Defense of WCC on Church and Society

The executive secretary of the WCC in the United States considers Alice Widener’s critique a distortion

Each person I know who attended the Conference on Church and Society in Geneva in August, 1966, and who has read Alice Widener’s report on it (CHRISTIANITY TODAY, February 17, 1967) has expressed shock at the distortions that report contains. A Federal Reserve Bank officer wrote that the article “makes me wonder if the Conference is the same one I attended.”

A question inevitably arises, therefore, as to how you can know whom to believe. Is there a way readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY can decide for themselves whether the criticisms voiced in the Widener analysis were fair? The one dependable way is to read the conference report. (Official Report: World Conference on Church and Society is available from the World Council of Churches, 475 Riverside Drive, Room 439, New York, N. Y., 10027; $1.50 per copy.)

Let me here cite just one illustration of extreme distortion. Unfortunately, other distortions are as extreme. (An analysis of eighteen misrepresentations in the Widener report is available on request.) As a matter of fact, this distortion is so fantastic that it would be funny, were it not that some have apparently been frightened by it. Miss Widener writes:

Obviously believing that a desired end justifies any means, the Conference report proposes: “the deliberate transfer of non-capital and non-technical intensive industries to countries with insufficient capital but abundant man power, and the acceptance of the problems involved in the fundamental restructuring of economies in the developed countries which that entails.

Now turn to page 85 of the official report and look at the context of the sentences she quotes. To understand that context, it will be helpful to know something about procedures at such world conferences. Persons come from many parts of the world, with widely differing opinions. To report such a conference accurately it is necessary to have some record of this range of opinions. It is also necessary to distinguish clearly ideas presented by individuals from conclusions reached by a conference. So the report of a discussion in a section may be “received” by the entire conference with no implication of evaluation or approval of each item in it. Evaluation and approval are involved only in reports that are adopted.

The sentences Miss Widener quotes occur in a group of suggestions that are introduced by the covering phrase, “The situation might be improved by.…” Readers will note that this record of discussion was “received” by the conference. It was not adopted. What was adopted was the body of recommendations listed on pages 90 to 93 of the conference report. There such “transfer of industries” is not even mentioned.

Yet, quite ignoring this context, the Widener report goes on to imply that the World Council recommends that the United States get out of textile manufacturing! Miss Widener even goes on to ask,

How many millions of people would be dislocated, ruined, enslaved, tortured and murdered under a World Council of Churches plan to restructure the world economy and to redistribute wealth among nations by arbitrarily allocating the right to engage in this or that kind of industrial manufacture?

The World Council of Churches has no such plan. Its 223 member churches have never authorized it to draw up such a plan, and it is unthinkable that they would.

The extreme exaggerations in Miss Widener’s reporting, when she writes of a WCC “plan to restructure the world economy and to redistribute wealth among nations by arbitrarily allocating the right to engage in this or that kind of industrial manufacture,” provoke the following comments:

1. Does the official report indicate anywhere that the WCC has adopted such a plan? No! The Geneva conference was authorized only to prepare material for evaluation by member churches and by the council. It was not authorized to speak for them and did not.

2. Did this conference itself adopt such a plan? No! (Note the recommendations on pages 90–93.)

3. Did the section where this discussion took place recommend such a transfer? No!

4. Did the opinion voiced in the discussion section urge such a transfer? No! The record lists it only as one item that “might help” the situation. Moreover, a footnote to this part of the report states, “The Conference recognizes that these are highly complex questions on which further detailed study is needed” (p. 80).

The process followed by the WCC in calling the Geneva Conference is responsible and sound: (1) authorization by the Central Committee; (2) financing through designated funds; (3) authorizing the conference to speak only for itself, submitting its materials to the churches and the Council for evaluation; (4) publication of the working papers well in advance of the conference (the four volumes were published in the United States by the Association Press); (5) provision of appropriate time after the conference to allow study, evaluation, and report by member churches; (6) action by the WCC at the Assembly in 1968, when full delegations from member churches will be present.

Membership of the conference included a wide spectrum of opinion on both theological and economic matters. Miss Widener quite ignores the fact that attendance included: a member of the U. S. Congress; the former vice-chairman of the World Bank; a Federal Reserve Bank officer; the former director of the U. S. Information Agency; officers of several of this nation’s large business corporations; officials in the European Common Market; Conservative members of Parliament from Great Britain and the Netherlands; the director general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

Some readers, of course, will wonder why the Church should ever be concerned about economic questions at all. Why should the Church get into areas of thought where it can be subject to distorted and malicious attack? The other side of that issue is, Has the Church a right to close its eyes on massive human suffering? Such suffering exists today in dimensions too difficult for us to understand. Moreover, it is on the increase. One-half billion persons suffer crippling hunger today. A billion more are undernourished. India, Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, and perhaps China already face the prospect of becoming areas of chronic famine. In Africa, Latin America, and the Far East (excluding China), per-capita food production is below the pre-war level. In most of these countries, housing lags vastly behind need, with half to two-thirds of the existing housing substandard. The population of Latin America between 1960 and 1965 increased 11 per cent, food production only 6 per cent. Meanwhile, in the prosperous United States six million families live on less than $40 a week.

What is the Church of Jesus Christ to do in the face of these facts? He died and rose from the dead for all men. Can the Church, which is his Body, be indifferent to such suffering?

To call for justice for the poor is a Christian task. The Church dare not avoid its obligation to lift before mankind the moral and spiritual issues operative in the political and economic forces that help produce and perpetuate poverty.

The prophet Amos lived at a time of great suffering. He was not content to sit in Tekoa and lament. He was not satisfied to wait until greater suffering occurred and then organize a program for the distribution of old clothes or baskets of food. He strode into the temple and called uncompromisingly for the establishment of justice among people.

