his active life. “We must meet ourselves in our life and struggle, in our morality and religion toward God. The Bible starts out of him . . . For the Bible God is the single reality that is taken in earnest.”149 Furthermore, at the center of Kutter’s work is the insistence that the Social Democrat carried out the will of God. The atheism that was so frequently blamed by Christian conservatives (such as, for instance, Stoecker and Naumann) bears in it the stamp of the living God.
For Kutter God used Social Democracy as an instrument to awaken the church. It is to be seen as the hammer of God. The socialists must serve God’s purpose. What Kutter saw behind the hope of the Social Democrat is an unconscious Christianity. Therefore, the society has no right to complain about revolution. “The salvation becomes, at first, full in the material thing. Sin means a faulty placement of the spirit against the material. On the contrary, the spirit must direct itself again to the material.” “God’s promise fulfills itself in the Social Democrats: They must!”150 However, Kutter believed that pastors are confronted with a different kind of work in which they are to shape the conditions for the new society by being faithful to the living God. They are to proclaim a prophetic call to Christians in accordance with a life in immediacy with this living God. Kutter was more restrained about involvement with politics. He did not join the Social Democracy Party. Kutter’s prophetic call had more to do with theology and the church than with politics. Among his books, Sie Müssen! maintained a lasting influence as the founding document of the religious-social movement in Switzerland.
Unlike Blumhardt’s entrance to Social Democracy as a sign of solidarity with the poor, Kutter’s contribution to the social question meant a new form of preaching. Such an approach gave rise to the following question: to what degree does a Christian take part in the socialist movement in a practical-political way? This question remained an issue of conflict between Kutter and Ragaz. Finally the environment of the general strike in Zurich in 1912 fostered a break between Kutter and Ragaz.
Leonhard Ragaz
Unlike Kutter, Ragaz was a political activist. Ragaz was born on July 28, 1868, in Tamin, a small mountain village in Canton Graubünden in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. He grew up in the democratic atmosphere of a Swiss village and remained a strong believer in democracy all his life. Impressed by the cooperative forms of economic life among Swiss mountain farmers, he was concerned with a decentralized form of socialism. His father was active in a number of offices in the community, and his father’s interest in politics passed over to Ragaz. Because his family was constantly surrounded by financial difficulties, Ragaz was well aware of social problems from his personal experience. After graduation from high school in nearby Chur, he decided to study theology, enabled by a scholarship. He enrolled at the University of Basel and spent some time at the universities in Jena and in Berlin. He then returned to Basel.
The theological background that he learned and developed in his years of study was liberalism, especially Hegelianism. (A. E. Biedermann, who made a great impact on Ragaz, was a Swiss Hegelian theologian.) In 1890 Ragaz was ordained as a Reformed pastor and began his ministry in three villages in Canton Graubünden. During his parish work, his main concern was with the intensive study of the Bible and the theology of the priesthood of all believers, encouraging the laity to be more involved in parish life. Between 1893 and 1895 Ragaz served as a language and religion teacher in Chur in part for health reasons, and also in part due to his dissatisfaction with ministry. During this time he was in contact with the writings of Christian socialism, including Carlyle, Kingsley, and Robertson, and German authors such as Naumann.
In 1895 Ragaz returned to the pastorate as a senior pastor in Chur and remained there until 1902. Influenced by the writings of Kierkegaard and Ritschl, he was preoccupied with ethics. In Chur he met Clara Nadig and married her. She remained a supportive companion throughout his difficult life. His experience with social issues was later deepened when, in the pastorate in Chur, Ragaz came into contact with poverty and social problems such as bad housing, poor working conditions, broken families, prostitution, criminality, and alcoholism. Later he wrote about this experience, saying it was “the comprehensive solidarity of guilt.”.151 Involved in an educational program for workers and giving talks to worker’s groups, Ragaz was given Karl Marx’s Das Kapital as an expression of gratitude from the laborers’ association. In 1902 he received a call from the Münster Cathedral in Basel. During his pastorate in Basel, the kingdom of God became, for him, the central teaching of Christianity. Seeing the kingdom of God as a gift of God, Ragaz called for human participation in the coming of God’s kingdom. Wherever people work for justice, peace, and humanity, one will find the signs of God’s kingdom. The labor movement was one of the most important signs of God’s kingdom for Ragaz.
Ragaz later experienced the great bricklayers’ strike in 1903. Troops were called to intervene. In his sermon known as the “Bricklayers’ Strike Sermon,” Ragaz claimed that Christ was on the side of the oppressed. The social movement, which for him was associated with the “humanization of humans,” became a sign of the kingdom of God; therefore, Christians are asked to take part in the struggle for the oppressed: “So the social movement is in its deepest ground a realization of the idea which stands in the middle point of the gospel: Human beings as the children of God and the brotherhood of humans . . . Who understands it, sees, in spite of all wave and storm, the blowing and ruling of the creative Spirit of God.”152
Shortly after the “Bricklayers’ Strike Sermon,” Ragaz became acquainted with Pastor Hermann Kutter in Zurich. Together Ragaz and Kutter founded a religious-social movement to join in the struggle for the humanization of humanity, “in the drama of the humanizing of mankind, whose value we do not quite realize yet.”153 Interestingly enough, Herrmann’s concern for the working class echoed in the development of religious socialism. Herrmann’s concern for socialism—regardless of his individualist bent—was mediated by Oskar Holtzmann. The thesis of “the social movement as the unconscious bringer of divine will” came out ten years earlier than Kutter’s book Sie Müssen!, and six years earlier than Blumhardt’s entrance to the social democratic party.
Herrmann’s thesis reads: “The Christian church has to thank modern socialism that her horizon is expanded, her formation of thought is deepened, in short, her inner life is enriched.”154 It was delivered by Herrmann as an address to the Evangelical Social Congress in 1891. Ragaz accepted Holtzman’s reappropriation of Herrmann’s socialism as the legitimate child of the Reformation for his development of religious socialism.155 Kutter’s book Sie Müssen! also made a significant contribution to the task of theology, especially in Switzerland. In 1906 Ragaz delivered his address “The Gospel and the Current Social Struggle” (“Das Evangelium und der soziale Kampf der Gegenwart”) at a pastors’ conference in Basel. This is one of the fundamental documents through which Ragaz was able to deepen and actualize religious socialism in terms of his theology of God’s kingdom and to bring to the fore its social and political implications. As the second thesis reads, “The Kingdom of God is the central concept of the good news. Jesus teaches the worth of each child of God as well as the brotherhood of men under God. Jesus sees Mammon as the greatest enemy of man.”156
According to Ragaz, socialism in its basic goals provides “the direction that will lead us out of capitalism to the next higher level in historical development.”157 Ragaz’s intent in this regard was not to identify the teachings of Christ with socialism. Rather his “task is simply to determine which telos an economic order must have if it is to harmonize with the life-style required by the gospel.”
