THE STORY
OF MEN
WHO
HAVE WORKED
FOR
CHRISTIAN
UNITY
0)
H
rn
"For more than thirty-five years I have lived
ecumenically. In large sections of tin's book 1
am writing about things that J have Jived
through; many of the leading participants to
whom I refer by name are my friends. I have
tried to record as I have and ex-
perienced them."
BROTHERS OF
THE FAITH
THE OF
FOR
Steph
en
The formation of the World Council of
Churches in 1948 climaxed nearly forty years
of struggle for co-operation among the
churches. This book is the first account of this
straggle to be told through the biographies of
the men who worked for it, rather than
through the documents and official statements
which resulted from it. Here you see the is-
sues, the problems, the successes, and the fail-
ures through the experiences of the men who
lived them John R. Mott, Nathan Soeder-
bloxn, William Temple, Willem A. Visser 't
Hooft, G. Bromley Oxnam, William Paton,
Bishop Azariah, and others.
Bishop Neill begins his book with the Edin-
burgh Conference in 1910 and ends it with a
look at the unity Christendom can expect in
the future. His biographical approach is as in-
teresting and enjoyable as it is informative.
Actually Bishop Neill, himself, deserves a
chapter in a book such as this, for he has done
extensive work in this field, He does include
his own valuable observations and comments
about this movement, along with those of his
subjects.
All Christians who want to know more about
the issues, the men, and the meaning of the
effort for denominational co-operation will ap-
preciate this nontechnical, inside story.
.JACKET BESKW BY ROBERT L. N-ANOK
KANSAS C1JY f.'O PUBLIC LIBRAP *
D DDD1 D3D7D17 5
280- i N41b
Neill
Brothers of the faith
62-25033
280*1 N41b 62-25033
Neill $4*00
Brothers of the faith
Brothers of the Faitk
Brothers
of the Faith
ABINGDON PRESS
NEW YOBK NASHVILLE
BROTHERS OF THE FAITH
Copyright 1960 by AUngdon Press
All rights in this book are reserved.
No part of the book may be reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission of
the publishers except brief quotations embodied in
critical articles or reviews. For information address
Abingdon Press, Nashville 2, Tennessee
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-9201
SET UP, PRINTED, AND BOUND BY THE
PARTHENON PRESS, AT NASHVILLE,
TENNESSEE, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PREFACE
FOB THREE ALMOST LITERALLY KILLING TEARS I WAS ENGAGED
on the preparation of the History of the Ecumenical Movement,
1517-1948. That was not an official work in the sense of represent-
ing a special World Council of Churches view of history the
World Council as such has no view of history other than a con-
cern that it should be accurately and impartially recorded.
Nevertheless, a work sponsored by so many august bodies
inevitably took on something of an official aura; the personal
factor had to be a good deal played down, and many things that
we would have liked to include had to be excluded for a variety
of personal reasons.
This, by contrast, is an entirely personal work. In 1924 I at-
tended the Birmingham Conference on Christian Politics,
Economics and Citizenship (COPEC). This means that for more
than thirty-five years I have lived ecumenically. In large sections
of this book I am writing about events that I have lived through ;
many of the leading participants to whom I refer by name are
my friends. I have tried to record things as I have seen and ex-
perienced them. This means that any other writer would have
recorded them from a slightly different angle. But this is the
way in which history ultimately emerges never with perfect
accuracy from the recollections of many men checked against
the documents and records of the time. Everything that I have
here stated has been checked against contemporary documents,
from which fairly long citations have been given. I hope that in
this way what is primarily a personal record may be found
also to have a certain objective quality.
There are shadows in the picture as well as lights. There al-
5
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
ways are in any true picture of the Church, and always will be,
as long as we walk by faith and not by sight. The path of
ecumenical endeavour is always an uphill road. Many things
aimed at have not been attained; many apparently fruitful
efforts have ended in frustration. There are many corners in
the road. Time and again the summit has seemed to be in view,
but when that point has been reached, it has merely opened out
the view of another and more distant summit. Yet for all the dis-
appointments and frustrations those of us who have lived
ecumenically through these years have felt that what we were
engaged on was worth while.
STEPHEN C. NEILL
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Ecumenical Era Arrives 9
I. Edinburgh 1910 John E. Mott and World Vision . . 16
II. Nathan Soederblom and Life and "Work 29
III. Charles Brent and Faith and Order 42
TV. Bishop Azariah and the Call to Church Union 55
V. Archbishop Gennanos and the Orthodox 68
VI. William Temple and World-Wide Ecumenism 81
VII. Oxford 1937 Let the Church Be the Church 95
VIII. Paton and Kraemer The Younger Churches Arrive 107
IX. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Worldly Christianity 119
X. D. T. Niles and the Future of Missions 131
XI. At Last : The World Council of Churches 143
XII. Evanston and Ecumenical Dangers 154
XIII. John XXIII and a Roman Council 167
XIV. What Next? 179
Index 189
Introduction
Tke Ecumenical Era Arrives
THE ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT EXISTS TO WORK FOB TWO GBEAT
aims the unity and the renewal of the church.
It has sometimes been thought that these two aims are coin-
cident that, if we can unite separated churches, there will im-
mediately be a release of spiritual power, and that, if a renewal
of the life of the churches takes place, closer fellowship will
naturally result. History shows us that this assumption is not
justified by the facts. We can now study a great many processes
of church union and the history of the united churches that have
sprung from them. In every case the union has produced many
advantages; it just is not the case that renewal of spiritual life
has always been included among those advantages. And some-
times spiritual renewal has resulted in fresh divisions. So it was
in England in the eighteenth century, when the Methodist move-
ment breathed on the stagnant waters of English Christianity.
Had things been other than they were, that great movement
might have been kept within the Church of England. As it
turned out, renewal was responsible for yet another division in
the Christian churches, a division that has not yet been com-
pletely healed.
Unity and renewal are both good things. Both must be eagerly
sought, but it must not be too hastily assumed that one will
follow in the train of the other.
As regards renewal, hardly anyone will be in disagreement.
We none of us know a Christian church which is what it ought to
be. The worship of the Christian churches is often uninteresting,
the challenge they present anaemic, their witness tame, their
attempts to grapple with social problems amateurish and less
effective than those of others who do not profess and call them-
selves Christians. Individuals who claim the name of Christian
9
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
are not always very different from their neighbors and some-
times seem less attractive than they ; their lives are not always
marked by overflowing joy and lovingkindness. These things
are undeniable. Anything that tends to make things better than
they are onght to have the uncompromising support of everyone.
As regards the unity of the churches it is unlikely that there
will be such complete and immediate agreement.
Some will maintain frankly that Christian divisions are a good
thing. It is only in this way that the full range of Christian
truth has been worked out. A little rivalry between the churches
is a good thing, it keeps them on their toes and prevents them
from falling down into too easy a complacency and self-satisfac-
tion.
Those who are not prepared to go as far as this may still feel
that Christian divisions do not really matter very much and that
no great effort need be expended on trying to reduce them. We
have grown up accustomed to the sight of half a dozen churches
in a single street. To decide which church you will belong to
seems to be part of that freedom which the American citizen
claims as his birthright. As a matter of fact an immense number
of Americans do moreover from one church to another, in some
cases several times in one lifetime, the change being motivated
by residence, by dislike of a particular minister, by a preference
for good music, or any one of twenty or thirty motives which
really have nothing to do with the Christian faith or the respon-
sibilities of Christian witness in the world. And why worry if
different churches seem to meet the needs of different tempera-
ments and different social levels in the population?
It must be admitted that things look rather different when we
move from the familiar American scene to, let us say, South
India. Here it is literally possible for two brothers, Hindus, to
be sent to different schools and there to be converted to separate
Christian churches which, now that they are Christians, will not
allow them to receive the Holy Communion together. The Christ
who, as we say, makes all men one has as a matter of fact intro-
duced a deep and disastrous division. If you live on one side of
a small stream and become a Christian, you will become a
Danish Lutheran that is the only Protestant church in your
area. If you live on the other side of the stream and become a
10
INTRODUCTION: THE ECUMENICAL EEA ABBIVES
Christian, you will join the American Dutch Eeformed Church.
At one time, in one square mile of Madras there were thirteen
different churches. Which of them is the perplexed Hindu to
join, if he wishes to follow Christ! The arguments in favor of
having just one Christian church in such a region would seem
to be strong.
We have to take seriously the situation in which we find our-
selves. Today the Christian churches are threatened as they have
not been threatened for a thousand years. In some lands they
live under the perpetual menace of the communist colossus.
In others secularism is eating away their very foundations. The
ancient religions of the East are awakening, and in alliance with
the new nationalism are sending out their missionaries to the
West. In times of political danger party loyalties are forgotten;
they give place to an intense sense of national loyalty and
solidarity. It might seem only commonsense, if the Christian
churches, realising their common peril, were to be driven to far
closer fellowship and co-operation than exist among them today.
But these are all superficial reasons. Some Christians, reading
the New Testament, seem to themselves to find a far deeper and
more commanding reason for unity in the will of God himself.
In Christ, we are told, there is neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian,
Scythian, bond nor free, but all together have been made one
new man in Jesus Christ. The first great problem of the early
church was to make room in one and the same organization for
Jew and Gentile, who in civil life had been kept so utterly sep-
arate from one another. The church, it seems, is meant to be the
great international society in which at last all men will find a
home. Already the church is the most international of societies.
It exists on both sides of the iron curtain and of the bamboo
curtain and of every other kind of curtain. It stretches far be-
yond the limits of the United Nations, for instance into Switzer-
land, resolutely neutral and therefore not a member of the
United Nations Organization. Yet this great fact is robbed of its
true significance by the endless divisions of Christians and by
their failure ever to show to the world the inner unity that holds
them together. Surely this is not what the New Testament means
when it talks about the church as the body of Christ.
Now when we talk of a united church, it must not be supposed
11
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
that we are thinking in terms of absolute uniformity. Even the
Roman Catholic Church, which insists on greater uniformity
than any other, permits the use of no less than twelve languages
in the conduct of services ; the idea that it insists on Latin every-
where is a common Protestant mistake. So if all the churches
were at last able to come together, there ought to be room for a
great variety of national expressions of the faith, of types and
forms of worship, and so on. "What it would mean, however, is
that anyone who was a minister anywhere in the church would,
by the same title, be a minister everywhere, and that anyone
who was a communicant in any of the churches would be a com-
municant in them all. We are far from that today. In every
international gathering of Christians our experience has always
been the same that it is impossible for them all to receive the
Holy Communion together in the same service.
From the beginning of Christian history there have been
divisions within the church ; from the beginning there have been
men and women consumed with a desire to see these divisions
eliminated and unity restored. But this ecumenical desire and
ecumenical service have taken different forms through the
centuries.
In the early centuries the great instrument of unity was the
Church Council, It was a great moment in the history of the
church when for the first time, in AJ>. 325, the Emperor Con-
stantine ordered the bishops of the whole church to come to-
gether in the Council of Nicaea. Bishops are very human crea-
tures ; they have their weaknesses and their passions like anyone
else. There is much that is sad, and some things that are dis-
creditable in the history of these councils. Yet they did define
the faith and exclude error. And through their records we can
still feel breathing the earnest desire of these men of old time
that the church of Christ should both be, and be seen to be, one
in him.
The division that has affected us most deeply was that of the
Reformation of the sixteenth century. In less than thirty years
the divisions in Europe had hardened down, and the lines be-
tween Catholic and Protestant, as they were then drawn up,
have hardly changed in four centuries. There is no country in
INTEODUCTION: THE ECUMENICAL EEA AEEIVES
the world in which this division is more sharply felt than in the
United States.
Our history books tell ns much about the divisions. They do
not usually tell us much about the earnest attempts of good men
to find a way back to unity. This was the age in which the ecu-
menical leaders were the theologians. Time and time again leaders
on both sides met and really tried to understand one another
and to see whether bridges could not be built from both sides.
Perhaps they came nearer to agreement at Eatisbon in 1541 than
ever before or since. But the differences were deep and com-
prehensive, and that is a division in the body of Christ which has
so far resisted all attempts to heal it.
In the seventeenth century the work was taken up by dedicated
individuals who gave their lives to the cause of unity. One of
the most famous of these was the Scot, John Dury. His whole life
was spent in endless travels from country to country trying to
get churches and church leaders interested in one another and
in the cause on which his heart was set. If not very much seemed
to come from his efforts, that was not for lack of trying ; perhaps
the propitious moment for successful ecumenical effort had not
yet come.
In the eighteenth century the rulers took a hand. Over almost
the whole of Europe it was still taken for granted that the ruler
had some responsibility in the sight of God for what his subjects
believed as well as for what they did. The eighteenth century
opens with some interesting negotiations between rulers in
Britain and rulers in Germany (we must not forget that at that
time the King of England was also Elector of Hanover) ; posi-
tive results were few, other than the translation of the English
Prayer Book into German in 1704. Christian negotiations became
too much mixed up in political affairs for any very useful results
to be possible. Then, after the eighteenth century had merged
into the nineteenth, the King of Prussia brought about the first
great reunion in Christian history, with the formation of the
Old Prussian Union in which his Lutheran and his Calvinist
subjects were, after a fashion, brought together. Many did, and
would now, regard this as a very unsatisfactory union, dependent
far more on the will of the ruler than on any theological princi-
13
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
pie. But at least it deserves mention as the first of an increasing
series.
The nineteenth century was the age of voluntary societies.
Societies formed by good Christians for good purposes were
numbered literally in hundreds. The important thing about many
of them was that they cut right across the divisions of confession
and denomination. One of the first of this type was the British
and Foreign Bible Society, founded in 1804 ; from the start this
had Anglicans and Free Churchmen on its committee. An even
more famous example is the Young Men's Christian Association,
the first of the great international Christian bodies and the great
pioneer in developing national leadership in the lands of the
younger churches. The basis of the Y.M.C.A. was personal faith
in Jesus Christ and allegiance to him. The question of denomina-
tional affiliation hardly arose; it was taken for granted that
the good member of a Y.M.C.A. would also be a loyal member
of some church or other, but these enthusiastic young people
found that their common loyalty to Jesus Christ bound them
together, in spite of differences and divisions on many other
levels.
The nineteenth century saw the development of Christian
co-operation on a scale and in a variety of ways never imagined
before. Not unnaturally this happened even more readily on
"the mission field" than in the older countries. Traditions were
less binding ; the needs were more urgent. Christians were tiny
groups isolated amid masses of unbelieving people. Almost in-
evitably they sought one another out and found that they could
work together in countless ways. By the end of the century co-
operation had become firmly established as a principle and
perhaps had gone almost as far as it could go. Was a further
step possible, and if so, what should that step be?
None of us can see far into the future. It is unlikely that any
leading Christian, asked in the year 1900 to prophesy about the
events that might be expected to take place in the Christian
world in the succeeding sixty years, would have correctly pre-
dicted any of the things that are to be written in this book. The
question that any reader of this brief summary of ecumenical
activity through the centuries might well ask would be, "Where
were the churches in all this 1 ' ' The answer, strange but true, is
14
INTRODUCTION: THE ECUMENICAL EEA AEEIVES
that the churches as such took hardly any part at all in all this
effort and on occasions opposed it. This was to be the great new
beginning of the twentieth century.
Enter the churches. In this book we shall watch them enter
very hesitantly, with many precautions and many backward
glances, but impelled by a force that they could not resist. The
twentieth century is the century of the churches. All the other
forms of ecumenical activity still exist and have their part to
play. But, increasingly as the years have passed, responsibility
to work for the unity and renewal of the church has been seen
to belong in the first place to the churches themselves and to
no one else. How this has come to be recognized is really the sub-
ject of this book. This is the golden thread running through all
the chapters and through all the multiplicity of subjects that has
had to be discussed. The churches have entered on a new period
of their history. Hesitantly and uncertainly they have been led
to respond to a new call, a new vocation that has been laid on
them in our time by the Head of the church himself.
I EKntwgh 1910
JoKn R. Mott and World Vision
AT EXACTLY 3 P.M., ON JuNE 14, 1910, THE PRESIDENT, LORD
Balf our of Burleigh, rose to his feet. In half an hour the business
had been done, and the first World Missionary Conference (to
consider missionary problems in relation to the non-Christian
world) had been constituted. The Conference had adopted the
salutary rule that "the time allotted to each speaker in the dis-
cussion . . . shall not exceed seven minutes " would that all
other ecumenical gatherings had done the same! And it had
accepted the resolution "that Mr. John B. Mott be appointed
Chairman of the Conference in Committee, in accordance with
Standing Order III/'
Edinburgh 1910 was not by any means the first attempt to
gather from all the world and from all the churches those in-
terested in the missionary vocation of the church. 1960 marks
the jubilee of Edinburgh 1910; it also marks the centenary of
Liverpool 1860. In that year a conference had been held, attended
by 126 members, of whom one was an Indian, the Eev. Behari
Lai Singh. Other conferences had followed in 1878, 1888, and
1900 with increasing interest and participation. The Confer-
ence of 1900 called itself the "Ecumenical Conference," not
because it claimed to represent all parts of the Christian church,
but because it did represent missionary work in every region of
the inhabited earth. But Edinburgh 1910 was different from
all previous conferences in a number of highly significant ways.
In the first place there was a change in the purpose and the
emphasis of the Conference. The aim of the previous meetings
had been illumination, information, and inspiration. They had
set themselves to draw together large numbers of people, to set
before them reliable information as to the state of the church
and its work in many parts of the world, and to stimulate them
16
EDINBURGH 1910 JOHN B. MOTT AND WOELD YISION
to greater devotion in Christian giving and service. "It was felt,
however, that the time had now come for a more earnest study
of the missionary enterprise, and that . . . the first aim should
be to make the Conference as far as possible a consultative as-
sembly." x
This decision did much to determine the character of the
Conference and its membership. Careful steps had been taken to
make the gathering really representative of the missionary work
of the church, with the exception, of course, of the Roman Cath-
olic Church, which was not represented. No less than 153 mis-
sionary bodies in various parts of the world sent delegates.
Although the Conference was held in Britain, the British dele-
gates were considerably outnumbered by those from America
and the continent of Europe. But more important than this was
the way in which those who organized the Conference had secured
the co-operation and presence of a number of the ablest thinkers
and statesmen in the whole Christian world. So here was Julius
Riehter of Germany, whose massive volumes are still our best
authority for the early history of missions in various parts of
the world, rubbing shoulders with a former Governor of Bombay.
Charles Gore, the Anglo-Catholic Bishop of Birmingham, reck-
oned by many to have had at that time the most powerful mind
in the Church of England, was there in company with famous
leaders of the American churches such as Robert E. Speer. Nor
must we forget the remarkable group of younger men who had
been gathered together to serve as ushers. There was a notable
scholar named William Temple, then twenty-seven years old,
whose name will recur again and again in our pages. Another
was John Baillie, later to be Principal of New College, Edin-
burgh, and at the time of writing one of the presidents of the
World Council of Churches.
No conference had ever before been so carefully prepared for
as this one. The main subject of the Conference had been divided
up into eight themes and a commission appointed to deal with
each of the eight. Questions were sent out to many hundreds
of missionaries in the field; their answers had been carefully
1 World Missionary Conference : History, Records and Addresses, p. 8.
Edited by J. H. Oldham and used by permission of Harper and Brothers.
17
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
considered by the commissions and digested in their reports.
So that whereas the previous conferences had started from zero,
Edinburgh 1910 had before it, from the first moment, eight care-
fully prepared and weighty documents.
But in nothing was the Conference more remarkable than
in its choice of a chairman.
John R. Mott, forty-five years old and at the very height of
his powers, had never been a missionary, but he was called to
preside over the greatest missionary gathering in history. A lay-
man, he had the Archbishop of Canterbury and many other
prelates sitting under his chairmanship. A life-long Methodist,
he was recognized as the leader in a movement that has drawn
together men and women from all the churches. An American
to the tips of his fingers, he had made himself the very symbol
of international fellowship and co-operation. Speaking hardly a
word of any language but his own, he was to be the master of such
polyglot assemblies as was this at Edinburgh.
Mott could be authoritarian, almost brutal in the Chair. He
would give short shrift to any offender against the rules of pro-
cedure. Determined to get things done, he at times swept oppo-
sition out of his path and roused opposition by his dictatorial
methods. But in a great international assembly he was at his
best. Firm, courteous, conciliatory, he would see to it that every
point of view was heard and that the due balance of order was
observed in all the proceedings. The assembly had no reason to
regret its choice; probably everyone present would have agreed
with the judgment of the official history that "Dr. Mott presided
. . . with promptitude and precision, with instinctive perception
of the guidance required, and with a perfect union of firmness
and Christian courtesy, of earnest purpose and timely humour,
which won for him alike the deference and the gratitude of the
members. " 2
But we must go back a little in our history to learn how all this
had come about.
In the 1870 's and 1880 's a great renewal of interest in the
Christian faith was sweeping through Britain and in particular
was touching the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
* Op. tit., p. 23.
18
EDINBURGH 1910 JOHN B. MOTT AND WOKLD VISION
In 1882 England was deeply stirred to learn that seven of the
outstanding men at Cambridge outstanding as athletes and in
many other ways were giving up everything to go out to China
as missionaries under the China Inland Mission. As a result of
this movement a group of Cambridge men crossed the Atlantic
in order to carry their message to American universities. At
Cornell J. E. K. Studd was drawn into contact with one young
Methodist in particular. This young man had experienced a some-
what childish conversion at the age of thirteen, but now he was
in a state of uncertainty regarding the Christian faith and re-
garding his own future course in life. Studd was used to bring
him to a definite and uncompromising surrender to Jesus Christ.
The young man's name was John Kaleigh Mott.
If Mott did anything, he was likely to do it thoroughly. Once
committed to Christ, it became the major task of his life to bring
others to like commitment. For the first thing to be known about
Mott is that all his life long he had the heart of an evangelist ;
what he wanted more than anything else was to proclaim to men
and women the good news of new life in Jesus Christ.
One of the addresses he repeated a great many times was on
"The Four Square Man." The phrase may have seemed to many
of his hearers of those days to typify Mott himself. Massive in
frame, simple, direct, advancing always as one who knew the di-
rection in which he was going, he seemed often to have the force
of a battleship moving effortlessly through the water. Mott could
never speak in any terms other than those of the superlative.
For him every hour was the decisive hour. Amused and kindly
friends made collections of his favorite epithets, watched for
their reappearance or for the appearance of a new one. "Every
sentence is brought down like a blow; and, as when the heavy
arm of some stone-breaker bangs blow on blow on the heart of
a lump of stone, until it fairly smashes into fragments, not other-
wise hammer the sentences of John E. Mott, with careful scien-
tific deliberateness, until, at the end, the audience finds itself,
in a word, smashed." So said Temple Gairdner, himself no
mean orator and chronicler of the great Conference. But as a
wise and true interpreter he hastens to add, "Such consistent
19
BBOTHEBS OF THE FAITH
power is vested in no man save him in whom it daily accumulates
by habitual communion with the one Source." 3
Mott's work started in America, but he was very soon drawn
outward into the international field. He was not, in the ordinary
sense of the term, at all an imaginative man ; yet he had a tre-
mendous power of imaginative vision, and what he saw was the
world. Few men can ever have had such capacity to hold the
whole world for so long before their minds without losing control
of the detail of the tasks that immediately lay to hand. One of
his first great achievements in this field was the formation, in
1895 at Vadstena in Sweden, of the World's Student Christian
Federation. This was not the first international Christian organi-
zationit had been preceded by the World's Alliance of Young
Men's Christian Associations and by the World's Young
Women's Christian Association. But Mott was right in think-
ing that this new organization for students was destined to have
special significance.
In the first place it was the instrument used to drive out
thousands of the finest students of that and subsequent genera-
tions into missionary service in every part of the known world
and to kindle in the minds of students who did not themselves
feel the call to that special form of Christian service a sense of
the worldwide Church, its mission, its task, and its struggles.
Of those present at the Edinburgh Conference and of those who
were to accept positions in the many movements which developed
out of Edinburgh 1910, more than a few had come up through
the Student Christian Movements and had received through
them the vision of what it means to serve Christ in the modern
More than this, almost from the first Mott had seen what a
tremendous power the W.S.C.F. could exercise in favor of the
unity of the churches. Already in 1895 he wrote :
The Federation will . . . unite in spirit the students of the world
... in doing this it will be achieving a yet more significant result
the hastening of the answer to our Lord's prayer, "that they
all may be one." We read and hear much about Christian union.
a W. H. T. G-airdner, Echoes From Edinburgh 1910 ( Westwood, N. J. :
Fleming H. Revell Company, Author's Ed;), p. 64.
20
EBINBUEGH 1910 JOHN B. MOTT AND WOELB VISION
Surely there has been recently no more hopeful development
towards the real spiritual union of Christendom than the "World's
Student Christian Federation which unites in common purpose
and work the coming leaders of Church and State in all lands. 4
All these are ideas that we shall find growing and broadening
out through the whole course of our study. The development
from Mott's international student work that was most important
for the Edinburgh Conference has yet to be mentioned.
What are we to do about our denominations ? As long as we live
in the little world of our own church or parish, we are aware of
the existence of other denominations and perhaps feel quite
friendly towards them, but we do not have to bother much about
our relationships with them. But the moment we begin to think
about co-operation with other Christians, the problem of denomi-
nationalism raises its ugly head. Prior to the end of the nine-
teenth century two main solutions to the problem had been found.
To some the principles of their own denomination seemed so im-
portant that it proved practically impossible for them to move
out of the charmed circle into fellowship with any other group
of Christians. On this side the problem of the Roman Catholic
Church and its relations with other Christians will come before
us later in our studies. Another approach, characteristic of the
great evangelical movements of the nineteenth century, was to
say that denominations really do not matter very much ; the all-
important thing is faith in Christ, and if we are agreed on that,
we need not talk very much about the details of those things that
divide us. In the task of witnessing to Christ we find ourselves
completely at one.
The Student Christian Movement, as it developed, came into
contact with certain groups such as High Church Anglicans and
later the Orthodox churches, which really longed for fellowship
but were not prepared to enter into it at the price of having to
regard as unimportant those things on which the churches dis-
agree. Could such folk come into an interchurch fellowship or
could they not ? Here came the new discovery. We need not think
of our own denominational loyalty as an unfortunate limitation,
4 From A History of the Ecumenical Movement, p. 341, by Stephen
Charles Null and Buth Bouse. Published 1954. The Westminster Press.
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
about which the less said the better; we may think of it as a
treasure which is to be shared with others, in so far as they are
able to accept it. Students were encouraged to join the Student
Movement in full loyalty to the church to which they belonged
and to bring with them all the beliefs and the traditions of that
church as a valuable contribution to the fulness of the Christian
life within the movement. No one need deny or try to hide any-
thing which he believed to be true, but no one must try to impose
on others his own particular beliefs.
Many of the leaders in the preparations for the Edinburgh
Conference were already familiar with this new principle of co-
operation. It was the acceptance of this principle that made possi-
ble the presence at the Conference of certain groups which other-
wise would certainly not have been there. And in particular,
through this acceptance one of the most remarkable of all those
who were present in Edinburgh in that month of June had felt
able to accept the invitation to be present and to address the
Conference.
Eandall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, was probably
the wisest statesman that any church has produced in this
century. He had a great knowledge of men and of the life of the
churches. No orator, he was at his best in the House of Lords,
where no one ever gives any sign of listening to what anyone
else is saying, where any attempt at rhetoric is frowned on, but
where a cool, reasoned presentation of a case is certain to be
listened to with respect. Such was the confidence felt in Davidson
by churchmen throughout the world that any action on his part
carried great weight, and his willingness to bless this new inter-
national movement gave confidence to a good many people who
might otherwise have been inclined to be suspicious of it. Not
only so, when he spoke of the place of missions in the church,
this ordinarily dull speaker seemed suddenly to catch fire and
to speak with all the authority of the authentic prophetic voice :
The place of missions in the life of the Church must be the
central place and none other. . . . Secure for that thought its
true place, in our plans, our policy, our prayers, and then
why then, the issue is His, not ours. But it may well be that if
that come true, " there be some standing here to-night who shall
22
EDINBURGH 1910 JOHN E. MOTT AND WOBLD VISION
not taste of death tin they see" here on earth, in a way we
know not now "the Kingdom of God come with power/* 5
We are still far from having exhausted the ways in which this
great Conference proved itself to be remarkable and prophetic.
It came just at the end of the most rapid period of development
that the Christian mission had ever known since the first century.
The great William Carey, who worked in Bengal from 1793 to
1834, once suggested that a general missionary conference should
be held in 1810, perhaps at the Cape of Good Hope. It is inter-
esting to contrast the one century with the other. If the confer-
ence had been held in 1810, who would have come to it? There
would not have been a single soul to represent China or Japan
or Korea. The heroic pioneers had begun to make their mark in
the South Seas. India had her devoted band of witnesses in north
and south. The Cape, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, a few out-
posts on the coast could represent Christianity in Africa, but
the whole of the interior of that vast continent was still com-
pletely unknown. And now in 1910, although the Conference had
before it a report on "Unoccupied Fields," it could affirm that
at least the Christian claim had been staked out in almost every
country in the world, and that the plans had been laid for further
advance. In many ways the most difficult part of the task had
been accomplished. Countless languages had been learned and
in many cases for the first time reduced to writing by the mission-
aries themselves. The New Testament had been translated into
two hundred languages. Through scientific discovery life in the
tropics had been made safer and more tolerable for the white
man. Many missionary methods had been tried; mistakes had
been made and rectified. Above all it had been shown that the
gospel is the power of God unto salvation to all the nations. Some
converts had been won from every known form of human re-
ligion ; few from among high-caste Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and
Parsees, and yet those few were significant as showing that what
most people, including many Christians, had deemed to be im-
possible had actually been done. At the other end of the scale
the Eskimo, in his fastnesses of ice and snow, and the Indian
outcaste had heard the gospel and had been transformed by it.
* Op. dt., p. 150.
as
BEOTEEES OP THE FAITH
No wonder that the Conference met on the crest of a wave of en-
thusiasm and confidence.
All this had been the achievement of the Western nations.
One of the fruits of missionary work had been seen among the
ancient churches of the Bast, which had begun to awake from the
somnolence that had overtaken them as the result of long cen-
turies of Muslim domination, but so far they had made but few
contributions to the expansion of the Christian church. But in
this close association of missionary work with Western power
a danger lay concealed only just beneath the surface. Exaggerated
tales have gone round about missionaries who lent themselves
to be tools in the hands of their governments for the develop-
ment of political and colonial plans. In point of fact missionaries
have as often been in opposition to their governments as hand
in glove with them. Missions have been accused of recklessly
breaking up cultures and civilizations that they did not under-
stand and unnecessarily westernizing their converts. No doubt
missionaries did make mistakes and sometimes confused the
habits of their own country with the essentials of the gospel,
but quite often the shoe was on the other foot. The converts
grasped eagerly at everything that came from the West, suitable
or unsuitable. Do not African gentlemen still go to church on
Sunday mornings in the sweltering heat of West Africa, in thick
European tweed suits? Quite often it was the missionary who
encouraged his people to keep some of the harmless and useful
customs that were their inheritance. Yet when every attempt
has been made to keep the balance, it is just the fact that the
great age of missionary expansion was also the great age of
colonialism. It was to be feared that, if a reaction against the
West and all its ways were to set in, a great deal of Christian
work would be liable to be swept away in the reaction.
To the perceptive signs were not lacking that the great change
might already be on the way. In 1905 Japan had defeated
Eussia. Eussia was only marginally a Western power. Yet here
was the new phenomenon of one of the ancient nations of the
East, waking up from centuries of sleep and in fifty years raising
itself to a level at which it was accepted by the whole of the
West as a first-class military power. The physical impregnability
24
EBINBUEGH 1910 JOHN E. MOTT AOT> WOELD VISIOK
of the West had been successfully challenged. Its moral superior-
ity was next, and very shortly, to be called in question. When in
1914 the " Christian nations'' set to fighting one another and to
drawing millions of non-Christians into their quarrel, they de-
stroyed for good and all the myth of the Christian West ; all that
their successors in 1939 had to do was to stamp on the few re-
maining fragments of Western reputation. After 1910 the Chris-
tian missionary cause was never again to speak in accents of such
triumphant confidence and forward-looking hope.
Edinburgh 1910 was specifically a missionary conference. Of
the more than 1,200 men and women who came together, only
eighteen were from the younger churches, and not one, even of
those few, had come as representative of a church. But the dele-
gates were well aware that, through the blessing of God on their
work, churches were coming into existence in every part of the
world. No subject was more earnestly discussed than the future
of "the native churches." And now for the first time, and per-
haps with pained surprise, the leaders of the Western churches
were to find that the younger churches were beginning to be
able to talk back. Among the addresses which attracted most
attention was that of Y. S. Azariah of India on "The problem of
co-operation between foreign and native workers. " Thirty-six
years old at the time, Azariah was almost unknown outside India,
but many of those who heard him on June 20, 1910 must have
forecast something of that great career to which reference will
have to be made again and again in this book. Azariah started
with a plain and blunt statement :
My personal observation . . . has revealed to me the fact that
the relationship between the European missionaries and the
Indian workers is far from what it ought to be and that a certain
aloofness, a lack of mutual understanding and openness, a great
lack of frank intercourse and friendliness, exists throughout the
country. 6
After considering why this might be so and suggesting various
steps that ought to be taken, he ended with words which rang
across the world:
* Op. tit., p. 307.
25
BBOTHEBS OF THE FAITH
Through all the ages to come the Indian Church will rise up
in gratitude to attest the heroism and self-denying labours of the
missionary body. You have given your goods to feed the poor.
You have given your bodies to be burned. We also ask for love.
Give us FRIENDS?
But we still have not come to the most important thing of all.
It must seem well-nigh incredible to readers of this book in
1960 that fifty years ago there was not in existence anywhere in
the Christian world, outside Eome itself, any permanent organi-
zation charged with the work of promoting Christian interna-
tional and interehurch co-operation. Each of the preceding mis-
sionary conferences had come into being almost by chance ; none
had taken any steps to perpetuate itself, though it was generally
assumed at the end of every conference that another one would
take place sometime somewhere. It was given to Edinburgh 1910
to take the first cautious step forward and to form that first
slender organization out of which was to grow, in God's provi-
dence, the whole of the great world-wide ecumenical movement.
The first step was very small, and it was taken very cautiously.
It is not hard to see why this was so the same problem pursues
aU ecumenical action. Churches, like states, are very jealous of
their independent sovereignty and autonomy. But how can you
honestly go into an international movement without losing some
of that autonomy? And if you allow an international organ,
however modest, to come into existence, will it not tend to grow
and develop until, like the fabled lion, it turns and devours its
own parents ? If we plant a very small acorn of co-operation in
Edinburgh, will it not have grown in a few years into the spread-
ing oak of a Protestant Vatican ? And if we commit ourselves to
co-operation, shall we not be led on step by step into a unity which
will be a betrayal of all our denominational principles? So men
thought and think, and so the basic challenge to ecumenical
advance was delivered.
It is hard to imagine a smaller acorn than that which was
presented by the leaders to the Edinburgh Conference in 1910.
7 Op. cit.y p. 315. The large capitals are there in the sober pages of the
official report.
26
EDINBUEGH 1910 JOHN E. MOTT AND WOELD VISION
All that was proposed was that a Continuation Committee should
be formed to carry forward the work of the Conference. To it
would be assigned such modest duties as " (3) To consider when
a further World Missionary Conference is desirable and to make
the initial preparations." But the sting, if that is the right word
for it, lay in number six: "To confer with the Societies and
Boards as to the best method of working towards the formation
of ... a permanent International Missionary Committee.' 1 This
had in it the promise of as yet undefined possibilities; though
once again the note of caution is sounded in the remark that, if
such a committee come into being, ' 'it should be a purely consul-
tative and advisory Association, exercising no authority but such
as would accrue to it through the intrinsic value of the services
that it may be able to render."
"The motion is carried unanimously." As the chairman made
the announcement, the great assembly rose spontaneously to its
feet and sang the Doxology. Those who were present knew that
something great had happened. They could not foresee how their
acorn would grow nor on how great a tree the few survivors would
look out, when fifty years on they came to observe the jubilee of
the day of sowing.
The Continuation Committee was formed. Perhaps the most
important thing about it was the three names with which the
list of its membership was closed :
FEOM JAPAN
Bishop Honda
FROM CHINA
Mr. Cheng Ching-yi
PEOM INDIA
The Eev. Dr. Chatterji
The right of the younger churches to be heard and to be re-
presented by their own people had been unmistakably recognized.
The Continuation Committee met immediately after the end
of the Conference. Almost inevitably the first sentence of its
record reads: "It elected Dr. John E. Mott as Chairman." So
BEOTHEES OP THE FAITH
John B. Mott took up a burden that he was not to lay down for
nearly forty years. 8
Perhaps Mott himself had foreseen something of the vocation
that would come to him, as to others, as the outcome of the Confer-
ence. This chapter cannot more fitly close than with a few senten-
ces of his closing address :
The end of the Conference is the beginning of the conquest.
The end of the planning is the beginning of the doing. What
shall be the issue of these memorable days ? . . . These and other
things that press upon the whole emotional and mental nature of
the delegates constitute our undoing and our peril if they issue
not in performance. If these things do not move everyone of us,
if these things do not move us to enter with Christ into larger
things, I ask it reverently, what can the living God do that will
move us ? ... It may be that the words of the Archbishop shall
prove to be a splendid prophecy, and that before many of us
taste death we shall see the Kingdom of God come with power. 9
8 During: the Conference the University of Edinburgh had conferred on
him the degree of Honorary Doctor of Law the first of the innumerable
doctorates that were to be showered upon him.
* World Missionary Conference : History, Records and Addresses, pp. 347,
349, 351.
28
II
Nathan Soederblom and Life and Work
ACCORDING TO THE LAW OP SWEDEN, THE FINAL WORD IN THE
appointment of an archbishop of Uppsala rests with, the king.
Three names are sent forward to him, but he has complete liberty
in choosing the one among the three whom he regards as best
fitted for this high office. In 1914 the archbishopric was vacant ;
passing over the first two names on the list, King Gustav V gave
his decision in favor of the third. And so at the age of 48 Nathan
Soederblom became the chief pastor of the church of his native
land.
Few among ecumenical leaders have had so thorough and in-
ternational a training as Soederblom. He was born not far from
the Arctic circle in the home of a poor country parson. There he
learned much of the way in which ordinary people live, of the
trials and sorrows that come to poor folk under the stress of a
harsh and ungracious climate. After a brilliant career as a stu-
dent at Uppsala he went to be pastor of the Swedish church in
Paris and at the same time chaplain to seamen. During his stu-
dent days, he had paid a visit to America for the Northfield Stu-
dent Conference; this had brought him into contact with the
young leadership of the Student Movements of the world and
had added to the deep evangelical piety he had learned in his
father's home and to his interest in missionary work a sense of
international Christianity and of the possibilities for Christian
unity in his day. At this conference he wrote in his diary : "Lord,
give me humility and wisdom to serve the great cause of the
free unity of thy church."
Soederblom 's main activity as a student had been in the field
of the history of religions. After some years as a professor in his
own university he had added to this responsibility that of pro-
fessor of the history of religions at Leipzig in Germany. He was
BBOTHEBS OF THE EAXTH
actually there when the news of his election to the archbishopric
reached him. Perfectly at home in Swedish, French, and German,
and with a good knowledge of English, widely read in the litera-
ture and theology of many nations, he seemed just the man to
lead his church out into the forefront of ecumenical and inter-
national activity.
The hour was matched with the man. Hardly had Soederblom
taken up his new office when the tornado of the First World War
burst upon the nations. We are now so used to one war after
another and to a cold war which seems destined to go on with-
out end that it is hard for us to realize the shock and horror
caused to the peoples of all civilized countries by this return to
the law of the jungle, and by the abandonment of the progress
that had been gained in centuries of peaceful intercourse. It was
always recognized that war might continue to occur in less ad-
vanced parts of the world Italians might fight Turks, and the
Balkin countries were in a state of perpetual effervescence.
Thoughtful people had for some time been aware of increasing
tension among the great nations of Europe. But it was the general
opinion that in the twentieth century war just could not happen.
Now it had happened, and dreams had to be exchanged for the
harshest and cruelest realities.
Sweden was a neutral country. Soederblom felt to the full
the horror of the situation into which the nations of Europe had
been plunged. It seemed to him his God-given duty to call the
leaders of the churches to joint action in order that as soon as
possible the destruction and bloodshed might cease and peace
come back to a troubled world. So in November 1914 he sent
out to a great many church leaders in many countries, with the
request that they would sign it, a statement that he had drawn
up under the title "For Peace and Christian Fellowship" :
The war is causing untold distress. Christ's body, the Church,
suffers and mourns. Mankind in its need cries out, Lord, how
long? ... We servants of the Church, address to all those
who have power or influence in the matter an earnest appeal
seriously to keep peace before their eyes, in order that blood-
shed soon may cease. . . . Our Faith perceives what the eye can-
not always see : the strife of nations must finally serve the dis-
30
NATHAH SOEBEEBLOM AND LIFE AND WOEK
pensatlon of the Almighty, and all the faithful in Christ are one.
