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The Prophetic Imperative: Social Gospel in Theory and Practice
Book by Gilbert, Richard S.
- GenresSocial Justice
Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
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February 7, 2016Quotes:
"We are in the process of learning that church social action is not a small band of marginal activists in the church decrying church inaction or seeking to represent the whole church. Rather, it is a congregational process of coming to terms with the mission of the religious community in a society that sometimes confuses the separation of church and state with the divorce of religion and public policy.", xii-xiii
"[S]ocial change today requires much more than charismatic individuals. It requires the mobilization of individual energies into communal power.", 6
"The prophetic church is a religious community that seeks to intervene in human history for the sake of social justice. This intervention is made in the context of religious conviction, but without the supernatural confidence of the Hebrew prophets.", 7
"Systemic change suggests that social action should be directed at underlying causes of social problems rather than merely at their symptoms. Treating symptoms alone, while often necessary, might well be a soporific to cover fundamental injustice, putting the proverbial Band-Aid on a cancer. Thus, food kitchens, however laudable, might merely feed the victims of a fundamentally unjust social order instead of rooting out the causes of their hunger. A systemic approach challenges the underlying premises of the American economy, which produces poverty in the midst of plenty and deals with public policy issues: taxation, government welfare programs, and income distribution, among others.", 8
"Real social education, radical education, digs to the roots of our problems and reveals pictures that are often unpleasant for those in power to view.", 10
"Yet that is what will be required if any semblance of justice is to be realized in our land. It is so much easier to give someone bread to eat than to change the structures that make them hungry in the first place. . . . To inveigh against poverty and to collect food for charitable distribution are laudable as far as they go, but they don't go far enough toward addressing the basic cause of social problems.", 13
"If liberal churches can mobilize themselves only to create more and better food kitchens and do not resolutely seek out the causes of hunger in a land of plenty, . . . then I charge they are ethically irresponsible.", 13
"We need to be equally skilled in comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, who, after all, may be us.", 14
"I submit that one of the central missions of the Unitarian Universalist movement is trying to fix these cracks, repairing the world and creating the Beloved Community of Love and Justice. The inner urge to work in the service of this vision I call the prophetic imperative, the sewing together of spirituality and social action as a seamless garment.", 19
"I find that the term Beloved Community is a humanistically oriented substitute for Kingdom of God, deftly finessing issues of sexism, patriarchy, and theology and creating a poetic metaphor to describe not theological salvation in the next world, but social salvation in this.", 26
"In short, what is our religious mission statement? My attempt to create one for myself goes as follows: 'In the love of beauty and the spirit of truth, we unite for the celebration of life and the service of humanity.' This is my faith as a militant mystic, a spiritual core coupled with an ethical imperative. By themselves, neither of these values can survive. They must stand together or the whole thing will fall apart.", 28
"In this new millennium we will need to do some serious soul-searching and world repairing--the two go hand in hand. We of the liberal religious faith are slowly, but steadily, being marginalized, overwhelmed by a confident fundamentalist political theology that threatens to engulf us utterly. However disparagingly we may speak of the Religious Right, it has tapped into something very deep; it has given its followers a spiritual rootedness in a dogmatic faith and a sense of purpose grounded in an absolutist politics.
"We who eschew dogma and reject absolutism will need to work harder than the denizens of the Right, for our faith demands more of us. We need the power of condition even in the face of our ultimate uncertainty about the nature of reality and right and wrong. While it is perhaps better to be vaguely right than absolutely wrong, the very nature of our faith requires of us deeper conditions.
