Living in the Church Universal Now

SWEET BRIAR COLLEGE

3 2449 0309967 D

EUGENE MLUAM LYMAN LECTURE

Octobers, 1954

SWEET BRIAR COLLEGE
P Archives Sweet Briar, Virginia

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Eugene William L'^man Lecture

LIVING IN THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL NOW

Howard Schomer, B.S., D.D.

Le College Cevenol

Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France

SWEET BRIAR COLLEGE
October 8, 1954

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50

The Eugene William Lyman Lectureship in the Philosophy
of Religion was established at Sweet Briar College in 1948,
in loving memory of a great teacher, scholar, and author.
Dr. Lyman lived at Sweet Briar from the time of his retire-
ment from Union Theological Seminary in 1940 until his
death eight years later. It is the hope of his friends and
admirers that this Lectureship may fittingly honor his mem-
ory by carrying forward his lifelong and devoted quest for
truth.

President Seelye Bixler of Colby College, once a student
of Dr. Lyman, gave the first Lyman Lecture at Sweet Briar
College on February 4, 1949, on the subject, "The Deeper
Ranges of Authority." The second lecture was given Octo-
ber 20, 1950, by Dr. Charles Earle Raven of Cambridge Uni-
versity, on "The Present Position and Prospects of Liberal
Theology." Professor Walter Marshall Horton of Oberlin
Graduate School of Theology delivered the third Eugene
William Lyman Lecture on November 14, 1952, on the sub-
ject, "Liberalism Old and New." The present lecture by
Dr. Howard Schomer is the fourth in the series.

LIVING IN THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL NOW

Early last summer on the coast of Maine I had the exciting
privilege of taking part in an intimate international Christian
seminar. Medical workers, educators, church leaders — both
lay and ministerial, men and women — came apart in a simple
retreat-house prior to the great ecumenical assembly at Evans-
ton for the purpose of listening, of asking each other, "What
is the Spirit today saying to the churches, all over the world ?"
The fifty or more participants came from Europe, the Near-
East, Africa, India, Ceylon, China, Japan, the Philippines,
Mexico, and several parts of the United States, including the
state of Virginia. Many of the earth's peoples, with their
burdens and their hopes, were vividly present in the minds
of all as we discussed the plight and the privilege of the
Christian Church in this revolutionary age.

Through these days of candid and earnest sharing we
were led to talk not only of world conditions and of the
Church as an objective organization — something outside of
ourselves to be observed and described — but also to speak
of the sources of our personal convictions, of the miracle of
our coming together from such diverse racial and social
backgrounds into such a natural and trustful fellowship.

One evening, the Dean of a Japanese theological school
confided to us how the shock of a serious illness in his
student days had shaken the unruffled and worldly atheism
which was his family heritage, had given him the lonely
quiet in which he discovered the aesthetic and spiritual
depths of his own being.

Seeking better to understand the new life which opened
before him after his convalescence, he came to New York,
shortly after the first World War, and began study at
Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary.
There he discovered, through the personality and the teach-
ing of him whom we gratefully commemorate in this lecture-
hour, the guiding force of all his later years. Our Japanese

friend told us that Dr. Eugene William Lyman's conviction
that at the very heart of the universe is "creative good will"
became the unshatterable foundation of his ow^n life and
faith. He confessed that this belief set up great tension in
his soul as, v^ith his people, he lived through the years of
vainglorious militarism, total war, total defeat, and then
national conversion to the ways of peace, only to find that
at present many of his American friends urge the Japanese
to deny their hard-bought pacifism and unhesitatingly to
re-arm. "If I were still an atheist, if I were a Shintoist or a
Buddhist," concluded the Dean, "I should not know such
a tension in my soul, such moral suffering and spiritual
anguish. It is because I became a Christian, convinced that
'creative good will' is ultimate in all life, that the contra-
dictions of our time hurt me so deeply. But what I saw
of the mind of Christ in those years at Dr. Lyman's feet —
these things I can never deny!"

I am sure that in our generation there are creatively suffer-
ing Christians like my Japanese friend in many lands and
in many parts of the United States. Such men and women
are incapable of making a comfortable spiritual peace with
a morally unstable world by simply adapting to each of its
successive contradictions. In their utter honesty about the
vast chasm which separates the ways of God and the ways
of men, their lives are beacon-lights by which humanity is
perpetually warned against that final treason of which it is
capable — the calling of evil good and good evil, the worship
of Satan as the Son of God. We gratefully remember in this
hour one who for decades unwaveringly reflected across the
realm of theological education in the United States the pure
light of that faith which holds that God is not made in the
image of men but that men may be born again in the image
of God. Dr. Lyman believed that the ultimate character of
the universe itself is neither vain nor demonic but Christly.
We can be sure that we truly honor Eugene William Lyman
when, rising above mere veneration of a spiritual forebear,
we seek, as he did, to read the signs of our times with
radiant confidence in the Lord of Life.