Let us therefore call upon God that he may destroy hate and
enmity, and in mercy ordain peace for us. His will be done ! x
Soederblom was disappointed that so few of the leaders to whom
he wrote were willing to sign his manifesto. The sentiments to
which he had given expression were unexceptionable. But had
he taken into account all the difficulties of the situation! The
Germans were convinced that they were an innocent people,
bravely resisting an unprovoked attack made on them by power-
ful enemies. To the rest of the world events presented them-
selves in a very different light. Germany had violated her own
pledged word to respect the neutrality of Belgium. Fair and
rich provinces of France had been occupied by German armies.
In May 1915 the sinking of the Lusitania shocked the conscience
of the world. Yet from Uppsala came no word of condemnation
of these and other crimes, Had the Swedish Archbishop really
understood the situation! He knew Germany well, understood
the German point of view, and was valued by the German govern-
ment for his "honest friendship for Germany/' He had far
less acquaintance with England ; America he never really came
to understand at all. It was not unnatural that those who were
deeply committed to a cause, as all patriotic citizens must be
in time of war, looked with uncertainty on these well-meant
efforts by a neutral to promote the cause of peace and felt that,
terrible as war must be, the rejection of the moral principles on
which European civilization has been built up might in the end
be more terrible still. So for the moment little if anything came
of Soederblom J s efforts.
Yet the vision did not fade. In one crisis the churches had failed
to maintain peace. Were they destined to remain for ever in that
same impotence! They had failed to act together when the
clouds of war were gathering. Could they learn to work together
in times of peace and so to prepare for greater effectiveness if
if another crisis were to burst suddenly upon the nations! It
1 Text in Swedish, German, English, and French in N. Karlstroem: Kristna
Samforstandsstravanden under Varldskriget 19U-1918 (Stockholm, 1947)
pp. 578-80.
31
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
was the business of the churches to prepare men for an eternal
destiny. Had they no concern for the conditions under which
men live in this life, no moral responsibility for decision in
matters of politics and economies and of the social order!
Gradually, thoughts took shape, and Soederblom saw the vision
of an ecumenical meeting in which the divided churches of
Christendom would come together, not like the councils of old to
define dark and mysterious doctrines of the faith, but to dis-
cuss frankly together the urgent problems of practical Chris-
tianity. He had failed to mobilize the leaders of the churches
in time of war; now he would set to work to bring them together
in the days of peace.
In the life of Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury,
there is a delightful description of the first meeting, in May
1921, between Davidson and the Archbishop of Uppsala. The
character of the two men is perfectly set out in the account
of this affair. Davidson was, before all else, a wise and prudent
ecclesiastical statesman, and nothing could shake his inveterate
Scottish shrewdness and caution. Soederblom was the enthusiast,
accustomed to making light of difficulties and to believing that
things would happen just because he willed them to happen. A
list of subjects that the two Archbishops might like to discuss
had been drawn up by the chaplain. Soederblom happened to
light on this paper in the chaplain's study, added one or two
Items to the list, and changed the order, putting "Universal
Conference on Life and Work" at the top of the list. When
this was reported to Davidson, he smiled and said, "He is a
dangerous man." Diplomatic conversation proceeded for half
an hour; the Archbishop of Uppsala always trying to edge it
round to the proposed conference, the Archbishop of Canterbury
always mysteriously managing to steer it on to some other
urgent topic. At last Soederblom managed to get ten minutes on
the conference, but even then Davidson was not to be drawn :
He did not obtain a clear opinion about the Conference from
the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was unwilling to give him-
self away, either for or against, and had previously told his chap-
lain that he hoped he would not be asked for a definite answer,
32
NATHAN SOEDEEBLOM AND LIFE AND WOBK
but if tie were asked would say that lie would consult the Arch-
bishop of York. 2
This meeting between two of the most remarkable churchmen
of modern times is interesting in itself, but it has been recorded
here at some length because it is typical of the difficulties which
Soederblom had to face in every direction. Church leaders are
necessarily prudent people and do not wish to be led into ad-
ventures which may in the end prove unfruitful, if not em-
barrassing. There were no precedents for what Soederblom was
proposing. The Edinburgh Conference had indeed met, but that
was an unofficial gathering of interested people to consider one
aspect, and that on the whole an uncontroversial aspect, of the
life of the church. Now something far grander was being planned
a meeting to which the churches as such would give their
blessing, to which they would send official representatives
charged with the task of discussing some of the most explosive
subjects in the world. It is not surprising that many hesitated,
convinced either that the meeting would not be held at all, or
that if held it might prove to be more of a danger than a con-
solation to the churches.
But Soederblom had grounds for confidence. He was far from
being the only Christian to feel that the war had represented
a fearful abdication of their responsibility on the part of the
churches. The sense of Christian social responsibility had been
slowly but steadily growing in many parts of the world. It no
longer seemed sufficient that the churches should preach a
gospel of individual salvation; their voice should be heard in
those areas of confusion and perplexity which were the legacy
of the industrial revolution and of the domination established
by the white races over nearly three-quarters of the population
of the world. In England the great prophet had been F. D.
Maurice, who had challenged the accepted philosophy and
economics of his day and had affirmed that co-operation is a
more effective principle than the unlimited competition which
in his day was held to be necessary in industrial affairs. His
*GK K. A. Bell, Randall Davidson (London: Oxford University Press,
3rd. ed., 1952), pp. 1049-51. (The chaplain concerned in thia affair wa
named G. K. A. Bell!)
33
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
thought continued to work in the minds of disciples, both within
and outside tlie Clrarcli of England, and led in 1911 to the
formation of the Interdenominational Social Service Council.
Similar movements came into being in France, in Germany, and
in Switzerland. In America the Social Gospel, of which Walter
Bausehenbusch and Francis G. Peabody were the most noted
prophets, had laid down the principle that the whole life of
society must be penetrated by the spirit of Christianity. One
of the first actions of the Federal Council of the Churches of
Christ in America was its adoption in 1908 of "the Social Creed
of the Churches. " On the basis of such thought and such con-
cern Soederblom was able to build his great design.
It was in England that action was first taken to give clear
expression to the post-war concern for the practical application
of Christian principles. Quite independently of Soederblom and
his plans, a number of English church leaders had decided, as
early as 1921, to convene a great conference on Christian Politics,
Economics and Citizenship the very terms, familiar as they
may now seem, sounded paradoxical at the time of their enuncia-
tion. The basis of the Conference was expressed as follows :
The basis of this Conference is the conviction that the Chris-
tian Faith, rightly interpreted and consistently followed, gives
the vision and the power essential for solving the problems of
today, that the social ethics of Christianity have been greatly
neglected by Christians with disastrous consequences to the in-
dividual and to society, and that it is of the first importance
that these should be given a clearer and more persistent em-
phasis. 8
Very careful preparations were made. Twelve commissions met
over a long period of time to discuss such subjects as education,
the treatment of crime, the Christian attitude to war and peace.
Many of the best brains in the country lent their co-operation,
and this ecumenical enterprise was distinguished by the fact
that many leading Roman Catholics took part in the studies,
until at a late stage disagreement on certain matters of prin-
ciple led to their withdrawal. Unlike many ecumenical publica-
8 The Proceedings of C.O.P.E.C. (London: Longmans, 1924), p. xi.
34
NATHAN SOEDEEBLOM AND LIFE AND WOEK
tions, tlie "COPEC" reports proved immediately popular; a
number of them had to be reprinted three times within a year
of their first appearance. Their up-to-date and relevant char-
acter may be illustrated by a single quotation from the report
on peace and war: "The future destiny of mankind cannot be
determined by Europe and America ; Asia and Africa will be-
come of increasing importance."
It has to be admitted that the Conference itself, held at
Birmingham April 5-12, 1924, was rather duU No one has yet
solved the problem of what is to be done with these very large
and miscellaneous gatherings of Christians, most of whom have
not had time to read the literature prepared for their edification.
Such numbers of people cannot possibly engage in profitable
debate or discussion. And yet such an assembly becomes deeply
discontented if it becomes too clear that the members have been
brought together only to serve as a rubber stamp for decisions
already reached by their devoted and hard-working committees.
The problem is still with us and seems likely to remain unsolved
till the end of time.
Still, there were some striking moments in the Conference.
One came right at the start, when the chairman, William
Temple, at that time Bishop of Manchester, defined what he
believed the purpose of the Conference to be :
The fundamental aim of the Conference is that we may re-
ceive a new realisation of God, especially in relation to those
phases of life from which any direct reference to God has usually
of late been excluded.
This puts it all in a nutshell; is there any phase of life from
which God and the law of Christ can be excluded? The man of
the world answers "many." The ecumenically-minded Christian
answers "none."
Then there was the moment at which the Archbishop of
Uppsala, at that time almost unknown in Britain, addressed the
Conference on the proposed "World Conference on Life and Work.
He would make three points. (1) He commended the admirable
reports. (2) The Conference had shortened the way between
faith and action. The way was perhaps shorter for English and
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
American Churches than for others. (3) Copec has made Chris-
tians uncomfortable, and that is often the best service that can
be given to a man. 4
In the meantime preparations were going forward in Sweden
and elsewhere, and at last the great day arrived. On August 19,
1925 the Universal Christian Conference on Life and Work, made
up of more than five hundred representatives from thirty-seven
nations, convened in Stockholm. Its aim :
Without entering into questions of Faith and Order ... to
unite the different Churches in common practical work, ^ to
furnish the Christian conscience with an organ of expression
in the midst of the great spiritual movements of our time, and to
insist that the principles of the Gospel be applied to the solu-
tion of contemporary social and international problems. 5
It is impossible to exaggerate the part played in the confer-
ence by Archbishop Soederblom. Without attempting unduly
to impress his personality on the proceedings, he was every-
where and in everything, alert, adroit, patient. Sixty years old,
he had brought to the Conference all the fruits of a many-sided
experience of the church, of watchful hope and expectation, of
a resolution to see this Conference through that could not be
dimmed or dulled by apathy, criticism, or hostility on the part
of others. One observer has described how, welcoming a group
of guests no two of whom could speak the same language, he
would dart from one to the other, slipping with perfect ease
from one tongue to another, bringing all together and making
all feel at home in one fellowship. His fellow-Swede Nils Bhren-
stroem has written penetratingly that "an authentic and indis-
pensable touch was his great sense of humour and his amazing
faculty of creating around him an atmosphere of joyous festivity.
But it was a humour glittering over mysterious depths; it is
suggestive that his sympathetic study of Luther carries the
title Humour and Melancholy." 6 And Miss Lucy Gardner, one
* The Proceedings of G.O.P.E.C., p. 261.
8 The Stockholm Conference 1985 (ed. G. K. A. Bell, Oxford University
Press, 1926), p. i.
* Bouse & Neill, op. (tit*, p. 546.
36
NATHAN SOEDEEBLOM AND LIFE AND WOEK
of the secretaries of COPEC, used of him a word which only
rarely finds its way into the solemn records of ecumenical debate :
I hardly dare begin to speak of the beloved President in
fact, I am not sure that he comes, so to speak, within my terms
of reference or indeed that he even comes within anybody's
terms of reference. But I wiU just say that we have grown to
love him and that the memory of his great vision his fun and
his spiritual understanding, will always be very precious. 1
Hardly less remarkable than Soederblom was the secretary of
the Conference, the newly appointed Dean of Canterbury,
George Bell. Forty-one years old, but looking much younger
than his years, Bell, after a brilliant career as student and
teacher at Oxford, had gone to be chaplain to Archbishop David-
son. We have already noted Davidson's personal greatness. But
beyond this he had a capacity, unequalled by any other Chris-
tian leader of this century, for producing greatness in others.
It was his habit to gather able young men round him as his
chaplains, to discern their special gifts, to trust them with im-
portant responsibilities, and so to send out into the church as
leaders men of sterling quality and tested intelligence. So Bell
came to the conference with ten years' experience of dealing
with great affairs in church and state. Modest, reserved, simple
almost to the point of naivete, unaffectedly devout, Bell was
incapable of seeking anything for himself. He had an abiding
concern for the unity of Christ's people upon earth and for the
manifestation of Christ's rule in every part of the life of men
and nations. He did not seek greatness, but greatness was thrust
upon him. And when he died in 1958, the whole Christian world
mourned for one of whom it could be said, as of an earlier servant
of God, that "he was a good man and feared God above many."
The Conference had hardly opened before it ran into stormy
waters. What do we mean by the kingdom of God, and what share
has man in bringing it to accomplishment?
The opening sermon was preached by Frank Theodore Woods,
Bishop of Winchester, who had won a high reputation in Britain
T The Stockholm Conference 19$$ (Ed. Q-. K. A. Bell, London: Oxford
University Press, 1926), p. 737.
37
BEOTHEES OP THE FAITH
as an expert on social and industrial problems. He started off
in terms of considerable optimism : * f We believe in the kingdom
of Heaven. We are conspirators for its establishment. That is
why we are here. That is the meaning of this Conference. ' ' And
towards the end of the sermon he struck the same note again :
To set up the Kingdom of God in this complicated civilization
of the twentieth century is a colossal task, a task which demands
thought, skill, patience, wisdom. But, I repeat, in Christ we
can do the impossible. Therefore, in this opening act of worship
we do our homage to Him. 8
It was almost inevitable that this British optimism should be
met by a sharp challenge, almost a rebuke, from another side,
and this happened in the allocution of His Magnificence the
Bishop of Saxony, Dr. Ihmels.
It is nothing but self-deception to suppose that the Kingdom
of God will reach its perfect development in this age. . . . Nothing
could be more mistaken or more disastrous than to suppose
that we mortal men have to build up God's kingdom in this
world. We must be careful how we express this. We can do
nothing, we have nothing, we are nothing. 9
Here we find two points of view that have remained locked
in apparently inextricable opposition all through the ecumenical
history of fifty years. It may serve a useful purpose to put
them in their extreme form. On the one hand some Christians
have sincerely believed that God has millenniums and ages in
which to work out his purpose, and that one day the kingdom
of God will certainly be established on this earth. It is man's
task to work with God for the manifestation of that kingdom.
It is true that without Christ we can do nothing, but with him
we can do all things and work with full confidence in the bless-
ing of God upon our work. On the other hand other Christians
equally sincere have affirmed that the kingdom is always the
gift of God which comes down from above ; it is never the work
of man. It will appear only at the end of the ages when Christ
8 Ibid., p. 45.
IUd., pp. 75, 76,
38
NATHAN SOEDBEBLOM AND LIPE AND WOEK
comes again in glory. All human hopes may be frustrated, and
aH human effort is based on sand. The German looks with
pained contempt on the naive optimism of the American, who
confuses the kingdom of God with the American way of life
and steadily refuses to face the elements of evil and destruction
that exist in human life. The American looks with sad contempt
on the continental, who supposes that the putting out of some
of his own lights of hope is identical with the extinction of the
sun and all the stars and is prepared to sit with folded hands
awaiting the trump of doom and the end of all earthly things.
Nearly thirty years later the preparations for the Evanston
Assembly of 1954 showed that the old misunderstandings were
as much alive as ever; we have not yet reached the point at
which these diverse understandings of the Christian hope are
complementary rather than contradictory.
In twelve days the Conference made a rapid tour, under the
guidance of experts, of all those areas in the life of men on
which the church has so often failed to speak and on which it
was the conviction of the majority of the delegates that it ought
now to speak with insight and courage. At the end the Con-
ference launched its message, its only official statement, a docu-
ment only six pages long and of exemplary simplicity, modesty,
and humility:
The Conference has deepened and purified our devotion to the
Captain of our Salvation. Responding to His call, "Follow Me,"
we have in the presence of the Cross accepted the urgent duty
of applying His Gospel in all realms of human life industrial,
social, political and international. . . . Only as we become in-
wardly one shall we attain real unity of mind and spirit. The
nearer we draw to the Crucified, the nearer we come to one
another, in however varied colours the Light of the "World may
be reflected in our faith. Under the Cross of Jesus Christ we
reach out hands to one another. The Good Shepherd had to die
in order that He might gather together the scattered children
of God. In the Crucified and Eisen Lord alone lies the world's
hope. 10
pp. 711, 715-16,
39
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
Many had believed that the Conference could never take place.
It had taken place. It had met and talked and prayed and
dispersed. What was left, now that it was over!
In the first place Stockholm 1925 was a great and representa-
tive assembly. Not so many peoples were represented as at Edin-
burgh 1910. But this time the Orthodox churches of the East
were present with a delegation of nineteen, including such well-
known figures as Archbishop Germanos of Thyateira and Dr.
Alivisatos of the University of Athens. One of the most impres-
sive moments in the Conference had been the recitation of the
Nicene Creed in Greek, at the closing service, by Photios,
Patriarch and Pope of Alexandria. The greatest weakness was
on the side of the younger churches; only six nationals were
present from China, Japan, and India, apparently no one at
all from Africa.
What is even more important is that the majority of those
present had been formally appointed by their churches. We
are moving out of the period in which ecumenical activity was
the chosen vocation of individuals ; slowly and almost unaware,
the churches themselves are being led into responsibility, and
the church period of the ecumenical movement is beginning.
The Conference had revealed many differences of opinion,
both on theological and on practical questions. It had not en-
tirely bridged the gulf that still separated the Germans from
the representatives of the other European nations. Yet for almost
all the delegates these had been days of illumination. Across
the barriers of confession, race, and language Christians were
discovering one another and finding that those things which
unite us in Christ are immensely more important than those
things that divide.
Most important of all, Stockholm 1925 like Edinburgh 1910
felt that it had begun a great work that must be carried forward.
A Continuation Committee of forty-five members was appointed.
This was a disappointment to some, who had hoped to see the
creation of some permanent organization more grandiose in
form and impressive in title. But probably it was wise in 1925
to take only cautious steps forward. Much that we now take for
granted was in those days regarded as rash and venturesome;
the churches had to be gradually persuaded that they were not
40
NATHAN SOEDEEBLOM AND LIFE AND WOEK
signing away their own independence by taking part in inter-
national Christian work. So the duties of the Continuation Com-
mittee were defined in rather stringent and restrictive terms, and
it was emphatically laid down that the Committee should "have
no power to speak in the name or on behalf of the Churches or
to take any action that shall commit any Church, its deliver-
ances being simply its own opinion, unless any particular de-
liverance or deliverances shall be expressly approved by the
Church or Churches concerned." These sensible limitations
apply to all the organs of ecumenical activity; they do not
impede freedom of study and action over a wide range of human
and Christian concerns.
So Life and Work was born. The feet of the churches had been
firmly set on the path that was to lead to Oxford 1937, to Amster-
dam 1948, to Evanston 1954, and to that undisclosed future
which still belongs to the realm of prophecy and not to that of
history.
41
HI
Charles Brent and Faitk and Order
FAITH AND ORDER. TO MANY CHURCHMEN THESE WORDS HAD AN
almost menacing ring. Two great international Christian con-
ferences had been held, and from the proceedings of each of
them the consideration of questions of faith and order had been
specifically excluded. This seemed quite reasonable at the time.
The missionary proclamation of the gospel is a practical busi-
ness and does not necessarily demand that its supporters should
work backwards from practice to theory. The concern of Stock-
holm was with "practical Christianity 7 ' (and in German this
became the official name of the movement that in English was
known as "Life and Work"). Almost with relief Christians had
come to believe that in practical service they could find the
solvent for agelong differences; "Service unites, doctrine di-
vides" was a slogan much heard in those days.
Yet is the matter one which can be settled quite so easily
as that? Christians go to the non-Christian lands to preach
the gospel. But what gospel is it that they go to preach? Can
this question be considered without bringing in all kinds of
questions of faith and theology? And how are we to explain,
or explain away, to the non- Christian world the hundred or
more missionary organizations that are at work in India? As
we have seen, on the very first day Stockholm 1925 stumbled
on grave theological divergences. Up to a certain point we can
say that such divergences are no part of our immediate concern,
but how far can we really act together, if there are undisclosed
differences of conviction, unresolved contradictions in our way
of getting at things? Questions of faith and order may be post-
poned; they cannot forever be evaded.
This was the vision that came to one of the delegates to the
Edinburgh Conference of 1910. We ought not to be afraid of
42
GHABLES BRENT AND FAITH AND OEDEB
these questions ; precisely at their points of difference Christians
ought to be able to meet in humility and frankness, to speak
with one another in love, and to find a way through. God has
laid on the churches immense new tasks; in their separation
they must needs be weak; only in union can they find the
strength for the work that God has given them to do. "I was
converted/ 7 he wrote. "I learned that something was working
that was not of man in that conference ; that the Spirit of God
. . . was preparing a new era in the history of Christianity."
The writer of these words was Charles Henry Brent, missionary
bishop in the Philippines of the Protestant Episcopal Church in
the United States of America.
Among all the figures that pass across the ecumenical stage,
none is more attractive than that of this son of a Canadian
parsonage who became a great apostle of Christian unity. After
ten years' work in a city mission in Boston Brent was appointed
in 1901 to the pioneer job of bishop in the Philippines, which
had but recently come under American control. There was an
immediate influx of American Protestant missions, most of which
gave themselves to the comparatively easy task of detaching
nominal or discontented members from the Church of Eome,
to which eighty per cent or more of the population belonged.
While not absolutely refusing to countenance such work, Brent
felt that a mission should be primarily a mission to the non-
Christians; so from the start he directed the energies of the
Episcopalians far inland and into the mountains of northern
Luzon, where lived simple people untouched by the gospel and
accessible to those who would approach them with endless
patience and endurance of hardship. The seal was set on this
side of Brent's work, when in 1959 for the first time a Filipino
priest was consecrated to the high office of suffragan bishop of
the missionary district which Brent had founded.
Brent was one of those men who cannot long remain hidden.
Much of his work was quiet and obscure. But he became the
friend and confidant of successive governors of the Philippines,
and through one of them he was brought into international
prominence as president of the first International Opium Com-
mission held at Shanghai. His strength of understanding and
integrity of judgment commended him to laymen concerned
43
BBOTHEES OF THE FAITH
with these delicate matters of international law and action.
On those who met him casually or in public, Brent always
left an impression of strength and decision. His diaries reveal
another and unexpected side of the man. He was at times bowed
down by an almost morbid sense of failure and unworthiness. If
he manifested strength and wisdom, he would have attributed
this humbly to the power of Christ, which is made perfect in
weakness, and to the wisdom of Christ, which can take the
foolish things of the world and make them wise. More than al-
most any other ecumenical leader Brent had learned the secret
of the hidden life of the soul in God ; this was his life, and without
it he would have found it impossible to serve. Whenever possible
he liked to spend the hour between 6 :00 and 7 :00 A.M. in medita-
tion and to follow this with half an hour for prayer and an hour
for study. It was his habit to write down his prayers ; we shall
make use of two of them as the concluding words of this chapter.
Such was the man who, at the age of forty-eight, felt himself
possessed by a new vision and a new call at the Edinburgh Con-
ference of 1910. He lost no time in making others aware of the
thoughts that were stirring in his mind. The General Con-
vention of the American Episcopal Church was to meet in
October, 1910. On the day before its opening Brent addressed
a large public meeting; he spoke of his conviction that God
was in a new way calling the churches to unity and expressed
the opinion that the time had come for the churches frankly to
examine their differences in a "world conference on faith and
order." This was probably the first occasion on which these
prophetic words were used. Many agreed that something must be
done. At the General Convention a resolution was proposed by
W. T. Manning, later bishop of New York, and unanimously
accepted, to the effect that
A Joint Commission be appointed to bring about a Conference
for the consideration of questions touching Faith and Order, and
that all Christian Communions throughout the world which
confess our Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour be asked to
unite with us in arranging for and conducting such a confer-
ence. 1
1 Bouse and NeiH, op. ott, p. 407.
44
CHAELES BEEKT AND FAITH AND OEDEE
Faith and Order liad been born.
So much has happened in fifty years that it is almost impossible
for Christians of the younger generation to realise how revolu-
tionary this proposal was at the time at which it was made. If
you have never lived without electricity and the telephone, it is
almost impossible to imagine a world in which these elementary
conveniences do not exist. If you have grown up in the modern
atmosphere of international Christianity, it is hard to picture the
endless labors and patience of the pioneers, by whom things that
we take for granted today were gradually brought into the com-
mon Christian consciousness. In 1910 a great many Christian
leaders regarded the holding of such a Christian conference as
first impossible, and secondly undesirable. As one leader pun-
gently remarked, "If they do meet, they will do nothing but
quarrel, and make things worse than they were before. They had
far better stay at home." Scholars recalled with apprehension
the atmosphere which prevailed at some of the early councils,
when the more precise definition of the faith was couched in the
terms of bitter anathemas, and the final result was exclusion
and division rather than the healing of the breaches in the Chris-
tian world. No such conference had ever been held in modern
times; there was no certainty that the churches would respond
or that a meeting of any significance would take place. Unless
Brent and his colleagues had been men of rock-like faith, they
would certainly have fainted and failed under the sheer weight
of the difficulties that had to be faced and overcome.
It was fortunate that Brent was not alone in his convictions.
To his aid, though at first only indirectly, came Peter Ainslie of
the Disciples of Christ. The Disciples had been brought into
existence in the early years of the nineteenth century for one
single purpose to recall the churches to New Testament Chris-
tianity, and thus to bring them back to the unity which they
ought never to have lost. But as has so often happened in Chris-
tian history, a great movement for unity lost its impetus and
took on the form of just one more of the endless denominations
into which the church of Christ is divided. Peter Ainslie felt it
to be his vocation to call the Disciples back to that activity on
behalf of Christian union, which was the sole reason for their
existence. In the years following 1910 he brought into being
45
BBOTHEBS OF THE FAITH
the Association for the Promotion of Christian Unity, of which
he became president, and in 1911 launched the Christian Union
Quarterly, an open forum for the discussion of all questions
related to Christian union, which he edited until his death in
1934
Even more remarkable was the long association between Brent
and Robert Hallowell Gardiner, the layman who had become
secretary of the Commission of the Episcopal Church. Inevitably
Faith and Order has been a clerical movement ; much of its work
has been in the hands of the theological experts, who alone can
walk with confidence in the midst of the highly technical ques-
tions that have constantly to be dealt with. It must not be for-
gotten that the man who gave shape and form to Brent's vision
was a layman and a lawyer.
The two men were an admirable team. To Brent was given the
vision of the prophet and the gift of expressing in biting and
vigorous language the challenge. Behind him, usually in the
shadow, was Gardiner, always ready to bring to a knotty problem
his keen, legally trained mind, and eager to work out the de-
tails of such organization as was necessary to realize the vision
of his colleague. 2
"Well, this means business." Such was the remark of some
friends of the movement, when in 1913 they saw the names of
the committee appointed on behalf of the Church of England
by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to co-operate with
the American movement. 3 The same, or almost the same, words
must have come spontaneously into the mind of everyone who had
to do with Gardiner. He believed in getting things done and in
getting them done without delay. Two great weapons formed his
armory the pamphlet and the letter. Almost from the start,
quietly and unobtrusively, the series of Faith and Order Pam-
phlets began to make their way into the world. None carried any
authority other than that of the Commission of the Episcopal
Church. Some were requests for prayer, others reports of con-
*A. C. Zabriskie, Bishop Brent (Philadelphia : The Westminster Press,
1948), p. 149.
8 Faith and Order Pamphlet, no. 24, p. 9.
46
CHAELES BEBNT AND FAITH AND OEDEB
ferences, others serious theological documents. The following
note indicates the international character which the work had
taken on from the start :
4. Leaflet no. 2 in Modern Greek
5. Leaflet no. 2 in Latin
6. Leaflet no. 2 in Italian
7. Leaflet no. 2 in Eussian
8. Leaflet no. 2 in German
9. Leaflet no. 2 in French
10. Leaflet no. 2 in Dutch. 4
By 1948 the series had run up to 103 numbers, and then a new
series was begun. It is typical of the modesty and simplicity of
the work carried out by Gardiner that several of the pamphlets
were allowed to run out to the very last copy, and no complete
collection of them exists anywhere in the world.
Helped by a generous gift from J, Pierpont Morgan, Gardiner
began to correspond with church leaders in all parts of the world.
In an extraordinary way he managed to instil confidence into the
minds of people whom he had never met, and this network of
letters passing to and fro between America and almost every
country in the world was the warp on which the web of Faith and
Order was later to be well and truly woven. Alas, for the delays
and disappointments of human affairs 1 Many ecumenical labor-
ers, like Moses on Mount Pisgah, have seen the promised land from
afar and have not entered into it. The first World Conference on
Faith and Order did not take place till 1927 ; in 1924 Gardiner
had been called to his rest. The Conference did well to pay
glowing tribute to his work :
Now that we can take measure of him as never before we dis-
cover him to be one of the foremost leaders and inspirers of our
day. "Without his sort, hope would wither, faith decline and love
grow cold. There is an ache in our hearts and a void in our fellow-
ship which must abide. And yet all the while we rejoice that the
Church raises up such men to enrich and inspire mankind. 5
* Faith and Order Pamphlet, no. 23, p. 21.
* Faith and Order Proceedings of the World Conference Lausanne August
3-12, 1927 (Ed. H. N. Bate, New York: George N. Doran Company, 1927)
p. 12.
47
BBOTHEES OP THE FAITH
One other form of preparation (in which Gardiner did not
take part) remains to be noted the ecumenical pilgrimage.
Delegations of churchmen, mostly American, travelled round
the world to meet church leaders personally and to interest them
in the proposed conference. This naturally raised the question
of the limits to which they should go in planning their visita-
tions. The answer was that there were no limits, other than that
laid down in the first declaration of the purpose of the Confer-
ence, to unite all those churches which confess faith in Jesus
Christ our Lord as God and Savior. This famous phrase was first
used by the Young Men's Christian Association at its Paris
Conference of 1855 ; it has passed into history as the basis of
the World Council of Churches. Taken seriously, it necessarily
meant that the Roman Catholic Church could not be excluded
from the interest of the pilgrims. And so to Rome a number of
them betook themselves in May 1919. This gave rise to one of the
most famous of all ecumenical incidents.
They ought to have foreseen what would happen. That they
did not foresee indicates that these, on the whole, wise and pru-
dent men had for the moment yielded to that naive optimism
which is one of the snares and perils of ecumenical activity. The
Pope received them in person. He spoke with utmost graciousness,
but as they left his presence, the visitors were handed a written
statement, prepared well in advance, indicating that though the
Pope felt goodwill for separated Christians who were seeking
the way to unity, neither he nor his church could have anything
to do with the proposed conference. We shall return again to
the Roman Catholic attitude toward unity; that church holds
that it has everything to teach and nothing to learn ; it possesses
the unity which Christ promised to the faithful and can bring
others into that unity, but in the process it cannot receive any-
thing from them. From this attitude the Vatican has never
budged. Other Christians may regret this attitude; they must
recognize it and take it seriously. So history cannot but regard
as a little unreasonable the reaction of the Anglo-Catholic mem-
ber of the deputation, the Bishop of Fond-du-lac, who, on leaving
the papal presence, remained silent for some time and then
raised his fist to heaven and " expressed his judgment on the
48
CHABLES BBENT AND FAITH AND OBDEB
Bishop of Borne in terms more forceful than complimentary. " 6
At last the preliminaries were over, and on Wednesday,
Angnst 3, 1927 the great conference opened in Lausanne, appro-
priately under the presidency of Bishop Brent.
It was a wonderful ecclesiastical menagerie. A hundred and
sixteen churches were represented. Apart from the regretted
absence of the Church of Eome almost the whole Christian world
seemed to be there. It was notable that delegates had come from
no less than ten of the Orthodox churches and from four of the
separated churches of the East.
Not less remarkable than the variety of the delegates was their
distinction. The Anglican churches, for instance, had sent Gore,
Temple, Headlam, and Palmer Gore, regarded by many as the
greatest theologian of the Church of England, and standing
for a rather stiff Anglo-Catholic position; Temple, the rising
star of the ecumenical world; Headlam, immensely learned,
abrupt, impatient of blurred or muddled thinking and of any
attempt to substitute feeling for hard thinking "I deprecate
any reference to the work of the Holy Spirit, " he was once heard
to say ; Palmer, Bishop of Bombay, wagging his beard, sometimes
using his slight stutter to lend explosive force to his utterances,
and always calling his hearers back to the hard realities of the
Christian situation. From Germany had come, among others,
Karl Ludwig Schmidt, already well known as one of the pioneers
of the " Form-criticism " of the New Testament; from Finland
Aleksi Lehtonen, later to be Archbishop ; from America William
Adams Brown, the great teacher of Union Seminary, New York,
and faithful ecumenical pioneer over nearly half a century;
from Italy Ernesto Comba to represent the martyred Waldensian
Church ; from France Wilfred Monod, with the face of a mystic
and a saint. And so the catalogue could go on, forming almost a
summary of the church history of a century.
Yet there were defects in the representation. The younger
churches were represented by learned and sympathetic Western
leaders, but in the list of members there are to be found only
four names of nationals of those churches. It was an old assembly ;
the ecumenical movement had not yet learned how necessary it
* Bouse and Neill, op. cit., p. 416.
49
BROTHEBS OF THE FAITH
is to keep youth In mind in all its concerns and at every stage
of them. And, of course, the gathering was overwhelmingly
clerical. Of the hundred members appointed to the continuation
committee, no less than forty-nine carried the mystic letters
"D.D." after their names I Yet there were notable laymen among
them too: "Professor of the History of Medicine, University of
Toronto" and "Judge of the Supreme Court, Scotland" stand
out pleasantly in the almost monotonous list of patriarchs,
bishops, and provosts.
They met. They talked. They found it extraordinarily diffi-
cult to understand one another. It was not merely that there
were difficulties of interpretation from one language into another.
Even when the words used were the same, it became clear that
long years and centuries of division had woven about the familiar
words differences of connotation and of understanding. At times
the members must have felt that they were attending a new
Babel and that the attempt to reach understanding had suc-
ceeded only in producing new discord. This was the view of some
unfriendly critics. One Canadian Roman Catholic journal re-
ported that :
From beginning to end the Conference was a sort of inter-
national exhibition of divisions and discordances which were
beyond reconciliation. It was an undertaking by men to sub-
stitute a human voice for a divine voice in determining and
deciding what God established the Catholic Church to determine
and decide. 7
Yet far more important than the recognition of division, which
sheer honesty and sincerity imposed on the delegates, was that
spirit which E. D. Soper has briefly formulated in the title of
his book, Lausanne, the Will to Understand. These men had come
together because they believed that beneath all the differences
there was a real unity in Christ, that the task of the Conference
was not to create a nonexistent unity, but to discover the unity
that was already there and to find means by which it might come
to fuller and more effective expression.
7 Quoted in E. D. Soper, Lausanne, the Will to Understand (Garden
City: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1928), p. 129
50
3S BEBNT AND FAITH AKT) ORDER
Of course, not everyone was happy. Most of the delegates had
come from Protestant churches. There was in some minds a fear
that statements might be issued that ' * Catholic" Christians would
not be able to accept. Some were anxious lest, in the enthusiasm
of mutual discovery and fellowship, the depth and reality of di-
vergence might be overlooked. In any case it had to be made clear
that this was a Conference and not a council of the churches
empowered to make declarations by which the churches might
be regarded as being bound. So, inevitably, the Conference had
to take note of some independent and critical statements.
As always the Lutherans, and particularly those from Ger-
many, felt themselves at a disadvantage. Pew of them spoke
English readily; they were not used to what they regarded as
"Anglo-Saxon" methods of doing business. They were concerned
to ensure that adequate theological consideration should be
given to all the great problems before the Conference. So they
handed in a statement of their own in which, among other things,
they affirmed that
The current discussions are, in large part, important and illu-
minating, and we desire that they may continue to the end of
the Conference. But we question whether it is possible, and
whether it comports with the dignity of this Conference and is
worthy of Christendom, to announce at once as finalities the
formulations here made on fundamental principles of faith and
order. . . . Accordingly no final vote should be taken on the
propositions formulated here. They should be added to the pro-
clamation as material for further consideration. 8
The Orthodox delegates also found themselves in a state of
considerable bewilderment. Few of them spoke any Western
language; they had never previously taken part in any such
discussions with members of other churches. Sincerely committed
to the cause of Christian union, they had very clear ideas as to
how such union could be brought about, " only on the basis of the
common confession of the ancient undivided Church of the seven
Ecumenical Councils and of the first eight centuries." Again
and again assurances had been given them that the purpose of
8 Faith and Order (ed. H. N. Bate), p. 374.
51
BBOTHEBS OF THE FAITH
the Conference was not to prepare a basis for immediate union
of churches. Still they were apprehensive as to the meaning that
might be attached to their assent to documents that they could
not be certain of having fully understood. And so they declared
that, while they were prepared to sign the report on the "Message
of the Church," they did not feel able to sign any of the other
reports, which seemed to them to have been drafted on "a basis
of compromise between what in our understanding are conflicting
ideas and meanings, in order to arrive at an external agreement
in the letter alone."
In view of these and many other tensions it is perhaps sur-
prising that the Conference managed to agree on anything at
all. Yet it did pass six reports and handed on a seventh for
further consideration by its continuation committee. The most
striking and moving of the reports was naturally the first, on
41 The Call to Unity"; and here special attention must be drawn
to the evident link between Edinburgh 1910 and Lausanne 1927 :
God wills unity. Our presence in this Conference bears testi-
mony to our desire to bend our wills to His. However we may
justify the beginnings of disunion, we lament its continuance and
henceforth must labour, in penitence and faith, to build up our
broken walls. . . .
More than half the world is waiting for the Gospel. At home
and abroad sad multitudes are turning away in bewilderment
from the Church because of its corporate feebleness. Our missions
count that as a necessity which we are inclined to look on as a
luxury. . . . We of the Churches represented in this Conference
cannot allow our spiritual children to outpace us. We with them
must gird ourselves to the task, the early beginnings of which
God has so richly blessed, and labour side by side, until our
common goal is reached. 9
In nineteen days the Conference had briefly considered a vast
range of subjects the gospel, the nature of the church, the min-
istry, the sacraments, and so forth. It was clear that in many
cases the surface had hardly been scratched and that an enor-
mous amount of careful theological work would have to be done,
if for no other purpose than to explain the churches to one
9 Faith and Order (ed. H. N. Bate), p. 401.
52
CHABLES BBENT AND FAITH A1STD OEDEB
another and to help them to see where agreements and differ-
ences really lay. So this Conference, like the others, appointed a
continuation committee, charged among other things with the
fairly comprehensive task of taking "whatever steps it may think
wise and necessary, within the purpose of the Conference on
Faith and Order, to advance the cause of Christian unity/' The
larger ecumenical movement was beginning to take shape. There
were now in existence three continuation committees, each having
in view the calling of further international Christian Confer-
ences. And the overlap in membership was such as to indicate
that it would not be possible forever to retain in three distinct
compartments the interest of the churches in missions overseas,
in practical Christianity, and in the Faith and Order of the
Church.
To the story of the first great Conference on Faith and Order
a brief postscript remains to be added. In 1929 Bishop Brent,
who had in 1918 become bishop of Western New York, was once
more travelling in Europe. For a long time his health had been
uncertain, and he knew well that death might come to him at
any time. On the way to the Mediterranean, where a cruise had
been arranged for him by an admiring friend, he had reached
Lausanne, the scene of his greatest effort and his greatest tri-
umph. There on the morning of March 27 he died peacefully.
According to Ms own wish, he was buried in the city where he
died. A simple tablet on the walls of the English church in
Lausanne serves to remind worshippers of one who saw more
clearly than most the bright vision of the City of God, and had
long dwelt in it by faith before he was called to share in the
heavenly citizenship. And so we end this chapter with words of
prayer written by the one who had been the inspiration of the
first World Conference on Faith and Order:
God, who hast folded back the black mantle of the night
to clothe us in the golden glory of the day, chase from our hearts
all gloomy thoughts and make us glad with the brightness of hope,
that we may effectively aspire to unwon virtues : through Jesus
Christ our Lord.
Lord Jesus, whose will it is to fold thy flock and to make us
all one in thee, behold our earnestness to be gathered into the
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
peace and unity of thy appointment. Guide us who have lost
our way into the path leading to thee and to thy purpose. Enable
us each and all to find thee, and in thee to find one another. Bless
our efforts to follow thy counsels and in love to reason together
concerning the things that separate, to the end that, misunder-
standing and self-seeking and prejudice being dispelled, we may
see clearly the blessed goal, and in passionate devotion pray and
seek and knock, until we know as we are known and love as we
are loved. 10
10 Prayers of Bishop Brent, pp. 3, 17. Used by permission of Forward
Movement Publications and Harper and Brothers.
$4
IV
Bishop Azariak
and the Call to Church Union
YOU WOULD HAVE TO HAVE A VERY IiARGE-SCALE MAP OF
India in order to find Velialanvilai. There is not mucli to dis-
tinguish this village of a thousand inhabitants from a hundred
others like it, built upon the sandy soil of the teri 1 and shadowed
by their tall and graceful palms. Yet there is one difference.
All the people of Vellalanvilai are Christians ; the center of the
life of the village is the century-old church. And in this remote
and unlikely place was born one of the greatest Christians of
our own or any other age.
Vellalanvilai is about fifty miles from Cape Comorin, the
southern tip of India, and so not far from the center of the first
mass movement to take place in Protestant missionary history.
