Again, the Social Gospel

What was the cardinal error of the Social Gospel? It was not that it advocated social and economic reform as part of Christian responsibility; if the Christian faith is to be relevant to the common life at all, it must make the Christian citizen particularly sensitive to the need for reform, where such need is found to exist. Nor was it merely that the Social Gospel, at least through some of its representatives, came out for the replacement of the capitalist economy by socialism; however misconceived this agitation was, it was not this that constituted the theological vice of the Social Gospel.

Herberg