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Theological Table-Talk
By Charles C. West

THE EXPERTS AND THE REVOLUTIONARIES

The first world conference on church and society in nearly thirty years, and the third in the historic sequence with Stockholm 1925 and Oxford 1937, could not help but be a rich feast of ideas in stimulating company. Probably never has so great a collection of experts from so many areas of life been gathered under Christian auspices. The theologian in their midst was a modest and almost secondary figure. The four volumes issued in preparation are unique in Christian literature for the variety and the overall quality of their eighty contributions to social analysis and ethics from every part of the earth.¹ The complexities of the modern world were widely represented and competently discussed, and many a wise judgment was brought forth. This was the strength of the conference. It was also its problem. For one sensed that many of those present, representing no doubt the hopes of people back home, were hoping for something more.

There is a romanticism about ecumenical conferences. One expects something superhuman to happen there. One looks to them for a charismatic Word for the time and place where they occur. Stockholm was the high point of liberal theology's confidence in the power of Christian principles to illuminate and guide society. Oxford called the church to be truly the church, to reform and renew itself in the light of its social task in the revolutionary world of the 1930's. Amsterdam coined the term "responsible society" as a guide to Christians in rebuilding the post-Hitler world. But

Charles C. West is the Stephen Colwell Professor of Christian Ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary. His prior experience included service as a fraternal worker in China and later in Berlin, and a period as Associate Director of the Ecumenical Institute in Bossey, Switzerland. The present report embodies his comments on the World Conference on Church and Society, held in Geneva from July l2th through 16th, 1966.
¹ The preparatory volumes (Association Press, N. Y., and SCM Press, London, 1966: $5.50 per Volume) were: Christian Social Ethics in a Changing World, ed. by John C. Bennett, 381pp.; Responsible Government in a Revolutionary Age, ed. by Z. K. Matthews, 381 pp.; Economic Growth in World Perspective, ed. by Denys Munby, 380 pp.; and Man in Community, ed. by M. M. Thomas, 382 pp.

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what was the gift of the Spirit, the unifying and enlightening word, at Geneva 1966?

The Conference itself provided no obvious answer to this question. The incredible diversity of professional competence was feeling its way toward a common expression, but the process had only started when the meetings ended. Theology, which had given drive and direction to earlier assemblies composed largely of professional churchmen, was no longer a common language. The so-called "third world"-a term which must be understood here in terms of political and economic disadvantage-confronted the industrialized north of Europe and America more forcefully and articulately than ever before. Indeed, the old "east-west" tension between the Communist and non-Communist worlds was largely submerged in this new confrontation. But the points at which the issue was fought-the phrasing of resolutions on Rhodesia and Vietnam-were only the symptoms, not the basic issues of the conflict.

In short, the rich variety of issues and insights, but also the confusion, of Christendom in the modern world (and of the modern world itself) was widely exposed and expressed. Hardly a question was left untouched, from the most intimate relations of marriage and the family to the prevention of nuclear war. But it is left to the interpreter to discern the theme of the whole. This interpreter, therefore, will take the risk of saying that three problems were basic to all the others. They were not solved; they were only presented. They are an agenda which this conference presents to the churches, for the next few years.

DEMONS, TECHNOCRATS, AND THE NEW MAN

"What is new about our age?" asked Harvard professor Emmanuel Mesthene on the very first evening. Not, he answered, the prominencc of science and technology in themselves. Not even the rate of technological change. Rather it is that "we are the first age who can aspire to be free of the tyranny of physical nature that has plagued man from the beginning." Physical reality as a whole is becoming subject to the inventing, planning power of man. Nature no longer has its structures and its laws over against the human will;

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it is subject to human re-creation. Even man himself can be remade by man.

Mesthene described this situation as a "recovery of nerve." For the first time since the days of the ancient Greeks we believe that the universe is basically intelligible, that it can be subjected to human reason and transformed by human will. This is the process whereby man himself realizes his self-transcending humanity, inspired by his eternal possibility which is God.

Professor Jacques Ellul of Bordeaux could not have agreed more profoundly with the facts thus presented, nor disagreed more completely with the meaning given them. Technology is indeed transforming man and nature, but its sociological laws are its own and its development from any human perspective is ambivalent. Some problems are solved, and other new problems appear. The ambiguity of human nature expresses itself in unforeseen ways at each new stage as the power stakes are raised and the game becomes more dangerous. The Christian cannot stop this process, but neither need he fall victim to some ideology of an ideal future. It would be better for non-technological societies to take another direction-one in which more human freedom and culture is possible-while they still can. But within developed technology also, Christians have the task of "formulating the desirable" as distinct from the "foreseeable," of holding up what is human here and now as an immediate critique of technological processes and what they are doing to man. Technology is a causal social process which cannot be stopped or directed from within, but only by interests, values, ideas, and hopes brought to bear upon it from without.