I. Called into His Marvelous Light

All of us know something of the spiritual anguish of
which the Dean of the Japanese seminary spoke. We are
convinced that in its source and in its destiny the universe
belongs to God. But as the storms of history buffet us about,
we too are overwhelmed by the avoidable tragedy which,
helplessly, we observe on every hand. We are forced to
recognize that, while the ultimate issues are without any
doubt safely in God's hands, here in our human realm Christ-
likeness just is not native, is no more at home now than it
was when the Christ himself walked our common earth. It
may be that sometimes, puzzled and perplexed, we ask
ourselves what belonging to Christ's Church, in such a
refractory world — and especially in such a violent epoch as
this twentieth century — can possibly mean.

Now the central affirmation of this lecture is that the
anguished followers of Jesus Christ in our generation, recog-
nizing that they are surrounded by the ruins of historic
Christendom, are called to a wondrous mission: theirs to
live brokenly, steadfastly, expectantly as fellow-members of
the universal Church which the Spirit of God is gathering
together from all the nations, through the centuries. This,
if we say "Yes" to Jesus Christ, is our high calling and awe-
some task. Awakening to its challenge, do we not already
find our orthodox liberalism or our liberal orthodoxy in
theological matters, the one no less than the other, surpassed
by the glory of the faith by which we actually live? Only
a more vital, a more loving theology than any upon which
we may at present rely will do justice to our exciting con-
temporary experience as members of the emerging world-
wide Christian community. To this ecumenical theology of
fellowship we would contribute these groping reflections,
asking forgiveness for their evident inadequacy in the face
of the Apostle Peter's ringing appeal :

"Come to him, to that living stone, rejected by men
but in God's sight chosen and precious; and like
living stones be yourselves built into a spiritual

house. . . . You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood,
a holy nation, God's own people, that you may de-
clare the wonderful deeds of him who called you
out of darkness into his marvelous light."

(I Peter 2:4,5a,9)

Our endeavor is simply to work out, in the Apostle's terms,
a description of the real situation of Christ's Church in this
mid-twentieth-century world.

II. The End of the Christian Era

When our great-grandparents read these words of Peter
about the "living stone," Christ, being "rejected by men,"
it is very possible that they saw in their mind's-eye the corrupt
Sanhedrin of the Jews judging Jesus a blasphemer, deserving
of the death penalty. If they thought of his "rejection" in
contemporary terms at all, probably they conceived of the
guilty parties as composed primarily of heathen peoples
abroad and certain notorious infidels or immoral persons at
home in the Christian West. Through more than fifteen
hundred years most of the Western World had paid obeisance
to Christ's Name, one nation after another making his Gospel
its official credo, or at least taking a very benevolent attitude
toward the Christian religion. After King Clovis' conversion
in 496 and the resultant entry of the whole French nation
into the Christian fold, France becoming "the eldest daugh-
ter of the Church," each century saw whole new societies

baptized into the faith. After all this, how could Europeans
help but feel that they were obviously "birthright Chris-
tians"? Only a tiny group of extremists, in the nineteenth-
century West, considered the "rejection" of Christ as other
than a first-century incident for which certain Jews and
Romans were entirely to blame.

It is the long chapters of European history thus rapidly
evoked, and not anything in the words and deeds of Jesus
Christ, which gave birth to the unconscious but basic assump-
tion of almost all of Western religious thought down to the
very recent past: Christendom. Christian monarchs, Chris-

tian nations, Christian society — a total Christian civilization
— were included in this fundamental notion. For all con-
ventional thinking, to be a European man was undistinguish-
able from being a Christian; if you were not European, you
certainly were not a Christian, and it was by no means sure
that you were a man!

The first wide-spread contacts between the European peo-
ples and other human groups — Marco Polo, the Crusades,
and the exploration of the New World — seemed only to
confirm this dogmatic conviction: Europe=civilization=
Christendom, whereas Outside-Europe^barbary=heathen-
dom. Since most contacts with this disagreeable Outside-
Europe were clashes of one sort or another, the auxiliary
notions of Christian territorial states. Christian armies to
protect them, and Christian conquest to extend them very
naturally took form. At the center of this vast fortified
power-block which was Christendom, reigning spiritually —
and in a measure temporally also — over a larger part of the
awakened world than any other emperor before or after,
sat enthroned the self-proclaimed Vicar-of-Christ-upon-earth,
the Pope at Rome. Having thus annexed most accessible
space, it was natural that the concept of Christendom should
annex time as well. Progressively throughout the early
Middle Ages the calendars of the civilized world discarded
all merely local or national ways of computing the passage
of the years, and five centuries after the death of Jesus Christ
the Christian era, the calendar A.D. and B.C., was born.

When the fire of the Reformation suddenly broke out a
thousand years later, we might expect to find that this all-
embracing idea of Christendom would be a target for the
Reformers' bitter attack. Did they not sound the trumpet
call for the return to the Scriptures, to decisive personal faith,
denouncing all mere formalism in matters of religion ? Yes,
this they did, and violent was their argument against the
Catholic jorm of unity, which they found imperial and
despotic in its Roman centralization. Yet the great Reform-
ers, dependent for the protection of themselves and their
cause upon the support of various princes, seem never to

have put in doubt the national form of Christian unity. They
largely accepted and based their church organization on the
old juridical principle upon which political Christendom had
been built: Cuius regio, eius religio — "Whosesoever the king-
dom, his the religion of the realm."

