They play political poker using a stacked deck of leftist ideologies.
The world council of Churches has announced that grants totaling $587,000 have been made to 47 groups in connection with the Program to Combat Racism (PCR). Since the first grants were made in 1970, close to $5 million has been allocated “to be used for humanitarian activities” and “without control of the manner in which they are spent.” If there is a calculated ambivalence about that, there is none at all when it comes to recipients. Money has been poured into the humanitarian activity of toppling the South African government. None has gone to parallel humanitarian activity in Communist countries, presumably because the latter are considered to be devoid of racism.
Disregarding the growing storm provoked by the Program to Combat Racism, the WCC carries on unmoved. We find this a little surprising. Many in WCC member churches who originally supported the principles behind the PCR (and who still, for example, abhor apartheid) are profoundly uneasy about the ways in which it has been implemented. Such Christians reject some of the things done in their name, and become frustrated at the Geneva executive’s bland and insensitive rejection of criticism as being ill informed, and its assumption of a father-knows-best posture. This is as bigoted an attitude as that of the seventeenth-century churchmen to whom an exasperated Oliver Cromwell said, “I beseech you, brethren, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you might be mistaken.” Another lesson taught by history is the unwisdom of trading an infallible pope for an infallible council.
In 1978, the PCR gave a grant to Patriotic Fund guerrillas who were alleged to have massacred 33 missionaries and their children over the two preceding years in Zimbabwe. On the murder of the innocents, the normally articulate voice of Geneva was lost for words. One dismal by-product of this bizarre partisanship is the damage it does to Christian testimony in a secular world. “Those wretched churchmen,” editorialized the Daily Telegraph of London. “In a way one could respect them more if they went to Africa themselves to murder missionaries and children rather than hired a pack of savages to do it for them.”
Two member bodies have recently by implication raised the same question. Last year the Presbyterian Church in Ireland withdrew its WCC membership. This year the Salvation Army took similar action. Neither body can be charged with ignorance of the human rights problem or the real world: the former because of its ongoing witness amid the violence in Northern Ireland, the latter because of its admirable record of international social concern that could teach even Geneva a thing or two.
On top of all that, some strictures recently directed at the WCC by Prof. Helmut Thielicke have again highlighted the issue. A scholar of such stature and integrity that he cannot be dismissed airily as ill informed, Thielicke has contributed a foreword to the German edition of Ernest Lefever’s From Amsterdam to Nairobi: The World Council of Churches and the Third World. He deplores the fact that “the World Council with its unilateral support of left-wing guerrillas and terrorist groups threatens to become increasingly a political club instead of a representative of the church.” The council, he adds, “well-nigh identifies itself with specific political ideas and systems, and legitimizes their revolutionary subversive movements. The executive in Geneva obviously was (or is) staffed with decidedly ‘left’ oriented members, and some officials have publicly embraced Marxist socialism, Mao’s rediscovery of original Christianity and similar ideologies. A report by the World Council of Churches frankly admitted that the antiracist contributions had the purpose to enable the Council to ‘intervene in the redistribution of power beyond compassion.’ ” With Lefever, Thielicke concurs that the World Council of Churches is “more influenced by contemporary secular sources than by the traditional social teachings of Christianity.”
The American sociologist Peter L. Berger, so Helmut Thielicke argues, has clarified the denouement of the council’s wrong-headed thrust. Why, Berger asks, should I still buy sociopolitical programs, “psychotherapy and racial peace slogans in Christian wrapping, if I can get them around the corner in secular (cheaper) wrapping, and moreover a little bit more fashionable”?
Thielicke’s evaluation of the World Council’s agenda for action gets to the heart of the matter: it is humanitarism without the gospel—and without the gospel, a secularized humanism cannot long remain humane.
“As soon as the proper motor is shut off—and this motor is for me the act of salvation as reported in the New Testament—the once started flywheels of a Christian culture keep on rolling for a while. It is true they continue to throw off sparks of ‘Christian ideas,’ principles of humanity, and many other items. But the movement becomes slower and slower. Finally, human activism—above all in the form of ideological impulses—must strive to keep them rolling, unless we reach back to the power of the event which once started the flywheel.”
