Abstract:
This work aims to present the Social Gospel Movement, considered the main expression that influenced the American church in the last one hundred and thirty years. A social movement of great importance and repercussion in English-speaking countries, mainly the United States and Canada, and which has been the precursor of important social movements, such as: the Civil Rights Movement, and the Theology of Liberation, in Latin America. The origins of the Social Gospel, its theology, sources of liberal theology and biblical sources of the movement, practical evolution and possible applications and implications for the current Church will be considered. As the Social Gospel Movement is a topic little researched in Brazil, there are almost no specific dissertations or theses on the topic, and there is only one specific book published, it was decided to enrich the research with many direct citations on relevant works on the topic. The research is organized into three chapters. In the first chapter we will present the Social Gospel Movement, its history and definitions, the context of American society at the end of the 19th century, the position of the Protestant church and its fundamentalist character in reaction to the Social Gospel movement. The second chapter will be dedicated to Walter Rauschenbusch, the most influential proponent of the social gospel movement in America. Here we will consider the relevance of liberal theology in his writings, a brief biography of Rauschenbusch and an examination of his Social Gospel Theology. In the third chapter, concepts and ideas about the Kingdom of God will be discussed. Given the importance of the theme to Social Gospel Theology, we will make an exegetical summary of Matthew 5.3-10, highlighting the social theme of the proposed text. Based on this exegetical summary, aspects of the beatitudes that overlap with the social perspective will be highlighted, highlighting discoveries that allow us to establish the relationship between the Social Gospel and the social function of the Kingdom of God contained in these beatitudes. Finally, aspects about the Kingdom of God will be considered, its centrality in the preaching of Jesus and the main concepts of biblical theology, seeking to establish a dialogue between the ideas of biblical theologians, focusing on the social issue about the Kingdom of God, relating them to comparing them with the proposal of the Social Gospel.
