Many neo-protestant ecumenists see the Church’s task as restructuring historical institutions into the Kingdom of God through socio-political revolution. This historicized eschatology replaces the central evangelical task of persuading sinners to accept forgiveness of sins and eternal life through the Risen Christ.
Snippets of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison letters are often quoted out of context to establish that revolutionary activist as a champion of radical secularism. In setting forth their alternatives to supernatural theism, Jürgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg import time into the nature of God, and deny the universal validity of New Testament doctrines. As a result, their emphasis that Jesus’ resurrection illuminates the eschatological goal of history readily accommodates a political view of the Church’s task in the world. Still newer types of dogmatics adjust historic Christian theism to a camouflaged atheistic humanism; biblical motifs survive only with an altered meaning, and these theologians celebrate the death of God by affirming man’s ability to fashion his own ideal society.
Myriads of young clergymen now herald Marxism as a norm of twentieth-century social ethics. They ignore the lean evangelical fragments that survive in recent mediating views. Many seminarians no longer connect the future or the present with the Bible or with Jesus. They are aware of how modernists, dialectical theologians, existentialists, and others manipulate the texts to maintain the “Christian authenticity” of their positions. Neo-Protestant theologians have made the Scriptures a rubber mask for their speculations. Now hundreds seeking ministerial careers have abandoned the conviction that the Christian Church exists on an apostolic base for divine purposes exhibited in Jesus Christ. They insist instead that the Church must change its own structures in order to get wholly involved in social revolution. Many politically oriented seminarians plan to use the traditional churches as instruments for smashing sociological and ecclesiastical structures.
Peter Beyerhaus, professor and director of the Institute of Missiology and Ecumencial Theology at Tubingen University, notes that the Reformation motif sola scriptura is yielding to the contemporary theme sola structura. Beyerhaus should know. Radical Marxist divinity students at Tübingen hold a “regeneration” party whenever another seminarian is converted from Christ to Marx. These revolutionaries propagandize for the addition of more radical professors to the faculty.
One estimate finds eighty active leftists among the 600 seminarians at Tübingen. Sixty others are strongly evangelical, while the remaining 460 divide about equally into those who consider the Church’s task primarily social change and those who are unsure of their theological commitments and Christianity’s mission in the world.
The 1968 WCC Assembly in Uppsala gave little assurance that ecumenical Christianity sees clearly the difference between humanization and redemption. In an ecumenical atmosphere pervaded by theological pluralism, both evangelicals and secularists strive to register their views as official. But ecumenical programs, personnel, and publications handicap the evangelical witness.
Because of the sorry state of theological education and the direful consequences for the churches, German evangelical theologians launched the new Confessional Movement (Bekenntnisbewegung “Kein anderes Evangelium”). Its first goal is theological renewal within the traditional churches; alternative structures are not to be seriously considered unless the inside attempt fails. In some church jurisdictions, evangelical leadership has already been achieved. The most significant development was the unified theological witness led by Walter Künneth of Erlangen that issued the “Frankfurt Declaration of the Fundamental Crisis of Christian Mission.”
The Frankfurt Declaration boldly and clearly analyzes the crisis in Christian mission. It locates the central problem not in changed historical circumstances or in outworn structures but in modern speculative assumptions that undermine the Christian message and task and betray the lost multitudes for whom Christ’s Gospel is intended. Over against the politically oriented mission theology of the WCC’s evangelism division, the Frankfurt Declaration gives a precise analysis of disquieting doctrinal deviation—more precise than American evangelicals produced in their Wheaton Declaration. The Frankfurt Declaration reaffirms the evangelical theological basis, content, and goal that stimulated cooperative missionary effort until its ecumenical derailment in this century.
Significantly, the declaration was issued by the theologically oriented Confessional Movement, and not by evangelicals solely interested in mass evangelism. Bultmann and other neo-Protestant dogmaticians have been making embarrassing inroads among pietistic students whose evangelistic zeal was unmatched by theological learning. After the Frankfurt Declaration there emerged the Conference of Confessing Fellowships in the Evangelical Church in Germany, a confederation of groups interested in theological renewal and apologetics as indispensable to evangelical witness.
Evangelicals in Germany face obstacles to large-scale cooperation similar to those in England and the United States, and the ecumenical alternative prospers through evangelical fragmentation. Whereas the Bekenntnisbeweguns is largely oriented to “state church” issues, the Evangelical Alliance is largely free-church oriented. Some ecumenical leaders have recently made noteworthy overtures to Baptist and Methodist groups whose leaders work to tie their churches fully to the ecumenical movement.
Samuel Külling of the Free Academy in Basel is pessimistic about possibilities of renewal within any ecumenical framework. The confessional movement considers this verdict premature, and hopes for across-all-lines evangelical cooperation. Its leaders concede that the ecumenical hierarchy may fast be approaching the uncomfortable options of accepting evangelical renewal or persecuting evangelicals. In a show of evangelical unity, the German Conference of Evangelical Missions in February approved the Frankfurt Declaration side by side with the Wheaton Declaration.
There are multiplying signs of widening evangelical interest in theological learning alongside evangelistic engagement. In Tübingen, Bengel House, an evangelical center, houses thirty divinity students pursuing serious theological and evangelistic work. Basel’s Free Academy offers course work at university level. Evangelical vision now reaches beyond evangelism crusades to publication of a confessional journal such as this writer encouraged a decade ago in conversations projecting Christentum Heute as a German arm of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.