Kierkegaard's celebrated story of the mid-nineteenth-
century Danish storekeeper v^ho, stirred to his depths by a
new^-style evangelistic sermon, began to ask himself if he
were really saved, is a wonderful evidence of how ingrained
even in Protestantism the notion of Christendom long re-
mained. The storekeeper's wife thought it quite sufficient
to put an end to her husband's absurd doubts to make him
look at the religious map of Europe: he was a Dane, Den-
mark was colored "Lutheran," Lutherans are Christians —
so of course he was saved!

It is a measure of the persistence of this all-conditioning
cultural view of Christianity that only a small minority of
Kierkegaard's contemporaries found him and the storekeeper
right, whereas most readers considered the storekeeper's wife
eminently sound. The un-Scriptural myth of Christendom
had only begun to explode with the appearance of the "fringe-
groups" of the Reformation, such as the Anabaptists on the
Continent and the English Independents. Their courageous
insistence that there are no birthright Christians, but only
converted ones, that a man's religion cannot be determined
by his king but only by the work of the Holy Spirit in his
individual soul, was not without effect. The persecution that
fell upon them when they proclaimed that no church exists
except where converted people gather, and that mutatis
mutandis wherever converted people gather, there is Christ's
church no matter what princes and bishops might say, did
not keep them from serving as heralds of a still far-distant
deliverance of the Christian faith from Christendom's illu-
sions of worldly grandeur. Their feeling that they served
society best not by baptizing its existent way of life "Chris-
tian" but through forming within the sinful body of society
of their time a close community in which the Gospel should
be practiced with thorough-going radicalism is doubtless too

advanced for the mind of most church people still today.
Nevertheless, the present-day renew^al of pure spirituality
and true universality in the Christian movement has its
historic origins in the work of the minority churches and
outright sects of the Age of the Reformation.

Although the root-cause of the disintegration of that daz-
zling hodge-podge called Christendom is thus the return
from the Christ of the cathedrals to the Christ of the Scrip-
tures, the recovery of the inwardness of faith, Christian
civilization suffered its most devastating attacks on the po-
litical and cultural, rather than the spiritual, planes. It was
in the New World outpost of that civilization that, for the
first time since our era became officially "Christian," a nation
of Europeans openly denied that their national state had a
religion. The founding fathers of the Republic of the United
States of America, faced with the fact that church-goers
among the American people were a minority, and that
among this minority were held many different ecclesiastical
convictions, provided in the Constitution itself that the Con-
gress should make no laws whatsoever with regard to the
establishment of any official form of religion. The Christian
West has thus had in its midst ever since 1787 at least one
nation-state whose official policy is benevolent non-partisan-
ship with respect to all religions. This was the first great
breach in that illusion of Christendom which had given rise
to the hoary fiction that every state must have an official
religion, even when it tolerated dissent, in order to insure
the basic unity of its people. Such a breach also let it clearly
be seen that the obverse side of the same fiction — that the
faith of the people is whatever faith their state professes —
is not necessarily so. When faith flourishes in a non-confes-
sional state, one can safely conclude that the faith of the
people is not all dependent upon the faith of their prince.
Then the reality of religion and the true nature of the church
are not by any means indissolubly linked up with the vast
politico-cultural power-block which is Christendom.

At the beginning of the twentieth century France took
the step which a modern nation, keenly aware of the sanctity

of individual conscience in matters of religion, is bound
sooner or later to take, if the dominant church in that coun-
try continues to maintain aggressively the pretentions of an
all-embracing Christendom: the complete separation of
church and state, the formation of an officially a-religious
government. The Etat laic, the "lay State," makes a still w^ider
breach in the facade of Christendom than the American type
of constitution, non-partisan but generally benevolent with
regard to all religions. The "lay" or secular state heralds
and even pre-supposes, a nation in which many people look
upon faith as an intensely personal matter, whereas many
others have simply ceased to look upon religion at all.

The final stage in the dissolution of the political structure
of Christendom is, of course, the advent of the so-called
"scientific state" of the Soviet type. The American "Found-
ing Fathers" respected the religious principle but denied the
state any power of regimentation in matters of faith. The
French anticlericals, themselves fundamentally agnostic, af-
firmed the sovereignty of personal convictions in all spiritual
matters, requiring the government to observe with regard
to such questions a cold, strict neutrality. But the architects
of the Soviet "scientific state," convinced of the truth of
dialectical materialism and the harmfulness of all "religious
superstitions," proclaim the coming of world-wide anti-
Christendom, the rise of a new, economically "scientific"
and thus anti-religious civilization. If the state, for tactical
reasons, still permits "religious propaganda," it actively pro-
motes anti-religious propaganda. The new "scientific state,"
like the old "Christian state," constitutes itself a guardian
of the people's faith, and both are in agreement in ignoring
the inwardness of faith, seeking rather mass-indoctrination
and conformity.

How important it is to see this last stage in the political
decomposition of Christendom in the full historical context
we have rapidly sketched! Official religiosity could in the
long run only lead to official irreligion, as any careful read-
ing of the Bible clearly discloses. The sins of the "scientific
state" are but those of the "Christian state" turned inside out.