In 1795 and 1796, in circumstances that still remain mysterious,
the Lutheran missionaries baptized more than five thousand
people in this area. For nearly twenty years this new and strug-
gling church was left almost without missionary oversight, to its
disadvantage in some ways and its profit in others. In many
matters it was able to develop its own way of doing things and
to take on from the start the lineaments of a genuinely Indian
church. Later it became very strictly Anglican, with an almost
exaggerated reverence for the Book of Common Prayer. Yet,
for all that, living in the Tinnevelly Church was as different as
could be imagined from living in the Church of England.
Almost all these first converts were drawn from the group
called the Shanars, or more politely, and as they prefer to call
themselves, the Nadars. Many of these people earn their living
ij the sandhills rising to 200 feet in height, which fringe this part
of the coast of India.
55
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
by climbing the tall palmyra tree to tap it for the sweet juice,
which rises during five or six months of the year. This liquid
ferments rapidly and produces a sweet and heady beer, but it can
be boiled down into a coarse sugar, which was and is the main
form of sweetening used throughout South India. Many of the
Nadars have a little land and cattle. Long hours of hard physical
work have produced among them a magnificent physique. At their
first entry into history they were found sunk in deep ignorance
and almost wholly illiterate; under the influence of the gospel
and education they have given evidence of great gifts and have
produced men and women eminent in every walk of life bishops,
cabinet ministers, doctors, teachers, and the rest.
In 1838 a Welsh missionary named John Thomas was sent to
this area to guide the growing movement. He was a man of strong
wiH and commanding energy. Seeing the Christian movement
rapidly growing, he felt that it would be good to have a fine
central church that would give to the scattered Christians the
sense of strength and of stability. He knew nothing about archi-
tecture. However, he bought a book, and ere long there rose from
the red soil the lovely church of St. Paul, built to seat 1,500
people (crossed-legged on the floor we do not have the un-
necessary luxury of pews in Tinnevelly). Then he thought it
would be nice to have a spire. So he built a spire 192 feet high.
The simple local people, never having seen anything of the kind
before, supposed that the spire had been constructed lying flat
on the ground and wondered by what witchcraft it had been
raised to an upright position. Then Thomas thought it would
be nice to have a bell. The bell was ordered from England, but
when, it arrived it was cracked. Thomas knew nothing about
bell casting. However, he bought a book, dug a large hole in the
ground, and recast the bell. It still chimes, though after a
century the purity of its note is not quite what it was.
But Thomas rendered a far greater service to the church than
any of these. He fought out the battle of the village ministry.
In 1845 there were nineteen ordained ministers in Tinnevelly;
eighteen of them were white and only one was Indian. It had
been taken for granted that the Indian minister must learn
Greek and Hebrew and do all the things that his missionary
friend had done. Thomas affirmed that with a rapidly growing
56
BISHOP AZASIAH AND THE CALL TO CHUBCH UNION
village church, the right course was to take the ablest of the
village catechists, give them a thorough but simple course in
their own language, and ordain them to the ministry. There was
much opposition, but in the end Thomas had his way. The first
ordination, of six candidates, took place in 1849 ; these men were
such a success that the voice of criticism was stilled, and the
Indian village ministry was established. In 1867, in the greatest
ordination yet held in India, one of the candidates admitted to
the ministry was a village catechist named Thomas Vedanaya-
kam.
This good man knew little or no English. But he was a true and
faithful shepherd to Ms flock in Vellaianvilai. In his home the
Bible was law, and everything was guided by a simple and
austere Christian devotion. Here, in 1874, after many years of
childless marriage his wife was gladdened by the gift of a son,
who was baptized by the name of Samuel Azariah, and from the
moment of his birth was dedicated to the service of the Lord.
It was part of the greatness of Azariah that when he was one
of the most famous Christians in the world, he was still at heart
a simple village boy, and that he admitted frankly on all oc-
casions that under God he owed everything that was best in
himself to the teaching and example of his mother.
It is a far cry from the palmyras and buffaloes of Vellalanvilai
to the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops and Buckingham
Palace. We must pass in silence over many stages in this great
career. But three friends left such a deep mark on Azariah 's
character and outlook that they must be named. Like many
other promising young men of that time, Azariah found his first
outlet for Christian service not in the church itself but in the
Y.M.C.A. There he was brought into contact with a young
American, Sherwood Eddy. Eddy has had a great career of his
own. But among all the good things he has done, nothing can
outshine the service he rendered by showing Azariah that equal
friendship between East and West is possible, by giving him
confidence in himself, and by encouraging him to think out all
problems for himself without depending on the judgment or
verdict of others. Henry Whitehead, bishop of Madras (and
brother of the famous philosopher), and his exceedingly able
wife Isabel were early drawn to Azariah. They too encouraged
57
BEOTHEES OF THE PAITH
him to read and think. Exceptional people themselves, they were
perhaps the first to discern the exceptional quality of Azariah
and to see that they had in their hands a possible bishop of the
church.
But the decisive turning point in Azariah ? s career, as in that
of Augustine, came from the almost fortuitous word of an un-
known student. Like other Indian leaders, Azariah had been
concerned that whereas missionaries from the West had been
spreading the gospel all over India, Indians were doing so little
for the evangelization of the non-Christian parts of their own
country. With others he had founded in 1903 the Indian Mis-
sionary Society of Tinnevelly to work in the backward terri-
tories of the Nizam northwest of Madras. In his travels on behalf
of the Y.M.C.A. he frequently urged Indian students with elo-
quence and passion to give their lives to the work of preaching
the gospel to their own people. At the close of one meeting at
which he had spoken, a student said to Azariah, "Why do you
not go yourself?" To such a challenge there could be but one
answer. The prominent Y.M.C.A. secretary became the lonely
missionary. Azariah sought ordination and took up work in what
was then the remote and tiger-haunted area of Dornakal. Within
four years he had been chosen and consecrated as the first Indian
bishop of the Anglican Church in India, in fact the first Indian
bishop of any church outside Travancore, where the very ancient
church of the Thomas Christians has existed from the earliest
times.
By some this step forward was welcomed with enthusiasm,
but not by all. Some faithful missionaries felt that the time
had not yet come when an Indian could effectively exercise this
great office in the church. Indian Christians of higher caste were
inclined to look down their noses at this upstart who had climbed
up on the shoulders of European friends. Azariah knew all this,
and deeply sensitive under his confident exterior, he suffered
deeply. But he held on. Within a few years he had become known
as a wise and firm administrator, as a great teacher, and a loving
shepherd of the flock. In the thirty years of his episcopate the
Christians in his diocese grew from 50,000 to 150,000.
The secret of Azariah 's life was that he lived on his knees.
Like most godly Indian Christians, he was up by 4:30 every
58
BISHOP AZABIAH AXD THE CALL TO CHUEOH ITKIOX
morning. At least an hour was given to prayer. He prayed every
day by name for everyone who held important office in his dio-
cese ; this must have meant at least fifty names, apart from many
other claims and intercessions. He was never a first-rate scholar,
but he was a tireless student. The long and tedious train journeys
over that extensive land would find him unaware of his sur-
roundings and sunk in the latest English commentary on some
Xew Testament book. The fruits of his studies were seen in the
steady stream of books that came from his pen ; his little book on
Christian Giving, republished in World Christian Books, has
now been translated into more than thirty languages.
We must now turn aside from Azariah's Indian ministry to
his world-wide service as the apostle of Christian unity. We have
already met him at the Edinburgh Conference and have heard
his earnest plea for better relationships between Indian and
Western servants of the Lord. Prom now on we shall find him
at almost every important Christian gathering in the world,
speaking always in terms of a sober realism that hardly hides the
passionate earnestness beneath.
At Lausanne 1927 the Bishop of Dornakal was chosen to
lay before the Conference the pitiful spectacle presented by the
divided Christian enterprise in non-Christian lands:
"I am a Baptist," said an Indian friend to me, "not because
of theology, but because of geography." Having accidentally be-
come attached to a Church, Indian Christians do not find it
difficult, when necessary, to change their ecclesiastical allegiance
to a Church other than their own. . . . The feeling of very many
Indian Christians is that they were not responsible for the
divisions of Christendom, neither would they perpetuate them.
Force of habit, financial dependence, denominational training
and, above all, loyalty to their spiritual fathers, now keep them
in denominational connections. But these circumstances cannot
keep them apart for ever. . . . Fathers and brothers ! Be patient
with us if we cannot very whole-heartedly enter into the contro-
versies of either the sixth or the sixteenth centuries. Eecollection
of these embitters church life; they may alienate the young
Churches from all ecclesiastical connections. Unity may be
theoretically a desirable ideal in Europe and America, but it is
vital to the life of the Church in the mission field. The divisions
59
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
of Christendom may be a source of weakness in Christian coun-
tries, but in non-Christian lands they are a sin and a scandal. 2
Azariah's Chinese colleague, Timothy Tingfang Lew, made
an even more striking conclusion to his allocution:
To achieve unity we must follow the Saviour all the way to
Golgotha, and there nail on the Cross all our personal prefer-
ences, individual habits, group prejudices, petty jealousies and
deeply entrenched interests. To achieve unity we must die with
Him and rise again. 3
Ten years later, at Edinburgh 1937, we find that once again
it is Azariah who is chosen to plead the cause of visible union.
Do we detect in his words a certain feeling of frustration that,
with all this beautiful talk about the blessings of unity, so little
had happened in ten years?
A leader of the Depressed Class in India said to me that his
people had decided to give up Hinduism and were considering
what religion they should accept as likely to give them a fuller
and higher life. "When Christianity is mentioned," he said,
"they remind me of the many divisions within the Christian
Church. We are united in Hinduism, say they, and we shall be-
come divided in Christianity. And, Sir," he said, "I had no
answer to give." And need I say I had no answer to give either!
We wonder if you have sufficiently contemplated the grievous
sin of perpetuating your divisions and your denominational
bitterness in all these your daughter churches through the world.
We pray that those who have risen up from the younger churches
and labour for union may not be considered ill-advised and hasty,
lacking in theological perception and historical perspective. We
want you to take us seriously when we say that the problem of
union is one of life and death with us. Do not we plead with
you do not give us your aid to keep us separate, but lead us
to union. 4
* Faith and Order (ed. H. N. Bate), pp. 4=93, 495.
8 Faith and Order (ed. H. 1ST. Bate), p. 499.
4 The Second World Conference on Faith and Order, Edinburgh 1937 (ed.
Hugh Martin, London: S.C.M. Press, 1938), pp. 53, 55.
60
BISHOP AZAEIAH AND THE CALL TO CHUBCH UNION
These concluding words glance at the baleful part that the
older churches with their financial dictatorship can play, con-
sciously or unconsciously, in making permanent the divisions
that the West has carried into its missionary work into the East.
The same note was heard in the following year at the Tambaram
Missionary Conference, in the declaration of the representatives
of the younger churches :
Loyalty . . . will forbid the younger churches going forward
to consummate any union unless it receives the whole-hearted
support and blessing of those through whom these Churches have
been planted. "We are thus often torn between loyalty to our
Mother Churches and loyalty to our ideal of union. We, therefore,
appeal with all the fervour we possess, to the missionary societies
and boards and the responsible authorities of the older Churches,
to take this matter seriously to heart, to labour with the Churches
in the mission field to achieve this union, to support and en-
courage us in all our efforts to put an end to the scandalous
effects of our divisions, and to lead us in the path of union. 5
We have detected a note of frustration and disillusionment
in the utterances of some of these great leaders of the younger
churches. So much less had happened than they had hoped for.
Yet even at their most pessimistic they would not have said that
nothing had happened. For great things had been happening out-
side the sphere to which so far we have directed our attention.
The little port of Tranquebar on the southeast coast of India,
once a Danish settlement, is one of the holy places of the earth.
There in July, 1706 the first two Protestant missionaries to Asia
landed from the inhospitable ocean to find an equally inhospitable
land. There just two hundred and fifty years later Rajah
Manickam, tried friend of all ecumenical effort, was consecrated
as the first Indian bishop of the Lutheran Churches in India.
And there in 1919 a group of about thirty ministers, all of them
Indians except for two foreigners, met to consider the problem
of the preaching of the gospel in India. From evangelism they
found themselves led on to the problem of church unity, and in
8 Tambaram Madras Series (London : Oxford University Press and
Edinburgh House Press, 1939), IV, 403.
61
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
the Tranqnebar Manifesto they sent out a moving and effective
challenge. Here are the oft-quoted words:
We believe that the union is the will of God, even as our Lord
prayed that we might all be one, that the world might believe.
. . . "We face together the titanic task of the winning of India for
Christ one fifth of the human race. Yet, confronted by such an
overwhelming responsibility, we find ourselves rendered weak
and relatively impotent by our unhappy divisions divisions for
which we were not responsible, and which have been, as it were,
imposed upon us from without ; divisions which we did not create,
and which we do not desire to perpetuate. 6
No one knows exactly how the Manifesto was composed. Most
ecumenical documents are the work of many hands, the result
of endless revisions which make the JEDP of the Pentateuch
seem a miracle of simplicity in comparison. Yet those who have
pondered the specimens of Azariah's style quoted above are likely
to think that it was his hand that drafted these crucial sentences
brief, concentrated, picturesque, decisive. Those present at the
Conference believed that they had done a historic thing. Others
were quick to see the prophetic significance of this challenge.
Almost at once Henry Whitehead of Madras wrote :
May we not see ... in this statement that has been issued
by the pastors at Tranquebar a small cloud, no bigger it may be
than a man's hand, which is destined rapidly to spread over
India and descend in showers of blessing over the whole Chris-
tian Church!
For this was not just another general panegyric of unity,
as something that ought to come into being but unfortunately
does not. It was a direct and deliberate challenge to action.
The Faith and Order movement, with an almost exaggerated
conscientiousness, has kept itself strictly within the limits of
theory. It has been an affair of theologians, scrutinizing and de-
bating doctrines and definitions. Whenever anyone has gone be-
yond this and temerariously attempted to formulate a plan by
6 This Mstoric document is cited in full in Bengt Sundkler, The Church
of South India (London: Lutterworth Press, 1954), p. 101.
62
BISHOP AZAEIAH AOT> THE CALL TO CHUEOH UNION
which divided churches might be united, Faith and Order has
indicated that such lower and concrete concerns are in no sense
its affair. It may chronicle them ; it refrains from judging and
leaves judgment entirely to the churches which are the respon-
sible bodies. But the men of Tranquebar had not talked about
union; they were thinking in terms of the union, an actual union
to be brought about between the Anglican Church in South India
and that earlier amalgam (1908) of Congregational, Presby-
terian, and other interests which was known as the South India
United Church.
Official negotiations were set on foot. An invitation was issued
to all the other churches to join in. Only the British Methodists
responded. And so the Joint Committee on Church Union in
South India was formed and began its work. Twenty-eight years
were to pass before hope passed into thanksgiving, with the in-
auguration of the Church of South India in September, 1947.
And indeed the task set before the committee was hard enough.
Here on the one side were staunch Anglo-Catholics, determined
not to jeopardize one particle of the sacramental and historical
theology of their church. On another side were rigid English
Independents, who entered into the negotiations convinced that
episcopacy could not mean anything but ecclesiastical tyranny.
The Basel Mission brought in a continental group, which did
not know the English language well and which was wholly un-
familiar with English theology and ways of thinking. Nationally
and ecclesiastically, it was a remarkable cross section of the
Christian churches that met year after year in this fantastic, and
as it often seemed desperate, search for Christian union.
A great mythology has grown up round the South India
negotiations. Those who took part in it have been represented
alternatively as old men in a hurry and young men in a hurry,
as nice but rather ignorant people two of whom happened to
have obtained a triple first class at the University of Cambridge,
as earnest pastors who were determined to force union through
regardless of any theological issues that might come up. In point
of fact they were a patient, rather learned, very human group
of Christians, who believed themselves to have heard a call from
God, and were prepared to sit down year after year to listen
to the voice of God. They saw the immense practical advantages
63
BEOTHEES OF THE PAITH
which would follow upon union, but this was not the considera-
tion that had led them into the enterprise and kept them working
through a whole generation of human life. They held on simply
because they believed union to be the will of God, and because
they had come to believe that to abandon these discussions would
be treachery to the name of Christ. Every point of theology as
of practice was patiently discussed. Every suggestion, from
whatever quarter received, was weighed with discrimination and
unhurried judgment. The delegates remained in close touch with
the authorities of their own churches in India and elsewhere and
with the best theological authorities in the whole of Christendom.
An enormous correspondence developed.
Professor Sunkler has written 457 pages on this exciting
chapter of church history; and even in this classic work of
scholarly research the half has not been told. Those who loved
through those years ("lived" is what I meant, but "loved" is
what my typewriter wrote, and perhaps the typewriter judged
better than I; we did come to love one another in those years)
can look back on countless moments of frustration and almost
despair and on some moments of illumination, when God seemed
to show a way through what had appeared to be an impassable
jungle. And so at last it was done. Line by line and clause by
clause the Scheme of Union was forged. The churches accepted it.
The stage was set for the glorious act of union.
But here once again we touch the pathos and the tragedy of
ecumenical work. The diocese of Dornakal had voted unanimous-
ly in favor of the Scheme of Union. And then just a month before
the whole Anglican Church in India was due to record its final
vote, the great bishop died, full of years and honor, worn out with
the care of all the churches and with the pastoral labors to which
he had given himself unstintingly almost till the last day of his
life. He had labored; other men were to enter into his labors.
The Church of South India now has twelve years of history
behind it. It has been widely recognized as the greatest venture
yet made anywhere in the direction of church union. What has
come of it all !
It has become clear that the act of union did not immediately
and of itself release a great new flood of spiritual power. The
unity of the church and its renewal are both good things, but
84
BISHOP AZABIAH AXD THE CALL TO GHUECH UNION
we must not suppose that one will necessarily lead to the other.
Each must be sought independently and for its own sake. Yet
the new church has stood, in the face of much criticism and some
disapproval. Those who live in it and for it find it an immense
advantage that the old Western names Anglican, Methodist,
and so on have just disappeared ; this is the Church of South
India and nothing else. This is no foreign body, no colony of the
Western powers. It is an Indian Church, fully self-governing,
dependent on no one outside itself, with its roots in the soil of
India or rather with roots only in Christ, who died for India
no less than for the rest of the world.
One feature of the organization of the church has come in for
the harshest criticism. It was agreed that a period of thirty years
should be allowed for growing together and for the accomplish-
ment of the union. No one would be ordained or reordained. All
ministers of all the churches would enter on an equality. Steps
would be taken to safeguard for every congregation the kind of
ministry to which it was accustomed. But all would equally
share in the government of the church, and all ministers would
be equally eligible for appointment to the episcopate. This plan
caused considerable difficulties in the relationships of the new
church with the Anglican churches. And yet through the suc-
cessive stages of the Lambeth Conferences of 1948 and 1958, the
English Convocations of 1950 and 1955, and the General
Convention of the Episcopal Church of America in 1958 hard
attitudes have softened, and a general acceptance has taken the
place of a tendency towards rejection. The Archbishop of Canter-
bury made history in 1958 when he invited two South India
bishops, one formerly a Methodist, the other formerly a Presby-
terian, to take part in the consecration of a bishop of the Church
of England.
South India has rightly attracted more attention than any
other plan of union. But it is far from standing alone in the coun-
tries of the younger churches.
The Church of Christ in China came into existence in 1927
on the basis of a very simple "Bond of Union." It brought to-
gether a wide range of churches no Lutherans and no Angli-
cans in a real fellowship but with so much independence for
65
BBOTHEBS OF THE FAITH
each church that this might seem to be rather a federation than
a genuinely united church.
In Japan during World War II, under pressure from the
government almost all the Protestant bodies were merged in the
Church of Christ in Japan, the Nippon Kirisuto Kyodan. As
soon as the war was over and pressure was relaxed, a good many
of these bodies resumed their independence. Yet most of the
Presbyterians, Methodists, and Congregationalists remained in
the Kyodan, which is today the largest Christian body in Japan.
It has recently put out its confession of faith and has manifested
its determination to take its stand as one of the historic churches
of the Christian world.
In the Philippines, as in Japan, government pressure during
the war forced on union. Later a series of kaleidoscopic changes
dissolved some unions and created others. But since 1948 the
United Church of Christ in the Philippines seems to have settled
down to a stable and orderly existence. The Philippines are un-
like any other country in the world. For four centuries the mass
of the population has been at least nominally Roman Catholic.
There is now no background of any great non-Christian culture.
The Filipino Christian is quite content to be a Christian and
nothing else and is not at all worried if being a Christian in-
volves some borrowing from the West. Vigorously independent
in outlook, he is quite prepared to take on any challenge from
the Westerner and to stand on his own feet. It is perhaps no
accident that Bishop Sobrepena of the United Church was presi-
dent of the Bast Asia Christian Conferences held at Prapat in
1957 and at Kuala Lumpur in 1959.
So in four great countries of Asia we see already united
churches in which a variety of traditions have been successfully
brought together. And this is not the end of the story. Ceylon
and North India have before them complete schemes of union.
In these an ingenious attempt has been made to eliminate the
c< interim period" of South India through a commissioning cere-
mony, by which at the inauguration of union all ministers of
aU the uniting churches may be brought together into one
common ministry. The churches have not yet finally voted on
these schemes, but there is considerable probability that they will
be adopted in the near future.
66
BISHOP AZAEIAH AND THE CALL TO CHUECH UNION
The influence of South. India has spilled over into Africa.
Nigeria has conte forward with a scheme which very closely re-
sembles that of South India, including the interim period. The
latest news is that the movement in favor of unity is gaining in
strength. This country of more than thirty million people will be-
come politically independent in 1961; it is the feeling of many
Christians that the churches should show the state the way and
should be the first to find their unity and their independence.
In the meantime what has been happening in the West! Have
the older churches made up their minds to turn their backs on the
things that divide and to seek and ensue a genuine unity in
Christ! There is much talk of unity, many negotiations. But it
seems that the resolution to act is lacking. It is possible to make
many excuses for the older churches. Traditions are longer and
more deeply ingrained. Vested interests are strong and complex
and so on and so on. But perhaps the problem was stated quite
succinctly and definitively by Timothy Lew as long ago as 1927.
The Western churches are not one, because they are not willing
to follow their Savior all the way to Golgotha. We still need the
leaders of the younger churches to issue the challenge and to
issue it in such rousing and irresistible tones that even the dead
must awake and give ear.
67
V
Archbishop Germanos and the Orthodox
IN A.D. 668 THE POPE SENT THEODORE OF TARSUS TO ENGLAND
to be Arclibishop of Canterbury. The aged compatriot of Paul,
already sixty-six years old, set out without hesitation for the
distant, barbarous, and scarcely known island on the very fringe
of the Christian world. In the twenty-two years during which
he served that young and so far rather shapeless church, he left
a deeper impression upon it than any of his successors in the see
of Canterbury. The twenty-nine years' residence of Germanos
Strenopoulos in London as Metropolitan of Thyateira, Exarch
of the West, and personal representative of the Ecumenical
Patriarch of Constantinople in the countries of western Europe
did not perhaps produce such visible and notable effects. Yet it
contributed in no small measure to the participation of the
ancient Orthodox churches in the ecumenical movement. A power-
ful factor in this development was the confidence which Germanos
inspired both among his fellow Orthodox and in the churches
of the West.
The Church of England had had a variety of contacts, almost
always friendly, with the Orthodox churches of the East. In the
seventeenth century a number of distinguished chaplains of the
Levant Company had lived in Orthodox lands and written a series
of remarkable books. In the reign of William III there had been
the fantastic plan for a church of the Greek nation in London ; it
being understood that in a church built under the patronage of
the Church of England as by law established there were to be
no ikons or other signs of idolatrous worship ! It is hardly sur-
prising that this scheme came to nothing. In 1896 an Anglican
bishop, the great Mandell Creighton of London, had journeyed
to Moscow for the coronation of the Emperor and had been some-
what perturbed to find that he was expected to wear a magnif-
68
AECHBISHOP GEEMAXOS AXB THE OBTHODOX
ieent cope, lent by "Westminster Abbey, while eating Ms dinner.
But no Orthodox had been present at the Edinburgh Conference
of 1910, and as the modern ecumenical movement began to take
shape, it was by no means certain that the Orthodox churches
would wish to have anything to do with it.
That ecumenical veteran Adolph Keller has left us a vivid
picture of the surprise, almost consternation, of a group of church
leaders, met to make the preliminary plans for the Stockholm
Conference, when the Orthodox churches literally burst in upon
them in the persons of three archbishops, bearded and swathed
in the flowing black robes that are worn by prelates of those
churches. It was in 1920 that this group met in Geneva, under
the presidency of Archbishop Soederblom. Delegates were eye-
ing one another somewhat uncomfortably and uncertainly,
since the terrible question of " war-guilt " was high in the minds
of many, and relations between the Germans and the delegates
of other countries were strained, if not positively hostile. It was
at this moment that Archbishop Germanos, at that time Metro-
politan of Seleueia, entered with Ms two companions, charged by
the Ecumenical Patriarchate to carry a message of good will, and
a letter of the utmost importance, to this first international Chris-
tian gathering after the first war. The Archbishop read his letter
in Greek. The assembled brethren were duly impressed at being
addressed in the accents, more or less, of Paul, but could make
nothing of Greek pronounced in the modern fashion of Con-
stantinople. Fortunately, Soederblom, who always seemed to be
able to do the right thing at the right moment, produced out of
his entourage a Swedish pastor who could speak modern Greek,
and the curse of Babel was removed from the assembly.
But we must go back a little in our history. Germanos had
been born in 1872, a Turkish subject, in a small village in
Thrace. But he was Greek by race and speech and feeling. He
went to study for the priesthood at the Orthodox seminary of
Halki, a small island in the Sea of Marmora, where Orthodox
students for the priesthood still receive their training. After
a period of study in Germany, in which he gave evidence of bril-
liant intellectual gifts, Germanos was called back to his old
student home as teacher. After a few years as lecturer he was
appointed at the early age of thirty five to the high office of
69
BEOTHEBS OF THE FAITH
rector of the seminary. For fifteen years lie remained in this
quiet spot, reading widely, thinking, praying, pondering the
nature of the church, impressing on his students his own deep
and simple piety. After some years he was raised to the episco-
pate with the title of Metropolitan of Seleucia, but he remained
at Halki and carried on with his quiet work as lecturer. But
increasingly he had become the trusted confidant and adviser
of the Patriarch and of others who were concerned about the
wider life of the Orthodox churches and their relationships with
the rest of the Christian world.
The letter which Germanos carried from the patriarchate
of Constantinople to the church leaders assembled in Geneva
was one of the most notable documents in the whole history of
interehurch relationships. This was the period of new hope
that had dawned upon the world with the formation of the
League of Nations, hope soon to be dashed to the ground by
the failure of America to enter the League and by the failure
of the League itself to act with the probity and courage which
alone could have established it as a force for righteousness and
peace among the nations. Later in the same year the Lambeth
Conference of Anglican bishops was to issue another notable
document, its " appeal to all Christian people" in favor of Chris-
tian unity. But to the astonishment of all those who supposed
that the Orthodox churches were still living in the Middle Ages
and were unaware of anything that was happening in the modern
world, the ancient Church of Constantinople took the lead and
suddenly came forward with proposals that gave evidence of
breadth of outlook and of an astonishingly tolerant spirit. No
one knows who wrote the ' * Encyclical letter from the Patriarchate
of Constantinople, Unto all the Churches of Christ wheresoever
they be." In January, 1920 the patriarchal throne was vacant,
and its affairs were under the direction of a locum tenens. It
is believed, however, that though the voice was the voice of the
church, the hand and the pen were those of Germanos, who
thus rendered his first outstanding service to the cause of better
understanding between the great churches of the world.
It is clear that those who sent out the document were deeply
under the influence of the ideals of the League of Nations. They
would regard it as lamentable if the churches were to "fall
70
AECHBISHOP GEEMANOS A2sTD THE OETHODOX
piteously behind the political authorities, who, truly applying
the spirit of the Gospel and of the Justice of Christ, have under
happy auspices already instituted the League of Nations, for
the defence of right and the cultivation of love and harmony
among the nations. 77 But the document is a genuinely Christian
appeal and not a political manifesto. It opens with ringing
words:
Our Church is of the opinion that a closer intercourse with
each other and a mutual understanding between the several
Christian Churches is not prevented by the doctrinal differences
existing between them, and that such an understanding is highly
desirable and necessary, and in many ways useful in the well-
conceived interest of each one of the Churches taken apart and
as a whole Christian body, as also for preparing and facilitating
the complete and blessed union which may some day be attained
with God's help. 1
It goes on to suggest no less than twelve methods by which the
churches could help one another forwards in the path of better
understanding and closer union. Among these are (d) by an
intercourse between theological schools and the representatives
of theological science . . . , (e) by the exchange of students be-
tween the seminaries of the different Churches, (f ) by convening
pan- Christian conferences to examine questions of common in-
terest to all Churches. 2
It seemed that a similar spirit of hope and desire for union
was blowing simultaneously in all the churches.
Two years later in 1922 Archbishop Germanos was sent to
London, with the new title of Metropolitan of Thyateira, to
supervise all the Greek-speaking congregations in the "West of
Europe. His many travels soon made him a familiar figure in
all the countries of Western Europe. In some ways his appoint-
ment had come too late. He never learned to speak English
fluently and did not take much part in public life in England.
But he was always there. We shall find him at almost every large
international gathering of Christians, from Stockholm 1925
1 The full text of the document is in Gr. K. A. Bell, Documents on Christian
Unity, first series (London: Oxford University Press, 1924), p. 44-48.
* Op. tit., p. 46,
71
BBQTHEKS OF THE FAITH
onwards. Always his influence was exercised in favor of charity
and larger mutual understanding. Far ahead of almost ail other
Orthodox prelates in his knowledge and understanding ^ of
churches outside the Orthodox world, he managed to combine
a firm, though always courteous, insistence on Orthodox prin-
ciples, with a deep and eager desire for inward and outward
unity among all those who profess the faith of Christ.
It must not be thought that Germanos stood alone. With him
were such outstanding figures as Hamilcar Alivisatos of the
University of Athens, Bishop Cassian of the Eussian Church in
exile in Paris, and Bishop Nicolai of Ochrida in Serbia. Through
the efforts of these men and of others like them Orthodox
participation in the ecumenical movement has been a great
reality. Yet there has always been present a certain factor of
anxiety, and the Protestant churches have never been able to
feel quite sure that they could count on their Orthodox brethren
as being fully committed to the ecumenical cause. "We have
already taken note of the Orthodox protest at Lausanne 1927 (it
is said that Archbishop Germanos, having read it, returned
to his seat, his face streaming with tears). We shall find that
at almost every similar gathering the Orthodox have found it
necessary to make a separate statement, and in one way or
another to safeguard themselves against any misunderstanding
of their position.
A number of reasons may be put forward as accounting for
this element of uncertainty in Orthodox ecumenical activity.
There is, first of all, the Orthodox understanding of the
church and its nature. In the eyes of all Orthodox Christians,
the Orthodox churches together make up the church there is
no other. In the fifth century the Far Eastern churches lapsed
into heresy. Between the seventh and the eleventh centuries the
Koman Church became at least schismatic; whereas in the
Nicene Creed the Orthodox churches proclaim that the Holy
Spirit proceeds from the Father, the Eoman Church has added
the fatal words "and from the Son," filioque. Even if this addi-
tion is not intended to convey any heretical meaning, a local
church like the Church of Rome has no business to make a
change in a creed which is the expression of the faith of the
whole church. Protestant bodies are voluntary societies of pious
72
AECHBISHOP GEEMAXOS AND THE OETHOBOX
laymen, with no guaranteed ministry, grace, or sacraments. (A
partial exception is made in favor of the Anglican and Old
Catholic churches.) Some Orthodox churches carry out their
principles in such logical and ruthless fashion that a Christian
who passes from some other church to the Orthodox is rebaptized,
though such repetition is condemned as blasphemy by the vast
majority of Christian churches. The Orthodox have the proud
sense that they alone have maintained the purity of the faith.
Western Christianity may represent the teaching of Paul; the
Orthodox churches alone have understood the fulness of truth
as it is set forth in the Gospel and Epistles of John.
From this understanding of the nature of the church certain
corollaries with regard to Christian unity naturally follow. All
that the other churches have to do is to return to the unity
that they have forsaken, and so the oneness of all Christ's
people, which is already visible in the Orthodox churches, will
be restored. If Orthodox go to international Christian assemblies,
they do not go to learn they have nothing to learn; they go
to testify to the truth which they alone possess in its fulness.
Other Christians in the ecumenical movement may not agree
with these claims of the Orthodox; it is most important that
they should understand that this is what the Orthodox really
believe, and that in any honest movement for Christian unity
they, like other Christians, must be given the fullest freedom
for the expression of their convictions. They cannot be expected
to subscribe to any statement which seems to them to impair
the full and majestic completeness of their claims.
The Orthodox are hampered and perplexed by their own
lack of unity.
We must not forget that not all the churches which call them-
selves "Orthodox" are recognised as such by the Orthodox
churches of Greece and Kussia. There is the group of Far
Eastern churches to which we have already alluded. These in-
clude the Armenians, the Copts in Egypt, the Church of Ethi-
opia, and the very ancient " Syrian" Church in South India.
All these adhere to the ecumenical movement, There are happy
signs today of better relations between them and the Orthodox
churches, but there is no intercommunion ; here we enter a world
73
BBOTHEBS OF THE FAITH
even older and remoter from our Western ways of thinking than
that of the Orthodox churches of the nearer East.
Officially, the head of the Orthodox churches is the Ecumenical
Patriarch at Constantinople. But many circumstances combine
to prevent him from exercising an effective headship, such as
that which the Pope exercises over the Church of Eome. For
long centuries Christians were oppressed and harried by their
Turkish masters. Patriarchs were assassinated, exiled, or re-
placed at the whim of the Sultan. Even now the Patriarch exer-
cises direct jurisdiction only over a very small number of
Orthodox Christians resident in Turkey and in certain regions
of northern Greece.
With the coming of the independence of the modern nations,
each regional church has claimed to be autonomous and auto-
cephalous, with its own patriarch, though standing in a rela-
tionship of loyalty and affection to Constantinople. This has
resulted in a large number of independent jurisdictions, gen-
erally linked to the use of a local language. Almost all these
jurisdictions have been reproduced in America by those who
have come from the various countries, to the confusion of those
who try to understand the situation of the Orthodox in the
United States.
There is a considerable psychological difference as between
Orthodox who speak Greek and regard themselves as the direct
heirs of the great Greek Fathers Athanasius, Chrysostom, and
the rest those who speak Arabic, and those who speak one
of the Slavonic languages.
There is a sharp and unhealed division between various groups
of Russian origin. A few hundred yards from the room in
Geneva in which I am writing is a beautiful Russian church.
This belongs to what is known as the Karlovtsy group the
conservative element, which has utterly rejected the Russian
revolution and is regarded as heretical by the Church of Moscow
today. A large section of the Russian emigration in France has
put itself under Constantinople, an action bitterly resented by
the Patriarch of Moscow. Then there are those, in western
Europe as in Russia itself, who have accepted the revolution
and are in possession of passports issued by the present Russian
government.
74
AECHBISHOP GEBMAXOS AXD THE OETHODOX
There is fierce rivalry between the Patriarchates of Con-
stantinople and Moscow. Who is the real head of the Orthodox
Churches! Historically, Constantinople has the better claim.
But Moscow has an answer. In 1594 Moscow was raised to the
status of an independent patriarchate. This was providentially
ordered. The first Eome had fallen into heresy. The second Borne,
Byzantium, the city of Constantine, had fallen under the
domination of the infidel Turk. Now God had raised up Moscow,
the third Rome, to be the light of the world, so that from holy
Russia the gospel might come back both to the paganized West
and to the countries once Christian in which the Muslim now
proudly rules. It may seem strange to us that the Patriarch
of Moscow should seriously take this view of his own position and
should claim to be the divinely appointed head of all the Chris-
tians in the world. There is no doubt whatever that this is Ms
view and to be ecumenical means to take seriously all the views
held by other Christians, however strange or bizarre they may
seem to us.
In 1948 the Patriarch of Moscow convened in Moscow a con-
ference of heads and representatives of Autocephalous Orthodox
Churches. Constantinople emphatically denied the right of
Moscow to call any general Orthodox conference. Inevitably,
Germanos was present, to partake in a friendly manner in the
celebrations of the fifth centenary of the granting of autoeepha-
lous status to the Church of Russia. But he did not sign any of
the resolutions of the Conference, and gave no sign of recogniz-
ing that it had any authoritative status in the Orthodox world.
These different groups of Orthodox have taken up remarkably
different attitudes towards the ecumenical movement and the
World Council of Churches. On the whole the churches of
Greek and Arabic speech and the Russians in exile have warmly
participated. Russia and the other churches of Slavonic speech
under communist domination have taken up a much more eau-
tous, critical, and sometimes even hostile attitude.
The Moscow Conference of 1948 discussed the question of the
participation of the Slavonic churches in the World Council
of Churches and passed a quite astonishing series of resolutions.
A few extracts may be given :
75
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
a) The aims of the ecumenical movement ... do not correspond
to the Ideal of Christianity or the aims of the Church of Christ,
as understood by the Orthodox Church.
6) The directing of their efforts into the main stream of social
and political life, and to the creating of an < ' Ecumenical Church ' '
as an important international power, appear to be as it were a
falling into that temptation which was rejected by Christ in the
desert, and a turning of the Church on to the path of attempting
to catch human souls in the nets of Christ by un-Christian
methods.
d) The theme of the reunion of the Churches on dogmatic
and doctrinal grounds ... is no longer discussed, only a second-
ary pedagogical significance is ascribed to it for some future
generation. Thus our contemporary ecumenical movement does
not safeguard the task of the reunion of the Churches by the
way and means of grace.
e) The lowering of the requirements for conditions of unity
to a single one, namely that of recognizing Jesus Christ as Our
Lord, debases Christian doctrine to the kind of faith which ac-
cording to the Apostle is available to devils. 3
Such resolutions cannot be read without astonishment. The
kindest interpretation is that no one among those responsible
for the drafting was able to read any of the official languages
of the ecumenical movement (English, French, and German),
and that they were dependent on very imperfect translations.
Even so it seems strange that the delegates should not have
been aware that the basis of the Faith and Order Movement,
taken up and adopted by the World Council of Churches, is the
confession of faith in Jesus Christ as God and Savior. A resolu-
tion which lamentably misquoted and then misinterpreted so
fundamental a document could hardly be taken very seriously
in the rest of the Christian world.
In a statement released during the first Assembly of the World
Council of Churches in 1948, the General Secretary pointed
out the one hopeful element in the situation :
The reasons given for the negative decision are based upon
8 Proceedings of the Conference of the Heads of the Autoeephalous
Orthodox Churches, held in Moscow, July, 194=8 (E. Tr., Y. M. C. A. Press,
Paris, 1952), p. 24041,
76
AECHBISHOP GEEMAXOS AND THE OBTHOBOX
a complete misunderstanding of the true nature of our move-
ment a misunderstanding such as can easily arise in a Church
whose leaders have no first-hand knowledge of ecumenical life.
If we succeed ... in making it clear that so far from pursuing
political purposes we have no other concern than the concern
for the Lordship of Christ everywhere ... it may yet be possi-
ble to remove the existing misunderstanding. ... In any case our
course is clear. We should keep the door open for the Church
of Russia and other Orthodox Churches not already represented
among us. 4
Although by doing so we shall break the chronological order
of events which we have been roughly following, it may be well
here to carry forward the story of relations between the Church
of Russia and the ecumenical movement.
Between 1948 and 1958 there had been considerable exchange
of documents between Geneva and Moscow and also between
the Church of Russia and other parts of the Christian world.
For instance a delegation of Anglican theologians, under the
leadership of the Archbishop of York (Ramsey), had visited
Moscow in 1956. At last in 1958 the Orthodox of Moscow felt
that the time had come when they could take one cautious step
forward and authorize three representative churchmen from the
Russian Church to meet with three representatives of the "World
Council of Churches.
The meetings took place quietly in Utrecht between August
7 and 9, 1958. One of the representatives of the World Council
was the Metropolitan James, who for some years had been the
representative of the Ecumenical Patriarch at Geneva, and is
now Greek Archbishop in New York. The official communique
setting forth the results of the meeting is, as is the way of such
communiques, very cautious in its language. Yet it contains
some momentous expressions. Both sides agreed that they ' i shared
the concern for the unity of Christians and the manifestation
of their unity in the life of the Churches. " They agreed that
they shared "a deep concern for world peace with justice and
freedom." The Russians undertook "that they would give a
* Mimeographed document, quoted by permission of the General Secretary
of the World Council of Churches.
77
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
report to the Patriarch, and the Holy Synod of their Church
and that they would do so in a spirit of full sympathy with the
fundamental principles of the ecumenical movement.' 7
Much had been gained. More was to follow in 1959. While
this chapter was being written, the Central Committee of the
World Council of Churches was meeting in Ehodes the first
important meeting of an ecumenical body to be held in an
Orthodox country. For the first time two observers from the
Church of Russia were present with the full authorization of
their church. It is likely that years will yet have to pass before
the Church of Russia sees its way to becoming a member church
of the World Council, but at least the process of mutual educa-
tion in the ecumenical setting has begun and here, as in so
many things, it is the first step that counts. 5
With two remaining Orthodox difficulties we can deal more
briefly.
