Can evangelicals pick up the fragments in a constructive way?
Professor Paul Ramsey’s Who Speaks for the Church?, just detonated by Abingdon Press as somewhat of an ecumenical bombshell, has much to commend it. But this critique of ecumenical ethics also confronts the evangelical community—for which Ramsey is an uncomfortable spokesman—with the task of fixing its own perspectives in regard to social justice.
The Princeton professor calls upon the churches to “return to the fundamentals of Christian social ethics” and to rectify their message to the world. He rightly deplores the optimistic identification of the Church’s outlook with the secular city’s autonomous decisionmaking. He also insists that the Church has no divine revelation or special competence in specific policy formulation. He is equally concerned—as all of us ought to be—that Christianity not become a spiritual cult lacking a pertinent social outlook, as well it might through pious disregard of urgent secular problems.
Evangelicals, who have much to say about the primacy of evangelism and missions, ought to take this opportunity to consider what they may properly say to the world about social justice. The Christian community is called to proclaim God’s full counsel. That counsel, of course, is first and foremost the evangel, the good news that redemption is offered in Christ’s name. But the Church is also to declare the criteria by which nations will ultimately be judged, and the divine standards to which man and society must conform if civilization is to endure. Surely the present hour of social lawlessness and unrighteousness is one in which both law and Gospel need to be vigorously published. All that the scriptural revelation says about the nature and role of government—its duties and its limits—and all the divinely revealed commandments and principles of social justice belong legitimately to pulpit proclamation.
When evangelical Protestants deplore the Church’s meddling in politics, they surely do not disown its proper role in enunciating theological and moral principles that bear upon public life. And now they are called to make a bold new inquiry into questions that concern the social and political ethos. Although the Church has no mandate, authority, or competence to say yes or no to political and economic specifics—except perhaps in some emergency that may require a no to preserve the Christian faith, witness, and life—it must set the principles of revealed morality in dialogic relation to the modern alternatives. Only in this way can Christians comprehend what really governs a good political community and what really constitutes a good society. Are evangelical churches really encouraging laymen to wrestle earnestly with such issues, not on the assumption that the Church has revelational solutions for secular specifics, but rather on the assumption that devout men motivated by biblical standards can contribute significantly to public dialogue, to public policy, and to public leadership? Surely such a contribution can be made without losing Christian ethical judgments either in broad generalities that fail to relate the modern scene to the biblical norm or in specific political and military judgments.
We should say clearly at this point that the alternative to conciliar ethics proposed by Professor Ramsey is somewhat obscure and sometimes disappointing. He proposes no “siding” with evangelicals against liberals; in fact, he seems to know conservative religious views only in a form fully as objectionable as liberal religious opinion: “In the United States conservative and liberal religious opinion is the same thing as conservative and liberal secular opinion—with a sharper edge.” What Ramsey’s preferred non-liberal, non-evangelical “mix” may be he does not say.
Ramsey’s formula—“The ‘prolongation’ … of the ultimate principles of Christian ethics—revealed ethics—for as far (and only as far) as this will take us”—is formally acceptable to evangelical Christians; even he, however, seems disposed to carry ethics into the realm of an ecclesiastical binding of Christian conscience.
Ramsey calls for “a possible class of church teachings that goes between or beyond a fixed choice of either ethical generalities or prudential specifics” (Who Speaks for the Church?, p. 16, italics added). Although he opposes ecumenical policy-making in political, economic, and military specifics, he insists with W. A. Visser ‘t Hooft that the Church must give more than merely “counsels of perfection.” Insofar as Scripture goes beyond revealed principles and specific commands and supplies such rules as “pay your taxes,” “honor the king,” “forget not to assemble yourselves,” and so forth, surely no evangelical will dissent. But Ramsey wants considerably more, and the result is a shadowland of proposed ecclesiastical teaching of uncertain authority and validity. Nor is Ramsey content to leave the facing of the issues of social action to laymen, in distinction from the organized Church. The Church, apparently, is to provide a directional content that goes beyond revelation. What Ramsey pleads for in conciliar ethics is “greater reticence in reaching particular conclusions” (p. 15).
Ramsey’s “ridge” between generalities and particularities, insofar as he identifies it, remains in a twilight zone. While he opposes church “directives” for actions that involve specific policy formation, he endorses ecclesiastical “directions” of actions: economic, social, and political analyses that are decision-oriented and action-related. What is objectionable is “excessive particularity” in political judgments; approved, however, is “relative concreteness of decision-oriented directions.”
