Theology Today - Vol 36, No. 4 - January 1980 - BOOK REVIEW

570 - Christianity and the World Order & Amsterdam to Nairobi: The World Council of Churches and the Third World

Christianity and the World Order
By Edward R. Norman
New York, Oxford University Press, 1979. 104 pp. $9.95.

Amsterdam to Nairobi: The World Council of Churches and the Third World
By Ernest W. Lefever
Washington, D.C., Georgetown University, Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1979, 114 pp. $10.00, $5.00 (paper).

Dean Norman is Lecturer in History at Cambridge, and his jeremiad on political theology in general, and the World Council of Churches in particular, has received widespread attention. The attention is attributable not to the novelty of his argument but to the freshness of its expression and, most important, to its being aired as the prestigious BBC Reith Lectures of 1978. Nor did it hurt that his statement came in the wake of the uproar over WCC grants to the Patriotic Front in Zimbabwe.

The burden of Norman's complaint is that agencies such as the WCC have exchanged the Christian heritage for a mess of political pottage. "Politicization does not mean mere political activity-indeed some politicized Christians … are notable for a very low level of participation in actual political organization." Polificization means that Chris-

572 - Christianity and the World Order & Amsterdam to Nairobi: The World Council of Churches and the Third World

tianity is "being reinterpreted as a scheme of social and political action, dependent, it is true, upon supernatural authority for its ultimate claims to attention, but rendered in categories that are derived from the political theories and practices of contemporary society." Statements by Christian leadership frequently "elevate political virtue as the test of authentic belief."

The result is not that Christian witness becomes too controversial but that it is so boringly predictable. "[Politicized Christians] believe they are bringing a Christian critique to bear upon the great problems of the day; that they comprise an external body of ideals. But that is not actually the case, due to the progressive secularization of the values to which their own understanding of religion is made to correspond." The church's posture is merely imitative of "enlightened" secular viewpoints and thereby ends up advancing a secularism inimical to Christianity. "Modern educationalists are secular in outlook, but also committed moralists. So their endeavours spread secular morality." Norman is scornful of the claim that the WCC's formula radicalisms are responsive to the dispossessed of the Third World. Third World "spokespersons" who are prominent in ecumenical councils "are not the wretched of the earth, but members of the bourgeois elite, emotionally attached to the idealism of social change. Their radicalism is itself a class characteristic of disaffected elements within the intelligentsia."

Norman joins other critics in scoring the WCC for its "double standard" in condemning injustices, noting a selective morality in the outrage directed toward capitalism and the West and a virtual silence with respect to socialist and "progressive" states. "The bloodshed and the ferocity of the security measures employed by General Pinochet's military junta have been exceeded in the advent of socialist regimes to South Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, and Afghanistan. But it is Chile that has continued to be condemned by the churches. Why is this?" Why are some violators of human rights excoriated while others are excused or even exalted? The condemned, answers Norman, "are those countries whose governments are for other, political, reasons earmarked for destruction."

Ernest Lefever's little book, Amsterdam to Nairobi: The World Council of Churches and the Third World, is similar in argument to Norman's. It has the additional value of providing detailed documentation in support of the charges made. Also, more than Norman, Lefever has an understanding of the churches' responsibility "to seek greater justice, freedom, and security in this world." Finally, Lefever offers very specific and positive proposals for the more effective exercise of that responsibility. Lefever is interested in the mechanics of implementing the "prudential imperative" suggested by George F. Will in the foreword: "The record of the WCC is only in part a record of some people who are well-intentioned but breathtakingly silly. Some of the people involved are more sinister than silly, and even those who are only' silly are culpable. Always, but especially in the high-stakes

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business of politics, there is a moral obligation to be intelligent." Lefever agrees with Paul Ramsey, whom he quotes, that church people need to "correct the pretense that we are makers of political policy and get on with our proper task of nourishing, judging, and repairing the moral and political ethos of our time."