It is the curious fact that in the Orthodox world, and espe-
cially in Greece, the majority of the theologians are laymen.
For instance, at the University of Athens all the professors of the
faculty of theology are laymen, who combine in delicate equili-
brium a genuine Orthodox faith with theological insights that
have come to them from other churches during periods of study
abroad. Most of the bishops have been monks, and though ad-
mirable in their pastoral work, have little knowledge of the
modern world and only slight acquaintance with the technical de-
tails of theology. When such prelates have attended ecumenical
meetings, they have tended to feel themselves confused and iso-
lated, understanding none of the official languages and being de-
pendent on perhaps inadequate translations for their knowledge
of what is going on. But according to Orthodox tradition, it is the
hierarchy alone that should pronounce on all matters of faith
and order.
This difficulty perhaps underlies the hesitating attitude of the
Church of Greece towards ecumenical affairs. If the Russians
complain that the World Council devotes too little time and
thought to questions of faith and order, the Greeks have been
s Shortly before I received the galley proofs of this book in Geneva, six
representatives of the World Council of Churches made a journey to Bussia
at the invitation of the Patriarch.
78
AECHBISHOP GBEMAXOS AXB THE OBTHODOX
inclined to tiJiink that the ecumenical moTement would do
better to limit itself to purely practical questions, rather than
become involved in matters of faith and order, on which it is
very ill qualified to pronounce. There have even been moments
at which it seemed likely that the Church of Greece would with-
draw altogether from ecumenical discussions. This extreme step
has been avoided, and the malaise and anxiety seen at least for
the time being to have been exorcised.
Finally, we come to the vexed question of missions. To us in
the "West, missions are naturally interpreted as meaning the
preaching of the gospel to non-Christian nations which have
never heard the gospel. To the Orthodox the word has another
and far more sinister connotation. For centuries they have had
not merely to maintain themselves with great difficulty against
Muslim aggression; they have also had to defend themselves
against the attacks of fellow Christians, who have tried to take
advantage of their misfortunes to subvert their ancient faith.
For centuries the Eoman Catholics have maintained their " mis-
sions " in Orthodox countries and have spared neither money
nor effort in the attempt to draw the Orthodox away from their
own allegiance and into the fold of Eome. The world has seen the
discreditable spectacle of groups of Christians being forcibly
converted in one direction, and then perhaps with a change of
political control, being forcibly converted back in the opposite
direction. But it is not only the Roman Catholics who have
offended. Some Protestant churches have also maintained mis-
sions in Greece and Turkey and elsewhere. Often these have
done splendid work in educating those who were to be the
young leaders of the newly independent nations. But some have
made no secret of their view that the old churches are so cor-
rupt that anyone who really wishes to follow Christ must neces-
sarily come out of them and find another way. As a result the
very word "mission, 75 with its special connotation of proselytism
from one Christian body to another, has come to stink in the
nostrils of the Orthodox world.
This is likely to be one of the main matters of ecumenical
debate in the two years subsequent to the publication of this
book. There is no easy answer.
Are we to say that in no circumstances whatever may a
79
BBOTHEBS OF THE FAITH
Christian leave the church in which he was brought up to join
another! If so, what are the Orthodox churches doing in the
"West and in Africa! Have they not gathered in a certain number
of Christians who were Anglican or Protestant or something else f
If this is not proselytism, what is it f
An acceptable solution will come only if the Orthodox churches
begin again to have real missions of their own. The Eussian
Church did great work in gathering in the pagan tribes of
Siberia. There was the famous mission of Bishop Nikolai in
Japan, of which today only fragments are left. But at the mo-
ment in the whole Orthodox world there is hardly anything that
could honestly be called missionary enterprise. The Church of
Greece is training some students from Uganda, but it is not
yet clear whether the Orthodox church in that country has
any stability or whether it is merely a splinter church, tem-
porarily separated from the larger and more stable churches
of Uganda.
In this matter it is perhaps the Church of Greece that ought
to give the lead. If that church, which has now had more than
a century in which to gather its forces after the long centuries
of Muslim oppression, would take over some area in Africa, in
which no word of the gospel has ever yet been heard, and would
set to work from the start to bring untouched pagan people
into the church, it would learn at firsthand some of the lessons
that the Protestant churches have learned over two centuries
of trial and error. It would learn anew the true meaning of the
word " mission." Many of the younger leaders are eager to
see the church move forward into such an experiment. If this
could come about, it would be perhaps the most important ecu-
menical advance of the middle years of the twentieth century.
A church in movement discovers what the ecumenical adventure
really means.
80
VI
William Temple
and World-wide Ecumenism
IN THE ROMAN CATHOLIC AND EASTERN CHURCHES BISHOPS ARE
not allowed to marry, but in the Anglican cliiirclies they are. So it
can sometimes happen that father and son are both bishops at
the same time. In 1958 Bishop Henry Sherrill ended his distin-
guished tenure of the office of Presiding Bishop of the Protestant
Episcopal Church by presiding at the consecration of Ms own
son Edmund as Bishop of Central Brazil. But it only rarely
happens that a son succeeds to a see of which his father had
earlier been bishop, and only once in history has it come about
that the son of an Archbishop of Canterbury has himself been
appointed as "Primate of All England. 77
At the end of the nineteenth century Frederick Temple, Arch-
bishop of Canterbury, was among the greatest churchmen in the
world. Gifted with a powerful mind and the capacity for lucid
and forceful expression, famous for his abrupt replies to silly
questions, with a rugged outward strength concealing infinite
tenderness within when Frederick Temple moved among men,
they sometimes felt as though one of the old gods had come
down again and was walking the earth as in the legends of
classic times. The Archbishop had remained unmarried until
the age of fifty-five. When he was sixty years old his second son
was born and was baptized by the name William.
So William, born in the purple, grew up at Fulham Palace,
the home of the Bishop of London. When he was thirteen, he
moved across the Thames to Lambeth Palace, accompanying his
father, who in 1895 had been appointed to the see of Canterbury.
It seemed that fortune had given William Temple every good
gift the example of a wonderful father, early training in a
simple, manly form of the Christian faith, a nimble mind, a
81
BBQTHEBS OF THE FAITH
cheerful disposition, and countless friends. But one thing fortune
had not given the good gift of health. In later years what
most people noted in the Archbishop were his jovial, friendly
disposition and his reverberating laugh. Few except his intimate
friends knew that his whole life was an endless struggle with
gout, one of the most painful and incapacitating of sicknesses.
Undergraduates at Cambridge smiled, and so did William
Temple, when the Archbishop of York, as he then was, had to
be wheeled to the Senate House in a Bath chair in order to
receive his honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity. It seemed
hard that a lifelong teetotaler should be afflicted with a disease
generaly associated with excessive indulgence in the pleasures of
port wine. They could not guess, and perhaps only Mrs. Temple
fully knew, the severity of the battle that the Archbishop had
to fight. Very few had any idea that he could speak with such
penetrating power just because he himself had so often passed
through dark places, and that his wonderful spiritual power
was a power born of suffering patiently endured.
In early days, however, everything seemed smiling and pros-
perous for the young William Temple. After a brilliant career
at school and college he was elected a Fellow of Queen's College,
Oxford, and settled down to study hard and to teach. Everyone
predicted a brilliant future for him ; he gave the impression of
doing anything that he wanted to do without effort and with
superb competence. A pretty picture of him in these early days
has been left by Eonald (later Monsignor) Knox, himself the
son of an Anglican bishop, in Ms poem "Absolute and Abitof-
helL," a marvellously skillful parody of Dryden's famous
"Absalom and Achitophel." This is how Knox saw Temple :
First, from the Public Schools Lernaean Bog
No paltry Bulwark, stood the form of OG.
A man so broad, to some he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind in effigy :
Who, brisk in Term, a Whirlwind in the Long,
Did everything by turns, and nothing wrong,
Bill'd at each Lecture-hall from Thames to Tyne
As Thinker, Usher, Statesman or Divine. 1
1 Essays in Satire (London: A. P. Watt & Son and Sneed & Ward Ltd).
WILLIAM TEMPLE A2TD WOBLD-WIDE ECUMENISM
What purpose were all these manifold gifts destined to serve f
When Temple was a schoolboy, he told Eleanor MacDougail,
later first principal of the Women's Christian College, Madras,
that when he grew up he was going to be a missionary of the
Church Missionary Society. Schoolboys often forget their earlier
ideals in the excitement of making a career. Not so Temple.
In 1908, when he was twenty-six, he offered to the Soeiety and
was accepted. Everything had been arranged; he was to go to
India as Principal of St. John's College, Agra. Then at the last
moment, to their eternal shame, the authorities of the Church of
England stepped in and told Temple that he was so valuable
in England that he must stay at home. I do not think that
anyone who knew Temple well can doubt that, if he had been
able to spend ten years in India at that formative period of his
life, he would have been an even greater man than he grew to
be. Firsthand contact with the problems of a non-Christian re-
ligion and the experience of life in a younger church would
have enlarged and balanced that immense understanding of the
problems of the West into which he gradually grew.
There followed a good many years of uncertainty and even of
frustration. For a few years Temple was head master of Eepton
School, where he did well but not outstandingly well. Then
he was rector of St. James' Church, Piccadilly, London, now in
its restored form after the bombing one of the most beautiful
places of worship in the Christian world. There he read widely
he claimed to be one of the few Anglicans to have read through
the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, a formidable task preached
steadily on John's Gospel, and laid the foundations for those
remarkable Readings in St. John's Gospel, a work of later years
which has rightly been called "the greatest devotional treatise
written by an English Churchman since William Law's A Serious
Call to a Devout and Holy Life/' Leaving St. James', he gave
himself to campaigning on behalf of that movement, "Life and
Liberty," which, after World War I, gave to the Church of
England the rudiments of the self-government which other
Anglican churches much more fully enjoy. But this was not
what people expected ; there was a widespread feeling that there
were depths in Temple that had not yet been revealed, gifts
that had not yet been stirred into self-expression.
83
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
At last his day came. In 1921, at the age of thirty-nine he
was appointed Bishop of Manchester. Faced by a task that was
worthy of all his gifts, he grew rapidly in every way and put
forth in many directions those great powers which until then
had seemed so largely latent.
From early years Temple, like his father, had been deeply
interested in the so-called working class. For a good many years
he was a member of the Labor Party. In 1905 he had joined
the Workers' Educational Association, a voluntary body which
aimed at making higher education available to working men;
he was president of the Association from 1908 to 1924. This
meant that he was far more closely in touch than most ecclesi-
astics with that movement for social justice and a better order-
ing of society that was to find expression in the COPEC Con-
ference and later in the international movement of Life and
Work.
In these years Temple proved himself unique in his power of
presenting the gospel to students in terms which they could
regard as intellectually respectable, and which yet conveyed a
challenge to what would now be called an existential decision.
The greatest of all his university missions was that to Oxford,
where spiritual life had burned rather low, in 1931. The closing
scene is so striking that it must be described in full in the words
of Temple's biographer, F. A. Iremonger. As the closing act of
the mission, the hymn "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross "
was being sung.
Before the last verse, Temple stopped the singing and said:
"I want you to read over this verse before you sing it. They
are tremendous words. If you mean them with all your hearts,
sing them as loud as you can. If you don't mean them at all,
keep silent. If you mean them even a little, and want to mean
them more, sing them very softly." There was dead silence . . .
and then to hear Isaac Watt's words
Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were an offering far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all
whispered by the voices of 2,000 young men and women was
84
WILLIAM TEMPLE AXD WOBLD-WIDE ECUMENISM
(in the recollection of one of them) "an experience never to be
erased from my memory until the whole tablet is blotted. ' ' 2
During these years, in the midst of endless other preoccupa-
tions Temple found time to write a series of memorable books.
As Archbishop of York (a position which he held from 1929 to
1942) he managed to produce in his spare time an impressive set
of Gifford Lectures, Nature, Man and God (1932-4), a compre-
hensive survey of the Christian faith in the light of the liberal
understanding of revelation, of the nature and of the destiny of
man. Certainly no better book from this point of view has ever
been written. The main lines of Temple's thinking had taken
shape by 1921, that is to say before England began to become
aware of the thought of Karl Barth. There was a close friend-
ship between Temple and Keinhold Niebuhr, but Temple had
little understanding of or sympathy for the kind of insights
that are associated with the names of Barth, Niebuhr, and Paul
Tiliich. This means that students today, reading his works, are
likely to find that, to use a metaphor, his wave length is not
the same as theirs the problems with which he is concerned
are not the same as those with which they have been wrestling.
Therefore, at the moment he may have little to say to them.
But this is likely to be only a temporary eclipse; there is a
great deal in Temple's thinking that is of permanent value,
and his work, like that of his great Scottish contemporary John
Oman, is likely to come back into popularity and esteem.
Here, however, we are mainly concerned with Temple's ecu-
menical work and with the development of the ecumenical move-
ment during the years in which he was its most prominent
figure.
As a young man Temple had been present at the Edinburgh
Conference of 1910, one of that remarkable group of promising
young men who had been brought together by J. H. Oldham to
serve as ushers at the Conference. But his first direct participa-
tion in the international Christian movement came when he
went to Jerusalem in 1928 for the second of the great series of
missionary conferences.
*!\ A. Iremonger, William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury (London:
Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 378.
85
BEOTHEES OP THE FAITH
Many things had happened in the missionary world since
1910. During the first world war German missionaries had been
interned or expelled from many territories. It was only by slow
degrees that they were allowed to resume their work. Heroic
efforts on the part of the newly formed International Missionary
Council and its secretary, J. H. Oldham, were needed to prevent
the sale of German missionary properties in West Africa to
secular concerns. It was becoming clear, first to Dr. Oldham and
gradually to many others, that Africa demanded far more thought
and attention than had been paid to it by the Christian world.
Men were becoming aware of a new enemy (secularism) that was
undermining not only Christian faith but every kind of religious
faith in the world. Eighteen years is a long interval ; it seemed
to many that the time had come for another great missionary
assembly.
Jerusalem 1928 was a very different gathering from Edinburgh
1910. It was much smaller, though almost equally representative.
And the same policy of gathering not only missionaries and
mission board secretaries but also church leaders of eminence in
various fields, and in particular a number of highly competent
theologians, had been followed. It was in this last capacity that
the services of William Temple had been specially sought.
As things turned out, this Conference gave him the oppor-
tunity to manifest, in notable measure, one of his special gifts.
Here he was to display, for the first time, that special capac-
ity, which called forth frequently the admiration, and some-
times the irritation, of his friends the gift of finding the
form of words in which two apparently irreconcilable points
of view would find their reconciliation. Again and again dur-
ing some heated discussion, the Archbishop would be seen to
be quietly writing. At precisely the moment at which deadlock
had been reached, he would rise and say, "I think that this
is perhaps something approaching the kind of thing that we
want to say. ' ' Again and again the heatedly disputing phalanxes
would lay down their arms and find that the area of agree-
ment between them was far greater than they had supposed.
It has to be admitted that occasionally Temple's love of mental
and verbal pyrotechnics carried him away, and that his agility
produced a formula that was no more than a compromise between
86
WILLIAM TEMPLE AND WORLD-WIDE ECUMENISM
two really opposing views. But this was the rare exception. He
had extraordinary gifts of penetration ; while others were wrest-
ling with surface questions, he could see through to the real
issues the expression of which had eluded them. Above aH God
was the constant and unchanging background of Ms thinking.
He was never interested in an immediate and pragmatic victory.
On countless occasions those who sat with him felt that through
his presence the subject of discussion had been lifted to an
altogether higher level. The divine perspective had become ap-
parent, and so Christians of really divergent outlook had been
led to see the point at which their differing viewpoints could be
brought together without dishonesty and without evasion.
Jerusalem 1928 gave ample scope for this irenic and diplomatic
gift. This was the moment of the most acute tension between
the more conservative and the more liberal wings of the mission-
ary enterprise. The liberals had put forward certain ideas which,
if accepted, would have meant a revolution in the whole con-
ception of Christian missions. The task of the missionary would
have been understood, not as trying to turn adherents of other
faiths into Christians, but as co-operating with them in the
discovery of the riches of their own faiths. On the other hand
the new influences from the continent, associated with the
name of Karl Barth, were already affecting some missionary
circles. It seemed unlikely that the Conference would be able to
issue any generally agreed statement on the central problems
that lay before the missionary enterprise. To Temple was com-
mitted the task of preparing a draft of the message of the
Conference.
In letters to his wife he has given some rather vivid pictures
of how it was all done :
April 3, 1928. I was drafting all the morning, and seemed
to be regarded as having done rather conspicuously my parlour
trick of fitting everybody's pet point into a coherent document
when they thought they were contradicting one another. . . .
There is a draught in the hut this evening for some reason so
my own candle is hopeless on the table. I have had to put it on
the floor and write lying on the boards on my tommy.
87
BBOTHEBS OF THE FAITH
April 4, 1928. . . . After tea I presented our report on the
Message. ... I seem to have written what opens the door for the
progressives while perfectly satisfying the conservatives. As a
matter of fact the writing was quite easy. We got the various
sections so to state their own views that they were compatible
with one another; and then it was only a matter of putting the
bits together in the right order April 5. Our " Message" was
unanimously accepted this morning by a standing vote, followed
by silent prayer and thanksgiving. There is great jubilation, as
it is thought to be good in itself, and there was apparently great
anxiety that we should not be able to agree on anything sub-
stantial at all. 3
As a matter of fact Temple has here rather underestimated
the greatness of his own achievement. The disagreements were
deep and serious ; it was only his unshakable hold on essentials
which made it possible to bring together the positive contribu-
tions of both wings.
To be appreciated, this classic message must be read in full.
Here only a few brief extracts can be given as samples of its
quality :
Our message is Jesus Christ, He is the revelation of what God
is and of what man through Him may become. In Him we come
face to face with the ultimate reality of the universe ; He makes
known to us God as our Father, perfect and infinite in love and
in righteousness; for in Him we find God incarnate, the final
yet ever unfolding revelation of the God in whom we live and
move and have our being. . . . Our true and compelling motive
lies in the very nature of the God to whom we have given our
hearts. Since He is love, His very nature is to share. Christ is
the expression in time of the eternal self -giving of the Father.
Coming into fellowship with Christ we find in ourselves an
over-mastering impulse to share Him with others. "We are con-
strained by the love of Christ and by obedience to His last
command. He Himself said, "I am come that they might have
life, and that they might have it more abundantly/' and our
experience corroborates it. He has become life to us. We would
share that life. . . .
*F. A. Iremonger, op. cit., pp. 396-7.
88
WILLIAM TEMPLE AXD WOBLD-WIDE ECUMENISM
We are persuaded that we and all Christian people must seek
a more heroic practice of the Gospel. It cannot be that our present
complacency and moderation are a faithful expression of the
mind of Christ, and of the meaning of His Cross and Resurrec-
tion in the midst of the wrong and want and sin of our modem
world. 4
In the year before Jerusalem 1928 Temple had been present at
the Lausanne Conference on Faith and Order. In the year after
it, following upon the lamented death of Bishop Brent, he
had been appointed chairman of the Continuation Committee
of that movement. Few men more suitable for this office could
have been found. Few leaders of that day were able to combine
in the same degree as Temple the practical and the theoretical,
an acute awareness of the actual situations of the church in the
twentieth century with the constant reference of all things back
to the basic principles of the life of the church in Jesus Christ.
Various committees of theologians had continued to work on
the subjects left open or incompletely discussed at Lausanne
1927. Carefully planned volumes on the doctrine of grace (1932)
and on the ministry of the church (1937) were published under
the auspices of this committee. It had been taken as generally
agreed that a second World Conference should be held at an
interval of about ten years after the first. But these ten years
revealed not so much a growing consensus as a deeper and more
tragic sense of the reality of divisions. These is an almost plain-
tive note in Canon Leonard Hodgson's introduction to the
volume on Edinburgh 1937. He recalled that in 1934
the provisional programme for 1937 . . . was severely criticised.
It became clear that whereas in England and some other parts
of the world, questions of the ministry and church order stood
out as providing the most serious obstacles to unity, on the
continent of Europe disagreements concerning the theological
doctrines of Grace and the "Word of God were felt to be of
much more vital importance, while in America a most acute
problem was presented by divisions based on psychological, social
* Jerusalem Meeting Report (London : International Missionary Council,
1928), I, 480, 485, 495,
89
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
and cultural factors and owing their origin to the course of
historical development of tlie new world. 5
Tliese words were written in 1937; they might be taken as
almost equally relevant to the state of the churches in 1960.
Once again Faith and Order met, this time in Edinburgh
more than four hundred delegates from 123 churches in almost
every part of the world, and with rather better, though still
wholly inadequate, representation from the younger churches.
By this time Temple had come to be so widely recognised as
the towering ecumenical personality of the time that it was
only natural that he should be chosen as chairman of the Con-
ference and invited to preach the opening sermon. This sermon
was most characteristic of Temple's thinking. While clear and
open-eyed in its recognition of the reality and the sinfulness of
division, its purpose throughout was to turn the eyes of men
back to Christ, in whom alone is to be found healing for nations
and churches :
The unity of the Church, on which our faith and hope is set,
is grounded in the unity of God and the uniqueness of His
redeeming act in Jesus Christ. . . . The unity of the Church of
God is a perpetual fact ; our task is not to create it, but to exhibit
it. ... The Church is not an association of men, each of whom
has chosen Christ as Lord; it is a fellowship of men, each of
whom Christ has united with Himself. The Christian faith and
life are not a discovery or invention of men; they are not an
emergent phase of the historical process; they are the gift of
God. ... It is not we who can heal the wounds in His body.
We confer and deliberate, and that is right. But it is not by
contrivance or adjustment that we can unite the Church of God.
It is only by coming closer to Him that we can. come nearer to
one another. . . . We can help each other here, and learn from
one another how to understand Him better. But it is towards
Him that our eyes must be directed. Our discussion of our differ-
ences is a necessary preliminary; but it is preliminary and no
more. Only when God has drawn us closer to Himself shall we
* The Second World Conference on Faith and Order. Edinburgh 19 S7
(London: S. C. M. Press, 1938), p. 9,
90
WILLIAM TEMPLE AND WOBLD-WIDE ECUMENISM
be truly united together ; and then our task will be, not to con-
summate our endeavour but to register His achievement. 6
The Eeport of the Edinburgh Conference is a considerable
document. It shows with what patience and diligence the dele-
gates had searched out the issues of unity and difference. Per-
haps at the end some of them may have felt that aE their work
had resulted only in bringing the differences more clearly and
painfully to light, and the many footnotes and parentheses that
various churches had felt it necessary to add show how easy it
is for phrases to be used in varying senses by those of different
traditions, and how difficult it is to arrive at an entirely satis-
factory expression of Christian agreement. The report contained,
however, one remarkable feature to which special reference
must be made ; this was an Affirmation of Union in allegiance to
our Lord Jesus Christ, which was adopted by the Conference
on August 18, 1937. This statement, covering only two pages
in the report, sets out as clearly as any human words could do
the deep longing of the churches for visible unity and their
desire to go forward on the road to unity, whatever the difficulties
in the way might be :
We are one in faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the incarnate
Word of God. We are one in allegiance to Him as Head of the
Church, and as King of kings and Lord of lords. We are one
in acknowledging that this allegiance takes precedence of any
other allegiance that may make claims upon us.
This unity does not consist in the agreement of our minds or
the consent of our wills. It is founded in Jesus Christ Himself,
Who lived, died and rose again to bring us to the Father, and
Who through the Holy Spirit dwells in His Church. We are one
because we are all the objects of the love and grace of God, and
called by Him to witness in all the world to His glorious
Gospel. . . .
We pray that everywhere in a world divided and perplexed,
men may turn to Jesus Christ our Lord, Who makes us one in
spite of our divisions; that He may bind in one those who by
many worldly claims are set at variance; and that the world
Op. cit., pp. 15, 17, 23.
91
BEOTHEES OP THE FAITH
may at last find peace and unity in Him ; to Whom be glory for
ever. 7
The Conference had other things to do besides debating end-
lessly the problems of Christian union. It had before it a proposal
for the formation of a World Council of Churches. For many
years the movement for closer fellowship between the churches
had been advancing along three separate and parallel lines
the International Missionary Council, Life and Work, and Faith
and Order. There was considerable overlapping in personnel
and an increasing feeling that this division of forces was both
unnatural and harmful. We have already noted the strong mis-
sionary emphasis at Lausanne 1927. The movement called Life
and Work had soon discovered the shallowness of the saying
that doctrine divides while service unites. We cannot touch any
question affecting Christian life, work, or witness without being
driven back, in a very short time, on the fundamental problems
of Christian theology. Life and Work itself had found it neces-
sary to appoint a theological committee. The Faith and Order
movement had found that "the search for unity is not made
in vacuo but in relation to the Church's task in the world." 8
It was out of the gradually increasing sense of common con-
cerns and the need of each movement for the others that the
idea of a World Council of Churches was born.
It must not be supposed that the idea had an entirely easy
passage at Edinburgh 1937 or anywhere else. Some felt that
they were getting on very well as they were. Some were, even
at that date, anxious lest a World Council of Churches might
grow into a super-church and infringe the independence of the
member-churches. Some in Faith and Order feared that the
more liberal tendencies of certain churches which supported
Life and Work might transform the Trinitarian basis of Faith
and Order into a Unitarian form an anxiety which we shall
meet again later on. But in view of the steady support of Temple
and other great leaders there could hardly be any doubt as to
the way in which the vote would go. At a late hour on August
T Op. tit., pp. 275-76.
8 The Ten Formative Years (Geneva: "World Council of Churches, 1948),
p, 9.
92
WILLIAM TEMPLE AXD WOBLD-WXDE EGIJMEXISM
11, 1937 the principle of a World Council was accepted by 112
votes to 19.
The details of the formation of the World Council will occupy
us in another chapter. Here we are concerned only with one
aspect of the development. The provisional committee of the
World Council of Churches must have a chairman j there was no
doubt in the minds of the leaders of the Christian world as to
who that chairman should be. The result is stated laconically in
one of the official publications of the Council: "The first meet-
ing of this Provisional Committee was held at Utrecht on May
13, 1938. Archbishop William Temple was elected chairman." 9
It was originally planned to hold the first Assembly of the
World Council of Churches in 1941. Then came the cataclysm
of the war. All thoughts of common Christian action had to be
abandoned under the terrible and remorseless pressure of those
years. Yet until 1942 Temple managed to retain a measure of
contact with the secretariat in Geneva, and through it even
with the churches in Germany. It was a great satisfaction to him
to learn that his broadcast addresses and other statements had
been welcomed by Christian leaders in neutral countries and
in occupied lands, and that they had even been studied with
appreciation and a great measure of agreement by leaders of
the German churches. What man could do to keep alive the spirit
of fellowship and oneness, Temple did.
And then tragedy fell upon the world. In 1942 Temple had
become Archbishop of Canterbury. As days passed, he spoke
with ever greater authority and a fuller ring of prophetic power
in his voice. The Free Churches regarded him as "our Arch-
bishop"; the man in the street knew that, if Lambeth spoke, he
would hear something that would stir him with hope and courage
for the future. And then quite unexpectedly, on October 26,
1944, William Temple died. Only once in our lifetime have the
peoples of the British Commonwealth had to face an equal shock ;
that was on the morning in 1952 when they heard that King
George VI had died peacefully during the night.
Although in this book I am writing so largely about my
friends, I have kept the narrative strictly impersonal. On this
9 IUd. p. 11.
93
BBOTHEBS OF THE FAITH
one page perhaps the personal note may intrude. Only a few
days before Temple's death I had returned from India in ill-
health. He had made an appointment for me to visit him and
then had had to cancel it because of a particularly violent attack
of gout. All that I could do was to go to Canterbury to rep-
resent the Church of India, Burma, and Ceylon at his funeral.
The tide of victory was flowing, but the war was not yet over.
Many of us had been separated from friends for long years, and
the funeral seemed to take on almost the festive aspect of a
gathering of old friends. We looked at one another a little
askance, and then someone remarked, "The last thing that
"William would have wished would be that anyone should be
gloomy at his funeral." It was perfectly true and fitting. Many
years before he had himself written: "A funeral for me is not
a parting, but merely the only way open to us of showing honour
and love." It was appropriate that, gathered round his body,
we sang the triumphant hymn, "The strife is o'er, the battle
done, Alleluia.' 7
When Temple died, he was mourned by literally millions of
his fellow Christians. Thousands of people in all parts of the
world felt that they had lost a personal friend. Those of us who
were allowed to call him friend felt that we had been privileged
to know the greatest Christian brought forth by the churches
of Christ in our time and one of the greatest of all the Christian
centuries.
VII Oxford 1937
Let the Church Be the Church
INEVITABLY THIS BOOK HAS TO DEAL MOSTLY WITH THE SAYINGS
and doings of Christians and churches, and perhaps a little
too mucli with the activities of ecclesiastics. Yet it must never be
forgotten that everything which happens in what we have now
learned to call the ecumenical movement happens in relation
to a changing world scene, of which the churches and their
leaders are perhaps more conscious today than they have ever
been before in the history of the church. We have seen how
closely Stockholm 1925 was connected with the events and ex-
periences of the First World War and how the bitter problem
of < war-guilt " dogged the footsteps of the early ecumenical
pioneers. As we follow the movement forward we are bound to
find ourselves more and more involved in the great and often
terrifying events that had been taking place far beyond the
confines of the churches.
When the first Edinburgh Conference met in 1910, the
churches were still in a mood of confidence and hope. A
tremendous epoch of progress and expansion lay behind them,
and there seemed no particular reason to think that a similar
epoch would not lie ahead. It was true that the defeat of Russia
by Japan in 1905 had indicated to those with eyes to see that
a startling displacement of power was taking place and that
the unchallenged supremacy of the West had now been sharply
challenged, but few had any premonition of all that was to
follow and of the series of disasters in which aH the familiar
outlines of the political and the ecclesiastical scene were to dis-
appear.
The first war had revealed the thinness of the Christian veneer
in all the so-called Christian countries and had permanently
shaken the authority and prestige of "the Christian West" in
95
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
aU the non-Christian parts of the world. The Russian revolution
had, for the time being, torn away from the Christian world a
great and ancient group of churches and had let loose on the
world an incalculable force that seemed bent on destroying for-
ever every Mnd of religious faith. And then after years of rest-
lessness in Germany Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933.
It is fashionable today to see nothing but evil in the Nazi
regime from the start. It requires an effort of imagination to
recall what that regime looked like to those who lived under
it in the early days. Hitler cleaned up a great deal of evil and
corruption. Witness the Swedes, who suffered as the purveyors
of pornographic literature in Germany escaped over the frontier
and set up their nefarious trade in Sweden. At a time when un-
employment was soaring, Hitler gave the Germans work and
food, and men will put up with a great deal from a government
that gives them these two things. More than anything else he
gave back to that great and proud people a sense of personal
and national dignity Germany was no longer to be the pawn
of competing victors; it would again count for something in
the councils of the nations. Even wise and good Christians did not
immediately realise the vastness of the problem by which they had
been confronted.
For, in fact, Hitler had raised what is always the question
of life or death for the church. Are state, community, and nation
the supreme authorities ? Or is there a point at which even the
patriotic Christian has to be prepared to say "No" to the rulers
of his country, on behalf of a greater and more lasting good?
A Eoman Catholic writer has summed it up as the problem of the
survival of the church in a community which recognizes no
formal limits, but which spreads its authority over the whole
of life and claims to be the source and goal of every human
activity.
These large-scale political events represented visible dangers
to the church. There were working at the same time other and
less obvious forces, which perhaps in the end would have even
more serious consequences in undermining the life of the churches
and weakening their hold on the minds and wills of men.
First, there was secularism. From the beginning there has
been a certain conflict, or at least Incompatibility, between man's
96
OXFOEB 1937 -LET THE CHUECH BE THE CHUECH
sense of loyalty to God and his absorption in the daily concerns
of work and home and society. "When did that higher loyalty
begin to disappear, as man's confidence in himself grew, and
the concerns of that which can be seen and felt and touched
began to seem all-important as contrasted with those things
which may be eternal but are not seen? It is hard to fix on any
one particular date. Already in the Middle Ages we can see
something of the tension. But there can be little doubt that the
process was greatly helped forward by the movement of the
eighteenth century known in Germany as the Aufklaerung and
in England as the Enlightenment. This was the age of Season.
Man in the days of his infancy had needed revelation to help him
forward in this difficult world. But now that he is grown up,
he will find his own way, will master himself and his surround-
ings, and will be the creator of his own new world. Such ways of
thinking were helped forward by the industrial revolution, by
the wonderful discoveries of physical science, and by the harness-
ing of these discoveries to human welfare in countless ways.
We of the middle of the twentieth century are secularized, per-
haps far more than we ourselves know, in all our ways of
thinking and feeling.
The nature of this process and its end were acutely summed
up in a book which appeared just at the time of which we are now
writing :
Men have preferred the material to the spiritual. They have
sought the heaven upon earth, which they believed that their
own efforts could enable them to create. They are captivated by
Utopias which hold out the promise of comfort and prosperity.
They live by theories which blind them to the realities of human
existence. They are no longer able to see the ultimate facts
which encompass man's life the realities of death, sin, judg-
ment and God. 1
If men have come to think and live in this way, they are not
likely to be much interested in the church. It is not that they
hate the church or wish to attack it ; it is all right for those who
1 J. H. Oldham and W. A. Visser >t Hooft, The Church and its Function
in Society (Geneva: The World Council of Churches, 1937), p. 111.
97
BBOTHEBS OP THE FAITH
like that kind of thing, a spare-time activity for those who
have time to spare. The problem is that the church and all it
stands for, the whole spiritual dimension, has come to seem
supremely irrelevant. There was a time when men believed pas-
sionately in these things and were prepared to burn one another
alive for not believing exactly in the right way. Now we do
not do such things. It might be better if we did, and as we
shall see later, the renewal of the church in Germany came
precisely when the opposing powers had to take the church
seriously, and when men were prepared both to kill and to die
because questions of faith had once again come to seem supremely
important.
What were Christians to do in such a time as this f We shall
find two words that recur almost monotonously in the literature
of the time. The first is "reaffirmation." The second is "the
church."
But what was to be reaffirmed? Merely to say over again all
the things that the church had been saying for so long would
cut no ice. Good ideas are always true, whoever may happen
to announce them. And good advice is not very welcome to those
who think they know better anyhow. But in the years after the
first war it came to seem to many in the church that they had
something new to say, something really very old but so long
forgotten that it came with the accents of new truth. What
matters is not what men think, but what has happened. In Jesus
Christ certain things happened. As a result of the things that
happened, or to put it more theologically, of the things that God
did in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the whole
being of the universe, the relation of men to themselves and to
one another and to the God who made them, has been changed.
We live literally in new heavens and a new earth.
During the war years, a young Swiss pastor of liberal outlook
had found that his message had nothing to say to men and women
in a time of desperate crisis. As he pondered the world situation
and the Bible, his outlook was changed. In 1918 there came from
the press Karl Earth's Commentary on the Epistle to the
Romans, a strange shapeless work in which, for all its chaotic
form, countless men and women found the authentic accent of
the voice of God speaking in modern terms. After reading this
98
OZFOED 1937 LET THE CHTJBCH BE THE CHUBCH
book, a German pastor summed up the experience of countless
others: "Now I can preach. " For forty years Barth has been
one of the great teachers and prophets of the Christian world,
and even those who least agree with him have had to take him
most seriously. His message crossed the Atlantic; in different
and characteristic form Reinhold Niebuhr and his followers, in
what has come to be known as Neo-Orthodoxy, began to set forth
the same doctrine of challenge, renewal, and reaffirmation.
The nineteenth century had been the great age of individualism
a man's business is to make the best of himself and to get as
near the top of the tree as he can by his own unaided efforts.
This was the gospel of American greatness, and "From Log-
cabin to White House" was the theme of some written and a
great many unwritten biographies. But as early as the end of
the nineteenth century even in America people were beginning
to wonder whether this was the whole of the gospel for mankind.
"With the industrial revolution and mass society new and more
formidable pressures have been brought to bear on man. Im-
mense powers are at work in the world, which the ordinary man
can hardly understand, which he cannot influence, and yet which
determine the shape and pattern of his life. A slight change in
the markets in London and Chicago, and thousands of workers
may be thrown out of work in Tokyo. What then of individual
rights and freedom! These are great realities, but can they be
more than pleasant words in a world in which man seems to be
the plaything of circumstances far beyond his own control! In
such a world man cannot stand alone; what he needs above all
else is community.
In the days of individualism Christians had been almost as
individualistic as anyone else ; the faith seemed to be concerned
with individual salvation or with the reinforcement of the efforts
of the individual to make himself. The church appeared as little
more than a convenience, in which the individual might or might
not find the spiritual or ethical help of which he stood in need.
But now, as the church like the individual was threatened by
these dark and hardly distinguishable forces, by the dimension
of the "daemonic," the idea of community began to re-emerge
from the shadows ; not now one of the many communities that
men can and do rightly make for themselves, but a divine com-
99
BBOTHEES OF THE FAITH
munity founded by God himself in Christ, a community which
has always been there though often forgotten, a reality which
ought to be able to speak to man's condition in dark days, and in
which man, all men of whatever degree, ought to be able to find
a home.
There is no rule as to the holding of ecumenical conferences ;
empirically, it has been found that ten years is as good an in-
terval as any other. It was clear that Stockholm 1925 had to
be followed up. By 1934 it had been decided that another con-
ference, dealing with much the same themes but relating them
to the changed situation, should be held. Those who reached
this conclusion were extraordinarily fortunate in their choice
of the man who was to be chief planner of the next great con-
ference on Life and Work.
Joseph Houldsworth Oldham was born of a Scottish family in
1874 but has spent most of his life in England and has become an
Anglican. After a short period of service with the Y.M.C.A.
In India Oldham returned to Britain to study theology. Part of
Ms studies were carried out in Germany, and a thorough knowl-
edge of German and an unusual alertness to the movements of
thought on the continent have remained with him ever since.
His mind is always moving on the frontiers of thought, trying
to ascertain where the next great problems will confront man-
kind and getting there long before the ordinary man has even
become aware that a problem exists.
Real Life Is Meeting is the title of one of Oldham *s books. A
better summary of the man could hardly be wished for. He
has never wished to appear on public platforms and has acquired
no reputation as an orator. For this reason Joe and the extra-
ordinary part he has played in ecumenical development remain
almost unknown to those who depend for their knowledge on
the public press and the reports of great ecumenical utterances.
Oldham 's strength is in personal relationships. Hampered from
early years by deafness, which any other man would have allowed
to cut him off from the fellowship of his kind, he has managed
for more than fifty years to gather round him one generation
after another of younger men and women, whom he has stimu-
lated to think, to reach out to the new ideas, to be aware of the
future just as he has been himself. "Joe thinks that all the
100
OXFOED 1937 LET THE CHUECH BE THE CHUBCH
really important ecumenical decisions are made over a table in
the corner of the dining-room at the Athenaeum" (the club
in London to which a great many bishops belong), -was the
kindly and not altogether inaccurate remark of one who knows
him well.
But there is another side of Oldham that must not be for-
gotten. He has written a number of books and one best seller;
the best seller is called A Devotional Diary. This little book has
gone through edition after edition. It is a searching challenge
to the reader to be honest with himself as to what he really
does about the life of prayer, as distinct from talking about it,
and offers him intelligent help in the way of doing better. Such a
book could have grown out of nothing but long years of effort
and experiment on the part of the writer. Ecumenical affairs are
largely concerned with speeches, committees, and arguments.
So much time is taken up by these unavoidable things that it
is easy for the participants to forget that it really does matter
whether men and women pray or not. It has been of incalculable
value to the whole movement to have at its heart one man
who never for a moment has forgotten this foundation truth.
But we have not yet come to that particular gift which has
made Oldham so creative in ecumenical affairs. He has shown
himself the greatest organizer of international conferences who
has ever lived. This gift was first shown in connection with
Edinburgh 1910, when Oldham, then only thirty-five years old,
was in charge of all that immense process of preliminary study
which made Edinburgh the best prepared of all the great con-
ferences up to that date. Now in preparation for Oxford 1937
his gifts were displayed to even greater advantage.
Experts in all directions, including many laymen of distinc-
tion who had never heard the word " ecumenical," were pressed
into the service. Papers were written and circulated. Comments
from other experts came in, sometimes only a few lines, some-
times lengthy and careful documents that themselves deserved
to rank as "papers." In all more than three hundred collabora-
tors took part in the work, rather too many perhaps from the
English-speaking world, but for this the political situation of
that time gives a ready explanation. A climate of thinking was
being created ; men and women were getting to know one another
101
BROTHERS OP THE FAITH
and gradually to make clear to themselves and others the kind
of problems that were pressing on the church from every side.
Qldham knew well that no ecumenical conference can be pre-
pared in less than three years; by 1937 he was ready. The results
of this long period of gestation were to be published in six
volumes.
