The Ecumenical Century

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The greatest gathering of Christians since the 16th century, when the Council of Trent worked for 18 years to counter the Protestant Reformation, ends this week in New Delhi. It is the third Assembly of the World Council of Churches. Behind all the well-organized confusion -- the hustling to and fro between auditorium and committee room, the 15,000 sheet daily blizzard of mimeographed paper, the lost traveler's checks, the distracting snake charmers and the non stop talking across language barriers -- a vast regrouping of Christendom seems to be taking shape. One veteran churchman. President Henry Pitney Van Dusen of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary, believes that "we are seeing right here one of the very early events in the second great Reformation of Christendom."

The first Reformation, in the 16th century, caused the breakup of a church so encrusted with corruption that it had lost much of its power to transmit the power and the glory of God to man. Into this glittering desert of faith the reformers threw their prophetic insights to have them seized and shared like bread among the starving; and the counterreformers on the Roman Catholic side pruned back their corrupt and dying tree of faith to a new life.

Scandalous Disunity. In the time of second Reformation, it is the scandalous disunity among Christians that has alienated men and cheapened the church. And in response to this, the scattered forces of the Christian faith are realigning and regrouping to make this the Ecumenical Century. The church, sharded by centuries of suspicion and prideful rivalry and man's inhumanity to man, is newly mindful of Christ's command "that they all may be one." The evidence:

> The Orthodox churches, after centuries of jealousy and vendetta among themselves, met last September in Rhodes (TIME, Oct. 6) to work out an agenda for a new Orthodox ecumenism.

> The Roman Catholic Church, pointing toward Pope John's historic Ecumenical Council (probably in 1962) is showing a new friendliness toward Eastern Orthodoxy and toward its "separated brethren," the Protestants. For the first time, the Vatican has sent official observers to an Assembly of the World Council. Within the past year, the Pope has received precedent-breaking visits from the Arch bishop of Canterbury and the Presiding Bishop of the U.S. Protestant Episcopal Church. In the U.S., a hew era of mutual confidence between Catholics and Protestants is symbolized by the election of the first Catholic President.

>U.S. Protestantism, riddled by sectarianism, is pulling together in the National Council of Churches. Meanwhile, individual denominations are merging in outright organic unity--there have been dozens of such mergers in the past generation--and interdenominational courtship is being stepped up by Presbyterian Eugene Carson Blake's proposal for merger of the Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians and United Church of Christ (TIME cover. May 26).

>And fortnight ago. the entry of the Russian and three other Iron Curtain Orthodox churches into the World Council of Churches placed Orthodoxy solidly within the ranks of ecumenical Christianity--and gave it a potentially powerful voice there.

Retreat & Rebirth. This new Christian cohesiveness is no sudden upsurge of agape in the hearts of men. As old enemies huddle together for warmth and protection in a raging storm, so the once proud and self-sufficient churches are being driven together by cold and whistling winds in a turbulent world.

On the one hand, many of the sectarian dicta and dogmas that once stirred great debates in Protestantism are dead letters. In America the ethnic loyalties and local ties that once buttressed such sectarian doctrines have almost dissolved in the comings and goings of the most restlessly transient population in the world. In Europe the state churches--both Protestant and Catholic--that once were part of the fiber of society, stand cold with empty pews and silent with declining vocations.

Even the once touted, now tapering off. religious revival in the postwar U.S. turns out--especially in the eyes of theologians --to have been largely a specialized boom in suburban churches, which folks joined to meet other folks and get into the community swim, and which served up a kind of Christianity as bland and homogenized as if it came out of a suburban kitchen blender. All too often, "the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed'' anything more Christian than a discussion group or a softball team or an every-member canvass.

The uncertainty at the center has been matched by the pressure from outside. The march of Marxism, the idolatry of science, the determinism of Freud, the stigma of being a "white man's religion," the resurgence, with the rise of the new nations, of the "national"' religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism and Islam--all are helping herd the scattered Christians into one corral. This is not true Christian unity, but it is producing a sense of unity and a growing recognition of an urgent common need--to rethink fundamentals and to change traditional ways. And the recognition of this urgency and this need is the fruitful prerequisite for changing defensive retrenchment into creation and rebirth.

The sense of urgency and change was abundantly evident at New Delhi. The new importance of the Orthodox communions served notice on old-line ecumenists that the predominantly Protestant flavor of the World Council would be considerably modified; it also indicated that theology and "spirituality" would begin to loom larger in Council considerations. But by far the most clamorous new voices in the Assembly were those of the "younger churches" of Asia and Africa. For the ecumenical reformation began in the missionary movement, where the scandal of interchurch bickering--before the wondering eyes of their converts--was especially uncomfortable.

The Four Ds. Leaders of these onetime mission churches spoke out with a vehemence and conviction never heard before at an ecumenical gathering. For one thing, they were on their home ground. For another, they are the most rapidly growing element in the ecumenical movement; there are 45 Asian and 26 African churches--more than twice as many as were members of the World Council when it began 13 years ago at Amsterdam.

