In the October issue of the Princeton Seminary Bulletin there is an address by Dr. William Hamilton, professor of Christian theology and ethics, Colgate-Rochester Divinity School. The address, entitled “The Sense of Loss,” was given at the annual Summer Institute of Theology at Princeton last July. Professor Hamilton has some very remarkable things to say about the loss of the church, the loss of the body (a very new slant for me), the loss of the family, the loss of privacy, and the loss of the future. The spirit of the article is not polemical; the author sort of gets at you in spite of yourself.
In the December 6 issue of Time Magazine, the lead article of the religion section has to do again with the Vatican Council; its title is, “What Went Wrong?” The Vatican Council seems to have come to a kind of grinding halt, and about the only thing that is being said so far is that more of the Romish services will be in the vernacular. There will be other things around the edges, I am sure; but once again the Curia is apparently too strong for the personality of the Pope, assuming that Pope Paul VI is as enthusiastic for ecumenical matters as was the late Pope John XXIII.
Relevant to this slow-down at the Vatican Council are some words from Professor Hamilton on “the loss of the church.” He sees “the increasing alienation of the regular lay Christian from the denominational and ecumenical thinking of the day.” Let me quote at length: “… some of the most impressive and high powered thinking going on in Protestantism today is working on the problems of Faith and Order. The subject matter of these discussions is correct, profound, and utterly unable to touch the ordinary lives of men and women who are in the world today. Thus it is a theology that has lost its way, forgotten its business, busy, deep, and empty. The modern Protestant American may have read somewhere that the great new fact in our time is the ecumenical movement. But he doesn’t believe it, and he shouldn’t” (italics mine—the “he shouldn’t” is most surprising).
To look in another direction, there is a book under the editorship of Robert McAfee Brown and David H. Scott titled The Challenge to Reunion: The Blake Proposal Under Scrutiny. I have read two reviews of this book, one by Walter Wagner and one by Norman V. Hope, and they both sum up objections to reunion in the same words: bustle, bigness, bishops, and bureaucracy. This volume makes clear that there is some disenchantment about the ecumenical movement in general and about the Blake-Pike proposal in particular.
Another book, and a very good one, is Institutionalism and Church Unity, edited by Nils Ehrenstrom and Walter C. Muelder; it is reviewed by Henry P. Van Dusen in the November, 1963, issue of the Union Seminary Quarterly Review. This particular book was preparatory material for the Faith and Order Conference held last July in Montreal. In this study, according to the emphasis of Van Dusen’s review, there was one “notable document” under the title of “The Non-Theological Factors in the Making and Non-Making of Church Union.”
Reference is also made to a comment of Professor C. H. Dodd of Cambridge: a letter “concerning unavowed motives in ecumenical discussion.” To quote Dr. Van Dusen, “One recalls the catastrophic impact of Dr. Dodd’s forthright testimony that many years of participation in Faith and Order discussions had led him to the recommendation that, each time a crucial theological issue was resolved a new theological issue emerged to frustrate progress, and thus to the conclusion that the intractable issues were probably not theological at all but at a more fundamental and deeper [sic] than theological level.” If there are such things as non-theological matters, and if there is anything deeper than theology, we can go along with the idea that settling matters of Faith and Order, if they can be settled, will not necessarily lead to union. Other things seem to prevail. No one who is willing to talk about the matter can deny, for example, that the race issue was highly decisive in plans for uniting Northern and Southern Presbyterians in spite of everything else that was said on Faith and Order.
Getting back to that article in Time Magazine, I was thinking long and hard on the gesture toward church union genuinely made by John XXIII and responded to by Protestants with almost girlish glee. The more I thought of it the less I thought of it, and I went along with Time’s query, “What Went Wrong?”
Once when I was a boy a high school track coach told me how to win a race: “Just get in front and don’t let anybody pass you.” Volleyball and tennis are very simple games. You just knock the ball back one more time than your opponent. I was bowling last night, and all I needed to get a strike every time was to curve into the pocket between one and three. I am impressed by these simplicities, but somehow they don’t always work.
I am not being naïve when I suggest that the union of the churches is simple in the same sort of way. Everyone is proud of his objectivity, tolerance, and rational thinking; and yet, try as I do, every time I think the problem is perfectly simple, somebody turns it into nonsense.
For example, let us take up the simple problem of the position and power of the pope. This may or may not be a “non-theological factor” or an “unavowed motive,” but it will do for a start. We point out immediately that along with 217,000,000 Protestants in the world there are 137,000,000 Eastern Orthodox who do not believe in the supremacy of the Roman pontiff. Now these 350,000,000 people must have something that bothers them about this pope business. According to Rome, the pope’s spiritual titles are “Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of St. Peter, Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Patriarch of the West, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, and Sovereign of the State of Vatican City.” So Rome and we divide. Now let’s get together.
We can begin very simply with an exegesis of “Thou art Peter and on this rock I will build my church.” Now all we have to do is agree that Peter founded the church in Rome and was the first pope and had the right to pass the office on; and, just in passing, all we also have to do is to get used to the idea that Peter, of all the disciples, could have accepted the ring kissing, the kneeling, and all those parades.
This idea of the pope seems very basic to all the Roman Catholics and utter nonsense to 350,000,000 non-Catholics. So let us clear up this problem first, and then go on. It is as simple as that.