"The times are dire, but then people who live under the prophetic imperative are always worried. I am hopeful, though not optimistic, about our capacity to repair the world in the face of the many unjust assaults upon it.", 29
"And it takes more than opinions to build the Beloved Community of Love and Justice. It will take a cadre of militant mystics whose gratitude for living is so pervasive that it overflows in the social life. Spirituality and social action are a seamless garment--a coat of many colors.", 29
"[Theodore Parker] evidently thought the clergy were beholden to the merchants: 'As a general rule, the clergy are on the side of power. . . . The clergy also are unconsciously bought up, their speech paid for, or their silence.' He accused these clergy of 'sitting drowsy in their Church of Commerce.'", 42
"His sophistication about the structural nature of society is revealed in a brief but seminal discussion of power, which James Luther Adams believes is the first systematic treatment of that subject by an American minister. Parker listed four major power configurations: commercial or trading power, political power, ecclesiastical power, and literary power (the college and the press). These were the forces that controlled society and with which any reformer must come to terms. In words more prophetic than he knew, he believed that commercial power dominated political power. 'It can manufacture governors, senators, judges, to suit its purposes, as easily as it can make cotton cloth. . . . Your Congress is its mirror.' He concluded simply, 'Money is power.'", 43
"'I pray every single second of my life; not on my knees, but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me. I cannot imagine a God of the universe made happy by my getting down on my knees and calling him great.'", Susan B. Anthony, 46
"In [Dr. Frank Oliver Hall's] 1909 address he said that 'the abject poverty of the many and the immeasurable wealth of the few is a disgrace not to the rich or the poverty-stricken individual necessarily, but to all of us who consent that such an unjust order of things should continue.'" 53
"Holmes responded to the controversy by withdrawing from the fellowship of Unitarian ministers. At the same time his church left the denomination. Holmes then launched a community church movement with his own church in the forefront. He drafted a statement of purpose for the new church: 'The Community Church is an institution of religion dedicated to the service of humanity. It is distinctive from other churches in these points: . . . It substitutes for loyalty to the single denomination, loyalty to the social group. It's first affiliation is. It with any denomination, but with the community as a whole. It substitutes for a private group of persons held together by common theological beliefs or viewpoints, the public group of citizens held together by common social interests. . . . It substitutes for the individual the social group S an object of salvation. It interprets religion in terms of social reconstruction, and dedicated its members to the fulfillment of social idealism. . . . The core of its faith, as the purpose of its life, is the Beloved Community.'" 55-56
"[Holmes] discerned that for individuals to be saved, the society must be saved: 'The church will care . . . not so much for emancipating men from what we call sin, as for emancipating them from the conditions of life and labor which make sin inevitable; not so much for saving souls, as doe saving the society which molds the souls for eternal good or ill.'" 56
"So we are functionally ultimate in that we must make choices out of our own concept of truth and goodness. We are actors in the drama of life, but not its director. We must in the end make a decision, fraught with subjectivity, regarding the truth claims we make. This is not the same as saying we are omnicompetent or omnipotent. We live in a reality greater than ourselves; as finite creatures we make sense of it as best we can. . . . In the least analysis, any decision we make constitutes a wager. We make a decision based on truth as we understand it, although we cannot demonstrate the truth of our choice. . . . The individual, then, is a co-creator of freedom, authority and value. No one can make absolute truth claims, for each of us is limited by our own circumscribed perspective. We engage in the quest for truth as coequals, able to criticize one another, to test alternatives, and to choose on the basis of the increased insight. Hence, a community is critical to the process of decision making. The use of freedom, reason, and tolerance is a central feature of the liberal religious community that has consistently rejected special revelation. Truth claims must be open to criticism by people as coequal centers of choosing.", 68
"Theology, then, begins with the self--the first bit of raw data that we encounter as theologians. Hence, our understanding of human nature becomes determinative for our theologizing. The self has transactions with ultimate reality, with historical reality, with social reality, and with the reality of its own depth--call it soul, if you will. Out of these transactions emerge values and meanings I call religious." 70-71
