An Ecumenical Self-Indictment

Antagonists of the World Council of Churches and of the ecumenical movement as a whole need no longer polish up arguments pointed at the adversary’s battlements. The fourteen contributors to the symposium Unity In Mid-Career, An Ecumenical Critique (edited by Keith R. Bridston and Walter D. Wagoner, Macmillan, 1963, 211 pp., $4.95) have carried their ecumenical critique so far that self-examination on their part has turned into self-indictment. The task has been so thoroughly done that it would be hard to improve upon it. Whatever criticism may be directed at it, the Bridston-Wagoner team is to be given credit for a great show of intellectual honesty.

At the outset, Liston Pope gives a foretaste as well as a promise of what is to come, with a candid admission that member bodies of the World Council of Churches have little in common theologically except a confession of “the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour,” the same confession being subject to diverse interpretations. In actual practice, most of these inter pretations are dominated by a concern for self-preservation. Quite a paradox in an organization primarily devoted to church unity! The problem of reaching the actual membership of the churches puts in an early appearance in the same paper, and the fact that it is raised again and again throughout the volume bears witness to its importance. Thus Walter Leibrecht finds it quite pathetic to see how little of the “fine work” done in the various departments trickles down to the congregations and their individual members. Indeed, the purpose of the WCC is no longer clearly under stood by the people. The popular image of the Council is that of “an organization of its own, an entity in itself.” In the same setting, the local minister has become “the Cinderella of the Ecumenical Movement” (Robert Paul). His chances of ever representing his denomination at a major assembly prove nonexistent unless he is the minister of a large and “successful” parish. Local youth workers fare worse still, according to John Garrett, who borrows the title of his paper, “Oikumene and the Milkman,” from the exclamation of the correspondent of an international wire agency: “I’m wondering what all this is going to mean to the Kansas City milkman.”

With the formation of the WCC, the ecumenical movement is becoming institutionalized. The difficulty of this transitional stage, according to Bridston, may be partly explained in terms of the Bismarckian comment: “Politics is the art of the possible.” But then, how can one forget that in pre-WCC days, the basic activity of Faith and Order derived its dynamism from a youthful independent leadership such as was then found in the Student Christian Movement? There was in evidence among churches in those days the pioneering and renewing power of a truly prophetic tradition. In this situation, the WCC may well appear as a potential hindrance to the ecumenical movement because it is both an institution—and as such tends to resist change—and an ecclesiastical institution, which may well become a super-organization, a kind of ecclesiastical monstrosity. Indeed, the WCC would seem to be susceptible to at least some of the common ecclesiastical afflictions Nicolas Berdyaev had in mind when he wrote of the ecumenical councils that “few things are more expressive of human pettiness, treachery, and fraud.” The least that can be said on the subject is that, as Leibrecht puts it, “lifting the councils to ecclesiological heights” will hardly “serve the progress of the ecumenical cause.”

Politics Or Bureaucracy

The problems faced by the WCC are not only those of a political organism—from bargaining for seats to control by self-perpetuating executive cliques—but those of the only alternative to politics, which is bureaucratic domination. Linder a bureaucratic regime, then, problems of politics are turned into problems of administration, and arbitrary decrees are often the result. Programming boards mushroom on every side and make themselves indispensable. This proliferation of boards and councils at every level adds up to a top-heavy machinery which must be fed by ever larger budgets. Thus the National Council of Churches in 1962 surpassed the dimensions of the WCC (staff, 650 vs. 202; budget, $15,414,110 vs. $1,297,000). According to Henry P. Van Dusen, the National Council of Churches has been described as “beyond challenge, the most complex and intricate piece of machinery which this planet has ever witnessed.” No wonder John Garrett feels like quoting a perceptive collector of dreary Council draft documents who once said: “In the ecumenical movement of the twentieth century, the Word was made paper.”