What is one to make of the charges leveled by Norman, Lefever, and others? If one cares about the constituting vision of the World Council of Churches (and, by inference, other organizations such as the National Council of Churches), the charges should be taken very seriously indeed. To be sure, these critics focus on the more controverted aspects of WCC work, largely ignoring unexceptionable but significant activities in humanitarian relief, theological dialogue, and the like. Yet, notably since the 1966 Geneva church and society conference, the WCC has articulated an encompassing posture toward social change to which almost all of its programming has been subordinate and which must be acknowledged as ideological. Those who strike an ideological stance with respect to the nature of the modern world-who is the oppressed, who is the oppressor, what socio-political systems hinder or advance the course of justice-have no complaint when those who analyze the world differently express their disagreement. It is a self-serving fatuity to dismiss critics such as Lefever and Norman as right-wing reactionaries of the ilk of Carl McIntire and other enemies of ecumenism.

To ignore the critics and, if they cannot be ignored, to deny what is valid in their critique is an unimaginative, dishonest, defensive, and finally self-defeating course. Yet, as seems to be inevitable with bureaucracies of all sorts-whether governmental, corporate, or ecclesiastical-the reflex when under attack is to adopt a seige mentality, to hunker down, and to claim that the critics are assaulting not the activities of the organization but the laudable purposes for which the organization was established. In short, a "them" and "us" mindset takes hold; to criticize the WCC is to oppose Christian unity, human liberation, and most things true and beautiful. The truth is that the WCC is in deep trouble. Its declining support and credibility, both in the churches and in the world it would address, will only be accelerated by ignoring the issues raised by Norman and Lefever.

It is relatively easy to impugn the intentions of these two critics. Norman finally does advocate a kind of withdrawal from the churches' social responsibility. His approval of the church's role in the Soviet Union and his resignation in the face of South Africa's "separate development" will strike many readers as outrageously ill-informed and indifferent to human suffering. As to Lefever, one cannot down the impression that he would not be so upset were the WCC to take positions more in accord with his own understanding of the right in, for example, Zimbabwe-Rhodesia or the field of nuclear strategy. Lefever's positive proposals are aimed chiefly at getting a better "balance" and coherence in WCC position-taking. Whether Norman is a quietist and Lefever a partisan who wants a better hearing for his side, both critics

575 - Christianity and the World Order & Amsterdam to Nairobi: The World Council of Churches and the Third World

expose mendacities and often mindless assumptions that have severely compromised the WCC as an agency that can "speak truth to power." Their intentions do not nullify the importance of the questions they raise.

Rather than engaging in frenetic efforts to dismissively "answer" the critics, friends of the WCC and of ecumenical social witness in general should press the questions further. If confidence in the WCC is to be restored, we should return to the "first principle" issues that shaped its founding vision at Amsterdam and before. Some of these issues were forcefully set out in Paul Ramsey's Who Speaks for the Church?, a response to the 1966 Geneva conference. A more dispassionate evaluation of Ramsey's case might now be possible, as it was not at the height of sixties turmoil over racial justice and Vietnam. On the theological level more attention should be paid to critics such as Wolfhart Pannenberg and John Meyendorff who have addressed WCC confusions in its Faith and Order work. In his recent book Living Tradition (St. Vladimir's Press), Meyendorff offers very specific recommendations for lifting up a theocentric anthropology and Christocentric confession that could make the WCC's witness more Christianly distinctive and therefore more believable and effective.

Theology is at the heart of a fundamental and urgently needed reconceptualization of what is meant by "church and society." The proper purpose of peace and justice bureaucracies is not to speak or act for the churches but to help the church be a "zone of truth and concern" in which the diverse views of peace and justice that exist among the people of God are intelligently engaged in the process of historical change that will only be consummated correctly-with results likely surprising to all of us-in the coming of the Kingdom. Norman and Lefever lay bare the bankruptcy of continuing with business as usual. Theirs is no little contribution, but it is far from the last word. If the WCC is to become anything more than the reliquary of a lost hope, now begins the hard work of theological and strategic reconstruction.

Richard John Neuhaus
Worldview
New York, New York