"It may be, for instance, that God is best understood not as a noun, but as a verb. That is, the word may not refer to any being up there or out there or even in there, but to a divine process of which we are part. It may be that we experience the sacred in relational power--that it is created out of the gathering of people in worship or in pursuit of a noble cause. Or God might be understood by the activist as the source of unrest in the world; that is, the vision of what we regard as divine, contrasted with the reality in which we live, mandates action to bring the ideal and the real closer together." 75
"Wiseman does not allow himself to be trapped by the theist-humanist debate. It is, he says, like the person who asks, when seeing an automobile for the first time, what makes it go? Does someone push it or is there a hidden horse pulling it? The answer is neither; rather, it is the exploding gasoline. 'Creativity is not God in the traditional sense of that word. But neither does it operate under the control of human purpose.' Creativity operates both in terms of the human mind and in terms of that which creates the human mind. 'This is the kind of transcendence involved in religious commitment to the creativity operating in human existence.'" 77
"We are in the process of learning that church social action is not a small band of marginal activists in the church decrying church inaction or seeking to represent the whole church. Rather, it is a congregational process of coming to terms with the mission of the religious community in a society that sometimes confuses the separation of church and state with the divorce of religion and public policy.", xii-xiii
"[S]ocial change today requires much more than charismatic individuals. It requires the mobilization of individual energies into communal power.", 6
"The prophetic church is a religious community that seeks to intervene in human history for the sake of social justice. This intervention is made in the context of religious conviction, but without the supernatural confidence of the Hebrew prophets.", 7
"Systemic change suggests that social action should be directed at underlying causes of social problems rather than merely at their symptoms. Treating symptoms alone, while often necessary, might well be a soporific to cover fundamental injustice, putting the proverbial Band-Aid on a cancer. Thus, food kitchens, however laudable, might merely feed the victims of a fundamentally unjust social order instead of rooting out the causes of their hunger. A systemic approach challenges the underlying premises of the American economy, which produces poverty in the midst of plenty and deals with public policy issues: taxation, government welfare programs, and income distribution, among others.", 8
"Real social education, radical education, digs to the roots of our problems and reveals pictures that are often unpleasant for those in power to view.", 10
"Yet that is what will be required if any semblance of justice is to be realized in our land. It is so much easier to give someone bread to eat than to change the structures that make them hungry in the first place. . . . To inveigh against poverty and to collect food for charitable distribution are laudable as far as they go, but they don't go far enough toward addressing the basic cause of social problems.", 13
"If liberal churches can mobilize themselves only to create more and better food kitchens and do not resolutely seek out the causes of hunger in a land of plenty, . . . then I charge they are ethically irresponsible.", 13
"We need to be equally skilled in comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, who, after all, may be us.", 14
"I submit that one of the central missions of the Unitarian Universalist movement is trying to fix these cracks, repairing the world and creating the Beloved Community of Love and Justice. The inner urge to work in the service of this vision I call the prophetic imperative, the sewing together of spirituality and social action as a seamless garment.", 19
"I find that the term Beloved Community is a humanistically oriented substitute for Kingdom of God, deftly finessing issues of sexism, patriarchy, and theology and creating a poetic metaphor to describe not theological salvation in the next world, but social salvation in this.", 26
"In short, what is our religious mission statement? My attempt to create one for myself goes as follows: 'In the love of beauty and the spirit of truth, we unite for the celebration of life and the service of humanity.' This is my faith as a militant mystic, a spiritual core coupled with an ethical imperative. By themselves, neither of these values can survive. They must stand together or the whole thing will fall apart.", 28
"In this new millennium we will need to do some serious soul-searching and world repairing--the two go hand in hand. We of the liberal religious faith are slowly, but steadily, being marginalized, overwhelmed by a confident fundamentalist political theology that threatens to engulf us utterly. However disparagingly we may speak of the Religious Right, it has tapped into something very deep; it has given its followers a spiritual rootedness in a dogmatic faith and a sense of purpose grounded in an absolutist politics.
"We who eschew dogma and reject absolutism will need to work harder than the denizens of the Right, for our faith demands more of us. We need the power of condition even in the face of our ultimate uncertainty about the nature of reality and right and wrong. While it is perhaps better to be vaguely right than absolutely wrong, the very nature of our faith requires of us deeper conditions.