It is unfortunate that during the Second World War almost
the whole stock of these volumes was destroyed in the bombing
of London; they have become in consequence something of an
ecumenical rarity, and are far less widely known than they
deserve. But even to read through the names of the contributors
is an exciting ecumenical education. A volume which contains
essays by H. EL Farmer, now of Cambridge, Eeinhold Niebuhr
of New York, and the Archbishop of York (Temple) is likely
to provide stimulating reading. In 1937 not so many people
knew who Paul A, Tillich was, but Oldham had found him out.
Dr. H. Lilje was not then the famous Bishop of Hanover. And
it comes as almost a shock to read among the names that of
John Foster Dulles. More than half of those who contributed
are still living ; they would probably all agree that a quiet and
firm ecumenical education under the hand of Joe Oldham was
one of the most stimulating, though occasionally infuriating,
experiences that they had ever passed through.
And so at last, after this long period of preparation, they met
in Oxford in July 1937, about 435 representatives from many
races and churches. Nothing could be more boring than an
account of conference after conference, each in its main outlines
very much like all the rest. Yet each has its own special features,
and the record is not complete unless some attempt is made to
detach these from the general jungle of ecumenical history.
The first thing that is likely to strike the reader of the Oxford
records is the stress laid on worship. The times of prayer and
worship in St. Mary's Church seem to have left a deeper impres-
sion on those present than almost anything else. That this was
so was due in the main to one man and one only Canon Cockin,
the rector of St. Mary's. Dr. Cockin, commonly known as George
because his names are Frederick Arthur, had, like Oldham,
served for a short period in India, and then for a considerably
longer period with the Student Christian Movement of Britain.
102
OXFOED 1937 LET THE CHUBCH BE THE CHUBCH
In 1946, very unwillingly, lie accepted promotion to the bish-
opric of Bristol. Unlike many others who have made similar
resolutions, he has adhered sternly to the decision never to speak
without careful preparation. Over the years, without any special
gifts of eloquence, he has exercised the quiet influence of a
humble and faithful man his entry in Who's Who carries
modesty and taciturnity almost to excess and of a wise counsel-
lor to many friends. Perhaps he has never had greater moments
than those in which he directed the worship of the Oxford
Conference.
Ecumenical worship presents a whole range of insoluble prob-
lems. There is no common language. Those present range from
the Friends who have no liturgical tradition at all and are
accustomed to worship in silence, to the Orthodox who are used
to the splendor and pageantry of ancient liturgies, and have
never even considered the horrible possibility that a woman
might be called to lead in public worship. It is no easy thing to
create a unity in worship and adoration in an ecumenical setting.
CocMn worked tirelessly with the various leaders, helping them
to see what could be done with so motley a throng assembled to
worship in the unfamiliar setting of an English Gothic church.
The success of his efforts comes out more than once in the reports :
In the periods of silence there was often an overpowering
sense that things were happening in the spiritual world, and
that in the coming years one might expect to see in the breaking
out of life in countless directions in answer to the prayers that
were being offered together to God. 2
The German Evangelical churches were not represented at
the Conference. Leaders in those churches had taken an active
part in the preparations, but at the last moment the government
of Hitler made impossible the attendance of any member of the
official delegation. There were present three members of the
small Free Churches which had managed to make a deal with
Hitler ; their presence only emphasised the absence of the others.
If Hitler had deliberately intended to draw the attention of
* The Churches Survey their Task, pp. 10-11.
103
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
the world to the nature of the German church struggle, still
very imperfectly understood outside Germany, he could not
have done better. The Conference marked its sense of the solem-
nity of the occasion by sending a message of brotherly sympathy
to the churches in Germany.
If one predominant note is to be chosen out from the many
pages of the report, it should probably be that of the dignity of
man as man. It was this that the delegates felt to be threatened
by so many things in modern life by the squalid conditions
of overcrowding in the cities, by inequality of economic and
educational opportunity, above all by the totalitarian state with
its unmitigated demands for a total surrender of the human will
to supposedly higher powers. On all these things the Conference
tried to lay down the measured judgment of the Christian
churches.
It is curious that the phrase, "Let the Church be the Church,"
which has always been specially associated with Oxford 1937,
does not occur in its official reports. It seems to be due to the
mind and invention of John A. Mackay, at one time a missionary
in Latin America, later president of Princeton Seminary and
chairman of the International Missionary Council, and one of
the outstanding orators of the ecumenical cause. The phrase
occurs in the original draft of the report on "The Universal
Church and the World of Nations," of which Mackay was chair-
man; there is every reason to suppose that the words actually
came from his mind and his pen.
What do they mean! How can the church be anything but the
church! The events of the day had lent a tragic significance to
precisely this question. Man lives in many worlds the church,
the family, his place of employment, the state, the wider world
of nations. What is the relationship of these to one another and
of the church to them all? Many different answers have been
given. In the Middle Ages church and state were practically
identical, and the church claimed the right to lay down man's
duties and responsibilities in all the worlds in which he might
be called to live. In 1937 it seemed to the delegates to the Con-
ference that the churches in Bussia had arrived at a manner
of living which depended on a total separation of two worlds.
The church may exist if it confines its activities wholly to the
104
OXFOBD 1937 LET THE CHUECH BE THE CHTJECH
concerns of the other world (which from the communist point
of view is a wholly nonexistent world) provided that it leaves to
the government all the concerns of this world (which from the
communist point of view is the only real world) . The Nazi govern-
ment of Hitler proclaimed the full satisfaction of all man's needs
and destinies in the service of the state. America proclaimed,
the legal separation of church and state, yet recognised the
constant overlapping of the concerns of the churches and those
of the state.
What Oxford 1937 was concerned ahout was the recovery of
the prophetic function of the church that faculty of discern-
ment and of pungent utterance in relation to current concerns
which we find in the great prophets of the Old Testament. But
how is this function to be exercised in the modern world?
William Temple once remarked that when people say that the
church ought to do something, they usually mean that the
bishops ought to say something. One of those deeply concerned
in the preparations for the Conference wrote that the genuine
utterances of the mind of the church must not be confused with
statements which merely expressed the wishful thinking of a
minority of the members of the churches a warning which has
not always been taken as seriously as it might have been. Yet the
dilemma is real and intense. If in times of crisis the churches say
nothing, they may seem to be indifferent to the needs and concerns
of those who suffer and of the great majority of the human race.
If they keep themselves to broad generalisations, they may
produce nothing but a string of platitudes, such as any fairly
intelligent minister of the church could produce in his study
on a Saturday afternoon. If they descend into the details of
immediate situations, they are likely to be rebuked by the experts
for laying down the law on matters which they know nothing
about sometimes with good reason, for the churches as such have
no expert knowledge of intricate questions of economic principle.
Yet even when all this has been recognized, the churches are
not necessarily condemned to silence. It is not always possible
to say what is right; quite often it is possible to say what is
wrong. After all the law under the Old Covenant was expressed
in terms of "Thou shalt not. . . ." The church itself is under
grace, but it may have words to say to those who are still under
105
BEOTHEBS OF THE PAITH
the law. The great utterances of the prophets had to do largely
with those things that ought not to have happened and ought
not to be allowed, amid a people that called itself the people of
God. If the churches courageously fulfill their function of say-
ing what ought not to be, this is by no means a negligible con-
tribution to the well-being of the world.
Sometimes the individual lay Christian sees things more
clearly than wise conferences of Christian leaders. At the high
table of a Cambridge college, conversation had turned on the
new Germany, and a young German guest was trying to defend
Hitler's third Reich and all its doings. An eminent historian,
usually of quiet demeanor and measured speech, suddenly broke
in "Not many years will have passed before your Hitler will
have gone to the place where he belongs, and that is hell/' Ox-
ford 1937 did not speak quite so abruptly as this ; yet it showed
itself well aware of the many evils that frustrate and thwart
and distort the life of men.
But this was a Christian Conference. Beyond the nay lies the
yea, and this too found expression:
There is no legal, political, or economic system so bad or so
good as to absolve individuals from the responsibility to tran-
scend its requirements by acts of Christian charity. Institutional
requirements necessarily prescribe only the minimum. Even in
the best possible social system they can only achieve general
standards in which the selfishness of the human heart is taken
for granted and presupposed. But the man who is in Christ
knows a higher obligation, which transcends the requirements of
justice the obligation of a love which is the fulfilling of the
law. 3
Twenty years later we are still trying to spell out the full
meaning of these wise and Christian words.
p. 94.
10$
VIII
Paton and Kraemer
the Younger Churches Arrive
ONCE A GREAT INTERNATIONAL* CHRISTIAN ASSEMBLY HAS MET,
recorded its views, and dispersed, there may seem to be no par-
ticular reason why it should ever meet again. Yet, as we have
seen, all the main Christian movements of recent years have
shown a tendency to call great assemblies about once in ten
years. Edinburgh 1910 was a splendid demonstration of the
strength of the Christian cause in the world. Jerusalem 1928
had been a much smaller meeting, perhaps harder working
just because it was smaller. But there was no general agreement
in the missionary world as to whether anything would be gained
by the calling of another such general meeting. Had anything
really new emerged in the Christian situation, and could not the
routine work be carried out efficiently and far more cheaply by
the regular committees of the International Missionary Council f
But unobserved by many, something new had emerged.
"The great new fact of our time." So spoke Archbishop
"William Temple on the occasion of his enthronement in Canter-
bury Cathedral. Few slogans of modern times have been so
extensively misunderstood and misapplied as this. It has been
supposed by many that the Archbishop was referring to what we
now commonly call the ecumenical movement, or even to the
formation of the "World Council of Churches, of the Provisional
Committee of which he was himself at that time chairman. This
is not in the least what he was talking about; he was referring
to the growth over two centuries of a genuinely world-wide
Christian community, as the result of the success of the mission-
ary work carried on by all the Christian churches in all parts
of the world. It is literally true that, in the twentieth century,
107
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
for the first time Christianity has become a universal religion.
Scholars tell us that, alone among the great religions of the
world, the Christian faith has had built into its texture from
the beginning the claim to universality. Alone among the great
religions It has found means to make Itself a universal faith.
Of course, the limits within which this is true must be kept
carefully in mind. It is very far from being the case that every-
one in the world has become Christian or has even heard the
name of Jesus Christ. That is not the sense in which the word
universality Is used. It is, however, the fact that the gospel has
been preached In almost every part of the world and has won
converts from the members of almost every race. Until recently
the kingdom of Nepal, on the troubled frontier between India
and China, was a closed country where no Christian work was
permitted; now it is open, and a variety of Christian agencies
have found their way there. Only Tibet and Afghanistan still
keep their doors firmly closed, and even in Afghanistan there
are at least the worshiping companies of resident Europeans and
Americans, though no direct preaching to the people of the
country Is allowed. Most of the Eskimo in Canada are now Chris-
tians of one church or another. Pygmies in the eternal rain forest
of Africa have heard and accepted the Word. At the same time
every other known form of religious faith has yielded some con-
verts to Christianity few from the higher faiths such as Islam
and Zoroastrianism, very many from among animists and ad-
herents of other simpler faiths.
This is the new fact. Supporters of the missionary enterprise
were aware of these things and in their enthusiasm sometimes
exaggerated the results that had actually been achieved. But
even they were slow to grasp the significance of what was hap-
pening. What was the status of these new groups of Christians
that were coming into existence in so many countries of the
world ? How were they to make their voice heard in the general
Christian chorus? What influence could they be expected to
exert on the development of the Christian cause in the world ?
Before 1910 these questions had hardly been asked. The new
Christians were " converts " of the missionary societies. They
had been introduced to various forms of Western Christianity,
which they had faithfully accepted exactly as taught to them,
108
PATOX AND KBAEMEB THE YOUXGEB CHUECHES AEEITE
and without any clear discrimination between what was inherent
in the gospel and what was simply part of the national tradition
of the particular set of missionaries who had come to them. In
many eases the church to which they belonged was simply a
part of the church in the homeland, with no status or independ-
ence of its own. Thus, for example, the Anglican Church in India
was until 1930 legally "the Church of England in India/' It
had to use exactly the English Prayer Book without deviation.
Bishop Cotton's beautiful prayer for India had been sanctioned
for use in church services, but so strictly were the rules kept
that it was not printed in the Prayer Book. It was printed
separately and pasted on to the inner cover of the Prayer Books
sent out in the languages of India. Many similar examples could
be given of the limitations imposed on the growth and freedom
of the younger churches by such archaic and unnecessary rules.
Two disastrous effects followed. The first was that on the
whole the Christians of these newer churches lived in a state of
contented dependence on the missionaries, who had done every-
thing for them, decided everything for them, and in a number
of cases paid everything for them. The second was that inevitably
and almost everywhere in Asia and Africa the church had a
foreign look. Little Indian choirboys, in not always very clean
surplices, sang the Psalms to Anglican chants in languages whose
rhythm suffers excruciatingly under such treatment. Church
buildings, church services, ways of living were all related
to a civilization six thousand miles away and not to the daily
life of the people and to their responsibility for the non-Chris-
tians who lived round about them.
It was clear to the keenest and most thoughtful minds that
this state of things could not go on very much longer.
In the first place there was nationalism. In 1921 M. 3L Gandhi,
"Mahatmaji" to millions of his fellow countrymen, came back
from South Africa to put himself at the head of the Indian
national movement. China was passing through a period of
violent anti-foreign feeling. Japan was highly conscious of its
status as a great world power which had rendered conspicuous
service to the Allied cause in the First World "War. In the
earlier years of these movements Christians had, on the whole,
kept their distance from them. They were not much interested
109
BHGXHEKS OF THE FAITH
in politics, and they could not approve of some of the methods
that were being followed by the more passionate supporters of
nationalism. But it was already becoming clear that this stream
was growing into a torrent that would carry all before it, that
the younger churches could not continue to exist as frail colonies
of the "West, and that they must find roots in their own countries,
in relation to the new sense of national pride, if they were to
continue to have any existence at all in the new epoch of national
freedom and independence.
But all this was not the chief concern of the best thinkers
in the missionary world. "We have already had occasion to note
the rise of a new consciousness of the significance of the church
and a new interest in the theology of it. Here was the heart of
the problem. What is a church? Can a group of Indian or Chinese
Christians living in dependence on a missionary society, which
itself may have no very clearly defined relationship to the church,
be called or regarded as a church? Is not some fundamental
rethinking needed? Must not these younger churches have in
their sphere the same sort of freedom as the politicians are
demanding on the national front? Must they not have liberty to
express the Christian faith in their own way, and if necessary
fall into some heresies in the process of doing so? Must they not
be free to consider what parts of their own national heritage in
music, literature, and the arts can be Christianized and brought
into the life of the church ? Can we expect ever to have leaders
in these churches, unless we give full freedom to the best men
and women in them to take responsibility, to make their own
deesions, to make their own mistakes ?
Fifty years ago many of these questions had hardly been asked,
and even today there are parts of the world in which, though
correct answers may have been given in theory, practice is not
yet determined by the new insights that are the fruit of these
years. That this is so is evident from a brief consideration of
the representation of the younger churches at the great inter-
national gatherings that have come before us in our survey.
At Edinburgh 1910 only eighteen Asians and Africans were
present, and not one of these had come as the representative of
a church ; all were there either by appointment from a missionary
society or by special nomination of the Conference committee. At
110
PATOX AXD KBAEMEK THE YOUKGEB CHUBCHES ABBIYE
Jerusalem 1928 things were better, though the membership of
the Conference was overwhelmingly Western. It is significant
that it was in this period that the term "younger churches/ 1
now so familiar to us all, first began to be regularly heard. But
it was clear that things must move much faster and that to
some extent the lead must be given from the top.
One of those who had thought most deeply about the younger
church problem was John E. Mott. It seemed to him that the
time had come for another general assembly of the missionary
forces, and that this time it must be quite clearly the great council
of the younger churches. Under his guidance the International
Missionary Council accepted the principle that, at its next
great meeting, half of the delegates must be nationals of the
countries which they came to represent, and that half of them
must be under the age of thirty-five. This was not to be a
gathering of reverend seniors, distilling wisdom from the many
years in which their beards had grown. It was to be in large
part a collection of young men and women from East and West,
some perhaps angry, all eager, and in general more ready for
adventure than the majority of those who come to the great
synods of the church.
Shortly before the Jerusalem Conference John R. Mott had
found an ideal lieutenant "William Paton. "A bulldog.'' That,
I think, is the phrase that is likely to come to the mind of
anyone seeing, for the first time, his picture, as it hangs in the
entrance hall of the World Council of Churches or reproduced
as the frontispiece to his life by Margaret Sinclair, A square,
determined face, speaking perhaps of Scottish ancestry and
Presbyterian resolution, of a man not given to any display of
easy emotion, accustomed to reflect long and deeply, and then
to carry out quietly and efficiently what he had resolved to do.
It is, in brief, the face of one of the wise men of the earth. His
biographer, comparing him with his great leader Mott, notes a
similarity of outlook in the two men:
the openness of mind to the Will of God, the approach to a
difficulty not as an obstacle looming darkly ahead, but as some-
thing to be examined for the clue, obscured and embedded
111
BEOTHEES OT 8 THE FAITH
though It might be, to a next move in a particular plan of ad-
vance. 1
Many things had combined to fit Paton for his special service
in the International Missionary Council. He had come np through
the British Student Movement and had served it in various
capacities. But at a time when others were finding their way
with difficulty through a period of liberal confusion in which
many of the great landmarks of the Christian faith seemed to be
disappearing, his mind settled gradually and patiently into a
firm and unshakable faith in the reality of the incarnation, of
the fact that God Almighty had actuaUy lived and worked on
earth as a man. In these years Paton became one of the speakers
to whom students listened with the greatest pleasure. If he was
on the program, you knew that you would have to listen to some-
thing fairly exacting, to a speaker who never tried to emphasize
Hs point by any tricks of oratory, but who always had a good and
solid point, backed up by wide reading and exact thought,
Then came a call to serve with the Y.M.C.A. in India, a
country which Paton had come to know and love during the
First "World War. This was almost immediately changed into
something larger and more exciting. John B. Mott's travels after
Edinburgh 1910 had resulted in the formation of a number of
national missionary councils, one of the best of which was the
council that served the churches in India. In 1922 the decision
was reached to transform this into the National Christian Coun-
cil of India, Burma and Ceylon, with a permanent and full-
time staff. What's in a namef Nothing, perhaps, but perhaps
very much. Here the change of name and structure meant a
revolution in thought and practice. It had been decided that half
the membership of the new council must be Indian. One who
served both before and after the change remarked that, if you
compared the two man by man, unquestionably the earlier
council was the abler, but that equally unquestionably the later
was the better council. It was more Indian, and therefore, better
1 Margaret Sinclair, William Paton (London: S. C. M. Press, 1949), p. 17.
When Dr. Garbett, Archbishop of York, heard of Baton's death in 1943,
he recorded in his diary the comment: "If he had been an Anglican, he
would have been one of the Archbishops. " Charles Smyth, Cyril Foster
Garlett (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1959), p. 460.
112
PATOX AXD KEAEMEE THE YOITNGEB CHUECHES AEEIVB
able both to discern the signs of the times and to help the
churches to measure up to their responsibilities and opportunities
in the New India.
Paton was just the man to make such a council work. He
loved India and Indians. He was deeply sympathetic with na-
tional aspirations and with the perplexities of the young, who
often found it difficult to reconcile their Christian loyalties with
their new vision of greatness for their people. He was every-
where, knew everyone from the Viceroy down to the simple vil-
lage cateehist. And everywhere he bred the spirit of under-
standing, sympathy, and good will.
It was India's loss and the world's gain, when he was called
back from India to the London office of the I.M.C. Years passed
and wisdom grew. This was the man who was chosen to organise
the third great missionary assembly of the churches.
The difficulty in finding a place for the meeting reflects the
unsettlement of the times. First it was to be at Kowloon to
the indignation of the Chinese, since Kowloon, though it is on the
mainland of China, is in British hands as part of the colony of
Hong Kong. Chinese insistence got this changed to Hangchow,
" Heaven Below/' a city the beauty of which Chinese and
foreigners vie with one another in extolling. But this was not
to be. Japanese aggression had disrupted the normal life of
China, and it was felt that prudence indicated yet another
change. Finally, the choice fell on the Christian College at
Tambaram near Madras to the bitter disappointment of one
delegate from India, who had to wait ten more years for his
first visit to China.
This great college had existed for the best part of a century in
the city of Madras and had only just moved to the extensive new
site eighteen miles from the city. It is a lovely place, well planted
with trees so arranged by the devotion and genius of a member
of the staff that something is always in flower. It has educated
many of the greatest leaders of the Indian Church and in-
fluenced many of the most notable among Indians who have
not become Christians. It has been served by many great men.
Conspicuous among those of recent years is Alee Boyd, who re-
tired from the principalship shortly before this book was written,
after thirty-five years of service in India, during which he
113
BBOTHEBS OF THE FAITH
acquired the reputation of being one of the best loved mission-
aries of any country or of any time.
So here we all arrived in the early days of December, 1938.
And what a collection it was ! Here were many of our old friends.
Inevitably the chairman was John E. Mott, now seventy-three
years old, but full of fire "I have never heard the old man to
better advantage," remarked one delegate after Mott's closing
speech. One of the speakers was Bishop Azariah. But there were
many new faces as well. England had sent Dr. Garbett, then
Bishop of "Winchester and later Archbishop of York. Those who
knew him well believed that the great release of new life which
made Garbett, in his closing years, the chief spokesman of the
Church of England dated from the shock of his encounter with
the younger churches at Tambaram. Theologians of eminence
came from many countries, among them Professor Farmer, now
of Cambridge, and Dr. H. P. Van Dusen, now President of Union
Theological Seminary, New York. Paton had worked hard to
secure the best possible representation and had not always
worked on conventional lines. Two of the chairmen of sections
were almost unknown young men, both then under the age of
forty, one of them now well known as Count S. C. van Eandwijek,
General Secretary of the Board of Missions of the Netherlands
Eeformed Church.
But, of course, the great thrill was the arrival of the delegates
of the younger churches. "This is the Holy Catholic Church,"
one delegate was moved to say to himself, as he saw them all
assembled in the first plenary session. And among them all pride
of place went to the Chinese. Their situation was delicate in the
extreme. Japan and China were not openly at war, but China
was already suffering all the agonies of invasion and the Jap-
anese were also at Tambaram. By the dignity of their bearing,
their calm refusal to allow themselves to be embittered, their in-
dividual distinction as thinkers, speakers, and simply as Chris-
tians, the Chinese won for themselves the affectionate admiration
of the whole assembly. Never again would it be necessary for
younger church leaders to claim equality with their brethren
from the West ; it had been already granted by acclamation. For
a long time it had been doubtful whether any delegates from
Germany would reach the Conference. But this time the disaster
114
PATON A^D KBAEMEBTHE YOrXGEB CHUECHES AEEIYU
of Oxford 1937 was not repeated, and one British delegate recalls
with pleasure that during the first four days of the Conference
he sat between Prelate Karl Hartenstein of the Church of Wurt-
temberg and Gerhard Brennecke, now General Secretary of the
Berlin Missionary Society.
The Conference had met. What was it going to do f First, it
had to face a theological problem of no mean magnitude : What
is to be the attitude of the Christian to the other religions of the
world f How far can he accept them as being in some measure a
manifestation of the truth of God?
At Jerusalem 1928 the liberal influence had been very strong.
A plea had been made that all religions should recognise that
their real enemy is secularism, and that they should all unite to
defend the spiritual interpretation of the world. This was carried
even further by a famous book, Re-thinking Missions, published
in 1932 as the outcome of the survey of missions made by a group
of American laymen. Here it was plainly stated that the business
of the missionary was not to supplant the ancient religions, but
to co-operate with the best elements in them. What was Tamba-
ram 1938 to say? Shortly before the Conference met, a rock of
the largest size had been cast into the already not very calm
waters of the missionary world.
And so we meet one of the most remarkable of all those who
had gathered to spend Christmas together in South India
Hendrik Kraemer. Everything in the career of this outstanding
man is paradoxical. He has never been a missionary; he went to
Indonesia as an expert in languages and Bible translation on be-
half of the Bible Society of the Netherlands. Yet no living man
has exercised a deeper influence on missionary thinking. He is a
layman. But no minister has had more to do with shaping the
new pattern for the life of the Dutch Reformed Church. He is
not a theologian. Yet he has read more theology than many of
those who make it their profession, and by his writings and his
work as Director of the Ecumenical Institute near Geneva he
has influenced the theological thinking of many of the leaders
in the younger generation.
As preparation for the Conference, delegates had been asked
to read, not as for Oxford 1937 a sheaf of papers, but one single
large volume, Kraemer J s The Christian Message in a non-Chris-
115
BBOTHEBS OF THE FAITH
tian World. This Is by far the greatest of Kraemer's writings.
It is a magisterial survey of the whole situation of the Christian
world face to face with the non-Christian peoples and religions.
Nothing comparable to it has appeared so far in this century;
it is perhaps unlikely that anything equal to it will appear in the
next fifty years. In his book Kraemer said a decisive and emphatic
no to all the affirmations of the liberals. We may rightly say that
God has somehow and somewhere spoken in the non-Christian
religions, though it is difficult to be precise and to say when
and where. But in Jesus Christ God has acted, has spoken his
final and decisive word. Nothing in any other religion is the least
like this. From the non-Christian faiths to biblical realism there
is no direct way. Given the choice between continuity and dis-
continuity, we must opt every time in favor of the idea of dis-
continuity. Passage from a non-Christian religion to faith in
Christ must always be of the nature of death and rebirth and
can be nothing else. Such a bare summary cannot do justice to
the riches and force of the original ; it can only indicate the lines
of the controversy.
And fierce and full the controversy raged! Naturally there
were at Tambarain representatives of the older liberalism, to
whom Kraemer's doctrine was anathema. And even many of those
who were prepared to go a long way with him could not accept
all his more violent statements in their entirety. The controversy
is still with us, and we cannot follow its details here. Suffice it
to say that, in a measure, though not entirely, the movement of
Christian thought over twenty years has been in the direction
of Kraemer rather than away from him, and many of the things
which shocked opinion at Tambaram would seem a good deal less
startling if said today.
In addition, however, to its main topic Tambaram 1938 in its
sixteen sections made a wide and efficient survey of all the
problems of the younger churches in their approach to full man-
hood within the fellowship of Christ. In two directions it struck
the prophetic note, though it is to be regretted that not all its
prophecies have yet come to fulfilment.
If the younger churches are ever to stand on their own feet,
it is essential that they should have ordained ministers as well
trained as the representatives of the older churches who come to
116
PATOX AND KBAEiTEB THE YOUXGEB CHFBCHES AfiBIYE
work among them, though the training given in these younger
churches need not necessarily f oEow exactly the lines that have
become traditional in the "West. The Conference affirmed that
"the present condition of theological education is one of the
greatest weaknesses in the whole Christian enterprise'' and
sounded a clarion call for improvement. But in view of the recent
development of interest in lay ministries in the church, it is
noteworthy that this section at Tambaram opened its report on
the ordained ministry with a classic statement on the priestly
character of the church as a whole :
The Church is the body of Christ. In all its work of ministering,
whether priestly, pastoral or prophetic, it is animated by the life
of the risen and ascended Christ, who is at once the great High
Priest, the Chief Shepherd of souls, and the eternal Word of
God. This ministry is committed to us as a function of the whole
body of Christ and cannot therefore be claimed exclusively by in-
dividuals or by one order within the church. Nevertheless from
the time of the Apostles there have been special orders and min-
istries in the Church, given by God, for the perfecting of the
saints unto the work of ministering, unto the building up of the
body of Christ. 2
Far less has been done than should have been done to follow
up the recommendations of this section. Tet some things have
been done. The progress of work for the improvement of theo-
logical training in the younger churches can be to some extent
followed in two notable books, The Christian Minister in India
(1946) by Charles Eanson, later General Secretary of the Inter-
national Missionary Council, and The Christian Minister in
Africa (1960) by Professor SundHer of the University of
Uppsala. And at last in 1958 the generous gift made available by
Mr. Rockefeller through the Sealantic Fund, matched by com-
parable giving on the part of the great American missionary
societies, is making possible advances that could hardly have
been imagined twenty years ago.
The other point on which Tambaram 1938 laid special stress
* The World Mission of the Church, Madras-Tambaram 1938 (London:
International Missionary Council, 1939), p. 66.
117
BROTHERS OF THE FAITH
was Christian literature. Millions of people all over the world
are learning to read. The communists are well aware of the im-
portance of capturing this market. They put money into it. Their
material is attractively produced, adapted to the class of reader
for whom it is intended, and produced at prices with which
the ordinary publisher simply cannot compete. What are the
churches doing? The answer must regrettably be that they are
doing remarkably little. Specialists are few. It seems to be sup-
posed that tired missionaries in their spare time and overworked
younger church leaders will by some miracle produce admirable
literature on every kind of topic. The list of Christian books in
almost every language used by the younger churches is short
enough to make an angel weep. Usually the I.M.C. does not take
the initiative in setting new projects in hand ; in this field it felt
that an exception must be made:
The ground on which the International Missionary Council
believes that it must take the initiative in this matter is that most
of the literature agencies on the field are either owned by, or
financially dependent on literature societies, missions or churches
of the sending countries. Until these bodies indicate a willingness
to consider joint action in oversea work, plans for closer co-
operation and, where necessary, unification of work on the field
cannot be fully achieved. 3
These were fine words. But, alas, they do things very slowly
in the Christian world. The logical outcome of this affirmation
should have been the setting up, by the I.M.C., of an international
bureau of Christian literature. That is something for which in
1960 we still wait.
We met. We prayed. We talked. We departed. And in less
than nine months we were once again at war. As so often in
history some of the brightest hopes of Christian men and women
were shattered on that hate and arrogance and cruelty that lie
hidden in the depths of the human heart, and which only the
power of the gospel of Christ can finally exorcise.
8 Ibid., p.
118
DC
Dietrich. BonLoeffer
and Worldly Christianity
"I SEEM TO GET MORE FROM THIS FELLOW BON"HOEFFER THAN
from anyone else." So said an American student, with that
generous disregard of the right of foreigners to pronounce their
languages in their own way, which is so characteristic of the
Anglo-Saxon peoples. It was clear that this student had read
The Cost of Discipleship many times and had been gripped "by
it as by no other theological work. In this there is something
strange. When Dietrich Bonhoeffer died in 1945, he was almost
unknown outside his own country, and even in Germany he did
not rank among the most influential Christian thinkers. And
now, more than ten years after his death, he seems to speak, as
few others, with authority to a generation very different from
his own.
It is always dangerous to generalise about generations. They
change so rapidly, and there are always so many exceptions that
no statement on the subject can have more than very limited
validity. Yet remarks of teachers in many countries seem to in-
dicate something like a common attitude among the young people
of many countries today. After the war we were familiar with
the cynical mood of many young men, who had fought for so
much and gained so little. Then came the tortured idealism
of the existentialists, trying to win some shred of hope out of
despair. Now it seems as though we had entered into a mood of
fairly serene contentment with a fairly serene world. "We are
not interested in politics," say many of the young. "Our aim
is to find a job, marry young, settle down, and enjoy bringing
up a family in a community of like-minded and fairly honest
people. " When a speaker at a famous American College recently
119
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
began his address with the words, "What are you prepared to
die for! ?y he was met with looks of horrified and incredulous dis-
may. In a world where everything is relative, is there really any-
thing worth dying for! Do not such phrases belong to the dis-
credited mythology of the bad old men who made the wars?
But this is not true of all. There is no such mood in the com-
munist countries, where the future still beckons in resplendent
and fascinating colors. And some in the West are realising that
the victory of the communists so far has lain in the spiritual and
not in the material world. They have made the West profoundly
uncertain of itself and suspicious of its own ideals. They have
given the West a bad conscience about imperialism and colonial-
ism and a host of other things. If the West dies, it will be not
through the shock of violent conflict, but through its own inner
inanition; civilizations live only by the power of ideas and ideals,
bitterly though these are derided by the hard-faced, practical
men of both East and West. But what can we put before the
young today! What will convince them that certain principles
matter, that there are more important issues than having things
as good as possible in a life that is bounded by the cares and
duties of every day! It may be that Dietrich Bonhoeffer has the
answer. The latest edition of the famous German theological
encyclopedia EGG ascribes to him "wegweisende Bedeutung,"
importance as a sign-post pointing to the future. Perhaps like
Soren Kierkegaard he will come into his own only long after his
death.
But we must go back in our story in order to put these things
into their proper historical frame.
After the First World War the German people had been
through a terrible time. Their glory had been laid in the dust.
They were hungry, and the blockade was continued long after
most people thought that it ought to have come to an end. The
French occupied the Euhr. The collapse of the German mark
in 1923 wiped out, in a few days, the savings carefully stored
up by many people over many years. There was no recovery and
no hope. And then on January 30, 1933 Adolf Hitler came to
power, by what methods of violence and chicanery it is not our
purposes here to discuss. What was the German people to make
of this new phenomenon?
120
BIETEICH BOSTHOEFFEB AKD WOELDLY CHBI3TIANXTY
Many accepted the new power with joy. It gave them work
and hope and a sense of human dignity. Even in the German
ehnrches Hitler had his friends and spokesmen, men who were
honestly convinced that in Ms rise and seizure of power they
could see the hand of God at work in history. This comes out
with strange intensity in some letters addressed by one distin-
guished theologian to another. The correspondents were Gerhard
Kittel of Tuebingen and Karl Earth. "If I stand by the side of
Christ, 77 wrote Kittel, "I know nothing in the wide world no
sparrow on the roof-top, no lily in the field ... no Palestinian
zealots and no Roman Emperor, no Mussolini and no Hitler in
which the Almighty Creator of heaven and earth, who has re-
vealed Himself to me as the Father of Jesus Christ, does not
exercise His sovereign sway. 7J A little later he goes on to state
that a church that remained indifferent to what was taking place
in the world, including what happened on January 30, 1933,
would deny the authority and responsibility entrusted to it by
the Lord of the church, who is at the same time the Lord of
history. And then, in italics for emphasis, that "if the decision
of world history in the life of a people lay between the Soviet
star and the Germany of January 30th, the Church under God's
Spirit and God's Word is not so poor as to lack full authority to
say whether the decision of that day was from God or Satan." 1
So here was a challenge clearly and firmly launched. A great
many Christians in Germany at the time would have agreed
completely with Kittel. This may seem strange in the light of all
that we know today about Hitler and his monstrous regime.
But the first art of the historical student is to project himself
into the past and to see and feel things as the men of a past
time saw and felt them, and in the light of the knowledge that
they had in their own day. "What did the average German know
and feel in those years between 1933 and 1945 f
"We didn't know." That is what most Germans will say
today, and of course, there is hardly anyone in Germany who
will admit that he ever was a Nazi. Naturally, there were many
thousands of people in the know, as the regime developed the
* Ein fheologischer Briefwechsel, pp. 10, 30, 34, quoted in The Church
and Its Function in Society, pp. 226-27.
131
BBOTHEBS OF THE FAITH
infamies of the Gestapo, of the massacre of the Jews and the
liquidation of opponents. But the testimony of a large number
of Germans of the deepest Christian conviction and sterling
integrity cannot be disregarded. The average representative of
a hard-working and rather unimaginative race, fully occupied
in rebuilding his life and that of his family after the bad
yearSj reading only a heavily censored press, and with few
contacts outside Germany, had very little idea of what his
government was up to. He probably knew that a few miles from
his home there was a large area enclosed by electrified barbed
wire, from which all strangers were strictly warned away.
But everyone knew that there were unstable and disloyal ele-
ments in the nation, and that it was the business of the Fuehrer
to take care of them. People in the East would become aware
that the streets inhabited by Jews had become strangely silent.
But movements of populations on a large scale had not been
unknown in post-war Europe had not a million Greeks been
transferred from Asia Minor to mainland Greece in 1923?
and who in the world could have imagined that in the civilized
twentieth century a maniac was planning the crime of the
elimination of six million Jews? These things would be quite
incredible, if they had not actually happened.
But there were some Germans who were more or less aware
of what was going on, and they were faced by the darkest of
uncertainties and the most difficult of decisions. For it was not
a question simply of protesting against this crime or that. A
fundamental principle was involved. How far can the claim
of the state go! Patriotism is generally recognised as a virtue.
The Bible bids us render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's.
But what if Caesar begins to claim also the things that are
God's? And where does the boundary lie between the two
claims, and who is to determine it? For Hitler there was no
problem; the state was to all intents and purposes God, and
obedience to it was the highest duty of man. The church could
be tolerated and protected just in so far as it lent itself to the
purposes of the regime. But not all could see it in such simple
terms as these, and there were no precedents from recent times
to guide the critics.
DIETRICH BO3THOEFFEB AXD WORLDLY CHBISTIANITY
The Church Is clearly facing today one of the major crises of
its history. It is confronted once again with a problem analogous
to that which met it in its early days as it faced the Roman
world. The question which arose then, and which meets us
again today, is one which Professor Ernest Barker has de-
scribed as perhaps the profoundest in history the question of
the relation between the Church as owning allegiance to a
supra-mundane authority and the integrated body which is
community-state or state-community. 2
The surprising thing is not that so many Germans were per-
plexed and uncertain as that so many, and from so early a
date, saw clearly the direction in which the new regime was
carrying them and were prepared to say, if necessary at the
cost of their lives, "Let the church be the church/'
The "Confessing Church" came into existence. This phrase
is strange in English and needs a word of explanation. It
implies not the formation of a new and separate church, but
the coming together of those within the German churches who
were prepared to stand fast by the great Confessions of Faith
of the period of the Eef ormation, with their affirmation of the
sovereignty of Jesus Christ over church and world alike. It
implies also a willingness to bear a good confession before the
world to the truths of the gospel and of the great Christian
traditions. In the period after 1933 it involved also a willing-
ness to stand up to Hitler and his followers within the churches
and to repudiate the exaggerated claims to obedience and
loyalty that they were making. In May, 1934 the "Confessing
Synod" of the German Evangelical Church met at Barmen.
It put forth that famous Declaration which was as a beacon
of light in a dark world:
Jesus Christ, as witness is borne to us concerning him in the
Holy Scriptures, is the sole Word of God to which we must
hearken, and which we must trust and obey, whether in life
or in death.
We reject as false the doctrine that the Church can and
should recognize, as sources for its proclamation, besides and
8 The Churches Survey Their Task, pp. 9, 10.
123
BB0THEBS OP THE FAITH
apart from this sole Word of God, other events and powers,
forms and truths as a revelation from God. 3
"Whether In life or in death. 77 It is easy to write such
splendid words. Who would dare to assert, before the trial has
been made, that he is capable of living them out! I have had
in my own hands original documents from the files of the
Gestapo, in which are to be found reports on every Protestant
pastor and every Eoman Catholic priest in a whole area. The
Germans are a thorough people. A friend has described to me
what it felt like to preach Sunday after Sunday, knowing well
that at every service there was a spy in the congregation. It
was not enough to be careful about what you said. What you
did not say might be equally important, and failure to put in
the right laudatory words about the regime, the duly fulsome
prayers for "the great leader whom Thou, God, hast given
us/* might land you in trouble with the authorities. This
friend knew that it could only be a question of time. He was
right. The fateful day came when the Gestapo arrived, and
he was carried off to spend more than three years as Hitler's
guest in Dachau, one of the worst of the concentration camps.
This particular friend survived to emerge again, to be elected
to high office in his Church, and to write an account of his
experiences in which there is not a single trace of bitterness
or hatred. There were many who disappeared and who never
came out again; the record of all they endured and suffered
is known to God only.
The man who attracted the greatest attention at this time,
in Germany and outside it, was Martin Niemoeller. This re-
markable man had served in the German Navy and at the close
of the war in 1918 had been a submarine commander. Feeling
the call to ordination, he had carried out the full course of
theological studies, and in 1931 had been appointed pastor
of Dahlem, a suburb of Berlin. Here his plain and courageous
sermons attracted wide attention, and his voice was heard
far beyond the limits of Germany. Such temerity could not but
provoke the rulers. Niemoeller was actually acquitted by the
8 Quoted in A History of the Ecumenical Movement, p. 466.
124
DIETBICH BOXHOEFFEB AXD WOELDLY GHBISTIA^TITY
court which tried him. But he was far too dangerous a man
to be at large; lie was arrested again and confined as Hitler's
personal prisoner a new and strange category in a succes-
sion of concentration camps from 1937 to 1945. During those
years he had little to do but study the Bible, pray, and deepen
his hold on the basic verities of the Christian faith. Since the
war Niemoeller has served in a variety of great positions, and
is a well-loved figure in half the countries of the world. But
perhaps he has done more in silence than in speech; perhaps
his greatest years were those in which he held on in loneliness
and suffering, a symbol to the whole of the free world of the
truth that loyalty to Jesus Christ must come before all other
things, even before life itself.
The church has always had its martyrs, but now martyrdom
had a new and special pain, referred to in moving terms by
the Swedish bishop Johannes Sandegren at the Tambaram
Conference in 1938. In the days of the Koman Empire, as for
Savonarola in Florence in the fifteenth century and for the
English martyrs under Queen Mary in England, death meant
a public spectacle, with crowds of sorrowing friends and multi-
tudes of perplexed and interested people. The testimony of
last words and of a courageous death might exercise untold
influence on the future. Now martyrdom would come obscurely
in some unknown prison, perhaps accompanied by torture ;
bereaved families might receive much later a little casket of
white dust. And the prisoners would be accompanied all the
time by the nagging, agonizing doubt whether all this suffer-
ing was worth while. To suffer demands courage; to suffer and
to hold on, although the suffering seems meaningless, is the
work of supermen.
