1910's Religion | Rauschenbusch, Walter 1861-1918

BAPTIST MINISTER AND THEOLOGIAN

Youth.

For Walter Rauschenbusch, becoming a pastor was not only a matter of finding a calling but also a family tradition. He was the seventh in a line of pastors that reached back to seventeenth-century Germany. But Rauschenbusch, born in 1861 in the United States, became the most liberal and best known in his family lineage. His father, August Rauschenbusch was one of the great patriarchs of American Baptists after shocking his family by converting from Lutheran to Baptist after he moved to America in 1846. Walter followed in his father's foot-steps, though he would eventually approach Christianity differently from the conservative Baptists of the Rochester Seminary, where his father was a professor from 1857 to 1888. Despite his father's altered faith in the New World, Walter Rauschenbusch developed strong ties to Germany, ties that would later cause him grief as World War I began, and...