"The times are dire, but then people who live under the prophetic imperative are always worried. I am hopeful, though not optimistic, about our capacity to repair the world in the face of the many unjust assaults upon it.", 29
"And it takes more than opinions to build the Beloved Community of Love and Justice. It will take a cadre of militant mystics whose gratitude for living is so pervasive that it overflows in the social life. Spirituality and social action are a seamless garment--a coat of many colors.", 29
"[Theodore Parker] evidently thought the clergy were beholden to the merchants: 'As a general rule, the clergy are on the side of power. . . . The clergy also are unconsciously bought up, their speech paid for, or their silence.' He accused these clergy of 'sitting drowsy in their Church of Commerce.'", 42
"His sophistication about the structural nature of society is revealed in a brief but seminal discussion of power, which James Luther Adams believes is the first systematic treatment of that subject by an American minister. Parker listed four major power configurations: commercial or trading power, political power, ecclesiastical power, and literary power (the college and the press). These were the forces that controlled society and with which any reformer must come to terms. In words more prophetic than he knew, he believed that commercial power dominated political power. 'It can manufacture governors, senators, judges, to suit its purposes, as easily as it can make cotton cloth. . . . Your Congress is its mirror.' He concluded simply, 'Money is power.'", 43
"'I pray every single second of my life; not on my knees, but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me. I cannot imagine a God of the universe made happy by my getting down on my knees and calling him great.'", Susan B. Anthony, 46
"In [Dr. Frank Oliver Hall's] 1909 address he said that 'the abject poverty of the many and the immeasurable wealth of the few is a disgrace not to the rich or the poverty-stricken individual necessarily, but to all of us who consent that such an unjust order of things should continue.'" 53
"Holmes responded to the controversy by withdrawing from the fellowship of Unitarian ministers. At the same time his church left the denomination. Holmes then launched a community church movement with his own church in the forefront. He drafted a statement of purpose for the new church: 'The Community Church is an institution of religion dedicated to the service of humanity. It is distinctive from other churches in these points: . . . It substitutes for loyalty to the single denomination, loyalty to the social group. It's first affiliation is. It with any denomination, but with the community as a whole. It substitutes for a private group of persons held together by common theological beliefs or viewpoints, the public group of citizens held together by common social interests. . . . It substitutes for the individual the social group S an object of salvation. It interprets religion in terms of social reconstruction, and dedicated its members to the fulfillment of social idealism. . . . The core of its faith, as the purpose of its life, is the Beloved Community.'" 55-56
"[Holmes] discerned that for individuals to be saved, the society must be saved: 'The church will care . . . not so much for emancipating men from what we call sin, as for emancipating them from the conditions of life and labor which make sin inevitable; not so much for saving souls, as doe saving the society which molds the souls for eternal good or ill.'" 56
"So we are functionally ultimate in that we must make choices out of our own concept of truth and goodness. We are actors in the drama of life, but not its director. We must in the end make a decision, fraught with subjectivity, regarding the truth claims we make. This is not the same as saying we are omnicompetent or omnipotent. We live in a reality greater than ourselves; as finite creatures we make sense of it as best we can. . . . In the least analysis, any decision we make constitutes a wager. We make a decision based on truth as we understand it, although we cannot demonstrate the truth of our choice. . . . The individual, then, is a co-creator of freedom, authority and value. No one can make absolute truth claims, for each of us is limited by our own circumscribed perspective. We engage in the quest for truth as coequals, able to criticize one another, to test alternatives, and to choose on the basis of the increased insight. Hence, a community is critical to the process of decision making. The use of freedom, reason, and tolerance is a central feature of the liberal religious community that has consistently rejected special revelation. Truth claims must be open to criticism by people as coequal centers of choosing.", 68
"Theology, then, begins with the self--the first bit of raw data that we encounter as theologians. Hence, our understanding of human nature becomes determinative for our theologizing. The self has transactions with ultimate reality, with historical reality, with social reality, and with the reality of its own depth--call it soul, if you will. Out of these transactions emerge values and meanings I call religious." 70-71
