Charting a Course

Not many months ago, while parked alongside one of Amsterdam’s five canals, I faced a rather unsettling thought. Soon, I said to myself, you will be facing a number of American audiences—people who more and more expect to hear something new as the reward for putting in an appearance. What will you say? My car was still grimy with the dust of driving 5,400 miles in Britain and 3,100 miles on the continent. Memories remained from every mile, memories I have not yet been able to shake off—of the months in Cambridge, the fortnight in Yugoslavia with Christian workers from Eastern European countries, of the Red-capped border guard whose refusal of an entry visa the weekend after the Black Anniversary riots deprived me of an opportunity to fellowship with two congregations in Prague.

We see the world through our own eyes, of course; this is inevitable, if not always good.

Billy Graham, heartened by the impact on European churches of his recently concluded Euro ’70 campaign, is greatly cheered by spiritual prospects there. However in the minority they may be, many Christians on the Continent have grown weary of the unending theological speculation of neo-Protestant scholars, and long to see the New Testament Gospel permitted to speak for itself once again. Theological students in Germany turned out in goodly number for Graham’s meetings, some out of curiosity, some out of qualified respect, not a few out of genuine interest. At one theological school, when a visiting American professor went out of his way to criticize Graham, the students booed and let it be known that they had been attending the services.

In Vaux, France, the new evangelical seminary is making steady gains, and in Basel, Switzerland, a new evangelical seminary will open this fall. A year from now European evangelicals hope to gather in Amsterdam for a national congress on evangelism.

Yet the time is gone in world history when evangelical Christians can come together in major gatherings without fixing attention on specific targets and observing a convinced order of priorities. Needless to say we cannot do everything, but by coordinating our efforts we shall at least be able to do some specific things that would otherwise remain undone. The world desperately needs our best efforts right now.

There is one Christian principle that the Communists seem to have deployed to their own devices, and until evangelical Christians recover it for themselves, they will, I think, suffer needless losses in today’s ideological conflict. That principle is the conviction that truth is not simply something to be known but something to be done, that is, to be translated into definitive action. Sometimes we hear it said that evangelical Protestants are long on fellowship but short on strategy, an assessment not altogether wrong. Timely and dramatic implementation seems to be wanting.

No Communist party workers today would think of adjourning a meeting without deciding how to implement particulars. Communists do not spend time deciding which events are good or bad (that distinction is too demanding for a naturalistic philosophy); they ask, rather, which developments are most useful for their purposes. Their chief concern is to make events of the day serve their goals, to make them contribute to a Communist future. Before any gathering disperses, they accordingly ask one another: What precisely is to be done, and who is to do it?

To many evangelicals, such an approach to Christian penetration might seem a bit irreverent—might imply, perhaps, a distrust of Divine Providence, a running ahead of the Holy Spirit, or a superimposition of human wisdom on the spiritual graph of history. Is this necessarily the case, however?

On the basis of present evangelical commitments, my own interpretation is no more optimistic concerning the European scene than the American. True, the opportunity for evangelical penetration is there; whether evangelicals accept the challenge is something else. Organized Christianity in Europe and in America seems to have forfeited its opportunity. Will evangelical Christians rise to theirs?

Recently the secretary for evangelism for the World Council of Churches, Dr. Walter Hollenweger, revived the kind of slander of non-conciliar ecumenists attempted by ecumenical aides prior to the World Congress on Evangelism. Evangelicals interested in the 1966 gathering in Berlin were said to be a species of Nazi Christians who wished the churches to concentrate on their traditional routines without challenging Hitler’s disregard of human rights and his slaughter of Jewry. Speaking in the United States, Dr. Hollenweger presumed to find in present-day American Christianity a division among Christians—those interested mainly in evangelism, and those interested primarily in the social implications of Christianity. Such partisan exaggeration of the differences should be viewed, it seems to me, as little more than polemical support of the kind of political Christianity often identified with conciliar ecumenism and largely responsible for disenchanting multitudes of churchgoers with institutional Christianity.

When such ugly rumors were circulated among the Berlin clergy in advance of the World Congress, several of the congress leaders made a special trip to Berlin to assure the misinformed German clergy that American evangelicals do not idolize Hitler but are devoted rather to implementing Jesus Christ’s commission and the command of God. The late Bishop Otto Dibelius, who made a courageous stand against the Communists, in due season welcomed participants in the World Congress on Evangelism to Berlin and addressed a public meeting. He told how he had urged the World Council of Churches to throw its full weight behind evangelism, and to use Billy Graham as a model in mass crusades; but the executive committee was unmoved.

It would be well if the evangelistic arm of the World Council talked more about Jesus Christ. Hitler is dead; should his ghost reappear, it will do so because the Risen Christ has been restrained or disallowed. If my memories and impressions of Europe suggest anything, it is the imperative, priority need of widespread personal commitment to Jesus Christ, and then of the translation of this commitment into all the spheres of life and culture.

Evangelical Protestants hope and pray for a better future, and that is fine, but not enough. The time has come to chart and implement specific courses of action.

CARL F. H. HENRY

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