And so we come back to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The outward
facts of this short life can be briefly recorded. Bonhoeffer had
served for a short time as pastor of a German church in
Barcelona, had studied for a year at Union Theological Semi-
nary, New York, and carried out a rather longer spell of pas-
toral service in London. He had thus a far wider knowledge
of the world and of the churches outside Germany than almost
any other German churchman of his time. When the second
war started in 1939, he was in America and could have stayed
125
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
there; he felt that God wanted Mm to be in Germany, and so
lie returned. From a very early date he had been occupied with
the affairs of the Confessing Church, and had come under the
suspicion of the government. Permission to teach, to speak, to
write, to live in Berlin had gradually been withdrawn from
him. In 1942 Bonhoeffer made an astonishing journey to Stock-
holm, in order to meet Dr. Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, and
other leaders in the world church. He convinced Bell of the
range and importance of the opposition to Hitler in Germany;
unfortunately, Bell's representations to the British govern-
ment, as was perhaps to be expected in the middle of a great
war, did not meet with much attention. Things could not go on
like this; it was hardly a surprise to Bonhoeffer 's friends when
news came that on April 5, 1943 he had been arrested by the
Gestapo. For eighteen months after his arrest he was able to
carry on a somewhat extensive, though clandestine, correspond-
ence with his friends. Then came the grave shock of the failure
of the attempt on the life of Hitler in 1944. Bonhoeffer ? s
brother and two of his brothers-in-law were taken and executed.
Many friends hoped that he might be spared, but it was not
to be. Just at the end of the war, in the crisis of the debacle
of Hitler's power, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged in prison
by the Nazis.
What was the secret of his power! To one who did not know
him personally it seems that he was one of those fortunate per-
sons born with a genius for friendship. All kinds of people
churchmen, students, working men, atheists seem to have
been drawn to him and to have found in him a sincerity, a
reality of inward life, which is often lacking in the professed
and professional servants of the church. And from his pub-
lished works it is clear that until the last day of his life he
was always learning, always finding fresh things in Jesus
Christ.
He was not a ready writer. With much of the poet in his
make up he could see visions and dream dreams, but the labor
of getting his thoughts down in black and white on paper in
systematic form was heavy. Among his papers are various
outlines of the books that he was going to write, but most of
these books remained unwritten. His influence in the world
DIETBICH BONHOEFFEB ANB WORLDLY CHEISTIAXITY
today is due to a few shorter works that were completed, to
the fragmentary and uncompleted Ethics, above all to the
Letters and Papers from Prison that were gathered and edited
by a friend after his death.
The early pages of the Ethics reveal the intensity of the blow
that had been struck by Hitler at all conventional Christianity.
What do we mean by ethics? All the old formulations seem to
be meaningless in face of a world in which all values have been
transformed, in which the devil seems to have taken on the
form of an angel of light, and draws near to the Christian with
alluring invitations couched in terms that used to stand for
righteousness. One man believes that he can face this need in
terms of conscience. But how can he trust his individual con-
science when the whole flow of the world's events seems to be
moving against it ! Another speaks of duty. But what is a man
to do when basic duties seem to be in conflict with one another!
Another withdraws from the turmoil of life to develop the
ideal of a purely inner saintHness and devotion to Christ. But
such a man can have no influence at all on the course of events.
And is he in truth following the man of Nazareth, who was
always about the streets and lanes of Galilee, and ended his
days on a Cross!
So Bonhoeffer is driven back, amid the shifts and whirls of
modern life, to the one place where a rock is to be found. Jesus
Christ is a reality. He lived; in the pages of the Gospels we
can see what God is and what goodness is. Ethics is not a
science that can be reduced to formulae and equations. It is
the desperate venturing of a man upon decisions for which
there is no chart or clue, in trust and hope that God will not
forsake him, and that Jesus Christ will manifest himself as
the unchanging reality:
wondrous change! Those hands once so strong and active,
have now been bound. Helpless and forlorn, you see the end
of your deed. Yet with a sigh of relief you resign your cause
to a stronger hand, and are content to do so. For one brief
moment you enjoyed the bliss of freedom, only to give it back
to God, that he might perfect it in glory. 4
4 Letters and Papers from Prison (London: S. 0. M. Press, 1953), p. 170.
127
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
The Ethics remain a noble fragment, only a small part of
what Bonhoeffer might have given us. It Is perhaps in the
Letters and Papers from Prison that the ordinary reader will
feel that he can come close to one of the most remarkable
Christians of our time. In the concentration camp Bonhoeffer
had to share the life of ordinary men, all sorts of men, as he
had never shared it before. He became increasingly aware of
the appalling distance that separates the churches and their
members from the way in which ordinary men think and live
their lives and make their decisions. And almost to his surprise
he found that he liked these ordinary men very much. They
seemed so real, and so much that goes on in the churches seemed
by comparison to fall under the condemnation of a pale and
unproductive pietism. And so Bonhoeffer began to work out a
new, and at first sight paradoxical, doctrine of the worldliness
of the Christian faith. "The world" had been a negative force
from which good Christians tended to shrink back in anxiety, if
not in horror; now "the world" is to be one of the categories
in which the Christian faith is to be re-expressed.
Only a rather long quotation can give the feel of this new
direction in which Bonhoeffer 's mind was moving:
During the last year or so I have come to appreciate the
"worldliness" of Christianity as never before. The Christian is
not a homo religiosus, but a man, pure and simple, just as Jesus
was a man, compared with John the Baptist anyhow. I don't
mean the shallow this-worldliness of the enlightened, of the
busy, the comfortable or the lascivious. It's something much
more profound than that, something in which the knowledge
of death and resurrection is ever present. . . .
Later I discovered and am still discovering up to this very
moment that it is only by living completely in the world that
one learns to believe. . . . This is what I mean by worldliness
taking life in one's stride, with all its duties and its problems,
its successes and failures, its experience and helplessness. It
is in such a life that we throw ourselves utterly in the arms
of God and participate in his sufferings in the world and watch
with Christ in Gethsemane. That is faith, that is metanoia, and
that is what makes a man and a Christian (cf. Jeremiah 45).
How can success make us arrogant or failure lead us astray,
128
BIETEICH BONHQEFFEE AXD WOELDLY CHEISTIAXITY
when we participate in the sufferings of God by living in this
world f 5
We are fortunate in hairing from an eyewitness a description
of Bonhoeffer's last days and hours. Payne Best, a captured
British officer, writes:
Bonhoeffer was all humility and sweetness, he always seemed
to me to diffuse an atmosphere of happiness, of joy in every
smallest event in life, and of deep gratitude for the mere fact
that he was alive. . . . He was one of the very few men that I
have ever met to whom his God was real and close to him. . . .
The following day, Sunday 8th April, 1945, Pastor Bonhoeffer
held a little service and spoke to us in a manner which reached
the hearts of all, finding just the right word to express the spirit
of our imprisonment and the thoughts and resolutions which
it had brought. He had hardly finished his last prayer when
the door opened and two evil-looking men in civilian clothes
came in and said: "Prisoner Bonhoeffer, get ready to come
with us." Those words "come with us" for all prisoners they
had come to mean one thing only the scaffold. We bade him
goodbye he drew me aside "This is the end," he said, "for
me the beginning of life," and then he gave me a message to
give, if I could, to the Bishop of Chiehester. . . . Next day at
Flossenburg he was hanged. 6
How strangely different life is from men's calculations!
Hitler had affirmed that he was settling the future of Europe
for a thousand years. To those who without warning heard
on the radio the appalling news of Hitler's pact with Kussia
in 1939, it seemed for a moment that he might be speaking the
truth. And yet within twelve years Hitler's Reich had gone
down in unimaginable shame and disaster. And the church of
Jesus Christ has proved itself once more one of those anvils
that has worn out many hammers. "My shade's so much more
potent than your flesh," said Browning's Bishop Blougram.
It seems that he was right. To all appearances force is the
mighty thing, and victory will always be on the side of the big
8 Letters and Papers from Prison, pp. 168-69.
* The Venlo Incident, p. 180, quoted in Letters and Papers, pp. 11, 12.
129
BBOTHEBS OF THE FAITH
battalions. But there Is a disturbing story about a man named
Jesus who was put on a cross and died, and yet is named with
reverence and adoration in a million churches today across
the world. "Was he right after all, and was Pilate wrong ! These
men believed and sealed their testimony with their lives. Their
name liveth for evermore.
We all say, cc lt couldn't happen here" which is exactly
what the Germans said before 1933. We now know that it
could happen anywhere and at any time. If it did happen here,
where would you and I stand?
130
X
D. T. Niks and the Future of Missions
ON A STEAMY EVENING IN THE SUMMER OF 1927 FOUB MEN
sat on a verandah of the splendid Y.M.C.A. building in Colombo
and talked. One was a young missionary recently out from
Britain; one a Burgher, of the mixed race springing from
Dutch and Ceylonese origins; one a Sinhalese-speaking Chris-
tian of the majority race in Ceylon; one a Tamil-speaking
student of the University College of Colombo, who hailed from
Jaffna in the extreme north of Ceylon. Another of the fated
men of the ecumenical movement has entered on our scene.
Jaffna is a strange part of the world. Most of the inhabitants
of Ceylon are Buddhists and speak Sinhalese. But more than
a thousand years ago a number of Tamil-speaking Indians came
in and settled in this northern and isolated corner of the
island. They are very different from the race of hardy Indian
laborers who, at a much later date, have come in to work on the
tea and rubber estates of Ceylon, and present the Ceylon govern-
ment with one of its most difficult problems. The Jaffna Tamils
speak what they claim to be the purest Tamil in the world.
The level of education and culture is very high. Here Daniel
Thambiraja Niles was born in 1908, the son of a lawyer whose
habit it was to read right through the Bible and the works of
Shakespeare every year to keep up his knowledge of Ms religion
and his understanding of human nature.
D. T., as he is generally known in the ecumenical world,
early heard the call to ordination. A brilliant career at the
Union Theological College, Bangalore, the best centre of theo-
logical teaching in Asia, brought him into touch with the latest
movements of Western theological thought. A meeting with
Visser ? t Hooft at a quadrennial conference of the Indian Stu-
dent Christian Movement left a deep impression on him. Travel
131
BEOTHEES OP THE FAITH
In the "West to attend other student conferences broadened his
mind and his understanding of countries and churches other
than his own.
Ten years passed. At the Tambaram Conference of 1938 a
group of highly distinguished men and women were sitting
round a table, trying to hammer out the Tambaram statement
on the Christian faith Henry Van Dusen, Georgia Harkness,
Herbert Farmer of Cambridge, Hendrik Kraemer, and others.
And there, almost inevitably, was D. T. Niles, perhaps at that
time feeling a little overwhelmed at finding himself in such
eminent company.
Another ten years passed. The First Assembly of the World
Council of Churches was meeting for its opening service. Arch-
bishops and moderators, cabinet ministers and professors, and
the rest of them had with some difficulty been shepherded into
their places. And then came the moment for the addresses.
There were to be two, the first naturally by John E. Mott. The
patriarch and prophet, already more than eighty years old,
began to reminisce; there passed before his mind the figures
of those great ones of the past with whom he had worked, who
had served the ecumenical movement in their day, and then
passed on into the unseen. It was perhaps inevitable that he
should dwell a little in the past. Then the slim pastor of the
Methodist Church of Ceylon, simply clad in the white robe of
his people and looking younger than his forty years, stood up
to speak. This was an address almost wholly directed to the
future strong, challenging, and consoling. God has bidden
Moses go down and speak to Pharaoh. But who is Moses that
he should make his way into the presence of the king, and what
assurance is there that Pharaoh will listen? God has bidden us
go to the world with a message concerning his Son. But who
are we that we should go? Do we even know what it is that we
have to say? But our confidence is not in ourselves. The everlast-
ing God is one who never changes, and it is he who has bidden
us go forward.
Ten more years have brought fresh honors an honorary
doctor's degree, the chairmanship of the World's Student
Christian Federation and the launching of a great four-year
venture of study on the Mission of the Church in the world,
132
D. T. STLES AXB THE FUTUEE OF MISSIONS
and finally the secretaryship of the East Asia Christian Confer-
ence. Truly the younger churches hare arrived with a vengeance !
As we saw, from Tambaram 1938 onwards the equality of the
younger and older churches was no longer a subject of debate.
It had been accepted in principle and with enthusiasm by all
the older churches. This did not mean, however, that all prob-
lems had been solved; there were still adjustments to be made
and possible sources of tension that had to be faced. It was to
some of these problems that the "Whitby Missionary Conference
of 1947 directed Its attention.
Whitby, Ontario, is a quiet little town. The Conference that
met there in July 1947, the first gathering of the scattered
missionary forces after the end of the war, was small and
hard-working. It produced a number of brilliant reports and one
brilliant phrase, " Partnership in Obedience." It is a matter
for great regret that Whitby and its reports have never been
taken very seriously in the Christian world. Preparations for
Amsterdam 1948 were already well on the way when it met;
the larger conference overshadowed the smaller, and Whitby 's
prophetic utterances fell for the most part on deaf ears. It is
time that the churches went back and picked up the threads
that have been dropped.
What Whitby was concerned about was the appalling fact
that in the middle of the twentieth century nearly half the peo-
ple living in the world have never even heard the name of
Jesus Christ. Sixty years earlier John E. Mott had electrified
the churches by his famous slogan, "The evangelization of the
world in this generation." You cannot put life into a phrase
that has had its day and no longer rings bells in the minds of
the hearers. Yet the problem still remains. In the Ascension
the lordship of Jesus over heaven and earth has been pro-
claimed and ratified. But in Tibet the lordship of Jesus is not
even denied; the inhabitants do not know enough about it
even to deny it.
At eventide King Jesus
Lay down in Joseph's grave;
The peoples were untroubled
Whom Jesus died to save.
133
BBOTHEES OF THE FAITH
What was true on the first Good Friday is still largely true
today; the peoples are untroubled by the gospel because they
have never heard it.
The problem of 1947 is in the main the same as the problem
of 1887. But one immense change has taken place, in the in-
tervening years, in the formulation of the problem. In 1887,
in countless areas of the world the church just did not exist;
if it was to come into existence at all, this could only be by a
Western invasion in the name of Christ, But now in almost
every part of the world a church exists. These younger churches
are charged with the task of the total evangelization of their
countries. The gospel must be preached to every creature. But
in this new setting of the task what are the respective parts
to be played by older and younger churches! It would be
quite easy to say that there is no problem. The younger churches
might say to the older, and have sometimes been inclined to say,
' * Thank you very much; you have started this, and now we
will carry on. You can all go home/' But this simple isolation-
ism is really a form of heresy. The older churches equally
might say to the younger, "We are very busy here; we have
the gigantic task of post-war reconstruction ; we are faced with
the problems of communism and the reconstruction of our whole
way of thinking. We can no longer spare you even the minimal
resources that we have given you in the past. We will now stay
at home," But this too would be heresy, though of a rather
different kind.
Whitby found the answer in the new formula of " Partner-
ship in Obedience." Each word in the phrase is significant.
Older and younger churches alike are faced with a new situa-
tion, which demands a new kind of obedience. Each must work
out in independence the nature of that obedience. But as they
do so, they will find themselves partners, because older and
younger alike are trying to discover the will of a common
Lord. Oddly enough, D. T. Niles was not at Whitby in 1947,
but no younger church leader has drank more deeply of its
spirit.
In the following year a first step was taken to implement
some of the Whitby ideas. The first East Asia Conference was
convened in Manila, jointly by the World Council (in process
134
D. T. OTLES A2SD THE FUTUBE OF MISSIONS
of formation) and the International Missionary Council.
This was a strange and moving meeting. Only two foreigners
were present; all the other members were leaders in the East
Asian churches. Yet hardly any of these men had ever met one
another before. Here we meet the part tragic, part comic situa-
tion produced by the follies of Western missions. Our missions
have been like the spokes of a wheel ; they all run in to centers
in Europe or America, but no thought at all had been given to
creating contact and fellowship round the rim. Thus, hundreds
of Indonesian students had crossed the world to study in Hol-
land, but although Australia and Indonesia almost touch not
a single Indonesian had ever been at an Australian university.
The Indian Student Christian Federation had sent students
to conferences in Indonesia, but the ordinary churchman in
India was hardly aware that churches even existed in Indonesia.
So it was a great day for these Asians, when for the first time
they met as Asians, and for no other purpose than to consider
the greater good of the churches in East Asia. Their first
thought was that they would have no difficulty in agreeing.
It was something of a shock to them to discover that they tended
to disagree with one another more sharply than with their
friends from the West, and that it was sometimes the foreigner
who had to serve as catalyst and interpreter.
This exciting conference led to one notable result the set-
ting up, once again jointly by the W.C.C. and the I.M.C., of
the East Asia Secretariat. At first the churches were not at
all sure that they wanted such an office. Might this not lead to
their being fobbed off with a local and second-rate form of
ecumenism, instead of having direct access, like other churches,
to the centers of ecumenical activity? It was only when it was
carefully explained to them that the existence of the Secretariat
would in no way jeopardise these direct contacts that they
were prepared to be convinced of its usefulness. Much depended
on the choice of the first secretary. He must be a man of great
tact and sensitiveness, able to help the churches toward mutual
understanding and fellowship, without in the least giving the
impression that he was there to direct or to enforce instructions
given from without. After careful thought the post was of-
fered to Rajah B. Manickam, who after a period of study in
135
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
America had served with distinction as General Secretary of
the National Christian Council of India. The choice was good.
Maniekam served the churches well and did exactly what was
wanted; he made separated churches aware of one another and
helped them forward in the path of fellowship and responsi-
bility. He left the office in 1956 to become bishop of Tranquebar,
the first Indian bishop of the Lutheran Churches in India.
One of the two foreigners present at the Manila Conference
had been so stirred by these events that he wrote in to the
ecumenical headquarters to suggest that this was a pattern that
might well be followed elsewhere, and that the time had come
to divide the world into eight regions North America, Europe,
the Muslim world, the Orthodox churches, Africa south of the
Sahara, Bast Asia, the South Pacific, and Latin America. It
had not been found possible for the W.C.C. and the I.M.C.
to combine at the center ; on the circumference they had found
it possible to work in harmony, and the development of such co-
operation would be the surest method of bringing them to-
gether in the end. No notice was taken at the time of this
highly imaginative proposal, but in a strange way the history
of the last ten years has tended to turn imagination into fact.
First we must take note of another " ecumenical" movement
which had begun to manifest itself in East Asia. This took
its origin in the Philippines, that country so different from any
other in the world, which, though Protestant missions there
have a history of little more than sixty years, has produced
some of the outstanding leadership in the Christian world and a
vigorous sense of national independence which is prepared to
assert itself against all comers. This movement was primarily
concerned with interchurch aid and exchange of personnel be-
tween the churches of East Asia. The name "ecumenical" had
been adopted without any consultation with either of the main
ecumenical bodies, and though this is not a patented and trade-
mark term, there was a certain amount of natural irritation in
high quarters. Such division could not be allowed to go on;
all the forces working for unity and mutual understanding
must be brought closer together. Somewhat delicate negotia-
tions followed; the result of them was the East Asia Christian
Conference, held in March 1957 at Prapat in Sumatra under
136
D. T. XILES AOT) THE FCTUBE OF MISSIONS
the chairmanship of Bishop Sobrepena of the United Church
of Christ in the Philippines.
By this time the reader of these chapters may be inclined
to say, **What, another conference! " And indeed there are far
too many conferences that are just conferences, opportunities
for people to get together and talk. Of such no notice whatever
has been taken in this book. But at Prapat something genuinely
new came into being. There had previously been Christian
conferences in Asian lands, but almost without exception these
had been planned and organized by Christians from the West,
and the Asians had found themselves really in the position of
guests in their own country. Prapat was genuinely a confer-
ence of the Asian churches. It had been planned and arranged
by them. Chairman and vice-chairman and most of the official
delegates were Asians. Representatives from many other coun-
tries were there and were welcomed, but this time unmistakably
it was they who were the guests. In a new way the Asian
churches had come into their own.
Prapat did two important things. It organized the East Asia
Christian Conference as a permanent body, with D. T. Niles as
secretary and Kyaw Than of Burma, a former secretary of the
Student Federation in Geneva, as assistant secretary. And by
appointing a New Zealander, Alan Brash, as its secretary for
interchurch aid, the Conference indicated both its entire
freedom from race or color prejudice and also its sense of the
new relationship in which the English-speaking dominions of
the South Pacific stand to the world of Asia. For more than
a century Australia, in spite of its proximity to Asia and its
fears of possible Japanese aggression, had turned its face the
other way, historically to Britain and economically to the United
States. But now the war and the logic of history had brought
about a change; Australia and New Zealand must recognize
that they have a special responsibility, as nominally Christian
countries, in relation to that great continent in which are to
be found half of the inhabitants of the world. It was symbolic
of the change that the urgent needs of the rapidly growing
church of Timor in Indonesia should have been met by the
sending of missionaries from Australia.
The East Asia Conference has met again (at Kuala Lumpur
137
BBOTHEBS OF THE FAITH
in 1959). But perhaps more significant for our present pur-
pose was the meeting of the first All- Africa Christian Confer-
ence in January 1958. "When the delegates arrived at Ibadan
in Nigeria, the greatest purely African city in the world, they
must have been almost compelled to say in wonder, "What
hath God wrought. " In Asia, after all, missions have gone on
for centuries and most of the inhabitants of the Philippines
have been Christians at least in name for four hundred years.
But here everything is so new. A century ago when Livingstone,
fresh from the first of his great African journeys, begged leave
to draw the attention of the University of Cambridge to Africa,
over the whole heart of the continent was written the single
word "unexplored." There were little Christian settlements
on the coast; in the interior a man could travel literally thou-
sands of mil eg and never encounter any evidence that Jesus
had ever lived and died. And now these Africans had come
from every territory in Africa, with the single exception of
the small Spanish colonies, as the representatives of great
and growing churches. No one knows how many Christians
there are in Africa. Certainly there are more than there were
in the Eoman Empire when Constantine made Christianity the
official religion of the Empire. In Eastern Nigeria it is reckoned
that 48 per cent of the population is Christian. The Kabaka
of Buganda, grandson of the persecuting king of seventy years
ago, rules over a million and a half Africans, of whom con-
siderably more than half are now at least in name members of
the Roman Catholic or the Anglican Church.
The Conference was not without its problems. White South
Africans born in Africa claim that they too are Africans, a
claim that the black Africans are not always ready to admit.
There were moments of tension between representatives of the
Dutch Church in South Africa, which is committed to the
doctrine of apartheid, and other Africans to whom apartheid
is as the sin of witchcraft. The Conference was presided over,
with dignity and charm, by a distinguished Nigerian, Sir
Francis Ibiam, and was received by the Prime Minister of
Western Nigeria, Chief Awolowo, a sincere and practising
Methodist. But it was recognised that, though the vast ma-
jority of educated Africans are in some sense Christians, a
138
D. T. KILES AND THE FUTUBE OF MISSIONS
large number of the leaders are no longer practising members
of any church. African independence is going ahead apace. In
the brief period since the conference met, tremendons changes
have taken place in the French union, leading to far greater
African autonomy. Even, in the Belgian Congo the tide is
coming in, and Africans who had been content with colonial
status are demanding something else. Who is going to take
the lead! The thoughtful African finds himself torn in three
by the claims of the ancient African traditions of his people,
by the demands of the gospel that he learned in Sunday school,
and by the exciting modern pull of secularism, with or without
a communist handhold on the rope.
The Conference was not very well organised. But the important
thing about it was that it happened, and that it planned to give
itself permanence. A continuing committee was appointed,
with a secretary, and the mandate to prepare for another con-
ference in about three years' time. It is clear that Africa south
of the Sahara is well on the way to constituting itself a
" region," in the sense in which the term was used above.
In 1960 or 1961 an All Latin American Conference is due
to take place. The vigorous independence and individualism of
Latin American Evangelical Christians is such that it is never
certain whether they can be persuaded to co-operate about
anything. But here is another area in which the formation
of a " region" is overdue, and in which, for the first time, it
has been made possible, through the yeoman service of the
D C-3 airplane, that modern packhorse of the vast stretches of
the Pampas and of the hidden valleys of the Andes. Also in
1961 we look forward to the holding of a conference for the
South Pacific, that generally neglected region of the world, the
most extensive of all, if we count the broad stretches of the
Pacific, the smallest in terms of actual land surface and popu-
lation, yet with a noble record of Christian service and of
martyrdom for the sake of the faith. One of the greatest needs
of this area is a united theological school for the higher train-
ing of its ministers; at present there seems to be literally no
body or authority through which such a school could come into
being.
It is perhaps not without interest that the churches of the
139
BROTHEBS OF THE FAITH
European continent have found It desirable to hold a meeting
on their own. Early in 1959 they met in Denmark, like others
gave themselves a permanent organization, and elected as their
secretary H. H. Harms, at that time a distinguished member of
the staff of the "World Council of Churches in Geneva. It really
looks as though the regional organization was something that had
come to stay.
But these are outward things. The inner problems of re-
adjustment are much more subtle and must occupy us for a little
time. In this new world what, if any, Is the relationship of the
missionary from the West to these new and proudly independ-
ent younger churches?
In the last fifty years an immense amount has been done to
transfer the leadership from Western to Asian and African
hands. There was a touching illustration of this at the Lambeth
Conference of Anglican bishops in 1948. For the first time the
delegation of Chinese bishops was led by a Chinese presiding
bishop, Lindel Tsen of Honan. He was accompanied by Ms
Canadian assistant, Bishop W. C. White. But many years be-
fore, when Bishop White was diocesan bishop of Honan, Lindel
Tsen had been consecrated to be his assistant. Now in his old
age the Canadian was joyfully serving as assistant to the
Chinese who had earlier been his own assistant.
Much has been done to transfer property and financial re-
sponsibility to the younger churches. In the past a great deal
of valuable property had been held by "the mission," and in
consequence the local church had felt little interest either in
the property or in the use to which it was put. Now it has been
almost universally recognized that the church is the body which
matters the mission as such must gradually disappear.
But the problem of the relation of the missionary to the
church still remains. It has to be recognised that the words
"mission" and "missionary" are very much disliked by most
of the younger churches. They speak of a period of alien
domination, and particularly of a period of Western financial
control, in which, although independence might have been
given in name to the younger church, the financial dominance
exercised from London or New York in fact made it impossible
for it to act on its own initiative or in accordance with its own
UO
D. T. KILES AXD THE FUTUBE OF MISSIONS
desires. Some great churches have now abandoned the term
"missionary" and replaced it by the term "fraternal worker."
For this there is a good deal to be said; the new term has a
suggestion of equality and informality that was lacking in
the old. And the change in words is meant to correspond to a
real change in thought. Now the church in the field is to be the
free and indigenous expression of the Christian faith; the
foreigner is there just to serve the church as it may desire.
So far so good. But we have not yet answered our question.
Is the fraternal worker a member and minister of the church
which he serves, or is he not! In the past missionaries have
sometimes retained their official membership in their home
church and have never transferred it to the church which they
served in Asia or Africa. Will the fraternal worker do the
same f And if so is this a sound and correct relationship I Where,
as has sometimes happened, the local church has been organised
on racial or national lines, it seems impossible for a foreigner
to become a member of it, unless he changes his nationality at
the same time. Recently, when a young German went out to
Indonesia to serve an independent younger church, the mis-
sionary society which sent him out had not even considered the
question of his relation to the church that he was to serve. It
had not even occurred to them that there was a problem.
He was a missionary, a being of a special and particular kind
and class; lie would not need to have anything to do with the
church, and the church would have no direct responsibility for
him. In some cases the foreign worker, being unable to work
within the church and not wishing to set up a parallel or-
ganization outside it, has been reduced to a state of total pa-
ralysis and frustration, and has wondered whether he really
made a mistake when he crossed half the world to preach
Christ to those who have not heard of him.
Clearly we are in a state of considerable confusion. The rela-
tion of missionary to national seems to have passed through
three phases. In the first the missionary was feared and loved
and respected. He represented authority, the authority of a
father over his children. Then came the time when the mission-
ary was disliked and criticized. The younger church leader
claimed freedom and felt that the missionary was holding on
141
BBOTHEBS OF THE FAITH
far too long to a purely artificial situation of control. Now
comes the time when the foreigner is regarded with indiffer-
ence. The younger church leaders know that control is in their
own hands. They do not really mind very much whether the
foreigner is there or not ; the question no longer interests them.
"Personally, I prefer the term missionary." The speaker
was D. T. Niles, the date September 9, 1959.
Two days before this chapter was written, an unexpected
meeting took place in Geneva between the subject of this chap-
ter and the writer of it. The main theme of a long conversation
was precisely that of the chapter. Why has the message of
Whitby never been heard, and what can we do to make sure
that it is heard f Some years ago Niles scandalized the general
secretary of a great missionary society by asking for more
missionaries for Ceylon. When asked why in the world he sug-
gested that missionaries were needed by what is probably the
best educated and most advanced younger church in the world,
he replied succinctly, "to finish the unfinished task." In 1958
the general secretary of the Indian Student Christian Move-
ment startled his British friends, and gravely perplexed a num-
ber of his Asian friends, by suggesting that the West should
send out a number of missionaries for special work among
the students of India. Are we passing out of the third phase?
That is what Whitby 1947 was trying to say. There is a
gigantic unfinished task before us. All the resources of all the
churches together are quite inadequate to finish it in our day
and generation. Can we get together, on a basis of intelligent
planning and loyal co-operation, to see who can and should do
what before it is too late! In face of this task, in its modern
dimension, the old distinctions between East and West, older
and younger, missionary and national fade into insignificance,
as each tries to be obedient to the Lord of the harvest and
loyal to his colleague in the harvest field.
One of the very few younger church leaders who has seen
this new vision of the unfinished task is D. T. Niles. Another
is his assistant secretary Kyaw Than. Is it possible that these
are the forerunners of a new generation of younger church
leadership, qualified to present to the West a call to service and
self-sacrifice which the West will neglect at its peril?
142
XI
At Last: Tke World Council of Churclies
IN THE COURSE OF THIS STUDY WE HAVE ENCOUNTERED A NUM-
ber of men who seem, from the day of their birth, to have been
predestined to take part in ecumenical affairs. One was G. K. A.
Bell, the Bishop of Chiehester, another J. H. Oldham. We have
still to make the acquaintance of two others in the same tradition,
though very distinct in character and outlook from the older
men.
At Stockholm 1925 the youngest member of the Conference
was a Dutchman named Willem Adolf Visser 't Hooft, who had
shortly before taken up work with the Y.M.C.A. We have already
seen that in 1937 Visser 't Hooft had been chosen to co-operate
with Oldham in writing the preparatory book for the Oxford
Conference, The Church and Its Place in Society. At Tambaram
1938 one of the younger delegates, who knew Visser 't Hooft well
by reputation and had expected to meet a bearded veteran of
the vintage of Oldham, or at least of William Paton, was
astonished to find that the slim young Dutchman sitting next
him was none other than the already famous Church leader,
and that he was in fact no more than a few months his senior in
age.
When the Provisional Committee, charged with the task of
bringing a World Council of Churches into being, met at Utrecht
in May, 1938, there was no doubt at all as to who should be
chairman. As we have seen, William Temple was unanimously
chosen as of all men then living the best fitted for this post.
There was far less agreement in the choice of a general secretary.
Visser 't Hooft's name had been put forward and had met with
a good deal of approval. Some, however, felt that at thirty-seven
a man was too young for so gigantic a task. It was Temple's
authority which turned the scale; the young general secretary
143
BBOTHEBS OF THE FAITH
of the "World's Student Christian Federation was chosen. Wil-
liam Paton of Britain and Henry Smith Leiper of the United
States were asked to share with him his formidable responsi-
bilities.
Looking back over twenty-one years, it is possible to doubt
whether any better choice could have been made.
Visser 5 t Hooft ("Wim" to friends of later years, ''Mouse" to
Dutch friends of earlier years) starts, like Nathan Soederblom,
with the great advantage of ready utterance in four languages
Dutch, English, German, and French and the ability to read
several others. In his years with the Student Federation he had
traveled widely, and with alert observation had made himself
familiar with the conditions and the problems of many churches.
In those years his sensitiveness to currents of thought, his
willingness to try out new experiments and to abandon methods
of work that were no longer relevant were proverbial. In all
these years of rapid movement from conference to conference,
and of intervals of office work surrounded by the dismal files
that seem inseparable from ecumenical activity, 3 t Hooft has
never lost his intellectual interests and has an acquaintance
with modern theological literature, mainly German, such as many
professors of theology might envy. A brilliant mind, more effec-
tive in analysis than in construction, enables him to go quickly
to the heart of almost any situation. By his quickness of
thought he can dominate almost any committee. On the platform
his speech is almost always effective, sometimes profoundly
moving. He has in very high degree the capacity to win and to
hold the confidence of older men and to win and to hold the
admiration of younger men. Beneath all these many qualifications
lies a quiet and resolute faith in Jesus Christ, so restrained in
expression that casual observers might well fail to realise what
is the driving force behind everything that the man does.
In twenty years the World Council of Churches has come to
be deeply marked by its first general secretary, both in his
strength and in his limitations.
Every great man has his limitations. For instance in early
years 't Hooft came deeply under the influence of Karl Barth
and his theology. Some have felt that this has made him less
sympathetic than he might have been with points of view other
144
AT LAST: THE WORLD COUNCIL OF CHUECHES
than those of continental theology. The gravest limitation, how-
ever, has been that the general secretary of the World Council
of Churches is not and never has been a churchman in the
professional sense of that term. Although an ordained pastor of
his church, the Dutch Eeformed Church, he has never held a
parish and has not that knowledge, which only experience can
give, of the life of the church as it is lived out at "the grass-
roots' 7 of parish and community. One of the criticisms of the
World Council that has most frequently been heard is that it is
simply the World's Student Christian Federation grown up
a criticism which, as the years have passed, has had less and
less basis in reality.
We must go back to 1938. Hardly had the Provisional Com-
mittee of the World Council of Churches begun its work, when
the Second World War burst on the world. Plans to hold the
first Assembly in 1941 had to be given up at once. It seemed
as though the war years might be years of total loss as far as
ecumenical advance was concerned. Once again history has con-
founded expectation ; in point of fact those years of distress were
perhaps the most creative years in the whole process of ecumeni-
cal development.
In the first place, just because those united in the faith were
so deeply separated from one another by the catastrophes of hu-
man folly, there was a deeper sense of spiritual awareness and
mutual concern. All this was summed up in the noble words of
Bishop Berggrav of Oslo, written in 1945 just after the war had
ended: "In these last years we have lived more intimately with
each other than in times when we could communicate with each
other. We have prayed together more, we listened together more
to the Word of God, our hearts were together more."
But there were also directly practical services to be carried
out. Until the final occupation of the whole of France by the
Germans in 1942, some measure of contact could be maintained ;
Visser 't Hooft was able to travel to Britain as late as the spring
of 1942. But when all visible contacts were cut off, the real
work began. Since Switzerland was neutral, there were Germans
in Geneva and on the staff of the World Council of Churches.
The general secretary had contacts in all countries, and by
devious and sometimes dangerous methods information con-
US
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
tinned to flow Into the "World Council y s office from many isolated
places. The Nazis were not unaware of this. A secret Gestapo
document published after the war states that the influence of the
ecumenical movement on German church life is considerable,
and orders that a Nazi agent is to be infiltrated into the ecumeni-
cal bodies in Geneva. It is believed that this order was never
carried out. Certainly no member of the devoted and overworked
staff looked in the least like a Nazi agent, but presumably the last
thing a Nazi agent would look like would be a Nazi agent ! *
During these years a strange, and as it has turned out, perma-
nent transformation came about. Ecumenical movements had
been means to enable people to talk to one another; they had
had little occasion to engage in anything very practical. Now,
driven by the necessity of the times, the World Council became
fully operational.
The first area of need to attract the attention of the staff was
that of prisoners of war. The Bed Cross, as ever, rendered
splendid service in helping to meet the physical needs of prison-
ers. To some extent the World Council was able to help with
spiritual ministrations to thousands of isolated men and women,
who discovered, perhaps for the first time, that the world-wide
fellowship of the children of Christ is something more than a
pious dream.
Nest came the refugees. Countless individuals and families
were being uprooted from their homes. Much experience had
been gathered during the First World War, and in the interval
between the wars, of problems of this kind. The World Council
was the natural clearing house for those in different countries
who were trying to alleviate the extreme misery of the displaced
and the homeless. When the war ended, it was thought that
these efforts would have to be continued for perhaps five years.
It was not foreseen that fifteen years after the end of the war
this problem would still be with us, and that as soon as needs
in one area had been to some extent met, tragedy would at
once break out in some new area. The World Council's division
of aid to refugees is still one of the most active parts of the
whole organization.
1 See A History of the Ecumenical Movement, p. 710.
146
AT LAST: THE WORLD COUNCIL OF CHUBCHES
The war had brought to many countries destruction on a
scale unparalleled since the Thirty Years 7 War three centuries
before. It was clear that whole peoples would be cold and
hungry and homeless, and that the churches in the devastated
countries would have the utmost difficulty In rebuilding their
shattered work. As early as 1942 plans were put in hand for the
work of reconstruction and interchurch aid. So carefully had
these plans been laid that, as each area was liberated, the depart-
ment was able to move in and to begin its beneficent work. Before
long countries such as Holland and Norway, which had been
receiving countries, began to be sending countries. The greater
part of the gifts came from the United States, but almost every
country in the world seemed to be eager to co-operate. It is
important not to forget the services rendered by governments
and by Roman Catholic and Jewish agencies. But it is no ex-
aggeration to say that in the whole history of the Christian
churches there has never been so great, so sustained, and so
simply generous a manifestation of Christian charity as this.
At last the war ended. Christians were able to look at one
another once more and to ask what the next steps should be in
taking up the work of building that had been begun. The first
anxiety was as to relationships between those who had been,
as far as political loyalties were concerned, enemies during the
war. This time there was no need for anxiety. When a World
Council group went to Stuttgart in October 1945 to meet a
number of German church leaders, these leaders made a declara-
tion in which they fully recognised their participation in the
guilt of the German people and expressed their desire again to
share fully in the work of ecumenical development. In later times
these German churchmen have had to face rather sharp criticism
from their own side; it has been felt that they laid down their
arms too easily and accepted too meekly the judgment of the
outside world on what had happened in Germany since 1933.
The immediate effect, however, was splendid. The question of
"war guilt/' which had so long bedevilled ecumenical relation-
ships after the first war, this time simply did not arise. German
after German has declared that in those days of renewal only
in church circles could Germans feel that they were at once
accepted and trusted as colleagues and brethren.
147
BBOTHEBS OP THE FAITH
One of the first questions, naturally, was that of the first
Assembly of the World Council, still in process of formation.
The first post-war meeting of the Provisional Committee was held
at Geneva in February 1946. As we have seen, it takes three full
years to prepare adequately for an international conference. But
already five years had passed since the date originally fixed for
the Assembly. Fifty churches had signified their desire to join
the World Council, in addition to the fifty which had been com-
mitted before the war started. People were getting impatient.
Urgent pleas that the Assembly should not be held before 1949
were overruled, and it was decided that the meeting should take
place in August 1948. This means that the preparations were
far less thorough than those for Edinburgh 1910 and for Oxford
1937. And some were not happy about the choice of Amsterdam
as the place of meeting. The International Missionary Council
has usually chosen quiet places for its meetings. A great city,
especially when that city is crowded with visitors and absorbed in
preparations for the inauguration of a new Queen, is hardly a
restful backeloth for profound theological cogitations. Yet so
the decision was made, and so it was carried out.
In August, 1948 the representatives of more than a hundred
churches came together in the Coneertgebouw at Amsterdam.
Their first task was to decide whether there should be a World
Council at all, whether its provisional status as "in process
of formation" should be exchanged for a real and official exist-
ence. On the morning of August 23 a greatly honored representa-
tive of the French Protestant Church, Marc Boegner, rose and
proposed formally: "That the first Assembly of the World
Council of Churches be declared to be and is hereby constituted
. . . and that the formation of the World Council of Churches
be declared to be and is hereby completed/ 7 The chairman,
Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, declared the mo-
tion carried and then called the whole assembly to stand, as he
led the members in prayer for the blessing of God on this new
venture. The World Council of Churches was in being; page
719 of the History of the Ecumenical Movement, which records
these events, bears as its caption the simple words "AT LAST."
It must not be supposed that this happy result had been
reached without difficulty. Certain great churches, such as the
148
AT LAST: THE WOELD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES
Church of Rome and that of Moscow, for different reasons had
refused to have anything to do with the new Council. Some of the
great free church bodies, notably those with a Baptist or Con-
gregational tradition, were deeply anxious lest the Council should
from the start try to transform itself into a superchurcli, re-
gardless of its declarations in favor of the freedom and autonomy
of every individual church. Some conservative sections of the
churches had convinced themselves that the Council was a
dangerous spearhead of extreme liberalism and backed up by
a good deal of ill-applied American money carried on a vicious
campaign of falsehood and misrepresentation. But on the whole
the Christian world, and even the world outside the churches,
seemed to feel that a great event had taken place. "Why didn't
they do it long ago?" was a comment not infrequently heard
from laymen in those days.