This exchange raised two basic questions: (1) How intelligible is nature and what is the character of the knowledge we have of her? (2) Is the power of modern technology demonic, or liberating, or both at once and in what combination?

On the first of these it was quite clear that the two speakers were speaking of intelligibility on different planes and that the theological plane, if expounded, would intersect both. Ellul spoke as a sociologist, more explicitly in his massive book² than in this conference, of the deterministic structures of society which emerge in interaction with technology regardless of the human will. As a Christian he placed his confidence not in the freedom and possibilities of Chris-

² The Technological Society, New York (A. A. Knopf), 1964.

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tian individuals within the system but on an understanding of what is truly human which has its source quite outside the whole-the future kingdom breaking into our time and confronting it with judgment and, possibly, with transformation. Mesthene on the other hand meant two things at once by "intelligibility," and their interaction obscured the problem which Ellul raised. The "nerve" of the ancient Greeks, primarily of Aristotle, was based on confidence in an objective rational structure of the cosmos and all being in which man may come to participate by the full development of his reason and redirection of his passions. Modern technological man's "recovery of nerve" may draw exhilaration from this vision of the human mind embracing the universe. Mesthene was clearly thus exhilarated. But the character of what he knows is basically different. His is a controlling, inventing knowledge. He no longer knows a cosmos, a nature, or even an Unmoved Mover as a limit to his action and object of his contemplation. Physical reality is more like an infinitely resourceful and submissive woman who helps man only to forget in his self-development that there are any limits on him at all.

Within such intelligibility, however, problems arise. Knowledge becomes a form of action, as huge modern science foundations know full well. Man, having no objective structure of nature to investigate, faces the mystery of his own nature in the relation he establishes with physical reality by an investigation at once scientific and technological. A report by the Theological Working Group of the conference agreed with Mesthene that there is no determinate limit to man's capacity to explore the secrets of nature. But, it suggests, "nature" is itself ambiguous. On the one hand it is related to God as creation and thus has its independence of human perception; on the other it is that which man perceives, controls, and to a certain extent even produces. In both of these relations it is historical, a process rather than a structure. Biblical theology, by its distinction between God and his creation, has laid the foundation for this understanding. But it has also placed man's understanding of nature, as a form of his relation to God and his neighbor, in the context of the whole history of this relation. "Knowledge is not only the possession of data and its uses. It is a creative interaction between the known and the knower in which their mutual relationship

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is in a continuous process of renewal of understanding and clarification of meaning."

The questions of scientific knowledge and of technological power are basically the same, then, though the perspective differs. Is this knowledge and this power a blessing or a curse? Can man be its master or is he its slave?

The Geneva meeting began With an overwhelming weight of disagreement With Jacques Ellul on this point in its preparatory materials. Dietrich von Oppen, the German sociologist, interprets the breakdown of communal bonds and the rise of functional organizational relations as a liberation of man for personal decision.³ Harvey Cox finds in the biblical disenchantment of nature, value given to work, and the hope of changing things, Christian sources for modern technological attitudes.⁴ Behind him is van Leeuwen's powerful reinterpretation of history which sees in modern technocratic society spreading over the earth a consequence-albeit distorted by the sins of Western Christendom-of the impact of the biblical message on every subsequent age.⁵ These and other voices would not deny the critical danger that technological man may fail in his mission. Robert Theobald sounded the warning both in his article and at the conference by pointing to modern weaponry, population explosion, cybernated production, and the manipulation of human nature as areas where the time is short before disaster overtakes our opportunities,⁶ But the general tone of this pre-conference advice is well expressed in Cox's concluding words:

The once terrifying forces of nature, the thunder clap and the lightning flash, no longer frighten modern man. He has tamed the wild panthers of the natural world and harnessed their energies for his own uses. But man himself is now the cause of terror. His machines and machine-like organizations can do more damage, or bring more health, than all the thunder and lightning of the aeons put together. But we know that the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ is not just the God of nature. He is also the Lord of history, the supreme sovereign of economic and political life. He is not demythologizing the structures of corporate human existence

³ "The Era of the Personal," in Man in Community, Chapter 10.
⁴ "The Possibilities of the Christian in a World of Technology," in Economic Growth, Chapter 8 . See also C. West, "Community, Christian and Secular," in Man in Community, Chapter 20.
⁵ Christianity in World History, by A. Th. van Leeuwen. N. Y. Scribner's Sons, 1966.
⁶ "New Possibilities in Modern Technology," Economic Growth, Chapter 7.

