462 - The Church In the World 1944 - 1969

The Church In the World 1944 - 1969
By E. G. Homrighausen

THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD OF 1944

IN retrospect the situation in the world twenty-five years ago was hardly favorable for the launching of a journal like THEOLOGY TODAY. The world was still at war. One journalist characterized the year 1944 as one of "blood, tears, and disappointment." The promise of an early peace was not fulfilled, even though the tide had turned in Europe and Asia. While victory seemed assured, death, destruction, and disruption were everyday news items. France and Belgium had been liberated, but internal problems made reconstruction difficult. The same was true of Italy, Greece, and Poland. The peace of Palestine was held only by British bayonets. The Arab federation was just starting, and Zionists were chafing at Britain's and the world's inaction. The political situation in China was disintegrating. Already the Russian sphere of influence was embracing the Baltic states, Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, and possibly Yugoslavia, and Hungary.

The Dumbarton Oaks Conference of October, 1944, began the shaping of what was later to become the United Nations Organization. Roosevelt, Churchill, Chiang Kai-Shek, de Gaulle, Gandhi, Jinnah, Stalin were much alive and in charge of political and military forces that were to reshape the entire world. The Allies landed on the Normandy beach in June, 1944, and started the costly but final offensive that led to the collapse of Hitler's regime. The Allies

For the past twenty-five years, Elmer G. Homrighausen has been writing for THEOLOGY TODAY and is known to our readers as a wide-ranging reporter of events and issues relating to the Christian church throughout the world. To re-read his regular columns is to re-live the major developments of church history for the past quarter century. A world traveler who has visited most of the places he describes, a cosmopolitan evangelist who "preaches" the good news whenever and wherever he can, "Homy" has endeared himself to a far-flung company of friends, associates, and many who know him only by name or nickname. This twenty-fifth THEOLOGY TODAY birthday has provided an opportunity for our Contributing Editor to review the church scene. As ever, the items catch the flavor and excitement of the passing years.-Ed.

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were recapturing island after island in the Pacific and had at last started the offensive for the Philippines.

The war involved the United States deeply in Asia and Europe in new relationships and responsibilities. There was growing concern as to the role of the nation in the international order that was in the making. The people of the country, especially its youth, were engaged in a mobility that was to bring about many changes in outlook and way of life. It was inevitable that the great depression in the thirties and the great war in the forties would bring about many new developments in national life. The convulsive results of this war would make it impossible to seek a return to "normalcy" which was the hope after World War I. The U. S. could "not go home again." Whether the churches realized it or not, they were caught in the same "wave of the future."

The churches were affected by the war. Millions of their members were in the armed services. Families were disrupted, mothers worked in essential industries, and men and women were dispersed all over the world. The churches were concerned about the returning soldier as well as about the moral decline which the war produced. Theological education was placed on a twelve-month basis to provide chaplains for the emergency. Local churches were alerted to their responsibilities. Cooperative missions were brought into action.

The churches worked together at home and overseas in relief and rehabilitation; indeed, this was one of the most significant chapters in the modern church's history. While the World Council of Churches was in the process of formation, the denominations worked together magnificently through a Geneva office in the work of reconstruction and reconciliation.

The ecumenical Faith and Order group was investigating the nature and function of the church. American theologians were at work preparing for a second Delaware Conference in 1945, on a Just and Durable Peace. Another significant committee headed by Dr. Robert Calhoun of Yale worked on the relation of the church to war in the light of the Christian faith. Significant studies in evangelism were made by the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, and the churches associated in the then Federal Council of Churches in North America. The churches in the United States associated in the Federal Council of Churches were preparing for

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a larger unity to bring together eight major cooperative agencies into a National Council of Churches.

Protestant-Catholic relations were no more than cordial. The President's appointment of Myron C. Taylor as his personal ambassador to the Vatican was not viewed with favor by many Protestants. During the year a leading religious journal ran a series on "Will Catholicism Win America?" Many Protestants and others were united to preserve the separation between church and state against constant threats to breach that "wall."

