Dangerously Plausible?

Of all the controversial subjects that divide Christendom, one of the most divisive is church unity. Two months ago, John D. Rockefeller Jr. made a well-intentioned plea for church unity (TIME, Feb. 12). Last week, as it must to all such pleas, came a stern rebuke. "Shocking," said Long Island's Anglo-Catholic (high church) Protestant Episcopal Bishop James P. De Wolfe, ". . . and contrary to the doctrine of the Church."

Layman Rockefeller had warned the churches that their survival hinged on their joining in a "great rebirth," had urged them to "pronounce ordinance, ritual, creed, all nonessential for admission into the Kingdom of God or His Church. ... A life, not a creed, would be the test." He pleaded for "a more spiritual and less formal religion . . . not for modification of form but for its subordination to the spirit."

Bishop De Wolfe's doctrinal dander rose when the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America and the Protestant Council of New York City distributed 300,000 copies of a pamphlet containing the Rockefeller speech. In a pastoral letter published in the Episcopal weekly, The Living Church, he charged that the Rockefeller statements "declare that baptism is unnecessary to church membership and that the Lord's Supper, although termed 'a sacrament,' is a symbol whose beauty is not always expedient. . . . The New Testament, the Creed and the agelong practice of the church do not concur with Mr. Rockefeller's evaluation. . . . The church [should] withdraw from the Federal Council, if the Council maintains and does not repudiate its seeming approval. ..."

Editorially, The Living Church stood squarely behind the Bishop: "The type of religion advocated by Mr. Rockefeller is especially dangerous because it seems plausible to the pragmatic American man-in-the-pew."

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