From his Christian perspective, Thielicke sees two major objections to the path taken by the World Council. First, the church ceases to be church. “By making certain political decisions ‘as church,’ she elevates to excess that which has its roots in human and all-too-human judgments.” In short, it confuses the fallible words of man with the infallible word of God. This in turn results in such “confessions” as that in which Fidel Castro and Philip Potter (the general secretary of the World Council of Churches) create a new standard for “ecumenical” unity by saying there is no contradiction between Christianity and Cuban socialism. Or that in which the council’s representative goes so far as to say that the leaders of the Black Power movement, Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, “have come much closer to the real meaning of God’s right hand than the churches.”
But according to Thielicke, the council’s social thrust not only stems from bad theology. It is also bad politics. In making political decisions of this kind, the World Council of Churches is again and again compromised by “incompetence and dilettantism.” He then cites Paul Ramsey, the prominent theologian and moral philosopher of Princeton University. Ramsey rebukes the World Council for having “disregarded the most reliable available information and instead turned to the diagnosis and the recommendations of a secular ideology, including ideologies influenced by Marxism.” Social philosopher Jacques Ellul sounds the same warning from his Geneva pulpit: “The World Council of Churches has precipitously adopted positions which hardly seem worth being taken seriously: only poorly analyzed problems, inappropriate proposals for solutions, superficiality … I shudder to think of the rule of the pseudoexperts!”
Finally, Helmut Thielicke outlines his own concept of the political mission of the church in opposition to the World Council of Churches’ theory and practice: “It is to preach the Commandment of Love as the supreme measure of action.” He then further defines this political message of the church by the use of two illustrations: a compass and a channel.
The needle of a compass points to the goal which is love of fellow man (not to exclude justice, we would note). Says Thielicke: “He who starts marching according to the needle cannot simply march obstinately straight ahead. Pretty soon his direct path will be blocked by obstacles: by fences, houses, rivers, and mountains. To reach his goal he must either overcome or circumvent these barriers, but in either case must keep an eye on the direction indicator.” The Christian politician must make judgments as to what to do about all these troublesome obstacles to love (and justice). These will necessarily be relative to his situation. “Precisely for this reason,” so Thielicke notes, “they are not part of the mission of the church as an institution which speaks in our time on behalf of eternity.” We must distinguish the voice of man from the voice of God.
Thielicke’s second image is that of a vessel guided through a dangerous channel. “The Church should stake off the channel in which the ship is to move. She marks the areas in which shallows are threatening and marks them clearly as her mission demands: racial prejudice, systems of terror and exploitation, and much else. But it is not her responsibility how the ship is to maneuver within the fixed channel. That is the responsibility of those who act responsibly in the secular realm and whom the church serves through her firm announcement of the compass direction and the staking off of the channel.”
The church must operate only through her Word. She serves God most faithfully and mankind most effectively when she refuses to be drawn into shallow waters where she has no business to go. Thielicke’s conclusion: The World Council of Churches since Geneva (1966) and even more so since Nairobi (1975) has moved in quite a different direction. It has turned to “political intervention,” to “identification with specific ideological groups,” and to “stimulation of violence.” His last word: “We can only note with alarm the byways and wrong ways of an ecclesiastical institution which has strayed from the Father’s mansion of the Gospel into the alien world of an ideological spell.”
For our part, we say that Helmut Thielicke is right on. One might marvel that a combatant council that so loudly champions the oppressed, and claims solidarity with the poor, should make itself vulnerable to the plaintive question, “What about the poor of Afghanistan?” But behind the quite legitimate questions about the World Council’s one-sided support of left-leaning guerrillas and myopic concern only for left-wing poor lie much deeper issues. Does the World Council headquarters really represent the authentic voice of the denominations for whom it purports to speak? And even more basic: what is the gospel that stems from Geneva? And what is the legitimate role of the church as it seeks to carry out its prophetic ministry and its servant role in a desperate, needy world?
Perhaps some of these questions will be answered when the WCC produces its long-awaited study of the Christian attitude toward violence and “the just war.” This was promised, if we are not mistaken, at the Central Committee meeting in Addis Ababa in 1971. Why the delay? Is it possible that the council is apprehensive about airing a subject that might show some of its critics to have been—well-informed, after all?