It was in 1944 that a famous Fortune article appeared which read in part, "The way out is the sound of a voice, not our voice, but a voice coming from something not ourselves, in the existence of which we cannot disbelieve. It is the earthly task of the pastors to hear this voice, to cause us to hear it, to tell us what it says. If they cannot hear it, or if they fail to tell us, we, as laymen are utterly lost. As 1944 closes, we, distracted despairing men are listening for that voice."

THE CHANGING WORLD SITUATION

The world of 1969 is different from what it was in 1944. After the hot war of the 1940's came the cold war that occasionally broke out in local conflicts and always threatened to explode into World War III. Nuclear stockpiles increased the danger of global destruction and produced a continuous state of anxiety. The possibility of peace or war was, and still is centered in Washington and Moscow.

This state of affairs has changed with the rise of China, and especially with the rise of new polarities between the developed north and the undeveloped South, the affluent north and the poor south, the white north and the black south, the old north and the young south. The Third World of new nations has emerged with its determination to have a place in the international sun. This world is predominantly colored and consists of children and youth under twenty-five years of age.

Western industrialism has penetrated into many areas of the world, resulting in a breakdown of old cultural patterns and values, stimulating the growth of a new kind of order, the shape of which is not

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yet evident. Highly developed industrialism has created vast city centers which pose baffling problems for civic government, family life, and personal well-being, While "the secular city" has been hailed and even celebrated as a portent of the social life of man on earth, it also presents aggravating and baffling problems of personal and social life. The population explosion taxes the food supplies of the earth. In spite of agricultural progress and medical services, undernourishment and even starvation are on the increase.

The world since 1944 has grown more secular. It has been called post-Christian, post-religious, post-bourgeois, post-personal. The churches, it is maintained, have lost much social influence. Man has "come of age" and has assumed mastery of nature, his environment, and his own life. Some have hailed this liberation from an old supernatural authority, which was repressive, and have championed a secular Christianity which would appeal to man's strength and responsibility.

Recent years have witnessed the rise of the spirit of dissent. It is not only related to the generation gap, or to the revolt of youth against a world of impersonal bigness, but it stems as well from a protest against injustice, poverty, and discrimination. It is intimately related to the struggle for civil rights and the rise of Black Power among Negroes. This spirit of dissent reaches into the churches, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, questioning tradition and authority in matters of truth and morality.

Closely related to the spirit of dissent is that of revolution and its right in situations where changes are not made quickly enough to relieve dehumanizing injustice. The problem of reformation versus revolution is a live issue in our time. Most imperious is the issue of racism, especially in the United States where riots have caused disruption of order and destruction of life and property. The problem of the control of political power in the process of change is a crucial current concern.

The churches in the United States face a peculiar problem in trying to exercise their pastoral and prophetic roles toward a nation in distress. Viet Nam, on the one hand, and civil disorder, poverty, violence, racism, and social injustice, on the other hand, have posed major issues for national leadership. And the churches have been forced into thinking hard and seriously about how to be the church in such a difficult domestic and world situation.

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THE CHANGING CHURCH SITUATION

The church of 1944 was wrestling with the immediate problems of the war and the post-war period. Its theologians were thinking about the nature of a just and durable peace and the relation of the church to war. Congregations were concerned about their members in the armed service, the moral decline the war had produced, the effects of the conflict upon families, the rehabilitation of the returned soldier, and about relief of war victims.

The immediate concerns of the situation soon gave way to concerns of a larger and profounder nature. The world and cultural situation in which the churches found themselves changed rapidly and radically, forcing the churches to give greater thought to their place, nature, and task in such a world. They found themselves in a new climate in which their status was changed and even challenged. This had already happened to the churches of Europe; it was now happening to the churches in America and among the new nations. To aggravate the situation, new currents of theology oriented toward secularism, together with a resurgence of evangelical conservatism, created unrest in the churches. A growing gap which has not as yet been bridged between leadership and laity, pulpit and pew resulted.

