No Pentecost

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And they were all amazed and marveled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans? And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born? Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.

--Acts 2: 7-11

In Amsterdam's great white-plastered Wester Kerk the light is religious but not dim. Through its many plain-glass windows floods a clear, Vermeer-like light. Last week, at the closing service of the first Assembly of the World Council of Churches, this revealing light showed every detail: ruff-collared Scandinavians; bearded, black-veiled Orthodox dignitaries; purple-cassocked Old Catholics; saffron-stoled representatives of the Church of South India; U.S. pastors in business suits and glittering spectacles. For the past fortnight, delegates from 147 churches in 44 countries--every major branch of Christianity except Roman Catholicism and the Russian Orthodox Church--had been working, planning and praying together.

The light shed by the assembly itself was equally revealing. This greatest church meeting since the Reformation could not even agree on a definition of the word "church."

The watching Protestant world had hoped, in its dim and sentimental way, for something better. It had perhaps even hoped for another Pentecost. At Pentecost, there were tongues of fire from heaven, and human beings like ready lamps, waiting to be lit. At Amsterdam, there were committees, agenda, resolutions, debates, and trilingual earphones. The men of Amsterdam did not expect and did not receive flames from heaven. They had not met to be inspired but to "get something done." They were moved, not by tongues of fire, but by reasonable anxiety, cautious good will, Protestant practicality.

The world wanted to be saved--but, like the rich young man, it wanted to save its possessions too. In their more informed, more professional way, the delegates at Amsterdam represented that ambiguous desire.

Grand Strategy. Had Amsterdam actually accomplished anything? Had the long, slow, painful struggle toward church unity been worth all the effort and all the talk? Christians around the globe applauded the words of one of Amsterdam's leaders, New York's Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam: "The need for unity is urgent . . . Our disunity is a denial of our Lord . . . We cannot win the world for Christ with the tactics of guerrilla warfare . . . This calls for general staff, grand strategy, and army. And this means union."

When the World Council was first planned more than a decade ago, Britain's late great Archbishop William Temple observed: "It is not by contrivance and adjustment that we can unite the Church of God. It is only by coming closer to Him that we come nearer to one another." Amsterdam aimed only for contrivance and adjustment. By those means, it was able to form a World Council which may bring the churches into a continuous relationship and start them up the steep path toward becoming The Church. Amsterdam did not accomplish the union of Protestantism; it did set up a loose federation of the Christian churches, Protestant and Orthodox branch.

The talk at Amsterdam was. mostly on the comparatively low level of diplomacy. What the world heard was very like a U.N. session. Of the assembly's major message, Czech Theologian Joseph Hromadka said: "It won't embarrass me at all in returning to Prague. Of course, it's pretty negative and doesn't offer much in the way of action."

On this level, however, Amsterdam did accomplish all that any conference except an inspired one can do: 1) it put into verbal form the agreements its delegates reached; 2) it put into organizational form the purposes its member churches had undertaken.

Vacant Seats. The Council will have its headquarters in Geneva, and other offices around the world. The six co-presidents are Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher of Canterbury (for the Anglican Communion); Pastor Marc Boegner, president of the French Protestant Federation (for the Reformed churches) ; Bishop Oxnam (for the Free churches); Archbishop Germanos of Thyateira (for the Orthodox churches); Archbishop Erling Eidem of Upsala, Sweden (for the Lutherans); and Dr. Chao Tse-chen, dean of the School of Religion at China's Yenching University (for the "younger," i.e., missionary, churches).

The full World Council will meet every five years. Between sessions, things will be run by a 90-member Central Committee (on which the U.S has 20 seats) and a smaller executive committee. The 1949 council budget is $539,660, 85% of it temporarily from U.S. sources. Eight seats were left vacant among the 90, in hopes that the Russian Orthodox and other churches in the Soviet sphere would soon join. Delegates from six countries behind the Iron Curtain were at Amsterdam.

Bishop Oxnam, a master of organization, headed the planning committee. Verbally, Amsterdam was earsplitting. "This is the greatest gabfest I ever heard any place or any time," cabled Frank Stewart, religion editor of the Cleveland Press and a veteran listener to ecclesiastical brekeke-kex koaex. Committee discussions were an eight-ring circus; plenary sessions were a politer Babel in the three official tongues (French, English and German), simultaneously translated over headphone sets, in the U.N. manner.* All the discussions were sober and thorough. Said Swiss Theologian Karl Barth: "I like solid work, and here there has been work."

"What-the-Hell." The Amsterdam delegates knew that the world was watching. Since the end of the war, many people have discovered--and announced their discovery as if it were news--that political and economic problems can be solved only on a moral basis. It was up to the churches to answer this challenge--and to find an adequate response to the secularism of modern society.