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It is likely (some observers would say even certain) that the
hypocrisy of the Christian state destroyed the faith of many,
whereas the spiritual barrenness of the "scientific state" may
yet quicken multitudes to an independent quest for personal
religious conviction. Whatever tomorrow may bring forth,
we must however face the stern fact that today we in the
West have, by and large, come up hard against the end of
"the Christian era."

Americans are generally incredulous at recent reports about
the religious temperature of the European lands in which
most of the churches of the United States, as institutions,
were cradled. Consecrated servants of the Gospel in France,
Catholic and Protestant alike, judge their land largely "de-
Christianized." Responsible British church-leaders refer to
their country as "semi-pagan." Less dramatic Scandinavian
churchmen reveal that church interest in their lands has
rarely in the past been manifested by so few. German church-
workers declare that, behind the facade of conservative con-
formity, there is among their people a very wide-spread
failure of contact with the essential Gospel. In the various
Western European nations, according to the estimates of
church leaders, no more than ten to twenty-five per cent of
the people are in good standing in their respective churches.
And everybody knows that most churches do not feel it
their duty to require high minimum standards for church
membership.

If we would, therefore, live in the Church Universal now,
the unique time in all the flow of the centuries which the
Lord of the Church has reserved for us, wc are bound to
do so in utter realism and even in anguish. Notwithstanding
the very recent revival of religious interest in the United
States, seen in the total world-context Christianity is today
riding no tidal wave of popularity among mankind. In
spite of the spectacular Assembly of the World Council of
Churches to which our country has so lately had the privilege
of being host, ours is the epoch of massive desertion of almost
all the historic churches of the world. If we expect, with
Peter, to "be built into a spiritual house," to be "a holy nation,

11

God's own people, ... to declare the wonderful deeds of
him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light,"
we will have under us none of the comfortable props of the
old and defunct political Christendom of bygone days. For
the truth of Christ's Gospel, for the health of our souls,
for the fidelity of this hopeful new ecumenical movement,
for the only certain way of redemption open to embittered
humanity, the hour has struck to renew the Reformers'
proclamation of the eternal word: "The just shall live by
faith alone!"

"Living in the Church Universal NowV Now is the
brashly post-Christian era!

III. Christendom Lost, Church Regained

The breakdown of the ancient structures of Christendom
has not overwhelmed the awakened churchmen of the world
nor smothered with its debris the fire which Jesus Christ
kindled among men. On the contrary, the decline of "the
Christian era" has seen the beginning of the recovery of the
Christian Church. The gradual social disestablishment of
Christianity has permitted men to regain some sense of the
Church as a peculiar, a divine. Society, miraculously gathered
together in the midst of rising and falling civilizations. As
the familiar image of Christendom fades, the naked outline
of the Church looms ever higher above man's desolate
horizon. The Lord of the Church, in his boundless humility
and infinite humanity, restores our hope.

Nothing in this happy development astonishes those who
recall such chapters of Christian history as that engraved
forever in the memories of French Huguenots. Perhaps their
ancestors were among the very first Christians to emerge,
consciously, from the web of illusions involved in Christen-
dom. If the earliest Huguenots, like the first Puritans, were
inclined uncritically to assume the existence of a "Christian
country" which needed only to be removed from the cor-
rupt Roman yoke and submitted to the pure Scriptural
government of the Reformed faith, their children in the 17th

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and 18th centuries moved far beyond the exiled Pilgrims in
the rediscovery of the essential independence of the Church
w^ith regard to all human institutions. Their armies destroyed,
their political rights abolished, their civil liberties annulled,
they lived for a hundred years as outlaws in their own land.
When their services and sacraments were absolutely for-
bidden, their parsonages seized, their church buildings razed,
their pastors arrested on sight, their leading people burned
at the stake or, worse still, chained for years to the oars of
royal galleys, the Huguenots could scarcely conserve un-
tarnished the vision of a total Christendom. In the "Church
of the Desert," as they termed their great congregations
assembled in wild mountain vales under the shelter of chest-
nut forests and at the feet of clandestine preachers who ex-
pounded God's Word from the modest height of a rickshaw-
type of portable pulpit, the Huguenots rediscovered the
depth-dimension, the rich inwardness of that Christian com-
munity which has been stripped of every exterior possession
and so possesses only Christ.

Boys of that day, who in the teeth of blackest adversity
answered a divine call to the ministry, had to make their
way through two hundred miles of mountains to a sort
of Huguenot theological seminary in free Protestant Switzer-
land. They came back bearing alias names rather than
divinity hoods, taking up the exhausting and dangerous
itinerant ministry which alone could preserve the great lines
of the Reformed faith for the isolated "churches of the
desert" scattered all across the mountainous southern-half
of France. Rarely did such dangerous living continue far
into their thirties, for hostile neighbors ultimately succeeded,
in spite of the Huguenot sentinels, in guiding the King's
police to the places where such forbidden meetings were
held. Summarily imprisoned or executed for no other crime
than the fact of their ministry in what the royal writs termed
"the pretended reformed religion," these youths came to
speak of their peaceful seminary on the shore of Lake Geneva
as "the School of Death." In the same Cevenol region under
the Nazi occupation, modern Boy Scouts — sometimes de-

13

scendants of 18th century martyrs — frequently chose to name
their patrols not "Silver Fox" or "Black Bear" but "Desubas"
or "Morel," in honor of some heroic pastor of the "Age of
the Desert," the whole patrol proud of the alias under which
he died and it now lives.