Protestantism especially was affected by this turn of events. The religious revival had spent itself by the middle 1950's. In face of developments in Roman Catholicism, it could no longer maintain its anti-Catholic intransigency. In face of its disestablishment in western society, it could no longer regard itself as the sole religious custodian of western culture. Not only did it face a pluralistic culture, but a culture that accused Protestantism of being irrelevant and of being a white Anglo-Saxon religion of the affluent. The attempts at renewal within Protestantism were not coordinated nor did they bring about the expected results. Protestantism had no grand strategy such as Catholicism had in Vatican Council II with which to meet the crisis. In spite of many studies carried on by the churches about the ministry, church structures, evangelism, theological education, and similar subjects, many of them suffered a loss of membership due to a loss of spiritual reproductive power.

Protestantism is wrestling with an identity crisis caused by a radically changed cultural situation, a fluid theological age, at a time

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when man has come of age and discussion about his nature and place in the world has top priority even outside the churches. This condition is aggravated by a current anti-institutionalism, a hostility toward tradition, an anti-intellectual activism, and the generation gap.

Roman Catholicism finds itself in a similar religious revolution. Its new-found freedom has released a series of inquiries on everything from the infallibility of the Pope to the authority of the church in matters of birth control, from the celibacy of the priesthood to the propriety of conducting parochial schools. The same cultural conditions which face Protestantism confront Catholicism except that the stances toward those conditions are different in each case. Protestantism seeks to move from its close identity with culture toward a truer concept of the church and its role in the world; Catholicism seeks to move from its transcultural tradition toward a truer concept of the church and its role in the world. Only time will tell how much Catholicism will be changed by the revolution through which it is passing.

Orthodoxy has "arrived" in ecumenical circles by becoming one of the dominant factors in the World Council of Churches. Not only has it arrived numerically and vocally, but its status has been enhanced in the United States where it now takes its place with older historic religious traditions. Orthodoxy is now stronger in Russia than it was in the days of the Czars. And even though autocephalous, it has become more universally united in the past twenty-five years. It, too, has had to confront new cultural situations without and new forces of renewal within. Old Orthodox Churches, such as the Egyptian Coptic, and Ethiopian, have felt the currents of modern culture and theological thought and are experiencing the beginnings of renewal.

A rising tide of evangelicalism is found in all churches. It is critical of the church's current trend toward social action at the expense of personal Christianity. It is afraid that an over-activity in social affairs will endanger the center of the Christian faith. This group embraces those who believe the church should have nothing to do with political or social affairs, as well as those who believe in conversion to Christ and conversion to the world. It sponsored the Berlin Conference on Evangelism and the Wheaton Conference on

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Mission, and it is in the process of holding a national evangelism conference in the United States.

Conditions without and within have brought about a Situation in the churches which may be termed revolutionary. It is a period of patient waiting, of agonizing self-examination, of mutual discussion, and of prayerful and probing inquiry into the nature of the Christian faith in a time when the older forms of the faith are respected but seem to be powerless to produce the renewal which is needed in our day.

INTERCHURCH RELATIONSHIPS

The most significant interchurch event of the past twenty-five years has been the development of the ecumenical movement. Starting in 1910 in Edinburgh, it soon embraced many agencies which came together in Amsterdam, 1948, to form the World Council of Churches. Since that time it has focused in the Assemblies of Evanston, New Delhi, and Uppsala. The remaining two unrelated ecumenical bodies, the International Missionary Council and the World Council of Christian Education, have now become associated with the WCC. It seems as if the "great new fact of our time," which the late Archbishop William Temple called the ecumenical movement, has come full cycle. The Council now includes in its membership over 200 denominations. It practically embraces the whole spectrum of Christianity, including several groups of Pentecostals. A large proportion of members are now of the Orthodox Churches and the younger sister churches of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. And relations with the Roman Catholic Church have already begun and are constantly developing in number and in character.