With the ebullience of youth, convinced that the future belongs to them, several suggested that the Christian missionaries begin to move the other way--from East to West. "An Asian Christian who has lived among Buddhists would be much more useful than American ministers," argued Ceylon's Dr. Daniel T. ("D.T.") Niles. Bishop Lesslie Newbigin of the Church of South India told the Assembly that he hoped "that the churchmen of Asia and Africa, having studied the spiritual situation of some of the older churches, will be moved to send missionaries to Europe and America to make the Gospel credible to the pagan masses of those continents who remain unmoved by the witness of the churches in their midst."

Dr. Masao Takenaka, 36, professor of Christian social ethics at Kyoto's Doshisha University, deplored the prevalence of what he called the four Ds of Christianity: "divided, dependent, derived and dated." Cried he: "I cannot conscientiously sell such Christianity to my dearest friends. Modern man is sick and tired of hearing propaganda. He is anxious to meet people who will participate in his struggle. I feel the presence of Christians in the secular world is very important." Dr. Takenaka brought up a problem that was raised again and again among the younger churches--that of making Christianity indigenous to the East through syncretism, the deliberate borrowing from other religions. "We have the long-established art of flower arranging in Japan," he said, "and I once asked a lady who was a famous flower arranger to portray the Crucifixion in flowers. It is syncretism to arrange flowers to represent Christ, but we do not make the mistake of worshiping the flowers."

Christians are old hands at this kind of syncretism; the Christmas celebration is an absorption of the Roman festival of the Saturnalia. D.T. Niles, 53, general secretary of the East Asia Christian Conference and top spokesman for the Asian churches, put it neatly: "The Christian Gospel is a seed. If you sow it, you get a plant. The plant will bear the mark of both the seed and the soil. The trouble with the missionaries was that they brought Christianity to us as a potted plant. Now we are breaking the pot and putting the plant in our own soil."

And what do his people want from the World Council? D.T. burst out: "Action at the local level. Everywhere the Asians and Africans are saying that the ecumenical movement has declared certain principles, found certain things in common. Now let's go do something about it, instead of messing around with what other principles we can find. There's all this business of study, study--and nothing happens! Urgency! That's the one thing we're after. What gives us this sense of urgency? Because we are under pressure from our environment. The church must become part of the world. God doesn't love the church--God loves the world."

The Africans were just as eager for the church to play a vigorous social role. Said Nigeria's George A. Ademola, M.D., lay leader and son of an African chief: "I don't believe in saving souls imprisoned in miserable bodies."

New Formula. At the center of it all--the 577 delegates and 200 staffers, 65 observers and 275 reporters, plus assorted wives and special guests--a stern, craggy Dutchman loomed over the Assembly like an orchestra conductor on a podium. Willem Visser 't Hooft is the prime professional of the international ecumenical movement, in which he has spent his entire working life, and the New Delhi Assembly is the crowning of his career, for he plans to retire some time before the next one--probably in Africa six years hence.

Each morning he appeared in the dining room of the Hotel Janpath at 8--"If my staff people have any problems, they can find me there." Three-quarters of an hour later, he was in his office to begin a day's work that combined the functions of guru, watchdog, troubleshooter, father confessor and cheerleader. Visser 't Hooft is especially pleased with the smooth sailing of the Russian Orthodox into the World Council; increasing the Orthodox representation was his longstanding concern.

Old-line ecumenists were swallowing hard at the prospect, and the political activists were far from happy about what the Russian Orthodox delegates might do to some of their pet resolutions. Visser 't Hooft fully understands their position: "I know that to bring in the Russian church is to bring in new problems. It will be more difficult to take those positions on international questions which we have taken in the past. We believe, however, that we simply have to accept that difficulty and seek to overcome it."

Visser 't Hooft's chief reason for wanting the Russians is that the church in Russia needs all the outside support it can get, and that Russian Orthodoxy rounds out the representation of the World Council: the only major group now missing is Rome. He is not nervous about Christianity's ability to deal with the Russians face to face; instead he thinks that Christians should welcome all contact with them and try to penetrate their society in every possible way. Says he: "I have far less apprehension about what the Russians might do within the World Council than I would if the Russian Orthodox Church remained apart from us, burying itself in its own mystical world and ignoring the Sputnik world outside."

Getting the Russians into the World Council drew from Visser 't Hooft perhaps the most brilliant single performance of his life--an illuminating example of how creeds are written. It took place in a Leningrad hotel, where he was breakfasting with an Orthodox delegation. At the time the constitutional definition of the World Council was: "A fellowship of churches which accept our Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour." The Russians complained that this definition overlooked the trinitarian basis of Christianity prized by Orthodox churches.