To this vision of a church whose living reality is so deep
that it can survive the loss of every normal exterior advantage,
the sons of the Huguenots, by their language, unconsciously
testify still today. They never call their place of worship a
"church." It is always "the temple." The "church" is people,
Christ's people, gathered in his presence. How could the
language of a church which existed for more than a century
without any buildings whatsoever, a church which has vivid
memories of "the Desert," ever return to the mistaken notion
that a building is a "church," or that Christianity is inextrica-
bly attached to a given society, economy, country, or civili-
zation ?

Even where, humanly speaking, history appears to have
treated churches more kindly than in the case of Huguenot
France, the crumbling foundations of the old Christendom
are apparent and not without happy repercussions. As
various segments of Christendom become less sure of them-
selves and their security, they become more interested in
each other's experiences, less bound by unchanging tradition
and more open to the Spirit's leading. Churches can grow
in breadth just as in depth.

For example, a different kind of government than the
Serbs, Croats, Magyars and Montenegrins have ever known
before shakes the century-old churches of what is now called
Yugoslavia. Suddenly they are all, great and small alike,
completely disestablished, Yugoslavia becoming the first
country this side of Russia to follow in the path France
opened up fifty years ago: sharp separation between church
and state. The Yugoslav Protestants, a minority of but
100,000, wonder how they will ever get along in this strange
new world where no tax-money is any longer available to
meet expenses and churches have no role in public life.

14

French Protestants have hardly been aware of the existence
of Yugoslav Protestants up until this point. Nov^ they wonder
if the latter would find encouragement in the history of
French Protestantism over the last half-century. The Yugo-
slavs are eager for full reports on how the little French
minority church has managed to survive, to evangelize, to
carry on foreign missions, welfare and educational work,
to publish, to influence French society in general. A team
of French pastors is invited to visit Yugoslav Protestantism,
to examine their similar problems, to address synods and
parishes about French experience. Yugoslav pastors prepare
to return the visitation. Two more churches have found new
reality welling up in their liturgical prayers and petitions in
behalf of the Church Universal.

As the old parochialism and provincialism give way before
the growing breadth of concern abroad among the churches,
as denomination after denomination feels increasingly that
the old Christendom, with its largely compartmentalized
national or confessional church-groups, is gone beyond repair,
the deep thrust toward a more inclusive fellowship pushes
churches into new and unheard of relations. For example,
because the Reformation broke out at a moment in European
history when the Turks were harassing the eastern borders
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whereas the Russian terri-
tories were (as so often before and since) almost hermetically
closed to foreigners, the churches issuing from the Reforma-
tion and the Orthodox (or Oriental) churches had through
many years little or no occasion to reflect upon each other's
existence. But today Orthodoxy is even less firmly entrenched
in the social order of some areas in the East than is Western
Protestantism in certain of its ancient strongholds. Vast
numbers of refugees from the East are a constant reminder
to Western Protestants that their sympathies would be narrow
indeed if they did not care for the Orthodox refugee just as
lovingly as for the Protestant refugee. But such spontaneous
growth in breadth of concern, developing ties of suffering
and service not only between those churches which are
immediate sisters but even between some churches which

15

have never before had contact with each other, cannot help
but lead to the fresh discovery of another dimension of the
Christian Church at large: its very great length, its ramified
history.

It is not that we had not known before, in a bookish way,
that just as Protestants continue their dialogue with Luther,
Calvin and George Fox, just as Roman Catholics sit in grate-
ful admiration at St. Thomas Aquinas' feet, so the Orthodox
commune with St. John Chrysostom and Gregory Nazianzen.
The difference is that, in the widespread disruption of our
times, we are coming to know members of various traditions
other than our own as living individuals, and their special
heritage is becoming, at least a little, our own. Slowly there
dawns in our hearts, and not only in our minds, the recog-
nition that in the Church Universal we embrace in fellow-
ship not only the multi-colored mass of our brethren in
Christ all over today's troubled world, but also our brethren
in all the centuries behind us and in all the years to come.
It is even possible, when we have come to know them better,
that in St. John Chrysostom, or St. Dominic, or John Wool-
man we may find a kindred spirit, a guide, a beloved brother
in Christ, such as, for us, no one of our own generation may
yet have become. Still more moving than such spiritual com-
panionship with Christian leaders of other times is the per-
sonal discovery of the whole corporate reality of the Church
in ancient cities and unknown lands. Our "home church"
comes to include not only the folks among whom we grew
up, the generation before our own, a Reformer or two, and
a sympathetic "saint" of a far-gone day, but all the fallible,
sinful and yet desperately hopeful followers Christ has ever
known, in all times and places — people very like ourselves
as they moved blindly toward death, trustfully toward Him.
The Church Universal in which we would live now did not
begin yesterday.