One of the tasks of the Church is always to make clear to its people and the world the meaning of justice. Since the day when Micah thundered at those who “covet fields and seize them, and houses and take them away,” and Amos pronounced judgment upon “you who trample upon the needy and bring the poor of the land to an end,” it has not been possible to isolate the question of justice from that of economics. To deal with such questions under the probing light of Christian conviction is always to invite controversy and attack. Nevertheless, the Church cannot turn back from the call of justice.

The World Conference on Church and Society in Geneva was a responsible attempt of Christians—from many countries, many churches, and many cultures—to lift before the churches, the World Council of Churches, and the world the moral and spiritual issues we face in seeking today to alleviate human suffering. This attempt was set within the larger framework of an effort to assess in Christian terms the revolutionary changes of our time and the response the Church should make to them. The report of that conference deserves independent, thoughtful study. I welcome that report as a Christian response to the call of Amos, “Hate evil and love good, and establish justice.” I welcome that report as a sign that Christians today take seriously these searching questions of Scripture: “What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (James 2:14–17).

Editor’S Comments: The Wcc And Socialism

Dr. Smith’s complaint that Alice Widener’s critique of the Geneva Conference on Church and Society was distortive of ecumenical aims raises some fundamental questions about the World Council of Churches’ involvement in political and economic activities.

It is ecumenically popular to justify propagandistic consultations by a covering appeal to the Christian Church’s responsibility in the area of social justice. But the fact is that ecumenical consultations today tend to reflect and to repeat the specifically slanted politico-economic ideology of the influential churchmen who approve these gatherings.

Without any reservation it can be said that, for a conference on church and society, the WCC could have assembled scholarly churchmen who were as highly respected in the world of liberal learning as those who met at Geneva but whose views were very different from those promoted there. Ecumenical spokesmen and meetings repeatedly throw their weight behind a controversial ideological slant that does not fairly reflect the divergence in their constituencies. Thus they dignify and propagandize their biased commitments in the name of the ecumenical church’s prophetic responsibility to justice.

Here we only wish to comment on the ecumenical legitimacy or illegitimacy of the Geneva Conference.

The procedure for convening the conference was: (1) authorization to proceed by the WCC Central Committee; (2) authorization of financing through designated funds; (3) authorization of the conference to speak for itself and to submit its materials to the churches and the WCC for evaluation; (4) authorization of publication of working papers ahead of the conference; (5) participation by persons from around the world “with widely differing opinions”; (6) distinguishing ideas presented by individuals from conclusions reached; (7) “receiving” reports without evaluation or approval; (8) “adoption” of reports when evaluation and approval were implied; (9) provision of time after the conference to allow study, evaluation, and reports by member churches; (10) action on the statements by the WCC at the 1968 Assembly, when full delegations will be present.

From this procedure it is obvious that the WCC Central Committee alone made the Geneva Conference possible on the very basis on which it was actually conducted. Its “widely differing opinions” reduced to a conspicuous promotion of a socialist ideology and of revolutionary means of achieving it.

If, as Dr. Smith insists, the World Council of Churches has no “plan to restructure the world economy and to redistribute wealth among nations …,” it should be called upon to evidence its good faith and to correct the ideological imbalance of Geneva by sponsoring a second conference on church and society whose participants would be equally learned and devout churchmen holding views diametrically opposed to many of the positions reflected by the Geneva Conference, where contrary views were minimized, if not distorted.

American Christians will now be eager to see what representation is given to non-socialist views in the U. S. Conference on Church and Society, to be sponsored by the National Council of Churches October 22 to 26, 1967.

While technically the WCC disavows responsibility for the “conclusions” of such conferences as Geneva, in the public mind all the prestige and power of the ecumenical movement is transferred to the highly publicized views that are presented. Not even the world press makes a careful distinction. In fact, the world press covers such conferences on the assumption that they have ecumenical significance and influence; otherwise they would scarcely be worth extensive time and space. An examination of reports of the Geneva sessions by special correspondents as well as by AP, UPI, and Reuters shows that the term “Conference” and “World Council” or “Council” were used interchangeably. The New York Times headlined its report on one day, “Churchmen Urge ‘Radical’ Action,” and on the following day, “Shift in Church Council.”

Once the press has given world visibility to slanted politico-economic positions in association with a WCC-related conference, it is of little practical consequence that WCC leaders emphasize to pockets of protest that nothing officially commits the World Council.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY therefore suggests that the World Council of Churches, as an evidence of its professed objectivity and impartiality in this area, sponsor a second Geneva Conference with a wholly different spectrum of ecumenical participants. The case against Marxism can be effectively stated by churchmen of various theological persuasions. Let them be men of prominence—men like Dr. Charles Malik (Orthodox), former chairman of the United Nations General Assembly; Dr. Eric Voegelin (Roman Catholic), formerly of the University of Munich, now lecturing in the United States; Dr. Benjamin Rogge (Episcopal), distinguished professor, Wabash College, Indiana; Dr. Gottfried Deitze (Lutheran), professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University—and a hundred others of all denominational and theological traditions who would challenge the perspectives given visibility at the Geneva Conference and point the Christian Church in sounder directions. It is not simply a disgruntled evangelical minority outside the ecumenical mainstream that the Geneva emphases offend; the elevation of socialism to an ecclesiastical credo is offensive to a vast multitude of Christians.

We are not here urging the WCC to “get into politics on the right” rather than “on the left.” We are simply saying that the weight of ecumenism is repeatedly cast behind partisan political and economic positions, whereas any honorable dialogue demands visibility for the alternatives. It would be better, to be sure, if the World Council would get out of politics and back to the Gospel. A truly prophetic mission will find its texts not in Marx but in the Bible.—ED.

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