"It may be, for instance, that God is best understood not as a noun, but as a verb. That is, the word may not refer to any being up there or out there or even in there, but to a divine process of which we are part. It may be that we experience the sacred in relational power--that it is created out of the gathering of people in worship or in pursuit of a noble cause. Or God might be understood by the activist as the source of unrest in the world; that is, the vision of what we regard as divine, contrasted with the reality in which we live, mandates action to bring the ideal and the real closer together." 75
"Wiseman does not allow himself to be trapped by the theist-humanist debate. It is, he says, like the person who asks, when seeing an automobile for the first time, what makes it go? Does someone push it or is there a hidden horse pulling it? The answer is neither; rather, it is the exploding gasoline. 'Creativity is not God in the traditional sense of that word. But neither does it operate under the control of human purpose.' Creativity operates both in terms of the human mind and in terms of that which creates the human mind. 'This is the kind of transcendence involved in religious commitment to the creativity operating in human existence.'" 77
May 24, 2025
"In this new millennium we will need to do some serious soul-searching and world repairing--the two go hand in hand. We of the liberal religious faith are slowly, but steadily, being marginalized, overwhelmed by a confident fundamentalist political theology that threatens to engulf us utterly. However disparagingly we may speak of the Religious Right, it has tapped into something very deep; it has given its followers a spiritual rootedness in a dogmatic faith and a sense of purpose grounded in an absolutist politics."
"We who eschew dogma and reject absolutism will need to work harder than the denizens of the Right, for our faith demands more of us. We need the power of condition even in the face of our ultimate uncertainty about the nature of reality and right and wrong. While it is perhaps better to be vaguely right than absolutely wrong, the very nature of our faith requires of us deeper conditions.".
The times are dire, but then people who live under the prophetic imperative are always worried. I am hopeful, though not optimistic, about our capacity to repair the world in the face of the many unjust assaults upon it (p.29).
It is my personal conviction that the fundamentalists have gained the upper hand not because of the superiority of their dogma, but rather because we Liberals have failed to exercise our prophetic voice with authority. It is this that Richard S. Gilbert addresses in The Prophetic Imperative.
The Prophetic Imperative: Social gospel in Theory and Practice, is not a how to save the world book, but rather a practical challenge to the beloved community of faith to proclaim the Social Gospel in a way that is Prophetic.
"[S]ocial change today,” Gilbert writes, “requires much more than charismatic individuals. It requires the mobilization of individual energies into communal power (p.6).” He goes on to say, "The prophetic church is a religious community that seeks to intervene in human history for the sake of social justice. This intervention is made in the context of religious conviction, but without the supernatural confidence of the Hebrew prophets (p.7)."
It is the “super natural confidence of the Hebrew prophets” that Gilbert calls us to emulate.
The Hebrew prophets weren’t about treating the symptoms of social problems. They were about treating the underlying causes of social injustice, Gilbert reminds us. A prophetic ministry is about directing solutions to underlying causes. Not that it is not sometimes necessary to treat the symptoms, but doing that alone merely keeps us constantly administering the proverbial Band-Aids. Our challenge is to find a systematic approach that challenges the social and economic status quo that perpetuates social injustices.
Such a systematic approach is much more than papers and programs, it is hands on action that takes place on the streets, at the polls, and through political pressure.
Gilbert uses the term “Beloved community” as a "humanistically oriented substitute for Kingdom of God, deftly finessing issues of sexism, patriarchy, and theology and creating a poetic metaphor to describe not theological salvation in the next world, but social salvation in this (p. 26).
What does that mean in term of mission? Gilbert writes,
In short, what is our religious mission statement? My attempt to create one for myself goes as follows: 'In the love of beauty and the spirit of truth, we unite for the celebration of life and the service of humanity.' This is my faith as a militant mystic, a spiritual core coupled with an ethical imperative. By themselves, neither of these values can survive. They must stand together or the whole thing will fall apart (p. 28).
