is great; too great for a little mind like mine to hold. I have traveled over thousands of miles of it, but for the most part my memory holds only a blur of space and movement.

      But there are a few places which my memory has made all my own. I know a place, just above Little Mud Turtle Lake, where the Gull River tilts around the rocks and sweeps in a curling crescent of foam around the wooded basin below the rapids. That place is mine because I swam in it with my boys; the river carried us down the rapids and around the whirlpool, shouting and laughing. ’Way up on the Ox Tongue River is a high, straight fall, and above it a platform of rock. I lay there one night in the open, while the cool night wind moved the treetops, and watched the constellations march across the spaces between them. That place is mine by the emotions and prayers it inspired.

      The world of the Bible, too, is a great world. I have wandered through it all, but I have never made it all my own. But some friendly hills and valleys in it are mine by right of experience. Some chapters have comforted me; some have made me homesick; some have braced me like a bugle call; and some always enlarge me within by a sense of unutterable fellowship with a great, quiet Power that pervades all things and fills me.

      Such passages make up for each of us his Bible within the Bible, and the extent and variety of these claims he has staked out in it measure how much of the great Book has really entered into the substance of his life.

      Paul’s Praise of Love

      Some passages are common camping ground for us all. The thirteenth chapter of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians is one of these. That half-page of print has been a force in human history. If we could follow its course through the generations, we should find it marked, like the windings of a brook, by a special greenness of life, by ferns and buttercups and gentians and cardinal flowers of human kindness. It has set the mired runnels of good-will flowing again. It has gentled our resentful feelings and made us forgiving. By making us feel the worth of love, it has made us feel the worth of those we ought to love. The old psalm ascribes to the pilgrim saints of God the capacity to pass through the valley of weeping and leave it a place of springs. This saintly little chapter has done just that by its irrigation of affection and cleansed will.

      It has such power to move us because it moved Paul deeply as he wrote it. His sentences suddenly grow rhythmic. His style runs into prose-poetry. His language rocks with the wave-beat of emotion. He was sure of a similar response from the Christian hearts to whom he was writing. This chapter is first-class evidence that primitive Christianity was charged with

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1