Whose Eschatology?

In August 1954, at Evanston, Ill., the World Council of Churches will hold the second General Assembly in its five-year history. The 750 churchmen participating will represent an estimated 168,000,000 Protestant and Orthodox Christians. As assembly time gets closer, most of the world's Protestant theologians are getting deeper and deeper in the preliminary debate over the council's agreed theme: Christ--the Hope of the World.

To plain laymen, the nature of Christian hope may seem too self-evident to permit much argument, but it is in fact a knotty problem on which Protestant theologians are hotly divided. The key word in the preliminary discussions, held since 1951, has been "eschatology," a $15 Greek term meaning, literally, the last things, and, theologically, the manner of the Judgment, the resurrection of the body, the Second Coming of Christ, etc.

Two Versions. There are two distinct Protestant versions of Christian hope. One of them is prevailingly held by European theologians, the other by those American theologians most actively associated with the World Council. The Europeans tend to be Biblically strict constructionist and socially pessimistic. They hold that things on this dreary earth will never really get better--despite all that Christians might like to do meanwhile--until Christ comes again to judge and sanctify it.

The Americans tend to be loose constructionist and socially optimistic. They contend that God works partly through human history, and that Christians, through their active corporate witness, must help improve their world. The two points of view are not mutually exclusive, although sometimes it would seem so.

Two Frontiers. Last week Dr. Willem Visser 't Hooft, general secretary of the World Council, dropped into Chicago, to make arrangements for next year's meeting. Said Dutchman Visser 't Hooft, speaking of eschatology: "The theme of hope was chosen because of its relevance in the world today, when so many areas show a certain hopelessness, while elsewhere there are certain false hopes, e.g., under a totalitarian ideology such as the Communist . . . There are two dimensions to Christian hope--one dealing in the present and one dealing in the future . . . Both dimensions of Christian hope are vital."

Most of the world's Protestant leaders will come to Evanston. Among them: Germany's Bishop Otto Dibelius, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Norway's Bishop Eivind Berggrav, Bishops G. Bromley Oxnam and Henry Knox Sherrill and Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr from the U.S.* But Dr. Visser 't Hooft was hopeful that delegates from the Iron Curtain churches would be there, too. Said he: "It's a way to emphasize Christian fellowship, and some of these churches have a great deal to give us."

He conceded that U.S. public opinion is not too friendly to some European church leaders, especially those in Communist countries. A case in point is Prague University's Dr. Joseph Hromadka. who sounded to many like a Communist apologist at the 1948 World Council meetings in Amsterdam and at similar meetings since. But he asked the U.S. to be broadminded about such things, as well as theological differences. Said he: "The foreign churches will be here not as guests but with exactly the same rights as the American delegates . . . We would ask the American press to make a special act of imagination about the Evanston assembly--to think of it not just as a purely American meeting, but as an ecumenical and truly international meeting . . ."

Will the Iron Curtain countries' delegates come? Answered Visser 't Hooft: "That question has two sides. First, whether the Iron Curtain delegates can get out of their countries. Second, whether they can get into this country."

*An absentee who will be direly missed: famed Swiss Theologian Karl Barth, 67, too busy with his work on dogmatics to make the trip. Wrote Barth, a strict constructionist: "I probably won't see the U.S. in this life, but I hope to see it from one of the lower reaches of heaven."

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