Amsterdam approached its task with becoming--and typically Protestant--humility. Bishop J.W.C. Wand of London said that Britons showed a growing "what-the-hell attitude that we have to overcome if we are going to do anything about the disorder of society." Secretary Samuel McCrea Cavert of the U.S. Federal Council of Churches cited the "disturbing discrepancy" between the numerical strength of the U.S. churches and their weak influence on U.S. life. German Pastor Martin Niemoeller warned that Christendom itself was in the same confused state as the rest of the world. Yenching's Dr. Chao put the question that troubled missionary leaders in many lands; he asked "whether Christianity and the Christian church have taken deep enough root in Chinese soil so they cannot be plucked out by the sway of hostile forces."

Said Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: "One has the uneasy feeling that . . . there is so little health in the whole of our modern civilization that one cannot find the island of order from which to proceed against disorder."

Equal Condemnation. Having conceded that the churches themselves were far from adequate, Amsterdam tackled the world's politico-economic problems in a controversial report, "The Church and the Disorder of Society":

"The world today is experiencing a social crisis of unparalleled proportions . . . Christians should ask why Communism in its modern totalitarian form makes so strong an appeal to great masses of people in many parts of the world. They should recognize the work of God in the revolt of multitudes against injustice that gives Communism much of its strength. They should seek to recapture for the church the original Christian solidarity with the world's distressed people . . .

"The proclamation of racial equality by Communists and their support of the cause of colonial peoples make a strong appeal to the populations of Asia and Africa and to racial minorities elsewhere . . ."*

The Amsterdam report then condemned Communism and capitalism equally: "The Christian church should reject the ideologies of both Communism and capitalism, and should seek to draw men away from the false assumption that these are the only alternatives. Each has made promises which it could not redeem. "Communist ideology puts the emphasis upon economic justice and promises that freedom will come automatically after the completion of the revolution. Capitalism puts the emphasis upon freedom and promises that justice will follow as a byproduct of free enterprise. That, too, is an ideology which has been proved false. It is the responsibility of Christians to seek new creative solutions which never allow either justice or freedom to destroy the other."

New Leadership. Episcopal Layman Charles P. Taft, president of the U.S. Federal Council of Churches and brother of Republican Senator Robert A. Taft, promptly tried to modify the condemnation of capitalism. He proposed inserting the phrase "the wholly self-regulating laissez-faire theory of capitalism" (i.e., pushing the condemnation back to the days of the 19th Century robber barons). The council accepted only the adjective "laissez-faire."

The slightness of the change showed the strength of Amsterdam's realization that the war had turned much of the world leftward and that the churches, if they are to spread their influence, must do more than reaffirm the prewar status quo. The forcefulness of the statement, compared to earlier ecumenical pronounce ments, showed that a new leadership was rising in the new World Council. In the top flight of that leadership is Bishop Oxnam.

G. (for Garfield) Bromley Oxnam is a chunky, solid, strong-voiced prelate of 57. He looks and dresses like a prosperous businessman, but his leftish social views got him listed in Elizabeth Dilling's The Red Network. Among the assets he brings to any enterprise are his organizing and administrative ability. He applies both to his personal life so formidably that there is never a paper left on his desk or a question left unanswered in any committee over which he presides. Says Theologian Niebuhr: "He gets through a meeting faster and better than anyone I know."

The son of a devout Methodist layman and mine executive, Oxnam was born at Sonora, Calif. In his youth, Methodist churches had a monthly custom of calling for declarations at the altar rail after service. One Sunday he told the girl sitting beside him that he felt a call to the ministry but disliked such public displays. Said she: "If you really feel you should be a minister, you ought to have enough nerve to go down there." He went. Among those he met at the altar rail was Ruth Fisher, daughter of a wealthy oilman, pledging herself to the mission field. Soon after he graduated from the University of Southern California, they married; later she inherited a sizable sum from her father.

Church of All Nations. As a fledgling minister in 1917, Oxnam was assigned to a run-down Los Angeles church with few communicants and a $15,000 debt. The square mile of his parish had 60,000 people representing 42 nationalities, and the highest juvenile delinquency rate in the city. Oxnam renamed the parish The Church of All Nations, organized youth clubs, developed a clinic with 28 doctors, let labor groups on strike meet in the church. Eventually, he built it into one of the great parishes of U.S. Methodism.

During his ministry there, he took a lengthy round-the-world trip as secretary to Y.M.C.A. Leader Sherwood Eddy. A frequent globetrotter, his acquaintance among world churchmen is wide and cordial; one of Amsterdam's highlights was the beardy kisses of welcome that Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens gave him in the robing room before the opening service. In 1928, Oxnam became president of DePauw University in Indiana; in 1936, at 44, he was elected bishop--then Methodism's youngest--and assigned to the Omaha area.