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and bringing them under human control, just as he once conquered the natural forces. He holds in his hand a future for this technological man far richer and more brilliant than anything we have yet imagined.

The conference statements on the whole followed this confidence. The Economic Development report wrote wisely about ways to mitigate and humanize the effects of automation and to spread the benefits of technology throughout the world. A special working group on technology reiterated its crisis and opportunity, and urged the widest possible participation in decision making and power control. "At its best," reported the section on Man in Community, "technology can be part of man's historic search for truth and justice, and from this search it derives its real meaning," It is part of and should serve an enlarging and deepening human community.

These were some of the indices, and there were many others. The call was to participate on every level in the planning and humanizing of technocratic society, listening to problems as they arise, as well as speaking. But the haunting question remains whether the conference, with all its practical advice in this direction, has really helped and convinced. How is the uprooted man-the refugee, the urban migrant from the country, the man deprived in middle life of his skill or profession-to lay hold of the promise and responibility technology offers him? How, asked a Japanese participant, can technology be made liberating for large masses of people who do not, and in the nature of the case cannot, participate in the decision-making process-because they lack the education, or because they belong to a class or a nation which is powerless? How is the powerful man to rejoice in his power when he knows the destruction he himself may cause by a wrong decision-about the use of military force, the placing of an investment, or the development of a drug, to take only three examples? The result will and must be hundreds of conferences and studies over the next few years which will bring into focus problems like these in every area where technology is remaking life. The Ecumenical Institute at Bossey is already at work on the problems of human engineering, and the use of biochemical materials that affect human personality. But another result has been to sharpen the second issue of the conference to a critical point.

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POWER, HOPE, AND THE REVOLUTION

There was one strong contingent at the conference for whom the whole debate on technology was a secondary matter, the house-talk of a system of economic, political, and ideological power which they were concerned to confront with a total No. Social revolution is no stranger to ecumenical conferences, but nowhere in the history of the World Council of Churches has it been so vigorously and thoroughly articulated as here. The issue was not between advocates of a Marxist versus a "western" society, but between those who have prosperity and power in some degree-that band of nations which circles the globe in the Northern Hemisphere, and the dominant groups in those nations-versus the races and nations and other groups which are basically powerless. "Our basic demand," said the Nigerian lawyer 'Bola Ige, "is for a share of the power now concentrated in the hands of a minority of mankind." This demand will not be met by aid programs or trade concessions, or by development according to the powerful nations' ideas of what is best and subject to their control. But since one cannot expect that the holders of power will ever surrender it voluntarily, the weapon of the powerless is revolution. It is the relentless attack on all the "existing suffocating constitutions, systems and the powers that keep them going," until the people really have power in their hands, and can build their own future in freedom.

The premise of this attitude is that "development" of poorer nations by evolutionary stages in partnership with the industrially powerful countries of Europe, including the USSR and America, is an illusion which only perpetuates patterns of exploitation and poverty. The evidence for this was massively presented by the Brazilian Catholic Professor Candido Mendes, at least for Latin America. Economic development was undermined by the failure of political changes to keep pace. International capitalism, rather than an indigenous middle class, set the tone. The result has been a permanent enthronement of a bureaucratic class in economic and political control. The state has become the main economic agent supporting the economic interests of this class, but not those of national development. The common people remain permanently outside this economy or on the edge of it at subsistence wages, for the poor countryside provides an endless supply of workers.

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This is a society nicely adapted to accept changes-on the surface-in order to resist any basic change in the control of wealth or power. It is colonial because the ruling bureaucracy is linked with international interests usually based in North America. The task of the Christian, often against his church, is then to arouse the mind and conscience of the people to the revolutionary change. Camillo Torres, the Colombian priest who joined the guerillas fighting his government in the mountains, is a model of this action.

Richard Shaull was the conference theologian for this point of view, and its North American representative. What Ige discerned for Africa and Mendes for Latin America, he found to be true also of the pattern of technological change in highly industrial society. However much patterns of life may change, patterns of power tend only to be reinforced. In the United States, too, to work for humanization even in small ways forces one into ever more radical opposition to the system as a whole. Therefore "technology can contribute, in the long run, to human well-being and fulfillment only as it is challenged by revolution."