Nor is it likely that it will end tomorrow, although we are
all learning to observe a certain modesty in our pronounce-
ments upon even the immediate future of this earthly globe,
let alone the total destiny of the universe. Come what may,

16

we know that as long as men exist, here on this planet or at
any other point where the heavenly Father may have set
them down in his limitless kingdom of space, He will be
leading still others, fundamentally like ourselves, out of
their sinful night into the warm light of fellowship in His
Son. They too are one with us in the shelter of the Church
Universal, for the sweep of its universality is surely com-
mensurate with the vastness of the universe itself:

"The Father of glory," writes Paul, "raised Christ
from the dead and made him sit at his right hand in
the heavenly places, far beyond all rule and authority
and power and dominion, and above every name
that is named, not only in this age but also in that
which is to come, and he has put all things under his
feet and has made him the head over all things for
the Church, which is his body, the fulness of him
who fills all in all."

The Emperor Constantine, even more than the early
bishops, gave the Church of Christ the stamp of organiza-
tional, territorial cohesion. That stamp is now broken, leav-
ing but jagged traces of the exterior unity it once imposed.
But God has blessed us with a stronger unity than any which
the princes of this world could possibly bequeath. The depth,
the breadth, the length and the height of this unity we, as
yet, only faintly perceive. But we know that it is grounded in
Him who is One, and that it will therefore surely abide.

IV. The Glory of the Church and the Misery
OF the Churches

Those who once have glimpsed the pure glory of the
authentic Church of Christ, delivered from its ancient bond-
age to the conglomerate ideal of Christendom, breathlessly
seek to live in this Universal Church now. The rational mind
can conceive of no new world order, the moral sense can
envisage no just society, the artistic soul can imagine no
natural harmony which elicits a devotion as strong as that
which men of faith would proffer to the Lord Christ. Grasp-

17

ing the utter wonder of God's eternal reign, looking to the
Church for its translation into the mortal language of time,
Christians are awakening from their spiritual sloth. Chris-
tendom, exalting priestly domination and rabbinical casuistry,
had deadened the religion of multitudes. The renewal of
the vision of Christ's perfect Church — inward, unitive, age-
old and even cosmic — has quickened the faith of many.

As long as modern men were content to assume the reality
of Christian civilization and to consider the churches as
pillars of civilized society, fundamental criticism of the life
of those churches was rarely heard. They seemed to be doing
their duty when they baptized, confirmed, married and
buried the peoples born within their territories, describing
to them essential Christian beliefs and values. Depositaries
of certain records and guardians of certain customs, churches
were not expected to be terribly unlike a Bureau of Weights
and Standards, functioning within the total administration
of Christendom. Only as the pristine image of a Church
radically true to its divine Lord was recaptured in this
twentieth-century, did vanguard Christians realize fully the
frightful misery of their actual churches.

We owe the ongoing subjects of present ecumenical study,
the objectives of ecumenical travail, to the first anguished
outcries of those awakened to the real state of the churches
through their consecrated effort to live already here and
now in the Church Universal. Today we share their dis-
coveries, and, like them, we too can never again slumber
and sleep.

After decisive personal experience of the grace of Christ,
the individual believer can never be the same person he
once was. In the same way, after even the first tentative steps
in living as a conscious part of the Church Universal, the
individual church can never again be content with itself or
its time-honored compromise between Christ's way and the
world's.

For we \now now that all things are ours, and we are
Christ's, and Christ is God's: but we guiltily recognize that,

in certain cases, our several churches are not simply distinc-
tive but hostilely divisive, blatant denials of the unity of
their one Lord.

In the marvelous light of Christ's world-wide mission,
we see clearly how closed our fellowship has unwittingly
become, how tremendous is the evangelizing task before us —
reaching the unreached in every land.

When we meditate upon the fullness of the call which
Jesus Christ addresses to every member of his Church, the
single-standard of discipleship which his Gospel reveals,
we are convinced that all of our churches, renouncing their
various forms of clericalism, must become indivisible com-
munities in which the faith articulated in the sanctuary
and the faith lived in the city are one and the same.

As we contemplate the warm, fraternal communion of the
saints, the power of reconciliation which is at the heart
of Christ's Church, conflicts between Christians are intoler-
able to our conscience, and must be overcome through deeds
of justice, mercy and love.

Patient, serious and often inspired work is being carried
on by Christians in many parts of the world, aiming at the
relief of all this misery within the life of the churches them-
selves. The ringing declarations of a great ecumenical assem-
bly like that at Evanston derive their only validity from the
fact that they give public expression to those points of repent-
ance and reform upon which the churches, in their day-by-
day work, have honestly reached effective consensus. Hap-
pily, once such formulations have been made publicly, they
encourage many of the timorous to let themselves go, to
abandon their traditional positions to the grace and mercy
of God. Thus the churches of Christ, always sinful but ever
in process of reformation, move toward their unique, their
divine calling.

