Friday, Aug. 05, 1966
Radical New Voice
The World Council of Churches spoke to the world last week in a radical new voice. Its 15-day Geneva Conference on Church and Society deplored U.S. military involvement in Viet Nam, put in a plug for violence in certain circumstances, foresaw a need in some countries for a "profound revolutionary change in the structure of property, of income, of investment, of education, of political organization."
The tone of the conference's pronouncements reflected the fundamental shift of power that has taken place within the World Council since its founding in 1948. At that time, men like John Foster Dulles, who was vice president of the Commission for International Affairs, spoke for the council, mirroring Western theology and social thinking. With the gradual admission of many new churches from Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the Russian Orthodox Church in 1961, the majority of delegates became non-Western.
Building Babel. The Geneva conference was the first on church-society relations since the council's parent organizations met in Oxford in 1937. From 87 countries it brought together 410 representatives, only a few more than a third of them from North America and Western Europe. Inevitably, the conference offered a platform for Africans and Asians to express their differences with the affluent Christians of the West, particularly of the U.S.
Bola Ige, an Anglican lawyer from Nigeria, praised Communist China as exemplifying "the best" of developing nations. Another Nigerian, S. A. Aluko, blistered both the U.S. and Russia for spending billions on the space race, which he compared to the "building of the tower of Babel" while millions went hungry. Russian Metropolitan Nikodim attacked the "cruel and lawless" deeds of the U.S. in Viet Nam and the "racist rule" in South Africa, while denying the existence of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.
The Rev. Eugene Carson Blake, the U.S. Presbyterian who is the incoming general secretary of the council, sought to calm the partisan outbursts. He helped head off passage of a proposal calling on the conference to take to the Geneva streets in support of peace and racial justice. Nonetheless, 250 participants, who felt, as one youthful U.S. Negro put it, the need to "give visible expression to our concern and commitment," marched through Geneva with such banners as WORLD PEACE OR THE WORLD IN PIECES, and AN IMPATIENT WORLD CHALLENGES A COMPLACENT CHURCH.
The Greatest Evil. Most of the Western participants, including a U.S. contingent of 73--among them Union Theological Seminary's President John Bennett and the Episcopal Presiding Bishop, John Hines--were caught in the radical tide. The Americans sent a cable to President Johnson voicing anguish over U.S. "involvement and escalation" of the Viet Nam war--and also issued their own statement calling on North Viet Nam to respect Red Cross standards in handling war prisoners. They enthusiastically agreed with British Economist Barbara Ward that the rich nations owed a minimum of 2% of their gross national product in aid to the have-not nations. Said Economist Ward: "I would rather have a soft landing in Harlem than a man on Mars in 1984."
The conference's conclusions denounced the white-supremacist regime of Rhodesia, endorsed revolutions as an "ultimate recourse," pronounced nuclear war to be "against God's will and the greatest of evils." In a confused pronouncement, the conference conceded that the Gospels teach the sanctity of monogamous marriage, went on to observe that "premarital and extramarital intercourse are not uncommon in any country," failed to suggest a clear Christian answer to the question. Despite the acrimony and outbursts, the Rev. Willem Visser 't Hooft, retiring general secretary of the Council of Churches, judged the meeting a success as a "terrific pedagogical experience" for the participants. He has always contended that the churches must not be content to be pious guardians of the economic and political status quo but revolutionaries in the tradition of Jesus of Nazareth, seeking to make the world anew.
In the perennial debate on whether the stress of religion should be laid on the individual and his spiritual needs or on the church working actively through society's institutions for the worldly betterment of man's condition, the World Council has now firmly chosen the course of involvement. "Participation in political life is a valid form of ministry," said one of the conclusions. What troubled many Westerners was the highly partisan ideological tone that the conference put on that participation.
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