The problem then is to help the victims of every system of power to develop a tactic of revolutionary action something like the flexible methods of guerilla warfare, but applied in the political arena. The aim will be continual changes in the power situation where and whenever they can be made. The tactic will be non-violent where possible but not exclude violence. The whole will be undergirded by a disciplined faith and commitment to an open and hopeful future. At this last point the Christian has his basic ministry. He is called to live out in the form of his revolutionary involvement the judging and transfiguring power of Christ, the hope for an open future and for the triumph of weakness over power which his faith gives him. Theology must "keep going the difficult but not impossible running conversation between the full biblical and theological tradition and the contemporary human situation, and discover how, in this context, to point concretely to signs of hope and of grace, of meaning and fulfillment, in the midst of the ongoing struggle for the future of man."

One may well ask of all these men, what this concretely means. "Where is God at work in the revolution and where is the Devil?" asked the British economist Denys Munby in reply to Shaull. Dr. Max Kohnstamm of the European Coal and Steel Authority took

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sharp issue with Shaull for setting up "a general theory of revolution" and therefore of the violent overthrow of patiently constructed rules of human behavior which deepen into common institutions through which we slowly learn to affirm one another's existence and welfare. But it is not at all clear that the antagonists really differ. The realism of Reinhold Niebuhr underlies them both, that in a sinful world power must be coerced by power until such a balance emerges as will allow a rough and dynamic justice to be done. The tactics of revolution, as these men set them forth, were essentially to this end.

It would be a mistake, however, to underestimate the pathos of the revolutionary theme. A basic rejection of present society rooted often in deep personal experience permeated their stance. The basic corruption of an interlocking power system was their premise. The first question they asked of any faith or ideology concerned its influence for changing the world. This was, to be sure, not the united voice of the "third world." M.M. Thomas spoke for another group when he posed the problem of a people emerging into the dynamics of modern secular history seeking to give a creative meaning to their own past, as a basis for self-identity. But the spirit of revolution forced the conference to face more deeply than it would otherwise have done the brute facts of exploitation, of power struggle, of mistrust, and the need for a theology for social conflict and change. Much of the report writing, especially on questions of economic development, seemed oblivious to this challenge. But the use of violence in challenging unjust systems was recognized and circumscribed. And the Theological Working Group was led to expound the basically historical existence of the Christian in faith which places him in the midst of the struggle for justice and humanity with a special knowledge of the judgment of God on his present, and the hope which comes from his future.

THEOLOGY AND HER IDEOLOGIES

Before the Third World Conference on Church and Society began, a controversy was already raging about the secularization of human thought and life, and the end of ideology. The volume Man in Community is its principal locus. Man, it was said, following Bon-

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hoeffer, has become empirical and problem-solving in his maturity, needing neither religious assurance of his salvation nor metaphysical assurance to a total philosophy. This maturity is upheld by Christian faith which is neither a religion nor a world-view but a living relation to God and the neighbor. But, wrote André Dumas (Chapter 3), ideologies are still pervasive and necessary, where they do not become substitutes for faith. They may symbolize the purposes of society, and the Christian must support such symbols even as he criticizes them when they become idols.

It was this positive function of ideology which was dramatized for the conference especially from Latin America. It is, said Hiber Conteris of Argentina, "the emergence on the plane of consciousness, under the form or representation, of a situation which until that moment had simply been lived." It is the form of understanding and analysis of a life situation, which illumines the form of action which that situation requires. In some parts of the world, where the society is stable and change is incidental, such understanding linked to action may not be necessary. But for those caught in the tide of change, also for Christians, it is essential, not as a total world view, but as a guide.

How then does Christian faith, and more specifically Christian theology, interact with the positive task of ideology formation? In one sense theology, as the Working Group on Theology and Social Ethics recognized, is itself such a process. "Christians" discernment of what is just and unjust, human and inhuman in the complexities of political and economic change is ... a discipline which aims not at a theoretical system of truth but at action in human society." The Christian must continually respond to what he understands to be the action of God in the world, and proclaim it as such.

This involves theology itself in all the problems of ideology formation. For human thought and action are not God's, even though they may be faithful. Ideology always faces a crisis of confidence in itself when its validity is challenged by the analysis and experience of another group. Christians share in this dilemma and are not deterred by it from analyzing and acting. But the Christian has a resource than can help the ideologist. "Theology reflects not

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only action but interaction between God's revelation and man's ideological understanding of his own condition and desires." It is in the way they show themselves to be corrected by this relation, while they act, that Christians can help all men to keep their ideologies in a relative perspective.

This too, however, is agenda for the next few years. The adventure of creative thinking and action for social change is one on which the churches have entered as little as they have probed the depths of revolution and the complexities of technological responsibility. The value of this conference has been not that it has given us answers, but that it has shown us some of our tasks.