Pastor Marc Boegner, president of the Protestant Federa-
tion of France, has reminded us all that the beginning of
the movement of the churches toward unity and renewal

19

is an act of prayer. The Lord's Prayer is already the prayer
of the Church Universal, learned and loved by every child
of Christian parents, Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protest-
ant alike. Churches that consciously pray the great prayer
with each other and for each other cannot interminably
ignore each other or the hunger of the w^orld.

In these past fifteen years of world-v^ide v^^ar and its disas-
trous consequences, churches which had been learning pain-
fully, through the first decades of this century, to talk
together about their serious disagreements have taken im-
mense strides toward responsible family life. If by the time
of the great Oxford and Edinburgh conferences in 1937
they had begun to taste the exquisite joy of uniting their
diverse accents in a common hymn of praise and a common
supplication, it has been through the challenge of unprece-
dented destruction and suffering that they have heard their
Master's call to far-flung tasks of common service. The plight
of war prisoners, the crisis of "orphaned missions," the
desperation of Displaced Persons, the hunger of whole popu-
lations, the devastation of thousands of church-edifices and
institutions, the disruption of existence for millions of refu-
gees, and now the menace of atomic annihilation of all the
world's peoples — these human situations of weakness and
horror have been the occasion of the largest common action
in which churches have cooperated since the Crusades.
Unlike the latter undertaking, today's network of interchurch
aid and refugee relief contains no slightest element of moral
ambiguity: churches are pouring out funds and lending
workers on a very important scale, with no other purpose
than to "bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law
of Christ." They seek to help each other understand better
what the Lord requires of each and of all together in this
nothing less than an apocalyptic age. Through down-to-earth
ecumenical programs of material relief, church reconstruc-
tion, refugee resettlement, and re-tooling of educational and
evangelistic enterprises in key-areas, multitudes of Christians
have, for the first time, beheld the vision of the Church
Universal.

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And yet . The various commissions in the Evanston

Assembly, in their final reports released to all the churches
for their study and reaction, show us movingly how far our
actual church practices still fall short of the glorious vision
of the truly universal Church.

Our growing Christian unity is real, but Evanston shows
the point at which it is now arrested:

"We as\ each other whether we do not sin when
tve deny the sole lordship of Christ over the church
by claiming the vineyard for our own, by possessing
our 'church' for ourselves, by regarding our theology,
order, history, nationality, etc., as our own valued
treasures, thus involving ourselves more and more in
the separation of sin. The point at which we are
unable to renounce the things which divide us,
because we believe that obedience to God Himself
compels us to stand fast — this is the point at which
we come together to as\ for mercy and light!'

A sense of mission to the whole inhabited world — the true
meaning of OIKOUMENE — is getting hold of the imagina-
tion of churches everywhere, but to carry out that mission:

"There must be encounter with the world. The
church must brea\ out of its isolation and introver-
sion, meeting the individual where he is with the
compassion and comprehension of Christ. . . . Too
often our words have been impotent because they
have not been embodied in wor\s of service, com-
passion and identification. It is not enough for the
church to spea\ out of its security, following our
incarnate and crucified Lord we must live in such
identification with man, with his sin, his hopes and
fears, his misery and needs, that we become his
brother and can witness from his place and condition
to God's love for him."

The churches are slowly awaking to the obvious fact that
the evangelization of the world can not be carried forward

21

in this generation by a professional clergy alone or supported
only passively by the other members of the church:

"The real battles of the faith today are being
fought in factories, shops, offices and farms, in politi-
cal parties and government agencies, in countless
homes, in the press, radio and television, in the
relationship of nations. Very often it is said that the
church is already in these spheres in the persons
of its laity.

"So far, although in varying degrees, our churches
have failed to give their members the support they
need to make them e'Qective representatives of the
church in their wording life An immense oppor-
tunity is open to the churches in the world through
their laity, not to be seized for ecclesiastical domina-
tion but for Christian witness."

Churches have come to realize more fully that it is their
duty to strive for ever greater justice and fraternity in society,
on both the local and the world planes, but they seek with
belated intensity their proper course in the epochal social
struggle of our time:

"The conflict between communists and non-
communists a^ects the political and economic life
of nearly every nation in the world, and creates
divisions even within the church regarding the right
attitude toward communism. Only as Christians
wor\ for social 'justice and political freedom for all,
and rise above both fear and resentment, will they
be fully able to meet the challenge of this conflict.
It is our concern for the brother for whom Christ
died that should impel us to fulfill our obligations
in the face of this conflict. In this way Christians
living in di'Qerent parts of our divided world may
contribute to the creation of the necessary conditions
for different systems to live side by side. This con-
cern of Christians does not alter the mission of the
churches to bear witness in the face of all atheistic
and self-righteous ideologies."

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As Christians everywhere look with consternation upon
the explosive world scene, they measure the awesome respon-
sibility which is theirs:

"The churches must, therefore, see in the inter-
national sphere a field of obedience to Jesus Christ.
They cannot agree that it falls outside the range of
his sovereignty or the scope of the moral law . . .
The church must see\ to be the kind of community
which God wishes the world to become. . . . It must
carry into the turmoil of international relations the
real possibility of the reconciliation of all races,
nationalities and classes in the love of Christ. It
must witness to the creative power of forgiveness and
spiritual renewal."