Then the World Council had to settle its own constitution. The
basis had already been formulated. The World Council had
taken over the formula that had served Faith and Order so well
and had declared itself to be "a fellowship of Churches which
accept our Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour." It was well
known that not all churches were entirely satisfied with this
basis; some would have liked it to say more, and others would
have liked it to say less. Behind the very innocuous resolution
concerning possible changes in the basis, to be found on page
115 of the official report, lies a curious little piece of unrecorded
history.
Under pressure from some churches which desired revision,
the committee which dealt with such matters was in process of
accepting a resolution which could have been interpreted as
meaning that the basis had been only provisionally accepted, and
was liable to be extensively revised. At this moment a member
of the World Council staff, who had been too busy to attend
earlier meetings of the committee, came in, was horrified to
discover what was happening, and made a strong speech against
any change in the basis being made or considered. Some con-
servative churches had joined the Council only with consider-
able hesitation. Any suggestion that the affirmation of faith in
Jesus Christ as "God and Saviour 7 ' might be weakened would
cause them seriously to reconsider their membership in the
149
BEGTHEES OF THE FAITH
Council. The passionate support given to this unexpected inter-
vention was such that the original resolution was entirely
dropped, and instead the Central Committee, though permitted
to receive suggestions from the churches regarding possible
change, was ordered "to keep its study of possible changes with-
in the Christological principle set forth in the present basis. "
Sections met and sections reported on the church and its
divisions, on the problems of evangelism, on the church and the
disorder of society, on the church and international disorder.
These documents have become part of ecumenical history, and
can be found in the appropriate places. Each has formed the
starting point for further ecumenical study and activity. That
which aroused the greatest interest at the time and the sharpest
criticism from both sides of the great political division in the
world was the report on the church and the disorder of society.
It was, naturally, an unusual and piquant event to have on the
same platform and at the same meeting John Poster Dulles, not
then so famous as he afterwards became, but already well known
as a stalwart defender of the Western understanding of freedom
and economic order, and Joseph Hromadka, the Czech theologian,
who according to his own oft-repeated declarations has never
been a communist, but has gone further than most Christians to
accept the Eastern revolution as an act of God in history and
to support the kind of peace propaganda that the Western na-
tions have not on the whole felt able to approve. In such a
setting a gathering of archangels would hardly have been able
to produce a formula acceptable to everybody. It is not surpris-
ing that in the next few weeks the World Council was attacked
by Moscow as a lackey of American capitalism, and by financial
circles in New York as a dangerous spearhead of communist-
inspired activity in the West. It is just possible that it kept
exactly to the middle line of Christian honesty and obedience.
Such an Assembly could hardly meet without sending out a
message to the churches and to the world. Only those who have
participated in the framing of such a message can have any
idea of the difficulties involved in such work. Not a single word
of the first draft of the message survived unaltered into its final
form.
To start with, members of the special committee appointed
150
AT LAST: THE WOELD COUNCIL OF CHUSCHES
to frame the message were not in the least in agreement as to what
needed to be said. Some, like the Bishop of CMehester, felt that
what was needed was a rather sharp and pungent message to
prick and sting the consciences of men. Others took the view that
in a day of such widespread distress the message should have a
more consoling character: "What men need to know/' said
one famous German theologian, "is that there is a Good Shep-
herd, and that he is available to them. 17 A layman of immense
international experience remarked that the only effective mes-
sage that can ever be sent either to church or world is, "Believe
in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.' 7 Three mem-
bers of one subcommittee, appointed to work on the message,
happened to have been missionaries in South India ; they spent
part of their time translating their draft rapidly into Tamil
to see whether it would "go 7> in a non-European idiom. This
draft fared little better than any other of the early efforts. Dis-
cussion and revision went on until almost the last moment before
the presentation of the Message to the Assembly in plenary
session.
As is so often the case when a document is the product of
many hands and many minds, the message of the First Assembly
of the World Council of Churches is marked neither by eloquence
nor by profundity of thought. But it does contain certain
phrases which have graven themselves deeply on the minds of
all who care for the unity and renewal of the church of Christ :
Christ has made us His own, and He is not divided. In seeking
Him we find one another. Here at Amsterdam we have com-
mitted ourselves afresh to Him, and have covenanted with one
another in constituting this World Council of Churches. We
intend to stay together. We call upon Christian congregations
everywhere to endorse and fulfil this covenant in their relations
with one another. In thankfulness to God we commit the future
to Him. 2
"We intend to stay together. 77 This was the operative word.
And over twelve years the churches have lived up to their good
resolutions. One or two small churches have withdrawn from the
* The First Assembly of the World, Council of Churches, p. 9.
151
BBQTHEBS OF THE IPAITH
Council for reasons that seemed good to themselves, but their
loss has been more than offset by the faithfulness of the great
majority and by certain gains that will come before us in an-
other chapter.
But what did it all amount to, and why have so many Chris-
tians, deeply versed in the affairs and in the history of the church,
come to regard Amsterdam 1948 as one of the great watersheds
of history? What distinguished this meeting from all that had
gone before was that here, for the first time, we encounter the
solemn act of the churches as churches.
We have noted from time to time the growing engagement of
the churches as such in ecumenical endeavor. At this point it will
be appropriate to draw attention once more to the revolution
that this involved. In the nineteenth century work for closer
fellowship among Christians had been undertaken almost ex-
clusively by voluntary societies either such international Chris-
tian groups as the Young Men's Christian Association and the
World's Student Christian Federation or the missionary and
Bible societies, which found themselves driven by the circum-
stances of their work into closer co-operation than that practiced
by other Christians. To such efforts in favor of Christian fellow-
ship the churches took up attitudes which varied between quali-
fied favor and suspicious disapproval. Edinburgh 1910 marks
the climax of that period and faintly indicates the beginning
of another. Those who met at Edinburgh came almost exclusively
as the representatives of missionary societies, some of which had
little if any connection with the organized churches of Christen-
dom. None of them had come as the official representative of a
church ; the churches as such were entirely uncommitted by any-
thing that was said and done at Edinburgh.
Already at Stockholm 1925 we note a change. Quite a large
proportion of the delegates came on behalf of and appointed by
their respective churches. And this was increasingly true of all
the succeeding conferences to which we have had occasion to
make reference. It was always the desire of the ecumenical pio-
neers that the churches should come to take responsibility out of
the hands of the volunteers who had first found the way. Until
1948, however, ecumenical activity found itself marked by the
152
AT LAST: THE WOELD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES
excitement or the discredit which attach to the activities of the
enthusiast, the amateur, the prophet, or the adventurer. But
now all this was at an end.
The World Council is, as its name suggests, genuinely a
council of churches. Its members are not individuals or groups
or societies or special interests. They are churches, independent
responsible bodies, which have decided in favor of membership,
and have been formally accepted by the responsible bodies of
the Council. This statement must be taken in its exact sense. The
Council is not a synod ; it cannot enact canons or decrees which
will be binding on any church. Its recommendations or de-
cisions will carry just that weight which they derive from the
guidance of the Holy Spirit at that particular moment and no
more. But when the Assembly at Amsterdam declared that "we
intend to stay together, " this was not the utterance of a group of
Christian individuals, swayed by the emotions called out by
fellowship in a great assembly. It was the carefully considered
affirmation of a group of men and women, who knew themselves
to speak as the chosen and accredited representatives of the
churches. The churches have stood by what they there said. It
is the churches that have resolved to stay together in this new
venture. And that is something new in the history of the churches
of Christ.
153
XE
Evanston and Ecumenical Dangers
ON THE DAY AFTER THE ENDING OF THE AMSTERDAM ASSEMBLY
of 1948 the whole spirit and character of the World Council of
Churches changed. It could not be otherwise. During the long
years "in process of formation," the World Council had been a
pioneer body, working toward a still uncertain future. It had
been under the direction of men who, while not irresponsible,
were not responsible for the official expression of the views of
any church and were in a very real sense of the word adventurers.
Now what had been fluid had crystallised ; indefinite lines had
hardened into a very definite shape. Such things are inevitable,
as tentative organization gives place to definition, and experi-
ment becomes limited by precedent. But some of those who lived
through the earlier and freer days have never quite reconciled
themselves to the changes that have taken place.
In the new order of things it was clear that a far more im-
portant role would be played by official church leaders, and in
particular by the great church bureaucrats, that special type
more notably present in the American scene than elsewhere. It
may seem invidious to select for notice one rather than another,
but it may be well to take a brief glance, by way of illustration,
at two of the men who have given yeoman service to the World
Council movement in its second phase.
By universal consent Bromley Oxnam would be regarded as
one of the outstanding leaders of the Methodist Churches in
America. At the age of forty-five he was called to the episcopate
of that church, serving first in Omaha and then in Boston. When
the Amsterdam Assembly met, he was Bishop of the Methodist
area of New York. From early days he has had a deep interest
in social affairs. It is significant that one of his earliest books
(1923) bears the title Social Principles of Jesus. Several among
154
EVAXSTON A3TD ECUMENICAL DANGEBS
Ms later books have followed up this early interest. TMs has been
quite enough to get Bishop Oxnam into trouble with those who
believe that any interest in such problems is a sure sign of in-
cipient communism or worse. During the lamentable period of
the dominance of Senator McCarthy, Bishop Oxnam had to en-
dure a series of wanton and cruel attacks, which shocked and
disgusted his friends throughout the ecumenical world. But
through it all he has carried on as a man who, while shouldering
an enormous load of administrative work, has never forgotten
that the first business of the church is to preach the gospel of
Jesus Christ.
Franklin Clark Fry, surprisingly, has not yet reached the age
of sixty. At the age of forty-four he was called to the exalted
position of president of the United Lutheran Church of America,
and has been reelected for period after period of service. As he
modestly explains, half of the electors thought that they were
voting for his grandfather, the other half that they were voting
for his father, and so at that early age he was chosen for a posi-
tion that is usually reserved for patriarchs. Fry is not a writer. To
the world he is best known as an administrator and as a forceful
but fair-minded chairman. At Amsterdam he was chosen as vice-
chairman of the Central Committee of the World Council of
Churches, and later succeeded Bell as chairman. It was thought
wise from the start to have the Lutheran churches of the world
closely associated with the high command of the ecumenical
movement. A better choice could not have been made. Fry, with
an apparently unlimited capacity for this kind of work, is also
treasurer of the Lutheran World Federation and president of
Lutheran World Eelief . But no one who knows him has any doubt
as to when he is happiest. One of the delegates to the I.M.C.
Assembly in Ghana in 1958, idly turning on the radio on Sun-
day morning, heard an American voice plainly and forcibly set-
ting forth the gospel of Christ. He wondered who the speaker
could be; at the end of the address the announcer said, "You
have been listening to Dr. Franklin Clark Fry."
To be a member of the Central and Executive Committees of
the World Council is not a sinecure. That men who are already
carrying so heavy a load in their own churches and in American
affairs should be prepared to give up so much time to ecumenical
155
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
service is one of the clearest signs that "ecumenism" has really
arrived. This is something that even the busiest churchmen must
take seriously, something to which they may be proud to devote
some part of their already overcrowded lives.
How does the World Council work, and what does it do ?
The events that catch the headlines are the great Assemblies, to
one of which we shall come later in this chapter. But perhaps
these are really the least important of the doings of the World
Council and its allied bodies.
All the time it is carrying on an enormous task of service to
refugees and other unhappy and homeless people. Some Russian
"Old Believers," having fled from the revolution in 1917 and
lived for many years in China, were later found living in great
distress in the Philippines and in Hong Kong, after a second
flight from communism. It seemed that new homes might be
found for them in Brazil and Paraguay. Naturally, the World
Council had on the spot in South America a British citizen of
Russian origin, who spoke Russian as his native language. These
things do not ordinarily get into the papers; they are part of the
lifeblood of ecumenical activity.
Perhaps more important than the great meetings are the small
gatherings, where business can be carried on in a more direct and
intimate fashion. Here a vital part is played by the Ecumenical
Institute at Bossey near Geneva. It is strange that Bossey is do-
ing little of that which it was brought into being to do, and yet
how indispensable it has become in the life of the churches.
Originally, Rockefeller gave the money first to rent and then to
buy this beautiful country house, in quiet surroundings about fif-
teen miles from Geneva, in order to serve as a lay training center.
Young people were to come from various countries, to be in-
spired with new visions, and to go back to take the lead among
the young people of their own churches. Just after the war, half
of Europe was unemployed, and it was possible to bring young
people together in this way. As early as 1947 it was clear that the
original plans were quite unpractical. Now Bossey offers for the
four winter months a period of study for theological students,
and a shorter three-week course in the summer, also for theo-
logical students. All the time conferences are going on. Laymen
do come to them, but the majority of those who take part are in
156
EVANSTON" AND ECUMENICAL DANGEB8
some way professional Christians. Yet this too is an invaluable
part of ecumenical life. The first director was Hendrik Kraemer,
who brought to it his vast experience and his alert and questing
mind, ever moving out in fresh directions. It is always difficult
to get good lecturers for the theological students 7 courses dis-
tinguished men and women are tied by their own work. But what
matters far more is the education that the students are giving
one another, in sessions that are often prolonged into the early
hours of the morning, or in quiet evening visits to the village and
the opportunities of entertainment that it offers. It is hard to say
exactly how students are changed by these experiences ; it is safe
to say that those who pass through them unchanged are very
few.
Necessarily, however, a good part of the life of the movement
is expressed in its formal committees, meeting regularly every
year. A large part of the business is so dull that any record of it
must also be dull. But every year matters come up that are of
more than passing significance. We may take as an example the
meeting of the Central Committee held in Toronto in 1950. Here
several matters of more than ordinary moment had to be dealt
with.
The North Koreans had invaded South Korea. For years every-
one who knew anything of the Far East had seen this coming.
The Americans had left the South Koreans with a police force;
the Eussians had provided the North Koreans with airplanes,
tanks, and heavy artillery. As early as 1948 Korean Christians
had been saying to their friends, " Don't you realise that this is
the front line? This is where it is going to start. " So Christian
opinion was perhaps less startled by the invasion than world
opinion as a whole. Nevertheless, it was clear that a situation
of the utmost gravity had arisen. President Truman had ordered
American troops into Korea ; the United Nations had approved a
"police action " for the restoration of order and peace. Should
the World Council of Churches say anything at such a time or
not? In 1946, together with the I.M.C., it had brought into being
the Churches' Commission on International Affairs to educate
the Christian conscience on precisely such problems as this. It
seemed to many that the time had come to speak out.
After long and sometimes heated discussion the Central Com-
157
BEOTHEBS OF THE FAITH
mittee accepted a statement "on the Korean Situation and World
Order." This statement lacked nothing in clarity and went very
far in supporting the Western interpretation of the situation :
An act of aggression has been committed. . . . Armed attack
as an instrument of national policy is wrong. We therefore com-
mend the United Nations, an instrument of world order, for its
prompt decision to meet this aggression and for authorizing a
police measure which every member nation should support. At
the same time, governments must press individually and through
the United Nations for a just settlement by negotiation and con-
ciliation. 1
It is easy to pass such resolutions in the quiet seclusion of a
Christian meeting; it is not always possible to foresee what
the consequences of such action will be. We do not know what
may have been in the minds of the North Korean leaders when
they launched the invasion. We do know that the thousands of
young Chinese who launched themselves recklessly on. the
American machineguns regarded themselves to a man as martyrs
in the Asian cause, as willing victims of unscrupulous aggression
carried out by the Americans, heirs of the colonial wickedness
of the European peoples, against Asian freedom. The Statement
confirmed the Church of Moscow in its belief that the World
Council is a lackey of American capitalism. For years it made
more difficult the rapprochement between Chinese Christians
and their friends in the West. And yet perhaps it was right for
the World Council to speak out ; it is very hard to know exactly
when it is right to speak the truth and shame the devil.
Then the Central Com mittee had to say something about the
nature of the World Council, what it is and what it is not, in re-
lation to the churches. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had put the question
neatly in a German phrase that simply cannot be translated into
English 1st die OeJcumene Kirchef What he meant was to ask
whether the ecumenical movement is really ckurchly, in the sense
that it springs from some deep apprehension of what the church
in its inmost nature really is. Or is it just a matter of ecclesiasti-
1 Minutes and Reports of the Third Meeting of the Central Committee
(Toronto, Canada, July 15, 1950), p. 91.
158
EYA3STSTOK AND ECUMENICAL DANGEES
cal carpentry, patcMng together disparate entitles for purely
pragmatic reasons!
The Committee had before it a document prepared by its
general secretary. By the time discussion had ended, not much
of the original document was left, but the statement on "the
Church, the Churches, and the World Council of Churches"
marks a real advance in ecumenical thinking. First of all it states
a number of things that the World Council is not, and must
never become. In particular "The World Council of Churches
is not and must never become a Super-Church." Then it goes
on to define eight assumptions on which the whole work of the
movement is based. It would take too much space to cite these in
full ; 2 one specimen will serve to illustrate the mixture of
theological and personal concern by which the movement lives :
(8) The member Churches enter into spiritual relationships
through which they seek to learn from each other and to give
help to each other in order that the Body of Christ may be built
up and that the life of the Churches may be renewed.
Thirdly, an apparently trivial matter, the Committee had to
decide where it would next meet. The text drily states that "the
General Secretary reported that the Executive Committee . . .
had canvassed thoroughly the possibility of a meeting in Asia,
but that financial reasons had made it appear impossible to hold
the meeting there." Behind this lies something of real impor-
tance. From the beginning friends of the World Council have
been troubled by its overwhelmingly Western character. Kepre-
sentatives of the younger churches are there and are listened to
with respect, but, as they themselves say, they regard themselves
as ambassadors for more than half the world, although the
greater part of that world which they represent is not yet Chris-
tian. A member of the World Council's staff had pleaded pas-
sionately that the next meeting of the Central Committee should
be held in Asia or Africa, and that thus a public declaration
should be made of the World Council's recognition of its uni-
versal character. He was overruled. In 1951, Miss Sarah Chakko,
1 The document is to be found in the Minutes and Reports of the Third
Meeting of the Central Committee, pp. 84-90.
159
BBOTHEES OF THE FAITH
whose early death robbed the World Council of its first woman
president, had better luck. She said bluntly, "If you don't meet
in Asia before the next Assembly, you may as well put up the
shutters and stop calling yourselves the World Council of
Churches." In face of this Asian determination financial con-
siderations seemed not to matter so much. In 1952 a successful
and well-attended meeting of the Central Committee took place
at Lueknow in India. The only contretemps was that many
members, having learned from their geography books at school
that India is a hot country, had failed to take seriously the
warning that Lucknow can be a very cold place in the cold
weather. The one medical member of the committee, Dr. Garcia
of the Philippines, had his hands more than full of ecumenical
work, caring for the members of the Committee who had suc-
cumbed to the cold !
Finally, the Toronto Committee had to determine the main lines
of thought and preparation for the second Assembly of the World
Council of Churches. In the preliminary discussions the idea
of "the Christian Hope" as the main theme for the Assembly
was brought forward by E. J. Single, formerly a missionary in
South India, and at the time editor of the International Review
of Missions. On the basis of this suggestion a paragraph was
drawn up by a member of the World Council's staff and was
accepted almost unaltered by the Central Committee:
The time has come when the World Council of Churches should
make a serious attempt to declare, in relation to the modern
world, the faith and hope which are affirmed in its own basis and
by which the Churches live We think therefore that the main
theme of the Assembly should be along the lines of the affirmation
that Jesus Christ as Lord is the only hope of both the Church
and the world*
The intention of the Committee was quite clear. The aim was
to produce a statement, in simple language, that could be read
with understanding by the ordinary man. In a world that is so
full of despair, why do Christians go on hoping? What is the
basis of their hope f What has Jesus Christ to do with it all ? Have
ibid., p. 23.
160
EVAHSTON AND ECUMENICAL DANGEES
the churches really any w$rd of comfort for troubled humanity,
other than the shallow optimisms which have been sheltered
again and again by the tragedy of human happenings! The
preparation of this statement was to be entrusted to a carefully
chosen body of twenty-five. The plan of the Committee was to
include a number of eminent laymen T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis
were particularly mentioned who, while not professional theolo-
gians, have a proved capacity for helping the ordinary man to
understand what the great problems of theology are all about.
Alas, never did carefully laid plans go so sadly awry. The
eminent laymen did not appear. The Committee of Twenty-five
was made up almost exclusively of professors of theology. Prom
the very first day the discussion soared aloft into the most diffi-
cult realms of theology and never came down from them again.
We have had a hint of such possibilities in the suppressed con-
flict at Stockholm 1925, between what the continentals regarded
as the absurd optimism of the Americans and what the Americans
regarded as the unbiblical pessimism of the continentals. Now
this conflict was to come out into the open and to range through
all the meetings of the Committee of Twenty-Five.
We can well imagine the confusion. The leading part was
played by theologians of German speech, none of whom had a
deep knowledge of English. The British and Americans were
rather better equipped in the matter of language, but many of
them found it difficult to follow the technicalities of language that
German theology had developed in the years of separation from
the thought of the rest of the world. Accurate translation of these
technicalities is extremely difficult. It seemed that no meeting of
minds was possible. The Germans felt that the Americans, having
never really experienced the tragedy of the war and all its con-
sequences, were still building sand castles, unaware of the raging
tides of the world's great seas. The Americans felt that the
Germans would not allow us any hope this side of the second
coming of Christ, and that this pessimism would cut the nerve of
the vigorous witness and service to which Christians are called
in this day of opportunity. The controversy overflowed from the
council room and provoked a storm of pamphlets and articles all
over the world. It was strange that no one seemed to note the
crucial fact that the word "hope" does not occur once in any
161
BROTHEBS OP THE FAITH
of the four Gospels. With all this controversy behind and around
them, it is perhaps surprising that the Committee of Twenty-five
ever produced a document at all. But under the wise and patient
leadership of Bishop Lesslie Newbigin they did produce some-
thing at last. It was not what the Central Committee had hoped
for. The statement on ' ' Christ the hope of the world ' ' is expressed
in such language that many of the delegates to the second Assem-
bly at Evanston had no idea at all of what it was talking about.
Instead of being a clear statement to church and world of that
faith and hope by which the churches live, it was another of those
theological manifestoes that leave the layman out of breath and
gasping.
To the second Assembly we must now turn. It was almost in-
evitable, with American influence so strong in the Council (an
influence which, to their eternal honor, the American members
have never overpressed) that the second Assembly should be held
in the United States. The generous hospitality of Northwestern
University made it possible to fix on Evanston, a suburb of
Chicago, as the site. So there from August 15-31, 1954 the multi-
tude of delegates and visitors made their way. "What happened f
As a spectacle and a demonstration there is no doubt that
Evanston 1954 was an enormous success. It was front-page news
in almost every newspaper in the civilized world. Visitors were
innumerable. Literally millions of Americans began to under-
stand for the first time what it is all about and appreciated that
the ecumenical movement is a living force, to which they are
linked by membership in their own churches. At the first As-
sembly everything had been experimental. Now the World
Council was an established organization, meeting with confidence
to carry out its own business under the arc lights, indeed, of
world publicity, but with a certain sense of intimacy and well-
tried friendship at its heart.
But how far did it go beyond Amsterdam, in the clarity and
challenging character of its utterances and its mobilisation of the
Christian forces to their world tasks in the present day! The
events are still too recent for a final judgment to be passed on
them, but perhaps, when the time comes, history will say that
Evanston 1954 did not actually say or do anything very original
or epoch-making.
162
EVANSTON AND ECUMENICAL DAKGEBS
Its Message ends with some direct and pungent questions to the
members of the Christian churches :
Does your church speak and act against such injustice! . . .
Does your congregation live for itself, or for the world around
it and beyond it f Does its common life, and does the daily work
of its members in the world, affirm the Lordship of Christ or deny
it? ... Do you forgive one another as Christ forgave you! Is
your congregation a true family of God, where every man can
find a home and know that God loves him without limit ? 4
Here no one can complain of obscurity ; for once a great church
body really was speaking in terms that everyone can understand
and presenting a challenge which every single Christian must
face.
A welcome emphasis in the reports is that on the laity
the Christian in his vocation. This had not been forgotten at
Amsterdam. But here it comes out with new vigor and lucidity.
Most Christians in the church are laymen; in the last resort
the quality of the life of the church will depend on what they are
and what they do. The World Council's department on the life
and work of the laity is one of the most vigorous and fruitful
branches on the ecumenical tree. It is strange that until Hendrik
Kraemer published his Hulsean Lectures, Towards a Theology
of the Laity, no single work of theology appears ever to have been
addressed directly to this theme. If the department brings to
success its current project of producing a book on the layman
in history, it too will unquestionably have pioneered in a field
which has been almost totally neglected by historians of the
church.
Such are some of the positive gains of the Assembly, and others
could be noted. But at the Assembly itself, and in the years that
have passed since it dispersed, many friends of the movement
have been more conscious of the dangers that surround the ecu-
menical movement than of the triumphs that have attended its
growth.
There is first the plain fact that it is no longer new. In an
4 The Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, The Evanston
Report (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1954), p. 3.
163
BBOTHEBS OF THE FAITH
admirable phrase coined or popularized by Albert Outler, the
ecumenical honeymoon is over. Now we know one another, and
the first delight of discovery is over. "We have said and done all
the obvious things* What do we do next f
This has raised for many people the question of the frequency
of assemblies. Naturally, the Student Christian Federation ar-
ranges a big conference once every four years that is the length
of a student generation. But was the World Council well advised
when It planned to hold an Assembly every five years? It takes
at least three years to plan such a meeting; if it has done any
useful work, It takes more than three years for that work to be
absorbed into the life of the churches. Big assemblies are very
expensive and very exhausting. Six years were allowed to elapse
between the first Assembly and the second. More than seven
years will pass between the second and the third. But are these
intervals not still too brief! Is there not a real danger that if
the World Council meets so often, it will be betrayed into the
fatal course of uttering platitudes and trivialities and will
end by losing the regard of the serious part of mankind f Most
of the great church bodies, such as the Lambeth Conference,
find that one meeting every ten years is quite enough. Is this
an example the World Council might be wise to follow?
The formation of the World Council presented a challenge to
every church. It was not surprising that ecumenical action was
followed by strong denominational reaction. In one sense this
has been good. It was necessary for the churches to turn back on
themselves and to ask in plain terms what they stood for, what
they believed that they had to contribute to the common stock
of the church's life. But in this course there may be certain
hidden dangers. Every one of the large denominations now has
some world-wide organization, of greater or less tenacity, and
some kind of periodical world meeting. Even the Anglican Com-
munion, which has suffered from an almost morbid fear of the
setting-up of a second Vatican at Lambeth, has now appointed a
whole-time central officer (the first appointment that of Bishop
Stephen Bayne of Olympia) to watch over inter- Anglican rela-
tionships and the missionary strategy of the Anglican Com-
munion. By far the best organized of all these denominational
bodies is the Lutheran World Federation, with its head offices
164
EVANSTOX AND ECUMENICAL DANGERS
overtopping those of the World Council in Geneva. Whatever
the World Council does, the Lutherans will do it too, and per-
haps do it better. They have their service to refugees and their
theological commission. They have gone beyond every other
church in having a central committee for missionary work, a
body that really does exercise an influence on the far-flung mis-
sions of the Lutheran churches. Is there not a danger that the
churches, in this new preoccupation with their own world-wide
affairs, may lose sight of the wider vision and may come to care
less for the unity of aU God's scattered people! This is not a
necessary consequence, but it is a possibility that every friend
of the ecumenical movement must take seriously today,
Of " evangelical' 7 reactions to ecumenism we must speak in a
later chapter. The World Council does well to take no notice of
the scurrilous attacks of malevolent people. But one of the facts
that must not be overlooked is that a large proportion of the
"evangelical" churches, in the American sense of that term,
is outside the ecumenical fellowship. There have been welcome
signs of friendship, as in the careful study of ecumenical affairs
recently made by one of the most notable leaders in the Pente-
costal groups. But there is evident a tendency on the part of these
evangelical groups to get together on a basis very different from
that of the World Council.
The greatest dangers of all, however, lie in a very different
direction. Ecumenism has grown up as a challenge. It looks as
though it could be used as a convenient means for the evasion
of challenges.
The greatest achievements in the field of actual union of the
churches all took place before the first Assembly of the World
Council of Churches in 1948. The World Council does not con-
cern itself directly with church union, rightly regarding this
as the field of the churches themselves. But there can be no doubt
that to many people the formation of the World Council has
come as an easing of conscience and a satisfaction to the craving
for union: "This gives us all the union we need; why should we
look for any other?" The World Council provides a place where
men and women can meet to talk in freedom and charity, a place
in which they can pray together, an instrument far better than
any we have had in the past for common action and witness. Why
165
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
spoil this paradise by seeking something beyond it? So men are
inclined to talk. Is it just possible that we may become so oc-
cupied with the theory of union, with all the new problems of
ecumenical relationships and the delicate diplomacy by which
they are to be maintained, as to forget that the only way to unity
is to unite, and that ultimately ecumenism must lead on to the
hard and relentless duty of finding a way to unite organically
with those from whom we are now separated?
Ecumenism and mission. How do these fit together? It seems
that in the minds of many young people the one excludes the
other. The one word is as popular as the other is unpopular.
Given the title "ecumenical," they will undertake almost any-
thing. The word "missionary" suggests the outworn pietism
of the nineteenth century. "Ecumenical" seems to speak of
large-hearted and genial tolerance, in which we try to under-
stand one another, and to offer service without any strings at-
tached. Awkward questions as to whether there is some radical
difference between truth and falsehood may be left comfortably
in cold storage. It must be recognized that there is much that is
excellent in this point of view. One will meet young Americans
aH over the world, carrying out really difficult jobs with patience,
cheerfulness, and a real desire to understand the point of view
of others. But the ultimate questions cannot forever be evaded.
There is one word which is hardly ever found in ecumenical
literature, the word "conversion." This is an unpopular word in
many circles in America, perhaps because it is burdened by too
many unhallowed memories. "We need not fight for the word,
but the idea is one that we cannot do without. The church exists
only because in every generation people have been converted
from every kind of non-Christian faith or lack of faith and
from service to the devil, the world, and the flesh. Unless they go
on being converted, ecumenism will cease to be a matter of very
much importance, since there will nowhere be any church to
which it can be related. The general secretary of the World
Council spoke prudently and exactly when he said that our major
problem in this second period of ecumenical life is that the ecu-
menical movement must become more missionary and the mission-
ary movement must become more ecumenical.
166
XIII
John XXIII and a Roman Council
WHO WILL BE THE NEXT POPE! THE QUESTION IS ALWAYS BEING
asked, and the only true answer that can be given is that no one
knows. There is an old saying at Rome that he who enters the
conclave as Pope leaves it as cardinal it is only rarely that the
favored candidate is elected.
There are exceptions to this rule. Pins XII was elected at a
time of grave disturbance in the world. He was known as a
friend and pupil of his predecessor Pius XI ; it seemed wise to
continue in the known and trusted paths. But strange reversals
of expectation do take place. The cardinals after all are human.
Although on so solemn an occasion they put aside, as far as
possible, their personal feelings and prejudices, they have their
partialities and their dislikes, perhaps sometimes even their
ambitions. Sometimes external pressures play a part, as when
in 1903 the Emperor of Austria practically vetoed the election of
Cardinal Rampolla. There is a tendency to choose someone rather
unlike the preceding Pope, so as to have the advantage of variety.
There is often a feeling that after the election everyone who was
in will be out, and a great many people who were out will be in.
This was certainly the case when Pius IX was replaced by Leo
XIII in 1878.
In 1958 the situation was peculiarly complicated. Pius XII
had kept everything in his own hands and had not even named
a Cardinal Secretary of State. As he grew older, he found it
increasingly difficult to make decisions ; though it was customary
for Popes to name cardinals almost every year, he had done so
only twice during his pontificate. Certainly his appointments,
when made, had been generous, and for the first time he had given
to the College of Cardinals a non-Italian majority. But at the
time of his death there were many gaps in the College, and
167
BBQTBjEBS OF THE FAITH
some of those who had been regarded as most likely candidates
for the papacy, notably Mgr. Montinl, the Archbishop of Milan,
were not even cardinals. Technically, the elected candidate need
not be a cardinal; indeed, under Eoman Canon, law any male
Koman Catholic over the age of thirty years can be chosen, but
as a matter of practice for centuries the cardinals have chosen
one of their own number.
So speculation in Home and in the world was particularly
vigorous in 1958, Some had thought it possible that a non-Italian
might be chosen. It is, indeed, unfortunate that for 437 years no
one but an Italian has been chosen as head of what rightly re-
gards itself as the most international body in the world. But
those most closely in the know thought it probable that an
Italian would be chosen, that he would be old rather than young,
and that he would be drawn from the ranks of the pastoral
cardinals and not from among those who were exercising high
administrative functions in Rome itself. This, if correct, would
considerably limit the range of choice. Yet even among those who
had made such calculations, few perhaps had given much atten-
tion to the chances o Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, the aged
Patriarch of Venice. Just at this time the presiding bishop of
the American Episcopal Church, Henry Knox SherriU, was lay-
ing down his office under the rules of his church at the age of
sixty-eight. It seemed hardly likely that the cardinals would
thrust a man of seventy-six into the most exacting office in the
world. It is clear that the choice was difficult and complex. Ten
official ballots were held, and behind these lay endless discussions
and proposals. But when at last the white smoke from the Vatican
told the world that a new Pope had been chosen, it was the name
of Cardinal Eoncalli that was announced.
No sooner was this known than people began to realize how
much there was to be said for the choice. For a long time the
French church had felt that it was neglected or misunderstood
by the Vatican. Recently the affair of the priest-workers had not
been dealt with entirely to the satisfaction of that church. The
French Cardinals were determined to have someone who would
understand their situation and their needs. Cardinal Roncalli
had served for a period after the war as Papal Nuncio in France.
One of the great interests of the Roman Catholic Church in
168
JOHN ZXm AND A EOMA^ST COUNCIL
modern times has been closer relations with the ancient Orthodox
churches of the East. Cardinal Eoncajli had been for no less than
nineteen years papal representative in Bulgaria and Turkey ; he
knew these regions well and had learned some of their languages.
And so the chorus of eulogies went on.
But if anyone supposed that this old man would be nothing
more than a genial figurehead, they were in for a series of shocks
and surprises. It was at once clear that the new Pope was going
to have his own way in a great many things. To start with, there
was the choice of his name. There had already been a John
XXIII, that incredible swashbuckler Baldassare Cossa, whose
morals would have disgraced any respectable barnyard, and who
more or less ruled from 1410 to 1415. By taking this name,
Cardinal Eonealli put the historians to a good deal of perplexity,
but made clear that he had set his seal to the Eoman view that
the other John XXIII had never really been Pope at all. It is
hard to imagine a greater contrast than that between the present
Pope and his predecessor. Pius XII had been to the finger tips
a Eoman aristocrat, with all the finesse that belongs to his race.
John XXIII makes no secret of his modest origins in the Italian
middle class; he possesses the rather different gift of shrewd-
ness. From the first day of his reign he began to show himself
friendly, sympathetic and vigorous, sweeping aside a good deal
of meaningless protocol and manifesting the zeal of a true Chris-
tian pastor. Discussions had been going on for years as to whether
the number of cardinals ought to be increased from the figure of
seventy, at which it had stood since 1586. Within a few weeks of
Ms accession John XXIII had increased the number to seventy-
five, apparently after very little consultation with anyone else,
and raised to the purple many men of eminence who had been
kept waiting by the long hesitations of his predecessor.
Then in January 1959 the new Pope made history by telling a
group of cardinals that he proposed to call an ecumenical
council.
This was news indeed. No council of the Roman Catholic
Church had met since 1870, when the Vatican Council was pro-
rogued in haste, to the sound of the guns of the French and
Germans, already locked in the deadly conflicts of the Franco-
German war. The Council was only prorogued, not dissolved,
169
BEOTHEES Otf THE FAITH
and probably it was the intention of Pope Pius IX to convene it
again, when the political skies were more propitious. But many
had wondered whether this Council would not, as a matter of fact,
be the last of the long series. The Vatican Council had been
brought together for one main purpose to declare the Pope
under certain conditions infallible. This it had done. It had
affirmed that when the Pope, in his capacity as Universal Pastor,
gives ex cathedra teaching on either faith or morals, then his
decisions are irreformaliles, above criticism or alteration, not by
reason of the agreement of the Church, but of themselves and of
their own authority. If this is so, what need to go to all the
expense and complexity of a council? Can the Pope not simply
give the faithful such directions as they need, on his own author-
ity, after such consultation as he himself may think fit with the
cardinals and other authorities of the church ? Many had reckoned
in this way. In a moment of time John XXIII had blown all
their calculations sky-high.
It is time to look back and consider briefly the attitude of the
Eoman Catholic Church to the ecumenical movement. .
We have already seen how the delegation of Christians rep-
resenting Faith and Order had been received by Pope Benedict
XV with a mixture of fatherly solicitude and of inflexible firm-
ness on the point of co-operation. Shortly after the Lausanne
Conference of 1927, Pope Pius XI, in an Encyclical Letter
commonly known by its first words, Mortalium Animos, made
perfectly clear the official attitude of the Roman Church and
its head to all non-Roman Catholic attempts to promote the
union of the Christian churches. There is one way to unity and
one only, return to obedience to the See of Peter and acceptance
of everything that it teaches. With any other form of effort
it is impossible for the Roman Church or any of its members
to have anything to do :
This being so, it is clear that the Apostolic See can by no means
take part in these assemblies, nor is it in anyway lawful for
Catholics to give to such enterprises their encouragement or sup-
port. If they did so, they would be giving countenance to a false
Christianity quite alien to the one Church of Christ. Shall we
commit the iniquity of suffering the truth, the truth revealed by
170
JOHN XXIII AND A ROMAN COUNCIL
God, to be made a subject for compromise! These pan-Christians
who strive for the union of the Churches would appear to pursue
the noblest of ideals in promoting charity among all Christians.
But how should charity tend to the detriment of faith f l
In making this declaration the Boman Church has rendered
a real service to the ecumenical movement. The perpetual danger
of such a movement is that it may sink down into the acceptance
of a woolly-minded friendliness as its goal. The Boman Catholic
Church reminds it that what matters is the truth. Charity and
fellowship are needed, but they are needed as conditions for an
effective search after truth. Attitudes may differ. Borne be-
lieves that it already has all the truth and need not seek it
elsewhere. Protestants must look with caution on any approach
to Borne, because they believe that Borne has grievously erred
from the truth and needs to recover it. But the fundamental
conviction should be the same on both sides.
From the attitude expressed in. Mortalium Animos the Vatican
has never really receded. Yet at one or two points there has
seemed to be a certain softening of the decisions of Borne in
practical matters.
The World Council of Churches has always desired to hold
the doors wide open for contacts, official and unofficial, with the
Church of Borne. This does not mean, as some enemies have tried
to make out, that the World Council is in some way a crypto-
papist organization. It simply means that the World Council
recognizes the duty of developing whatever measure of fellow-
ship is possible with all who in any way whatever call on the
name of the Lord Jesus Christ. It was in accordance with this
principle that the Provisional Committee of the World Council,
at its last meeting before the Assembly of 1948, authorized the
presidents and the general secretary to invite a small number of
individual Boman Catholics to be present at the Assembly as
unofficial advisers. The Vatican soon made it clear that no Boman
Catholic would be permitted to be present at the Assembly with-
1 See Gr. K. A. Bell, Documents on Christian Unity, Second Series (Lon-
don: Oxford University Press, 1930), pp. 57, 58. The full text of Mortalium
Animos, in English translation, is given on pp. 51-63 of this book. The official
title of the Encyclical is "On Fostering True Beligious Union.'*
171
BBOTHEBS OF THE FAITH
out its own special permission; ere long it had become quite
clear that in no ease whatever would such special permission be
given. A few Roman Catholics were present at the Assembly as
journalists ; some others were in Amsterdam at the time as visi-
tors, but there was no official Roman Catholic participation of any
kind in World Council affairs.
In the following year the Holy Office at Eome issued an in-
struction to Eoman Catholic Bishops on the Ecumenical Move-
ment. That such an instruction was felt to be necessary in itself
shows the wide extent of the interest aroused in the Roman
Catholic Church. The instructions on the whole are highly nega-
tive. The document starts with the plain declaration that "the
Catholic Church takes no part in Ecumenical conferences or
meetings." It is largely concerned with warnings that Roman
Catholics who take part in meetings with non-Roman Christians
may be tainted with "indifferentism." Yet Roman Catholics
interested in ecumenism have on the whole read this formidable
document in a very positive way, as opening doors that had
hitherto been shut. In the first place, for the first time it officially
recognizes the existence of the ecumenical movement. It recognizes
that meetings between Roman and non-Roman Christians will
take place, and though the rules it issues for the conduct of such
meetings are strict, it does not absolutely prohibit their taking
place. Above all it clearly states that
although every sort of communicatio in sacris is to be avoided
at all such conferences and meetings, it is not forbidden to open
or close these gatherings with the common recitation of the Lord's
Prayer or some other prayer approved by the Catholic Church. 2
So much for the official attitude ; this is what it is, and there
is no likelihood at all that it will change in the near future. But
the moment one turns to unofficial Roman Catholic approaches,
one moves in a wholly different world. Here one is conscious of
an ardent, almost passionate, desire for the union of all Christ's
people that often puts to shame those on the Protestant side who
2 The full text of this instruction is to be found, in English translation,
in G. K A. Bell, Documents on Christian Unity, Fourth Series, 1948-57
(London: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 22-27.