Visser 't Hooft recalled that Protestants had often voiced another complaint: the absence of any mention of Scripture. And he saw that he had a chance, by the right words, to stress the unifying elements of Christianity while diplomatically playing down differences. "So," he remembers, "I took the breakfast menu and wrote out a new formula." Last week in New Delhi the Council adopted Visser 't Hooft's breakfast-menu definition as the Council's new credo. It reads:

"The World Council of Churches is a fellowship of churches which confess the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour according to the Holy Scriptures and therefore seek to fulfill together their common calling to the glory of one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit."

Last week's most ticklish problem for the General Secretary was steering the Nominations Committee through the final nominations for the 100-member policy-making Central Committee and the six presidents. The result: a Central Committee still dominated by North Americans (21) and West Europeans (26) but with 18 Orthodox members and 28 Asians and Africans. The new presidents: the Most Rev. Arthur Michael Ramsey,- Archbishop of Canterbury; Pastor Martin Niemoeller, World War I submarine hero, president of the Evangelical (Lutheran) Church in Hesse-Nassau, Germany; Presbyterian Layman Sir Francis Ibiam, Governor General of the Eastern Provinces of Nigeria; Archbishop lakovos of New York, head of the Greek Orthodox Church in North and South America; Methodist Layman Charles C. Parlin of Englewood, N.J.; and the Rev. Dr. David G. Moses, Principal of Hislop College, Nagpur. India, and a member of the United Church of Northern India.

Taking a Stand. The sum of the Council's deliberations, this week, will be reports positioning the organization in three major areas of thought and action. At week's end, the general trends were clear. The section on Unity seemed to agree that church union will eventually entail nothing less than the death and rebirth of many of the various churches' forms and practices. The section on Witness felt that evangelism should begin to stress dialogue techniques in spreading the Gospel (even "dialogue sermons'') rather than straight preaching. This report also pointed out that churches will have to count on laymen for a bigger share in expanding Christianity. The section on Service agreed on two important points:

>Christians must take an all-out, unambiguous stand for racial equality, exorcising prejudice from all churches and identifying with ''oppressed races."

>Governments--the report shied away from naming the Communists--must be limited in power; political structures must allow for nonviolent changes in governments; freedom of choice and conscience must be permitted.

Cosmic Christology. Perhaps the most original and challenging address given at the Assembly came from Lutheran Dr. Joseph Sittler, professor of theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Before he left for New Delhi, Sittler told a Chicago friend what he had in mind. Christians, he felt, were too much inclined to dismiss Communist ideology as "barren materialism." But Communism "succeeds because it is not materialism. All things are given value and purpose and drawn into a huge vision for the totality of man and the world." In contrast, Christianity has shrunk until it has become little more than "a support to our weakness, companion to our loneliness, counselor to our neuroticisms, and heavenly confirmer of our national purpose." What is needed is an all-encompassing Christian vision--"truer, vaster and tougher than the Marxist vision," with a core of spirituality illuminating "economics, politics, and all other areas of human affairs."

Sittler's speech made no reference to Communism; instead, he concentrated on developing the positive idea that there must be a Christology of all creation--a "cosmic Christology" in which Christ is not set against the facts and processes of nature. "We have had a Christology of the moral soul.'' he said, "a Christology of history. But we do not have a daring, penetrating, life-affirming Christology of nature."

Sittler's speech was a notable launching pad for ecumenical arguments. Dutch Reformed Dr. Hendrikus Berkhoff of the State University of Leiden maintained that to "widen the pattern of our thinking" beyond practical work might endanger church unity. Lutheran Theologian George F. Vicedom of Frankfort was opposed, because whereas "God and Jesus stand over the world, he also stands against the world." The Rev. Thadikkal Verghese, a Syrian Orthodox priest of Kerala. India, was enthusiastic about Sittler's line. "We need to recover the cosmic dimension," he said. "Angelic beings should be reinstated in our theology, even though it might be incompatible with the modern scientific mind. We must recover both the angelic and the demonic."

But Dr. Sittler was talking to the point --the unity of Christians to be had by accepting all creation as Christ's.

"The Church has found a melancholy number of ways to express her variety," he said. "She has found fewer ways to express her unity. But if we are indeed called to unity, and if we can obey that call in terms of a contemporary Christology expanded to the dimensions of the New Testament vision, we shall, perhaps, obey into fuller unity. For in such obedience we have the promise of the Divine blessing. This radioactive earth, so fecund and so fragile, is his creation, our sister, and the material place where we meet the brother in Christ's light. Ever since Hiroshima the very term light has ghastly meanings. But ever since creation it has had meanings glorious; and ever since Bethlehem, meanings concrete and beckoning."

Dr. Sittler's text, from the Epistle to the Colossians (1:15-20), might be the Apostle Paul's memorandum to all Christian meetings:

He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities--all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

* It was announced last week that a delegation of four, led by Eugene Carson Blake, top U.S. Presbyterian, would visit Russia right after the Assembly to prepare for another official visit of the National Council of Churches.

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