The fact of the imbalance just pointed out between the NCC and the WCC has naturally led to the charge that the entire organization is a vehicle of the West in general and the United States in particular. Discussing the issue “Regionalism or Centralism?” as it appears east of New Delhi, U Kyaw Than, a Baptist of Burma, is sadly amused to see churchmen from Asia regarded by those of the West as representing younger churches as well as new nations, while the truth is that a number of Asian churches trace their history back to the apostolic days, “long before Columbus discovered America or England first heard the Gospel.” In a somewhat similar mood, Elizabeth Adler exposes the superior attitude of the Westerner to the Eastern Christian. But then an Orthodox priest, Alexander Schmemann, articulates the same kind of complaint with regard to the position of the Orthodox churches in the World Council. His thesis is that “in spite of all official pronouncements, affirmations or actions, the Orthodox participation in the WCC … encounters a deeply rooted suspicion and hostility.…” Going to the root of this attitude, Schmemann ascribes it to an initial faux pas.

Truth Over Unity

As he views the whole ecumenical issue, it is truth and not unity which should be the immediate goal of the movement—or rather, unity is “nothing else but the natural consequence of truth, its fruit and blessing.” A possible ground for ecumenism was to be found in the living tradition of the Church, but it was ignored. The ecumenical problem and preoccupation was no longer the content of the tradition, but the very fact of its existence. The ultimate choice between truth and heresy was displaced by the presupposition that ultimately all “choices” are to be integrated into one synthesis. “The word ‘heresy,’ in fact, is absent even today from the ecumenical vocabulary, and does not exist even as a possibility.” Hence the fundamentally false position of the Orthodox Church in the WCC—false, that is, both theologically and institutionally, “and this falsehood explains the constant Orthodox ‘agony’ in the Ecumenical Movement, the anxiety and the doubts it raises in Orthodox consciousness.”

For most of the contributors to the present symposium, unity is something to be achieved by human effort. In the words of Lewis S. Mudge, Jr., “Ultimately, the churches themselves must decide what the one great Church is to be, and, in conversations with each other, seek to achieve it.” For what purpose, may one ask? William B. Cate points out that in the last analysis one is to look “to the day when enough unity will be realized so that all churches in a community can sit down together and, in the light of relevant and sociological facts viewed from various religious perspectives, begin to plan the total mission of the church for Main Street.” But even this down-to-earth conclusion seems to be too ambitious. As Walter Leibrecht looks at the record of actual achievements, all he can say is that “in spite of all the optimism displayed by some conciliar association enthusiasts, we have through our ecumenical effort only reached the state where churches begin to be polite to one another”—which sounds like the year-end evaluation of what the local church Sunday school has achieved.

No Biblical Reference

What most impressed this reader as he waded through so much organizational manipulation was the absence of any basic biblical reference to that which constitutes the Church. He has missed the victorious outcry, “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there I am in the midst of them.” There unity arises as genuine disciples acknowledge the presence of one another. As Rudolf Sohm put it in his little classic, Outlines of Church History, “It is by no means essential to the Church … that it should have a legal constitution, with Pope and Bishops, Superior Ecclesiastical Council, and Superintendents, after the fashion of the State. On the contrary, if every congregation of believers represents the Church, that is, the whole of Christendom with Christ its head, then no single congregation has any legal authority over another. And if Christ alone is the head of Christendom, that is, of the Church which is Christ’s body, then no man may presume to make himself the head of the Church.” And the same applies to groups of men. Therefore, as a subtitle of Ralph Hyslop suggests, it remains for the churches to discover the Church.

Wherever and whenever bodies of Christians, however small, in the grace of God acknowledge one another’s discipleship in His name, there and then is the unity of the whole represented. There and then does Oikumene come into its own. And lo and behold, it is all of the Lord’s doing. This evangelical approach to the subject has steadily been upheld by men of the calibre of John A. Mackay, who has done more than any other living American I know for the cause of genuine ecumenism, and whose absence from this symposium may or may not be purely coincidental.

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