172
JOHN XXni AA T B A BOMAN COUNCIL
are loudest in their professions of ecumenical interest. We have
become used to division, and can put tip with it. To the best
Eoman Catholics it is never anything but a cause of agony that
there are Christians with whom they cannot worship and enjoy
the fulness of unity. They believe themselves to know how unity
can be secured. Yet they are clearly moved by the deepest charity
towards those whom they now delight to call "our separated
brethren"; perhaps as the years have passed, the accent has
moved from the word "separated" to the word "brethren."
Attention may be called to some of the forms of fellowship
which do actually exist between the Eoman Catholic and the non-
Roman world.
Eoman Catholic students are quite extraordinarily well-in-
formed about everything that happens in the ecumenical field.
It is a common saying that if you want to know what is hap-
pening in this field, you should go, not to the headquarters of
the movement in Geneva, but to Eome there they will have
everything at their finger tips! It is the remarkable fact that
the three books which will perhaps rank as the most important
ecumenical publications of the last few years are all by Eoman
Catholics Histoire Doctrinale du Mouvement Oecumenique (A
Doctrinal History of the Ecumenical Movement) by the Belgian
scholar Canon G. Thils (1955) ; Fr. Maurice Villain's Introduc-
tion a I'Oecumenisme (1958) and the work of the American
Jesuit Edward Duff, The Social Teaching of the World Council
of Churches (1956).
More important than anything else is the movement of prayer.
A Frenchman, the Abbe Paul Couturier of the Archdiocese of
Lyons, was led to promote a movement for prayer that "our
Lord would grant to His Church on earth that peace and unity
which were in His mind and purpose when, on the eve of His
Passion, He prayed that all might be one." Clearly this was
something in which Christians, of whatever confession, could
conscientiously join. The dates selected for the "Octave" of
prayer were the week between January 18 and 25. This has been
officially accepted by the World Council's Commission on Faith
and Order, and each year notice of the Week of Prayer and
suggestions for its use are sent out from the headquarters in
Geneva. The death of the Abbe Couturier on March 24, 1953
173
BEOTHEES CO? THE
caused no halt in the spread of a movement which was already
firmly launched on the whole Christian world.
Roman Catholic scholars have frequently lectured at the
Ecumenical Institute near Geneva; they have spoken with
frankness and charity of the position of their Church, and their
contribution has been warmly welcomed by successive generations
of students. Visits in the other direction are less frequent, but
they do occur. Not long ago an Anglican bishop, who has
the unusual advantage of being able to speak something like
intelligible French, spent a week in Belgium, lecturing in im-
probable places such as Jesuit Colleges, meeting students, talking
with leaders in various groups interested in ecumenical things.
He came away almost overwhelmed by the generosity and candor
of his reception and with the warmest invitations to come again.
Both before and after his accession John XXIII had shown
himself deeply interested in questions of union, especially with
the Orthodox churches of the East, which he knows so well. It
is against this background of official firmness and personal
charity that his plan to call a council is to be understood. Over
the past year nothing has been more widely discussed in the
Christian world; it is possible that the Pope himself did not
realise all the difficulties that would lie in the way of the fulfil-
ment of his purpose.
He had declared that this would be an ecumenical council. But
what is an ecumenical council? This is a word that has been
used in many different ways, particularly in this connection.
The Church of England recognizes as fully ecumenical (world-
wide) only the first four councils of the series, up to Chaleedon
in 451. After that the ancient churches of the Far East broke
away. The divisions have never been healed, and the church has
never again been one as it was before this separation took place.
The Orthodox churches recognize seven councils as ecumenical ;
these took place before the great separation between East and
West, in which the year 1054 marks one crucial stage. But the
Koman. Catholic Church accepts as ecumenical a great many later
councils, such as the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century
and the Vatican Council in the nineteenth, though only the
Eoman part of the "Western church was represented at them,
and though no other part of the church has accepted their de-
174
JOHN XXIII AND A BOMAN COUNCIL
cisions. Clearly we are not agreed in our understanding of the
word " ecumenical."
Then there is the question as to who can call such a council.
The first great Council, that of Nicaea in 325, was convened by
the Emperor Constantine. The special responsibility of Christian
princes in relation to councils is recognized, for instance, in the
39 Articles of the Church of England (Article XXI). In 1438
the Eastern Orthodox came to the Council of Florence, at which
for a short time they were united with the Eoman Catholic
Church, but they came only because they were accompanied by the
Christian prince, the Byzantine Emperor, whose presence alone
would make the Council ecumenical you can still see him riding
his horse in Benozzo Gozzoli's splendid fresco in the Chapel of the
Medici in Florence. But now there are no more Christian princes
in the old sense. The Eoman Church takes it for granted that the
Bishop of Home can convene a council at will, and that it is his
authority and nothing else that makes it ecumenical. In the
Eastern churches decisions of councils do not possess authority
until they have been accepted by the whole church. In the Eoman
Church they have full authority from the moment at which they
have been accepted by the Pope, and none at all until that
moment.
Next comes the question of possible invitations to members
of non-Eoman Catholic churches to be present at a Council.
If such an invitation were given, on what terms would these other
representatives be invited to come ? If they were to come merely
as observers, without power to speak or in any way to influence
the course of the discussions, it is hardly likely that any would
trouble to come. But if they were invited to participate as well as
to listen, a revolution in church history would have taken place.
Supposing that all intermediate difficulties had been overcome
and that members of the non-Eoman churches agreed to be present
at a Eoman council, what would they talk about ? One often has
the impression that Eoman Catholic friends are hardly aware
of the chasm in matters of faith that separates them from those
with whom they long to be united, and of the way in which
that chasm has deepened in recent years. It is paradoxical that
Pius XII, the Pope who spoke in most earnestly affectionate
terms of his desire for the unity of all Christians in one visible
17$
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
fellowship, took tibe action which, more than any other In hun-
dreds of years, has created an apparently impassable barrier
between Koman and non-Roman Christians.
In November 1950 the Pope promulgated the doctrine of the
corporal Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Since that
date, according to Koman Catholic doctrine, everyone in the world
has been required to believe, as an essential part of the Chris-
tian faith, that the Mother of Jesus was raised up in body and
soul to that state of glory to which it is God's will ultimately to
raise all those who have believed in his Son. Christian churches
vary in the degree of reverence which they accord to the Mother
of Jesus, but almost the whole of the non-Roman world agreed
in condemning and repudiating this addition to the Christian
faith. It is true that for centuries the Roman Church had held
this doctrine in an unofficial way. But there is an immense dif-
ference between pious opinion, things which the faithful may be-
lieve if they find them edifying, and the declaration, as infallible
truth and as an essential part of the Christian faith, of something
that half the Christian world regards as historically uncertain
and in any case unnecessary as a part of Christian faith.
The non-Roman Christian world has been driven back on its
foundations. For the doctrine of the Assumption there is not
the smallest trace of authority in the Holy Scriptures. There
is not the smallest trace of it in early tradition. What, then, is
the basis of our faith f The non-Roman churches ascribe varying
degrees of authority to tradition ; they are all agreed that ulti-
mately tradition must be subject to Scripture, that it is in the
word of God alone that we find all things that Christians must
believe as the expression of their faith in Jesus Christ. Is the
Roman Church prepared for a reopening of some of these funda-
mental questions? Out of countless utterances on this subject
we may select some words of a young French scholar of Russian
origin, Fr. Jean MeyendorfL He first puts the question whether
this proposed Council will be not merely " ecumenical " but true;
In any case, the Orthodox will not find it possible to take part
in the Council, if the agenda does not include the question of a
review of that immense and fundamental evolution which has
taken place in the life of the Catholic Church between the ninth
176
JOHN XXIII AJSTD A EOMAN COUNCIL
and the twentieth centuries. For it is this evolution which con-
stitutes the main obstacle to the reunion of Christians in one
true faith. Alas i Koine seems hardly to be thinking of the possi-
bility of such a review. 3
What attitude, then, have the churches of the world taken up
towards the Pope's proposed Council! The answer is that there
can be no question of taking up an attitude, since at the time of
writing there is nothing to which an attitude could be taken up.
Everything is fluid, and since the Pope's first declaration of his
intention there has been no official clarification of what has been
intended. So bodies like the "World Council of Churches, while
expressing great interest in the project, have been very careful
not to say what they might do in a number of circumstances,
which may never arise and which at present cannot be more than
a matter of conjecture. It seems likely that the Council will be
a purely Roman Catholic affair, of great significance to the
Eoman world and of considerable interest to the rest of the
Christian world, since the Eoman world does after all constitute
half of the Christian world. There for the moment we must leave
the Council.
It may, however, be appropriate to end this chapter with a
few lines from the first Encyclical of the present Pope. Like his
predecessor he shows a most earnest solicitude for the unity of
all Christian people and goes so far as to address a direct invita-
tion to all Christians who are not now members of the Eoman
Catholic Church:
Let this marvellous spectacle of unity . . . touch and move your
hearts, you who are separated from this apostolic See. Permit
us, in our affectionate eagerness, to address you as brethren and
as sons. Permit us to entertain the hope of a return which is so
earnestly desired by our fatherly heart.
Take note, we pray you, that our affectionate appeal to the
unity of the Church does not invite you to enter a strange dwell-
ing, but to enter the house which is common to us all, the Father's
house. Thus we address as brethren all those who are separated
from us, in the words of St. Augustine: " Whether they will or
8 Quoted in French in Vers I 'Unite Chretienne, July- August 1959,
p. 61, and translated by the author.
177
BEOTHEES OP THE FAITH
not, they are our brethren. They will cease to be our brethren
only if they give up the use of the prayer, Our Father . . . Let
us love the Lord our God and let us love His Church, God as
our Father and the Church as our Mother. . . . So, very dear
brethren, all with one single soul, hold fast to God as your Father
and to the Church as your Mother. ' ' 4
Christians who are not of the Roman allegiance may think
that the Pope has gravely underestimated the difficulties that
lie in the way of union. All can agree in appreciating the spirit
that underlies these noble and moving words.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Since this chapter was written, it has become
increasingly clear that the Council will not meet before 1962
at the earliest, and that when it does meet it will be a purely
Eoman Catholic Council, occupied with the discussion of the
domestic affairs of the Roman Catholic Church.
4 The first Encyclical of Pope John XXIII; translation by the author.
178
XIV
What Next?
WE HAVE BROUGHT OUR CHRONICLE UP TO DATE. NOW WE MUST
take a glance at the future, and our sober narrative must take
on, for the moment, the more exciting colors of prophecy. "What
is likely to happen to the ecumenical movement in the next few
years ?
The first answer to this question must be clothed in anything
but exciting colors. It deals with "integration/' one of those
strange pieces of jargon that the movement tends to cast up
in its progress, partly no doubt because so many of its leaders
have to think in one language and speak in another. As we have
seen, the modern ecumenical movement began in the sphere of
missionary responsibility; then the two main streams began
to diverge, and World Council and International Missionary
Council have endured a period of not altogether easy coexistence.
Naturally, for many years past there has been a feeling that the
two wings ought to be brought together again.
Various steps have been taken in this direction. Since 1939
the two bodies have had a joint committee. (Owing to wartime
conditions, this did not actually meet till 1946.) Since Amster-
dam 1948 each has existed officially "in association" with the
other. As we saw, the two co-operated in creating in 1946 one of
the most effective of ecumenical bodies, the Churches' Commission
on International Affairs. But when it comes to the question of
"integration," in such a form that there is only one great inter-
national ecumenical organization and not two, we begin to come
up against a host of complex problems.
There is, first, a purely technical problem. From the beginning
the International Missionary Council has been a council of
councils. Its members are the councils or conferences of mis-
sionary societies in the sending countries, and the Christian
179
BBGTHEBS OF THE FAITH
councils in the various lands of the younger churches. Missionary
societies are related in one way or another to churches, but
they are not themselves churches. A body such as the National
Christian Council of India includes representatives of churches,
of missions, and of a variety of corporations such as the Bible
societies, which are strictly speaking neither missions nor
churches. The "World Council, as its official name implies, is a
council of churches. Only church bodies, which pass the Council's
definition of what a church should be, a definition not entirely
satisfactory to all churches, are eligible for membership. Certain
other great international bodies such as the Y.M.C.A. and the
Student Federation have a standing fraternal relationship to the
"World Council, but they cannot qualify for membership and
can exercise no official influence on its policy. It is clear that any
form of union between I.M.C. and W.C.C. is going to demand
the exercise of a considerable amount of ingenuity.
The necessary ingenuity has been available. The Joint Com-
mittee of the two bodies has produced a plan which was felt
to be workable and which secured a considerable measure of
approval from members of the Central Committee of the World
Council in 1957. Conveniently, the I.M.C. was holding an
Assembly in Ghana in January 1958, and here "integration"
was one of the main subjects for discussion. Some may have
thought that, with the preparations so carefully made and with
such obvious advantages in union, the matter would go through
almost without discussion. If so they were to be severely disillu-
sioned in the ecumenical world things never go quite so easily
as planners have hoped and expected !
The manner of presentation of the theme was, to say the least,
unfortunate. The first three speakers were all Americans; all
had been deeply engaged in the earlier planning, and all were
strongly in favor of integration. It is not surprising that some
delegates felt that this plan was being imposed upon them, with-
out freedom to say "yes or "no." The immediate result of
this introduction was that Max Warren rose and spoke to the
subject for a full half hour. This was in itself important. The
Rev. Canon M. A. C. Warren, general secretary of the Church
Missionary Society in London, is recognized throughout the
churches as one of the few first-rate thinkers on missionary prob-
180
WHAT NBXTf
lems in the whole Christian world. His monthly Newsletters, each
one devoted to a careful survey of some area of the world or
some field of special Christian concern, are masterly and contain
some of the most up-to-date thinking on missionary affairs that
is available anywhere. His speech was unusual. He started by
saying that he was going to vote for integration, but that he
would do so with a heavy heart because of the evils that he saw
almost certainly following on the vote.
What were these evils! There was far more opposition to "in-
tegration" than had been foreseen. There was a feeling in some
parts of the missionary world that the World Council and its
leaders were not really interested in the preaching of the gospel
in the world, and that if the I.M.C. were absorbed by the already
larger body, the missionary interest would simply be lost. It
would then be necessary to create a new I.M.C. to take the place
of the body that had been killed by integration. Some felt that
each organization was already, if anything, too large and that
amalgamation could produce only a completely unmanageable
monster. But by far the most serious opposition came from those
who would call themselves " evangelicals " or " conservative evan-
gelicals." We must distinguish sharply between this group and
those responsible for the vitriolic and baseless attacks on the
World Council and its leadership to which we have referred more
than once.
To make clear the nature of this opposition, the best method
will be to use a rather long quotation from a letter written
more than eighteen months after the Ghana Assembly, temperate
in tone and from the pen of a man who has friends in many
camps :
The chief reason why the typical Conservative Evangelical
is uninterested in the World Council of Churches is seldom theo-
logical . . . the typical Conservative Evangelical is seldom a good
denominational man. He is normally more concerned with get-
ting on with his work for Christ in the district in which he lives
than with synods, assemblies and central committees. He is
normally very willing to stretch a hand across denominational
barriers at the local level, whenever he thinks there is a practical
value in so doing. . . .
Then you seem to overlook that there are prominent elements
181
BEOTHEES OP THE FAITH
in the W.C.G., which do not really want to make the movement
all-embracing. We have to face the fact that there are Liberals
who regard the Conservative Evangelical with horror, especially
if he belongs to a "fringe" sect. ... It is not sufficient to write
of the " neglect 77 of this side of Christianity; if it had been only
this, it could be healed without too much difficulty. We are deal-
ing with an active hostility on the part of a small but influential
section of W.C.C. leadership. ...
An interesting commentary on this is the way in which the
International Missionary Council was able to build up a very
much wider co-operation than the W.C.C. has achieved, at least
among Protestants. The elements that are pressing most strongly
for W.C.C.-LM.C. integration are fully aware that it will lead
to a breakdown in much of the missionary co-operation that now
exists, but they seem to be indifferent to the fact so long as the
bigger united body can be set up. It is doubtless unfair, but is
it too unfair, if I suggest that the motto of many in the Ecumeni-
cal Movement would seem to be not "That they may all be one,"
but "That all the more respectable of them may be one"? x
It is always good to see ourselves as others see us. Not every
word of this comment will be accepted as gospel by those who
have long been concerned in the affairs of the ecumenical move-
ment. It is ? however, worthwhile to consider why this writer and
others like him feel such deep concern at the direction in which
things are moving.
A large part of Protestant missionary work is carried out by
societies which look with suspicion on co-operation with others
whose principles are not exactly the same as their own. In certain
regions it has been possible to bring together such groups only
on condition that they are not required to be related to the
I.M.C., a far too miscellaneous body to meet with the approval
of these cautious brethren. Thus, for instance, in Kenya in Bast
Africa every single Protestant mission is associated with the
Christian Council of Kenya, one of the best and most efficient
of the councils set up in the lands of the younger churches. But
this association is dependent on complete independence at any
suggestion that this Council should affiliate itself with any
world body, a number of the associated missions would walk
1 EL L. Ellison in Frontier, Summer, 1959, pp. 122-23,
182
WHAT NEXT!
out. One of the councils which just trembled on the verge of the
I.M.C. was the Council of the Congo. As a result of the Ghana
decision in favor of integration this Council has decided to with-
draw from the I.M.C. In other regions of the world there are
painful uncertainties and anxious searchings of hearts.
This may all seem rather remote and technical. But discussion
of these issues is going to be very much in the air, until the next
Assembly of the World Council of Churches is held in New Delhi
in November 1961 ; it is possible that a number of readers of this
book may find themselves called to contribute to official decisions
on the matter. If so, there is one weighty consideration that must
always be held in mind. We have as yet little clear guidance on
the question from the younger churches most affected. The rep-
resentation of the younger churches at the Ghana Assembly was
regrettably small and inadequate as compared with Tambaram
1938. But those who were present expressed themselves, almost
without exception, as enthusiastically in favor of integration.
It seems that, in many regions, there is a real division of opinion
on this matter between the missionaries and their friends in the
local churches. Where missionary influence is still strong, it may
be thrown against wider ecumenical union; where the younger
church has a freer voice, the results may be different from those
to be anticipated if too much weight is attached to mainly
Western and mainly conservative utterances.
Hard is the path of ecumenical advance. It might seem that
the Joint Committee of the two ecumenical todies had quite
enough to put up with in being sniped at so effectively by Warren,
Birkeli, and other friends in the more conservative camp. But
this was far from being the end of it. In quite another quarter
a number of hornets were beginning to buzz audibly and angrily.
For reasons that we have already explained, the Orthodox
churches of the East dislike the word "missions" just as much
as some leaders of the younger churches. In fact the Orthodox
had never been represented at international missionary gather-
ings. But now a new thing had happened. The Metropolitan
James of Melita, now Greek Archbishop in New York and a
president of the World Council of Churches, but in 1958 special
representative of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople
in Geneva, was present at the Ghana Assembly of the I.M.C. The
183
BEOTHBBS OF THE FAITH
alert and watchful eye of this good friend of all the ecumenical
leaders was on them all the time, as they hatched their plans for
"integration." During the Assembly the Metropolitan James
read out a statement expressing Orthodox views and anxieties
about the proposed closer relations between the two large bodies.
The Ecumenical Patriarchate, he affirmed.
would never vote for any radical amendment of the W.C.C.
Constitution nor would it be prepared to accept any change in
the W.C.C. "ecelesiology " as declared in the well-known Toronto
document. Finally the Ecumenical Patriarchate will insist on
the two principles (a) that the sole aim of " missions " should
be to reach peoples yet unconverted to Christ and never to pros-
elytize among the members of Christian churches, and (b) that
the "missions" should be "church missions" and should work
for the up-building of the Church. 2
A whole world of Christian history underlies these words.
While these pages were being written, the question of "in-
tegration" came up again at the meeting of the Central Com-
mittee of the World Council of Churches, held at Khodes in
August 1959. Naturally, Orthodox representation at the meeting
was stronger than it has ever been before at such meetings, and
a number of those present had not previously had any ecumenical
education. It is not to be wondered at that once again anxiety
was expressed at the idea of any closer association with those
terrible and destructive bodies, "the missions." One Orthodox
prelate urged the World Council to remain what it is a Council
of Churches. The Metropolitan Parthenios of Carthage, of the
G-reek Patriarchate of Alexandria, said frankly, "For us Ortho-
dox, the word 'mission' is something which we fear. I don't know
why. It's my tradition. For this reason, I say to you, 'Go
slowly.' "3
In the two years that will elapse before the next Assembly
of the World Council of Churches takes place, the International
Missionary Council will have no very easy path to tread. It is
* The Ghana Assembly of the International Missionary CounoU ed.
Orchard, (Jxmdon: Edinburgh House Press, 1958), p. 163.
9 Ecumenical Press Service (Geneva), August 28, 1959, p. 6.
184
WHAT NEXT!
perhaps providential that just at this moment it has been pro-
vided with a new leader, who can bring a fresh mind to bear
on the many and complex problems that have to be faced.
The name of Lesslie Newbigin has come before us once or
twice already. Before we end our story, we must take a closer
look at one on whose wisdom and capacity for decision much will
depend in this crisis of ecumenical development. The new general
secretary of the I.M.C. has won distinction as scholar, thinker,
writer, preacher, and administrator. If he had gone into politics
or diplomacy or business, there is hardly any height to which
his ambition might not have soared. Instead, resisting pressure
on the part of his church, the Presbyterian Church of England,
to remain in England, he accepted the vocation of a missionary
in South India. Ten quiet years were spent in learning Tamil,
reckoned by many the most difficult language in the world, in
deepening his understanding of India and in the endless tasks of
very ordinary missionary life. In 1947, at the age of thirty-eight,
he was chosen as one of the first bishops of the new Church of
South India. But at the World Council's Assembly at Amsterdam
this slim, young bishop with the Presbyterian background was
unknown by sight to the vast majority of the delegates. Ten
years of authorship, of hard episcopal work, of endless ecumenical
activity have made him one of the best known churchmen in
the world. When Charles Eanson felt led to give up his post as
general secretary of the I.M.C., there were many who felt that
there was only one man in the world who could adequately re-
place him. The time and the man seem to have met
It seems almost certain that in 1961 " integration" will be-
come a reality. This may mean some withdrawals both from the
World Council and from the LM.C. It is hoped that they will
be very few. Some will look with anxiety on a fusion that will
create one immense organization for so many different forms of
ecumenical work. But perhaps to those who have worked hardest
and longest in the cause, the event, if it comes, will come as the
crown and fulfillment of fifty years of endeavor. The modern
ecumenical movement came into being in the heart of the mis-
sionary movement. Then for a time, by what has seemed to many
an unnatural separation, different aspects of the movement fell
apart. Their coming together again in one body may seem to be
185
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
in line with the will of God, whose purpose it is to make all things
one in Christ.
It is time to sum up the achievements of these fifty years and
so to "bring our story to an end.
It is only by a great effort of imagination that the churchman
of today can realise what things were like in 1910. At that date
there was not in existence one single organization through which
regular international Christian consultation and action were
possible. Not only so; many of the greatest and wisest leaders
in the church thought that it was impossible that such organiza-
tions could be brought into being, and that if it were possible, it
might not be desirable. Today a whole variety of organizations
for thought, prayer, consultation, and action exist, and have
come to be taken for granted as part of the permanent machinery
of the Christian world. We can hardly imagine what it would
be like to be without any of them.
In consequence there has been a steady growing together of
the churches in friendship and mutual understanding. The dif-
ferences are still extremely grave. No attempt to minimize them
has been made in these pages. Yet it is just the fact that the
leaders of Christian thought and action across the world are
better acquainted with one another personally, are more closely
linked together by subtle and mysterious bonds of Christian
friendship than has ever been the case in earlier periods of
the history of the church.
This moving together of the churches has expressed itself in
this half century by the formation of at least thirty-eight united
churches. Some of these have been large, some small. Many at-
tempts to unite the churches have ended in failure; others are
still being carried forward in hope tempered by anxiety. What
is certain is that never before in the long centuries of the
church's history has anything in the least like this happened. The
nineteenth century was the great century of the church's ex-
pansion; so far the twentieth has been the great century of
Christian union.
Even thirty years ago the word " ecumenism" was hardly
known. " Ecumenical" was a headache to the journalists of the
world and was constantly confounded with tf economical." Now
at least the word is familiar. It is not true that the ordinary
186
WHAT HEXTf
church member has any clear idea of what it is all about; but
at the time of Evanston 1954 any American churchman who
read any church paper, or indeed read any kind of paper at
all, knew that something was happening in the Christian world
and that the churches were meeting in a way and on a scale that
was without parallel in the previous history of the church.
All these are achievements of no mean magnitude. But what
is yet to come is far more important than anything that has
happened in the past.
It is still true that roughly half the people in the world have
never even heard the name of Jesus Christ.
Does it matter? That question cannot be argued out in these
pages ; this is a study of ecumenism and not an apologetic tract.
But as Archbishop William Temple once remarked with his
usual shattering capacity for putting the most important truths
in the simplest language, "If the Gospel is true for any man
anywhere, it is true for all men everywhere. ' ' If the gospel is true
at all, it is literally a matter of life and death for every man
and woman now living in the world. When the general secretary
of the World Council of Churches said that the missionary move-
ment must become more ecumenical and the ecumenical move-
ment must become more missionary, he was pointing to the
consequences of a recognition of these elementary truths.
Churches have sometimes lived inward-looking lives. They
have been concerned with the guidance and sanctifieation of their
own members only. In that case they have not really been
churches of Jesus Christ, the good Shepherd, who gave his life
for the sheep. His church exists only as it is mission, only as
it lives related to the ends of the world and the end of time, only
as it is turned outward to men and women in all the needs and
tragedies and darkness of their daily lives.
If the churches really began to live in this way, they would
find that they could not do without one another. Take any area
of the world you likej all the churches together are far less
than adequate to deal with the social needs of that area, whether
it be the juvenile delinquents of the East side of New York or
the immigrants who are streaming all the time from Eastern
Germany into Western. A great deal of the work of the church
goes undone just because we do not know how to work together.
187
BBOTHEES OF THE FAITH
Every church should live all the time in awareness of its mem-
bership in the great fellowship of all those who today literally
from China to Fern call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ
as God and Saviour, and at the same time in awareness of the
unfinished task that lies before them. If all the churches were
to work together to an intelligent and planned strategy and
were to multiply five-fold their giving in money and in man
power, they would still be unequal to the task of preaching
the gospel of Jesus Christ to every creature.
To recognize these things means to live ecumenically in aware-
ness of the greatness of the vocation of the church, in shame at
the weakness and misery caused by our divisions, in readiness
for a greater call from God than we have ever yet heard. And
for each individual Christian awareness of these dimensions
would mean a Christian life of an intensity and devotion such
as usually lie beyond the horizons of our best imaginings. What
this would involve has been so well expressed by "Walter Freytag
of Hamburg, another of the great missionary thinkers of the
world, in his address to the Ghana Assembly of the International
Missionary Council, that no words can better serve as a conclu-
sion to this book :
It is an illustration only of what I said, that those who live
in the obedience of faith are part of God's action. An illustration
only, not the matter itself. This fact, that every Christian is a
part of God's action towards His goal, has a much deeper mean-
ing. . . . The decisions of God's action are made in our life with
Christ. There, more than the decision about our personal destiny
takes place. There it happens that the Holy Temple of God is
being built to its consummation. It happens or it does not happen,
therefore according to how we live with Christ or do not live
with Christ, we are a part of God's mission or we stand in its
way. Therefore the Christian life cannot be lived without the
wide horizon, the view of the world which God has in mind,
the world which God loves. There God's mission is going on
and it will be disclosed at the Day of our Lord. 4
* The Ghana Assembly, p. 147. TMs wise and gentle man had played so
great a part in ecumenical affairs that his sudden death between the writ-
ing and the printing of this chapter caused almost as great consternation in
the Christian world as the equally sudden death of William Temple.
188
INDEX
Africa, 23, 40, 138-39. See also
Kenya; Nigeria
Ainslie, Peter, 45-46
Alivisatos, Hamilcar, 40, 72
All-Africa Christian Conference,
138-39
American Episcopal Church. See
Protestant Episcopal Church
Amsterdam 1948, 76-77, 132, 148-
53. See also World Council of
Churches
Anglican Church
in Africa, 138
in India, 55, 58, 63, 64, 109
See also Church of England
Australia, 137
Azariah, Bishop Samuel, 25-26, 57-
60, 62, 64, 114
Baillie, John, 17
Barker, Ernest, 123
Barth, Karl, 85, 98-99, 121, 144
Bayne, Bishop Stephen, 164
Bell, Bishop G. K. A., 32-33, 126,
143
Bell, George, 37
Berggrav, Bishop, 145
Bingle, E. J. 160
Boegner, Marc, 148
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 119, 120, 125-
30, 158
Book of Common Prayer, 13, 55,
109
Bossey, Ecumenical Institute, 156,
174
Boyd, Alec, 113-14
Brash, Alan, 137
Brennecke, Gerhard, 115
Brent, Bishop Charles H., 43-46,
49, 53-54
Brown, William Adams, 49
Cambridge University, 18-19
Carey, William, 23
Cassian, Bishop, 72
Ceylon, 66, 112-13, 131, 142
Chakko, Sarah, 159-60
China, 19, 23, 40, 109, 114
China, Church of Christ in, 65-66
Christian Polities, Economics and
Citizenship (conference), 34-
35, 84
Christian Union Quarterly, 46
Christian Unity, Association for
the Promotion of, 46
Church of Christ in China, 65-66
Church of Christ in Japan, 66
Church of Constantinople, 70-71.
See also Church of Greece
Church of England, 9, 34, 46, 65,
68-69, 83, 109, 174, 175. See
also Anglican Church
Church of Greece, 78-79, 80. See
also Church of Constantinople
Church of Moscow, 74, 75, 149, 158.
See also Church of Bussia
Church of Borne. See Roman Cath-
olic Church
Church of Bussia, 76-78, 80. See
also Church of Moscow
Church of South India, 63-65, 185
Church Union in South India, Joint
Committee on, 63-64
Churches' Commission on Interna-
tional Affairs, 157, 179
Churches, native. See Younger
churches
Churches, younger. See Younger
churches
Cockin, Frederick Arthur
(George), 102-3
Comba, Ernesto, 49
"Confessing Church, 123-24
189
BEOTHEES OF THE FAITH
Congo, Council of, 183
Constantlne, Emperor, 12, 75, 138,
175
Constantinople, Church of. See
Church of Constantinople
Conversion and ecumenism, 166
< ' COPEC. ' ' See Christian Politics,
Economics and Citizenship
Cotton, Bishop, 109
Couturier, Abbe Paul, 173-74
Creighton, Mandell, 68-69
Davidson, Randall, 22-23, 32-33,
37
Disciples of Christ, 45-46
Duff, Edward, 173
Dulles, John Foster, 102, 150
Dury, John, 13
East Asia Christian Conference.
See Prapat 1557; Kuala Lum-
pur 1959
East Asia Conference (Manila),
1948, 134-36
East Asia Secretariat, 135
Eastern Orthodox churches. See
Orthodox churches
Ecumenical Institute, Bossey, 156,
174
Eddy, Sherwood, 57
Edinburgh 1910, 16-28, 33, 42, 44,
52, 69, 95, 107, 110, 152
Edinburgh 1937, 60, 89-93
Ehrenstroem, Nils, 36
Ellison, H. L., 181-82
English Convocations, 1950 } 1955,
65
English Prayer Book, 13, 55, 109
Episcopal Church. See Protestant
Episcopal Church
Evangelical churches, German, 103-
4
' Evangelicals, ' ' and ecumenism,
165, 181-82
Evanston 1954, 39, 154-66, 187.
See also World Council of
Churches
Faith and Order, 42-54, 62-63, 76,
78-79, 89-90, 92, 170
Farmer, H. H., 102, 114, 132
190
Federal Council of the Churches of
Christ in America, 34
Fisher, Geoffrey, 148
Fond-du-lac, Bishop of, 48-49
Free churches, German, 103-4
Freytag, Walter, 188
Fry, Franklin Clark, 155
Gairdner, Temple, 19-20
Gandhi, M. K., 109
Garbett, Archbishop of York, 114
Gardiner, Eobert Hallo well, 46
Gardner, Lucy, 36-37
German Evangelical churches, 103-
4, 123-24
German Free churches, 103-4
Germanos, Archbishop, 40, 68-71,
75
Ghana Assembly, 180, 181, 183, 188
Gore, Charles, 17, 49
Greece, Church of. See Church of
Greece
Harkness, Georgia, 132
Hartenstein, Karl, 115
Hitler, Adolf, 96, 106, 120-30
Hodgson, Leonard, 89
Hooft, Willem Adolf Visser >t, 131,
143-45
Hromadka, Joseph, 150
Ibiam, Sir Francis, 138
Ihmels, Bishop, 38
India, 23, 40, 42, 55, 56-57, 58,
61, 63, 64, 109, 112-13, 136,
160. See also North India;
South India
Indian Student Christian Federa-
tion, 135, 142
Indonesia, 141
International Affairs, Churches '
Commission on, 157
International Missionary Council,
92, 111, 118, 135, 136, 148,
157, 179-88
International Review of Missions,
160
Interdenominational Social Service
Council, 34
James, Metropolitan, 77, 183
INDEX
Japan, 23, 40, 80, 109, 114
Japan, Church of Christ in, 66
Jerusalem 1988, 85-89, 107, 111,
115
John XXIII, 168-70, 174, 177-78
Keller, Adolph, 69
Kenya, Christian Council of, 182
Kittel, Gerhard, 121
Knox, Ronald, 82
Korean War, 157-58
Kraemer, Eendrlk, 115-16, 132,
157, 163
Kuala Lumpur 1959, 137-38
Lambeth Conferences, 65, 140
Latin America, 139
Lausanne 1927, 44-53, 72, 89
Lehtonen, Aleksi, 49
Leiper, Henry Smith, 144
Leo XIII, 167
Lew, Timothy Tingfang, 60
Life and Work, 29-41, 42, 84, 92
Lilje, H., 102
Lindel Tsen, 140
Liverpool I860, 16
Livingstone, 138
Lutheran Church, 51, 55, 155, 165
in India, 61, 136
See also United Lutheran Church
of America
Lutheran World Federation, 165
McCarthy, Senator Joseph, 155
MacDougall, Eleanor, 83
Manickam, Rajah B., 61, 135-36
Manning, W. T., 44
Maurice, F. D., 33-34
Methodist Church, 154-55
Meyendorff, Fr. Jean, 176-77
Monod, Wilfred, 49
Morgan, J. Pierpont, 47
MortaMum Animos, 170-71
Moscow, Church of. See Church of
Moscow
Moscow Conference, 1948, 75-77
Mott, John R., 16, 18-21, 27-28,
111, 112, 114, 132, 133
National Christian Council of In-
dia, Burma, and Ceylon, 112-
13
Native churches. See Younger
churches
Nazis, 96, 105, 119-30, 146
New Zealand, 137
Newbigin, Bishop Lesslie, 162, 185
Nicolai, Bishop, 72, 80
Niebuhr, Reinhold, 85, 99, 102
Niemoeller, Martin, 124-25
Nigeria, 67, 138-39
Niles, Daniel T., 131-42
Nippon Kirisuto Kyodan, 66
North India, 66
Oldham, Joseph H., 85, 100-102,
143
Oman, John, 85
Orthodox churches, 68-80
attend Lausanne 1927, 51-52
attend Stockholm 1925, 40
desire fellowship, 21
ecumenical councils, 174, 175
and Pope John XXIII, 169, 174
view of missions, 183-84
see also Church of Constanti-
nople; Church of Greece;
Church of Moscow; Church of
Russia
Outler, Albert, 164
Oxford 1937, 100-106
Oxford University, 84-85
Oxnam, Bishop Bromley, 154-55
Parthenios, Metropolitan, 184
Paton, William, 11-13, 144
Peabody, Francis G., 34
Philippines, 43, 136-37
Philippines, United Church of
Christ in, 66
Photios, patriarch of Alexander,
40
Pius IX, 167, 170
Pius XI, 170-71
Pius XII, 167-68, 169, 175-76
Prapat 1957, 136-37
Prayer, Week of, 173
Protestant Episcopal Church, 43,
44, 46, 65, 168
Ramsey, Archbishop, 77
Randwijck, Count S. C. van, 114
Ranson, Charles, 117, 185
Rauschenbusch, Walter, 34
191
BBOTHEBS OF THE PAITH
%ethinking Missions, 115
Bichter, Julius, 17
BockefeUer, 117, 156
Boman Catholic Church, 12, 34,
43, 48-49, 50, 66, 138, 149,
167-78
Sandegren, Johannes, 125
Schmidt, Karl Ludwig, 49
Sherrill, Edmund, 81
Sherrill, Henry EJIOX, 81, 168
Sinclair, Margaret, 111-12
Singh, Behari Lai, 16
Sobrepena, Bishop, 66, 137
Social Service Council, Interde-
nominational, 34
Soederblom, Nathan, 29-37, 69
Soper, E. D., 50
South India, 10-11, 55-56, 63-67,
115, 185
Church of, 63-65, 185
Joint Committee on Church
Union, 63-64
South India "United Church, 63
Speer, Bobert E., 17
Stockholm 1925, 32-41, 42, 69, 95,
143, 152, 161
Studd, J. E. K, 19
Sundkler, Prof., 64, 117
Tambaram 1988, 61, 114-18, 132,
143
Temple, Frederick, 81
Temple, William, 17, 35, 49, 81-
94, 102, 107-8, 143, 187
Than, Kyaw, 137, 142
Theodore of Tarsus, 68
Theological training (Bossey), 156
Theological training in younger
churches, 116-17
Thils, Canon G., 173
Thomas, John, 56
Tillieh, Paul, 85, 102
Tinnevelly Church, 55, 56, 58
Tranquebar Manifesto, 61-62
United Church of Christ in the
Philippines, 66
United Lutheran Church of Ameri-
ca, 155
192
Universal Christian Conference on
Life and Work. See Stockholm
1925; Oxford 1937
Van Dusen, H. P., 114, 132
Vedanayakam, Thomas, 57
Vellalanvilai, 55
Villain, Fr. Maurice, 173
Warren, Canon M. A. C., 180-81
Whitby 1947, 133, 134, 142*
Whitby Missionary Conference.
See Whitby 1947
White, Bishop W. C., 140
Whitehead, Henry, 57-58, 62
WMtehead, Isabel, 57-58
Woods, Frank Theodore, 37-38
World Conference on Faith and Or-
der. See Lausanne 1927; Edin-
burgh 1987
World Conference on Life and
Work. See Stockholm 1985;
Oxford 19S7
World Council of Churches, 48, 75,
76, 77, 78, 92-93, 135, 136,
154-66, 179-88
See also Amsterdam 1948;
Evanston 1954
World Missionary Conference
(first). See Edinburgh 1910
World War I, 25, 30-31, 86, 120
World War II, 25, 66, 93, 119,
145-47
World's Alliance of Young Men's
Christian Associations, 20
World's Student Christian Federa-
tion, 20, 145, 164, 180
World's Young Women's Chris-
tian Association, 20
Young Men's Christian Associa-
tion, 14, 48, 57, 180
Younger churches, 107-18, 132-42
at Edinburgh 1910, 25
at Edinburgh 1937, 60
at Lausanne 1987, 49-50
in ecumenical councils, 27
at Stockholm 1985, 40
at Tambaram 1988, 61, 113-18
and World Council of Churches,
159-60, 180-83
STEPHEN NEILL is an Anglican bishop who
has actively participated in interdenomination-
al efforts since 1939, when he became bishop
of Tinnevelly in the Church of South India.
Chosen by an electoral body of 96 per cent
Indian and 4 per cent European, Bishop Neill
served in The Church of South India for six
years before he became Lecturer in Theology,
Cambridge University. He is now General Edi-
tor of World Christian Books under the spon-
sorship of the International Missionary Coun-
cil.
Bishop Neill was educated at Trinity Col-
lege, Cambridge. He holds honorary degrees
from Trinity College, Toronto, Culver-Stock-
ton, and the University of Hamburg. He
speaks six languages and can read at least a
dozen more. Since 1947 he has conducted uni-
versity missions in Europe, Canada, and the
United States.
He has served the World Council of
Churches as Associate General Secretary and
Co-editor of History of the Ecumenical Move-
ment.
Bishop Neill is known for his dynamic per-
sonality and sense of humor, which are re-
flected in his books. He has contributed many
articles to such periodicals as Tlie International
.Review of Missions, The Churchman, The
Student World, Journal of Theological Studies,
and Religion in Life.
ABINGDON PRESS
132217
CXI
3;
