We must distinguish between what we call politics and what we call religion (in the highest sense). Politics cannot exist without a struggle for worldly power, but religion (at any rate that religion which is in the spirit of Christ) wishes the opposite: to reject all power for the sake of God and humanity. Politics wants to rule; religion wants to serve. In this sense, socialism, as it is generally understood, is a political movement. I believe we have to say more precisely that it is a partly political, partly religious movement. It wants to break away from the old power politics, the politics of exploitation and domination of one class by another, and substitute a politics of justice, solidarity, and mutual helpfulness. Thus does socialism stand, as it were, between politics and religion. But under no circumstances can one expect of it that highest level that the Kingdom of Christ expects of its citizens. For this, certain presuppositions are essential that are not necessary found in socialism. The wish of each Christian remains that socialism would some day dissolve in the Kingdom of God, allowing politics and religion to converge, but today we hare only on the way.
Leonhard Ragatz in Signs of the Kingdom: A Ragatz Reader, 57 (1917)