But at Evanston the churches recognized their special guilt
in that area of social concern where they could make their
most direct contribution — racial relations:

"The great majority of Christian churches affili-
ated with the World Council have declared that
physical separation within the church on grounds
of race is a denial of spiritual unity and of the
brotherhood of man. Yet such separations persist
within these very churches, and we often seek, to
justify them on other grounds than race; because in
our own hearts we know that separation solely on
the grounds of race is abhorrent in the eyes of God.
. . . The church is called upon, therefore, to set aside
such excuses and to declare God's will both in words
and deeds. 'Be not conformed to this world, but be
ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that
ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and
perfect, will of God! We believe it to be the will of
God that such proof in word and deed now be
given."

How great is our gratitude to God for the advances marked
by this courageous Evanston Assembly! Surely millions of
men and women found and will continue to find in those

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of its pronouncements where it spoke not from uneasy
necessity but out of the depths of blazing conviction a whole
series of rallying-points for living unity in this age of revo-
lutionary upheaval. Major implications of our prayer for
the Church Universal are now spelled out. Are there some
who have heretofore felt that the ecumenical movement was
largely a spiritual luxury for certain overly-cultivated church-
men ? Now it becomes evident that belonging to the Church
Universal inexorably leads to the radical transformation of
many of our customary ways and those of our home churches.
The "coming Great Church" bears in it the power of world
revolution — that revolution which is born in repentance and
grows in holiness, finding its ultimate goals realized only
in the coming of the Kingdom.

V. Beyond the Church Universal

Term by term, we have probed the content of each word
in our theme:

Now is the "post-Christian era."

Church Universal is deep inner fellowship with Christ's

friends throughout time and space, independent of all

passing social institutions.

Living in this universe of eternal meaning begins as an
act of intercessory prayer, and becomes confident
labor for the continuing reformation of the churches
and of the world.

Yet the most important term in our theme, unexpressed
but undergirding all the rest, we have not fully evoked:
the Lord Jesus Christ. We have the real possibility of living
— in the Church Universal — now only because Jesus Christ
sustains his Church everlastingly.

This must be unmistakably clear. Ecumenism is not
ecclesiasticism. The Church into which we have been called
is no end in itself. It is a Body, at the service of a Head.
It is a herald announcing a King. The "coming Great
Church" is destined to foreshadow, in all humility, a coming

24

— and infinitely greater — Kingdom. The coming of the truly
universal Church is no more than our eager response to the
final coming of our glorious risen Lord.

When I was a student, I should have preferred to round
off the unseemly edges of the awkw^ard New Testament
affirmation that Jesus Christ will return to judge the world
and visibly inaugurate the definitive reign of God in the
affairs of mankind. I liked much better the image of my
own making — a Cathedral Universe — in which every valid
aspect of human culture would eventually find its place, in
spite of every set-back in the long process of this cathedral-
construction. It seemed to me that, twenty centuries back,
God had fully revealed His unchanging purposes for men
in the life and teachings of His Son, and no further miracle
would be in good taste. How could Jesus more fittingly
return than through the gradual reshaping of all the reflective
life of the world, than in the emergence of a universe that
would show forth his moral likeness? When not only the
natural world of the earth but even the farthest reaches of
space should somehow become "humanized," graciously
harmonizing their vaulted strength with the needs of a
spiritually redeemed mankind, would not the Kingdom have
come, as promised, with power and glory, forevermore?

In these present years of mounting catastrophe, such a
dream appears to be a total misinterpretation of that "creative
good will" which Dr. Lyman glimpsed at the very heart
of the universe. We know with even greater certainty than
.before, if that were possible, that the core of life is infinitely
creative and good: how else explain the dawn of Christmas,
of hope, in a world as black as that we know ? Nothing in
human history can, by itself, be pointed to as an adequate
source for the character and faith of Christ. But few are
those today who believe that the ultimate victory of that
creative good will in the human realm can any more come
without a preliminary denouement of the tangled web of
history than Jesus could proceed from Christmas to Easter
without passing through the decisive ordeal of Good Friday.
Christianity simply cannot dispense with any of the cardinal

25

deeds and hopes of the New Testament without faiHng to
answer our own twentieth-century questions.

The highest wisdom of the World Council Assembly in
Evanston, in its closing Message, is a glad return to the heart
of the faith by which we, like our spiritual forefathers, live:

"Here where we stand, Jesus Christ stood with us.
He came to us, true God and true Man, to see\ and
to save. Though we were the enemies of God, Christ
died for us. We crucified him, but God raised him
from the dead. He is risen. He has overcome the
powers of sin and death. A new life has begun.
And in his risen and ascended power he has sent
forth into the world a new community , bound to-
gether by his Spirit, sharing his divine life, and com-
missioned to ma\e him \nown throughout the
world. He will come again as fudge and King to
bring all things to their coitsummation. Then we
shall see him as he is and \now as we are \nown.
Together with the whole creation we wait for this
with eager hope, kjtowing that God is faithful and
that even now he holds all things in his hand. . . ."

"We do not \now what is coming to us. But we
know who is coming. It is he who meets us every
day and who will meet us at the end

— Jesus Christ our Lord."

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