It is this mission statement that Gilbert expands in The Prophetic Imperative: Social Gospel in Theory and Practice. The book is broken into two parts: The first explores the “Theoretical Foundations” of the prophetic imperative. The second, “The Social Gospel in Practice.” Both sections are personal. Gilbert writes as “Militant Mystic” out to repair the world. If we would be true to our Liberal calling, The Prophetic Imperative has much to offer.
Skinner House offers a study guide for congregations.
"We who eschew dogma and reject absolutism will need to work harder than the denizens of the Right, for our faith demands more of us. We need the power of condition even in the face of our ultimate uncertainty about the nature of reality and right and wrong. While it is perhaps better to be vaguely right than absolutely wrong, the very nature of our faith requires of us deeper conditions.".
The times are dire, but then people who live under the prophetic imperative are always worried. I am hopeful, though not optimistic, about our capacity to repair the world in the face of the many unjust assaults upon it (p.29).
It is my personal conviction that the fundamentalists have gained the upper hand not because of the superiority of their dogma, but rather because we Liberals have failed to exercise our prophetic voice with authority. It is this that Richard S. Gilbert addresses in The Prophetic Imperative.
The Prophetic Imperative: Social gospel in Theory and Practice, is not a how to save the world book, but rather a practical challenge to the beloved community of faith to proclaim the Social Gospel in a way that is Prophetic.
"[S]ocial change today,” Gilbert writes, “requires much more than charismatic individuals. It requires the mobilization of individual energies into communal power (p.6).” He goes on to say, "The prophetic church is a religious community that seeks to intervene in human history for the sake of social justice. This intervention is made in the context of religious conviction, but without the supernatural confidence of the Hebrew prophets (p.7)."
It is the “super natural confidence of the Hebrew prophets” that Gilbert calls us to emulate.
The Hebrew prophets weren’t about treating the symptoms of social problems. They were about treating the underlying causes of social injustice, Gilbert reminds us. A prophetic ministry is about directing solutions to underlying causes. Not that it is not sometimes necessary to treat the symptoms, but doing that alone merely keeps us constantly administering the proverbial Band-Aids. Our challenge is to find a systematic approach that challenges the social and economic status quo that perpetuates social injustices.
Such a systematic approach is much more than papers and programs, it is hands on action that takes place on the streets, at the polls, and through political pressure.
Gilbert uses the term “Beloved community” as a "humanistically oriented substitute for Kingdom of God, deftly finessing issues of sexism, patriarchy, and theology and creating a poetic metaphor to describe not theological salvation in the next world, but social salvation in this (p. 26).
What does that mean in term of mission? Gilbert writes,
In short, what is our religious mission statement? My attempt to create one for myself goes as follows: 'In the love of beauty and the spirit of truth, we unite for the celebration of life and the service of humanity.' This is my faith as a militant mystic, a spiritual core coupled with an ethical imperative. By themselves, neither of these values can survive. They must stand together or the whole thing will fall apart (p. 28).
It is this mission statement that Gilbert expands in The Prophetic Imperative: Social Gospel in Theory and Practice. The book is broken into two parts: The first explores the “Theoretical Foundations” of the prophetic imperative. The second, “The Social Gospel in Practice.” Both sections are personal. Gilbert writes as “Militant Mystic” out to repair the world. If we would be true to our Liberal calling, The Prophetic Imperative has much to offer.
Skinner House offers a study guide for congregations.
August 2, 2008
This book provides a quick history of UUs & Social Movements in the US, as well as a gloss of theology & organizing, plus it's got a practical description of the "rochester model" that Gilbert developed for working on social justice issues based on having a group of people committed to it and supporting them with a plan (this is essentially the "Justice Associates" model we have at UUOakland right now -in some ways its great, in some ways it's not)
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