Faith and Future

Latest effort to formulate a practicable faith for a world in a flux is a brief (104-page) symposium called A Righteous Faith for a Just and Durable Peace. The pamphlet was issued by the commission picked by the Federal Council of Churches to study the basis of a Just and Durable Peace. The contributors include John Foster Dulles (head of the commission), William Ernest Hocking,Henry P. Van Dusen, Luther A. Weigle, John Mackay, Pitirim A. Sorokin, Harry Emerson Fosdick. The little 25-c- book brings within the reach of everyone the most recent Protestant thought on the problem which is vital not only to the establishment of lasting peace but to the winning of the war.

By Action. Precisely because he writes as a layman for laymen, Lawyer John Foster Dulles' paper is of special importance. He says: "There are those who assert that during war our thoughts should be of nothing beyond military victory and that the Christian virtues should be laid aside and dependence placed upon primitive emotions. The demand that Christians thus choose between Christ and State is one that can be and must be rejected. To reject it involves no disloyalty to State, for what we are seeking for the American people is nothing that will prove a weakness. Our purpose is that the American people be filled with a righteous faith and sense of mission in the world."

How, asks Mr. Dulles, are we to achieve this sense of mission? He answers: by action--"by action based upon seeing, understanding, and thinking. We urge that men clarify their vision so that they may see truly the world in which they live; that they purify their spirits so that they may be comprehending; that they free their minds of paralyzing emotions so that they may be competent. We then ask for action. Out of action directed by such qualities of vision, of soul, of mind, will be born the faith that will make us strong."

Among the group of able minds represented in this book, two especially clarify and amplify Mr. Dulles' thesis. They are William Ernest Hocking, chairman of Harvard's philosophy department, and Henry P. Van Dusen of Union Theological Seminary.

World-Deep. Professor Hocking's subject is the spiritual task of the churches in wartime. He says: "Men have labored a thousand years to make civilization stable; war shows the frailty of their wisdom. War is thus the great evil, and the great revealer of flaws; it is the great darkness when man's artificial light goes out; it is the ruthless exposer of shame. Now it is the function of religion to solve the 'problem of evil' for men none of whom escape evil. Since war is the great evil, it is the ultimate task of religion; unless religion can meet it, it is no good. It has been the power of Christianity that it has sought no escape from the abyss of evil; it is the religion not of avoidance but of overcoming."

For the soldier facing death, the Church, "by its presentation of the supreme value, is the natural source of all proportion in the field of value; not even death, ruin, upheaval are absolute and unfaceable evils." For the prosperous and complacent the Church's role is "to 'stab such spirits broad awake' and compel them to take part in the anguish and bewilderment of their time." For all men, "unless the Church can give them truth it can give them nothing." Truth, Professor Hocking says, is to be found in the mind of Christ: "it is the function of the Church to discern 'the mind of Christ'; and to announce concretely the divine attitude which man in wartime may strive toward." "The Christian," he says, "has never the right to despair."

World-Wide. If Professor Hocking's phase of faith is world-deep, the phase which Professor Van Dusen investigates is worldwide: the job of the churches in furthering a World Order.

More & more in the past century Christian leaders have begun to think of their churches as members of a "World Community." This development has gone on along two main lines: "a movement of expansion" and "a movement of consolidation." The first is the Christian wishing; the second is the effort toward Christian unity. World War II has put both these movements to a supreme test. "Amidst a humanity rent into embattled segments, what reality," asks Professor Van Dusen, "could be preserved for a universal spiritual fellowship?" He finds a partial answer in: 1) the heroic resistance of the churches in Germany and in the Nazi-conquered countries; 2) the continued work of the missions despite the war; 3) the projected World Council of Churches with a "provisional committee" and secretariat in Geneva, London and New York and a membership of churches in 28 countries.

Professor Van Dusen has no illusions about the present influence of "World Christianity." But he believes that it may raise up "here and there into the leadership of nations . . . men and women deeply committed to the realization of world peace through world order even at the price of national sacrifice." He believes, too, that it holds up "before all who will see . . . the only basis upon which world order can be securely founded--conviction of the essential and indissoluble brotherhood of all mankind under the common fatherhood of the Living Sovereign of all humanity."

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