But the Council is more than an organization; it is a center for study and fellowship through its several departments and agencies, especially the Ecumenical Institute. It has inspired and produced studies on many subjects, including church and society, evangelism, the missionary nature and structure of the church, education, and other relevant issues. It has sparked national and regional councils of churches and inspired ecumenical conference and study centers in various parts of the world. It has provided the younger churches especially with an ecumenical context and inspiration which has

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been most helpful in their minority situations. Perhaps the most significant service the Council has rendered the churches has been its channeling of relief and refugee work. It is estimated that ten million persons have been helped through this work.

Vatican Council II in the early 1960's brought something new into interchurch relationships. Ever since Protestant observers were welcomed by Pope John XXIII, many doors of understanding, dialogue, and even cooperation has been opened. The range of such interrelationships runs from the World Council of Churches and the Vatican to living room dialogues between Protestants and Catholics in local communities, from joint ecumenical services of prayer and praise to Roman Catholic membership in state and community councils of churches, from Lutheran-Reformed-Catholic theological colloquiums to cooperation in the ecumenical institute in the Middle East, from joint editing of theological literature to proposed cooperative projects in theological education.

Church unions are in process of discussion or have been consummated. The two latest unions are the Evangelical United Brethren Church and the Methodist Church and the proposed merger of the Presbyterian Church in the United States and Reformed Church in America. Most significant, however, is the Consultation on Church Union (COCU) which has moved far toward bringing the major Protestant denominations together in a large organic union.

A grass roots ecumenicity continues to grow among congregations of different denominations who work together to minister to the entire community without benefit of denominational union. Denominational differences have become less important to ministers and laymen alike during the last twenty-five years. Whether this change in attitude is due to the growth of a more missionary ecumenical theology or an erosion of denominational theology is a question. It may be both. This observation can also be made of denominational seminaries which have become increasingly ecumenical, and many so-called confessional seminaries are indistinguishable from union seminaries. Most of the seminaries in the Third World are united in one form or another.

The growth of cooperative Christianity continues in spite of the strong persistence of denominational structures. The spirit of this new ecumenicity finds old council structures inadequate. It finds expression in many experimental ways. The shape of the ecumenical

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Christian community that seeks expression is not yet evident. In spite of the growth of the ecumenical movement, real church union seems to be more distant than ever.

THE CHURCH IN MISSION

In spite of a World situation which has become hostile, indifferent, or self-sufficiently secular, the churches have not withdrawn from the field. On the contrary, the world has forced the churches to revise their agenda and take into serious consideration the issues of race, technology, peace, poverty, population, nationalism, world order, and other inescapable concerns. The churches have developed a greater sense of responsibility for the world in these past twenty-five years, so much so that the World Council of Churches called a conference on Church and Society in 1966 to update the findings of the Oxford Conference of 1937. Instead of condemning the new secular thrust in theology, most of the churches have listened to this emphasis on God's concern for the salvation of the world. New probings into the social nature of the gospel are now in progress which go far beyond the assumptions of the Social Gospel in the early part of this century.

As a result of the challenge of the world, many of the churches have tried to turn themselves "inside out," by creating new ministries and services to reach and serve the world. The servant image and missionary nature of the church have been emphasized. Revolutionary experiments are being made by the churches in Christian education, pastoral ministry, worship, and parish life. Theological education has been re-studied with a view to educate leaders who will release the laity to become the church in and for the world.

In some parts of the world the churches have been persecuted, their property destroyed, their services restricted, their schools confiscated by the state. They have been forced to exist in a hostile climate. In the People's Republic of China, organized Christianity has practically ceased to exist. Yet in eastern Europe the churches have carried on bravely to such a point that communist leaders have been intrigued by the churches' vitality, and a series of Marxist-Christian dialogues has been held. The vigorous, growing Christian communities in Korea, Brazil, Taiwan, Indonesia, Kenya, and many

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other places offset the loss of membership and influence in some older churches and give promise that the center of Christianity is no longer in New York, Nashville, London, or Basle. It is everywhere! It may be that in the future the largest number of Christians will be found in Asia and Africa. The day of "foreign missions" is past; the sending of fraternal workers is now a two-way traffic. Such a concept is sponsored by a six-continent mission of the World Council of Churches. A joint Action for Mission (JAM) seeks to pool resources, personnel, and facilities among churches to strengthen the church's mission. The younger churches, once sole recipients of "foreign" missionaries, now have 200 missionaries of their own in other lands.

