Program to Combat Atheism

Ten years ago, Ian Henderson launched a savage attack on the World Council of Churches in his Power Without Glory: A Study in Ecumenical Politics. Professor of systematic theology at Glasgow University who acknowledged a great debt to Bultmann, Henderson wrote with wicked wit as he set out to expose the tricks of the conciliar trade. His thesis: a cosmic swindle is being practiced; ecumenical discussions are never quite what they seem; the double-think and the doubletongue are inevitable; language is used to conceal rather than reveal motives; ecclesiastical takeover bids have increased, are increasing, and ought to be diminished; failure to recognize institutional churches as power structures is leading to mass delusion; and God does not will unity just because the 1927 Lausanne Declaration says he does.

Just published from a very different source is The Fraudulent Gospel: Politics and the World Council of Churches (The Foreign Affairs Publishing Company, Essex, England). The author is Bernard Smith, an Anglican layman, founder of the Christian Affirmation Campaign. The CAC, briefly, upholds the authority of Scripture and creedal Christianity, traditional moral values, and personal freedom and responsibility. It opposes modernist theology, the idea that the kingdom of God is no more than human brotherhood, and the attempt to interpret the Gospel as revolutionary politics.

Smith’s ninety-nine-page paperback documents the WCC’s dealings with or attitudes toward such subjects as African terrorists, Black Power in Britain, the Soviet Union and human rights, Georgi Vins, Jews in the USSR, North American Indians, the Viet Nam war, South Korea, missions and Marxism, and the theology of anti-Christ. The front cover has a picture of the bodies of twenty-seven Black Rhodesians “massacred by WCC-financed terrorists” in December 1976.

Dr. Henderson’s attack was satirical, presumably on the basis that, like Thomas More’s Devil, the WCC does not care to be mocked. Mr. Smith’s approach is rather different; he has painstakingly gathered together data concerning the Council’s obsession with a Christian social philosophy. His thesis: member churches have too readily surrendered their authority and independence to the WCC; and (here Smith quotes Britain’s leading Anglican newspaper) “the WCC has displayed a political bias recognisably Marxist in its preference for social revolution of a Leftward character over any spiritual initiative of Christian mission in the world.”

Much of the ground has been covered before; Smith lays no claim to originality. He does, however, remind us of what others have been saying. Thus Solzhenitsyn on the question of when a terrorist is not a terrorist: “When we are attacked, it’s terrorism, but when we do the attacking, it’s a guerilla movement of liberation.” On this issue Smith considers that the churches’ authority has been fatally compromised.

But Smith also gets in a few shrewd blows on his own account. “The WCC,” he comments, “is staffed by professional ecumenists and intellectuals who exhibit all the symptoms of a sickness which is general in the West. Consumed by post-imperial guilt, they are convinced that the West can only expiate its crimes by humbling itself before its former victim, the Third World, and its future destroyer, Communism.”

He questions the lack of control over grants made by the WCC’s Program to Combat Racism, and the wisdom of Dr. Potter’s justification of this procedure (“there could be no real sense of solidarity with people if you did not trust them”). He reminds us of the 1973 Central Committee’s identification of areas in which oppression and discrimination could be detected (South Africa, Latin America, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, and the USA), and how a Swedish committee member pointed to the omission of Communist countries. Delegates from the latter rose one after another to deny suppression of human rights—and only two committee members supported the Swede.

Referring to the 1975 Nairobi Assembly, Smith mentions how a letter smuggled out of Russia from two Orthodox Church members led for the first time to a debate about human rights in the Soviet Union, to the indignation of that country’s delegates who were unused to such churlish and outrageous treatment. According to Smith, Dr. Potter was charged to investigate what progress toward religious liberty had been made in those countries party to the Helsinki Agreement—but said nothing about the matter in his report to the next Central Committee meeting in August 1976.

After Nairobi, the sub-dean of Westminster, Canon David Edwards, an influential liberal theologian, wrote a thoughtful article for the Church Times. In it he wondered whether the enthusiasm shown by the WCC for its program to combat racism would be matched by comparable enthusiasm for a program to combat atheism.

David Edwards has gone right to the heart of the matter. Whatever the merits of the PCR, it enabled the WCC to hit world headlines as never before—and put subtle pressures on its spokesmen. The successors of John Mott and J.H. Oldham drifted into unbalanced preoccupation with worldly controversy until the words of lan Henderson (who died in 1969) did not seem so exaggerated after all: “In this ghastly internecine strife among Christians which the Ecumenical Movement has brought about, it is only the Ecumenical who knows how to hallow acrimony, only he can justify and barb, however vicious, in his knowledge that it is directed against those who are opposing Christ.”

Some years ago, I covered a major WCC meeting in Geneva. An English-language weekly took advantage of the occasion to ask six of the participants, representing five continents, the question: “What is the major obstacle to world peace?” The answers were revealing. They cited the division between rich and poor nations, the question of national prestige, the economic bondage of new countries, the lack of universal brotherhood, the failure to give top priority to the quest for maximum understanding between human beings, and the difference between current ideologies. Only one of the six mentioned God, and that came in incidentally. None suggested that the state of man’s heart might be a relevant factor, even in a debate that ostensibly sought to clarify the role of Christians in the technical and social revolutions of our time.

And yet, my notes of that meeting disclose a splendid opening address that is worth quoting at length: “In a world in which the very foundations are being shaken, in which all faiths, all ideologies are called in question, in which it is loudly proclaimed that God is dead and that man’s existence has ultimately no meaning—the one and only important theme is surely to proclaim the Gospel of the loving God and to call men to that repentance which leads to newness of life.… And does that not imply that direct personal evangelism comes first and that the issues of life in society are secondary? Can a new and better society be built with men who have no faith, no hope?”

The speaker: Dr. W.A. Visser’t Hooft, just before his retirement as WCC general secretary. That likable Dutchman was all for a square confrontation of what he called “terrestrial problems,” but only after right priorities had been established.

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