For a Methodist prelate, Oxnam has two unusual hobbies; the theater and art. He and his wife go to every play they can and have a good collection of paintings (mostly of the Barbizon school), including a Sargent and a Sir Joshua Reynolds: Girl with a Bird. When the mayor of Omaha tried to censor some profanity from the Lunt-Fontanne production of Idiot's Delight, Oxnam got him to drop the attempt, declaring: "Censorship is more dangerous than an occasional realistic line. If the mayor decides to remain in politics, may I suggest a theme song for his coming campaign: 'Every little Damma must be taken from our drama.' Censorship is, in fact, 'Idiot's Delight.' "

From 1939 to 1944, Oxnam was bishop of the Boston area. There he had one notable success -- persuading Cardinal O'Connell to sign a joint statement with him condemning the 1942-43 wave of anti-Semitism in Boston--and one small failure, in his drive for ever-increasing personal efficiency. The latter was his scheme for hooking a dictation machine, to his car battery, so that he could park at spare moments and dash off a few letters. After finding himself marooned a few times with a dead battery, he abandoned the experiment. But he was the first bishop in the area's history to visit all 800 of its Methodist churches.

"Wesley Organized . . ." In 1944, Oxnam was U.S. Protestantism's man of the year. He was elected president of the Federal Council of Churches and also became bishop of the New York area, Methodism's most important diocese, where he succeeded Bishop Francis J. McConnell, another famed liberal. He has carried on McConnell's work. At the Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn, for example, he found no racial discrimination against patients but a rule excluding colored candidates from nursing school. After months of firm pressure from Oxnam, the hospital board repealed the rule.

Oxnam attended both the Oxford and Edinburgh conferences of 1937 and has been active on the provisional committee for the World Council. Says he:

"Before Amsterdam, cooperating between the churches was occasional. From Amsterdam onwards, it will be continuous. The difference is that between the traveling lecturer who may inspire and the school which educates. Whitfield preached and passed; Wesley organized and abides."

How long will the World Council abide? Will it ever turn the churches into The Church? Can it meet the challenge of a secular century?

On these questions Amsterdam met an even stiffer stalemate than on its attempt to define the word "church." There is a great gulf between U.S. activism and continental Europe's apparently passivist theology. Most U.S. Christians, as shown by Bromley Oxnam's tireless example, believe in muscular, active Christianity--serving their faith by works. To U.S. liberal Protestantism, most European Christians have a let-George-do-it reliance on God.

Karl Barth raised this controversy in unmistakable terms at Amsterdam. "We ought to give up," he declared, "every thought that the care of the church, the care of the world, is our care . . . This is the final root and ground of all human disorder; the dreadful, godless, ridiculous opinion that man is the Atlas who is destined to bear the dome of heaven on his shoulders . . . We are not the ones to change this evil world into a good one. God has not resigned His Lordship over it into our hands ... By God's design is not meant something like a Christian Marshall plan ... All that is required of us is that in the midst of the political and social disorder of the world we should be His witnesses, as disciples and servants of Jesus."

Christian Message. The Americans were not slow to point out that this extreme Barthian view seemed to have an organic kinship with Europe's ruins, and ignored the Christian's moral responsibility to add works to faith. But even Barth, like John Calvin before him, is a paradoxical blend of passive theology and furious personal activity in wrestling with contemporary problems. If the churches can be both active and Christian, they can still meet the secular challenge.

In its diligently plodding fashion, Amsterdam did try to meet the challenge. At the closing service there was a prayer for Lutheran Bishop Lajos Ordass of Hungary, "appointed a delegate to this Assembly who has just been arrested"--phrasing more akin to a chancellery's dignified note of protest than to the Acts of the Apostles. But on this diplomatic and administrative level, Amsterdam set up a better human means toward the blessed end of Christian unity than the world had known since the first great schism, between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, in the year 1054. And Amsterdam's final "Christian Message," to be read in member churches throughout the world, did rise above the legal level:

"Our coming together to form a World Council will be vain unless Christians and Christian congregations everywhere commit themselves to the Lord of the Church in a new effort to seek together, where they live, to be his witnesses and servants among their neighbors . . .

"It is not in man's power to banish sin and death from the earth, to create the unity of the Holy Catholic Church, to conquer the hosts of Satan. But it is within the power of God. He has given us at Easter the certainty that His purpose will be accomplished. But by our acts of obedience and faith we can on earth set up signs which point to the coming victory . . . Let us give ourselves to those tasks which lie to our hands and so set up signs that men may see."

* One contrast with U.N. was startling. In two years, Lake Success has had no noticeable loss of headphones; after the first day of the World Council, 30 sets were missing -- 25 of which were later returned. younger churches of Asia and Africa than did earlier ecumenical conferences. Handsome, flashing-eyed Sarah Chakko of India expressed their attitude: "There . . . seems to us to be an undue fear of Communism, especially among the delegates from the U.S. In Asia the people we must reach are people who are asking them selves frankly, 'Is Communism the right way for us?', and we must face its challenge not with denunciations but in direct specific terms."

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