While there are still two billion people on the planet who have not heard the gospel, through mass media, literature, and travel, the good news of Jesus Christ is being heard beyond church circles. A new phenomenon in our time is the penetrating power of Christianity into non-Christian cultures. This is evident in India and Indonesia, for instance where Christian values prevail beyond the statistical churches.

The churches have engaged cooperatively in conducting studies and consultations in various parts of the world. Youth, laymen and laywomen, ministers, and professors have conferred on various subjects, such as salvation, conversion, baptism, healing, theological education, theology and the laity, church and family. Youth have been audacious in discussing vocation in a workless society, sex ethics in a test tube society, and the search for wholeness in a fragmented society. The voluminous reports and accompanying papers indicate the involvement of the church in mission in the world.

Limitations of space prevent an expansive treatment of the church in mission in publications, broadcasting, and films. The churches have engaged in literacy campaigns, refugee work, agricultural and rural life programs, ministry to service personnel overseas, and other projects. Most widely known, of course, are the Delta Ministry in Mississippi, the Christian Ministry to National Parks, the Urban Training Center in Chicago, and the cooperative ministry in the model-city of Columbia, Maryland.

The churches have become increasingly involved with secular organizations and movements, whether labor, business, educational, political. They have also become involved in social research, the

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arts, foundations, communication, and eleemosynary groups. While the churches have been laggard in civil rights, many individual and representative churchmen have participated in demonstrations and marches. One large Protestant denomination is using undesignated funds running into millions of dollars for investment in high risk low cost housing developments. Not all churchmen have agreed with the churches' involvement in the major social issues which have erupted in the past twenty-five years. A polarity of opinion has grown in many churches which threatens their peace and unity.

CRITICAL ISSUES

The relation of the churches to the world is of crucial concern. Since the churches find themselves in a new cultural situation, they are in desperate need of a theology of culture. This is surely true for western Christendom where the supporting context of the churches has now given way, and the churches find themselves nakedly exposed to a post-Christian or a still pre-Christian world. They are seeing themselves as they really are. This is also true for the younger churches which are set within the context of a new nationalism. This situation demands of the churches a theological integrity which can provide them with guidelines for the fulfillment of their vocation. Perhaps this dialogue between the new culture and the older churches is of the essence of the theological problem of our time. And this calls for a fresh dialogue between the churches and the Christian tradition and also between the churches and the world.

The confusion in almost every aspect of the churches' life and thought centers here. It accounts for the unrest among clergy and laity, the ferment in theological education, the paralysis in evangelism, and the gap between the leadership and the membership of the churches. Little wonder, then, that some able observers say that what the churches need is an evangelical revival that will issue in a new ecumenism and a fresh neighbor concern.

Twenty-five years ago the churches were more interested in "church dogmatics" than they are today. In 1969 they want a "frontier theology" set in the secular context, with an ecumenical character and implementation. This legitimate and welcome desire forces the churches to do some hard theological thinking on the nature of

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Christianity, the place and purpose of the church in God's work of human and world redemption, and the relation of church to world. In this painful but creative pursuit a pertinent question is put to the churches in the title of Langdon Gilkey's book, How the Church Can Minister to the World Without Losing Itself. It is taken for granted that the church must minister to the world, or it will lose itself. But it is also evident that before a church can minister to the world it must understand what it means to be a church, what kind of world it is asked to serve, and just how its unique ministry can be performed with effectiveness in the world of our time.