Although Ramsey concedes that “none of us knows the contours or the content of the ecumenical ethics of the future,” he seems wholly confident that ecumenical exploration could discover a middle way, a way that he apparently cannot define clearly. But is there really hope for more than a merely semantic reconciliation of the principle-particularity alternatives? As things stand, Ramsey’s approach is freighted with serious ambivalence. The Church is not to promote policy-making specifics, but neither is it to confine its message simply to the truth of Scripture. Its authority is apparently to be transferred also to proposals that range somewhere in between. Thus we face the same spectre that haunted those “middle axioms” long advocated by John Bennett—axioms that Christians were to honor as if they were divinely given when in fact they were not (and that Bennett invoked in order to rally liberal Protestants to the socialist cause).
On the one hand, Ramsey criticizes conciliar ethics because the Geneva commitments were “too particular”; on the other, he wants the Church to become more specific than the moral principles and teaching of Scripture. But how does specificity avoid particularity?
If the Church is to approve specific courses of action as authentic Christian guidance, does not this endorsement—if it has any validity—also imply the non-Christian character of the alternatives?
Ramsey is not speaking, it should be noted, simply of counsel or guidance that a local congregation may properly supply to its members, but of ecclesiastical guidance that the institutional church is to provide for member churches and individuals in addressing the world in an extra-biblical way.
We find it difficult to reconcile such proposals with the passages in which Ramsey wants the Church to “penetrate to a deeper and deeper level the meaning of Christian responsibility—leaving to the conscience of individuals and groups of individuals both the task and the freedom to arrive at specific conclusions through untrammeled debate about particular social policies” (p. 15).
Ramsey asserts that the older “Faith and Order” models of ecumenical social ethics are sounder than that of Geneva, and commends Oberlin 1957 and Montreal 1964. Vatican II, Ramsey thinks, ought temporarily to serve as a procedural model for ecumenical ethics. Preparatory volumes by experts ought to be integrated into ecclesiastical deliberation, and the same discussants should meet over a period of years, with time between sessions for substantive theological-ethical reflection on drafting, followed by sessions with ample time for debate. Protestantism’s genius, he notes, has been in elevation of the laity. But today “an intractable difficulty” hinders the advance of Protestant ecumenical ethics: the lay expert is exalted “in an age when lay Christians have so largely ceased … witnessing to one another concerning the meaning of Christ for our lives.”
So far so good. But would such a return to Faith and Order, or to an approximation of Vatican II, really provide the Church with a desirable pattern of engagement in the contemporary social crisis? From an evangelical perspective, even these “sounder models” leave much to be desired. Ecumenical theology, we might observe, is in fully as much turmoil today as ecumenical evangelism and social ethics. Does neo-Protestant ecumenism stand in need only of revision? Is it any longer capable of reform—and if so, how is the ecumenical curia that has created and perpetuated the present ecumenical predicament to be dissolved?
Christianity Today On Political Ecumenism
… Ecumenical leaders would deny to churchmen and laymen even as individuals any conscientious expression of points of view contrary to left-wing ecclesiastical commitments. Their tactics ought not to obscure the growing political intervention of the institutional church through ecclesiastical approval of specific legislative items.CHRISTIANITY TODAYfirmly insists that the institutional church has neither a divine mandate, nor competence, nor jurisdiction in such matters (editorial, October 8, 1965, issue, p. 34).
While there may indeed be emergency situations in which the Church must confront the inhumanity of tyrannical forces that place themselves above law (as did the Nazis in their slaughter of six million Jews), the possibility of this kind of emergency confrontation hardly justifies the corporate church’s day-by-day political involvement, for which it lacks a biblical mandate, divine authority, and technical competence (editorial, May 13,1966, issue, p. 31).
Under the vague concept of “giving directions” while not propounding policy, much of what is objectionable in political ecumenism can be continued. Who speaks for the Church? Who will choose the issues for which the Church will formulate directions (Auschwitz, apartheid segregation, civil rights, poverty, minimum wages?).
As Ramsey sees it, admission of Red China to the United Nations is not a fit subject for church pronouncements. But when events deteriorate to the situation of Auschwitz, he says, it is much too late for the Church to begin to speak. What issues is he ready to put on the list with the Nazi crimes? And are these assuredly of such a nature that they demand an ecclesiastical Barmen whereby the Church confesses that Christ rather than alien totalitarian powers has Lordship over its life and thought?
Ramsey’s proposal that each delegate to Church and Society take along an informed counterpart who holds alternative views about policy proposals is amusing. The use of Christian funds and energies to sponsor gigantic meetings that engage in an illicit activity should be deplored. Ramsey himself was an informed participant holding alternative views at Geneva, but he did not have the privilege of voting.
No group of churchmen from around the world, meeting for two weeks in an ecumenical jamboree, can by their consensus inform the conscience of that vast host of devout Christian believers who, with Bibles open, want to know above all else what God’s will requires.
Reviving A Medieval Mentality
Sad signs of religious intolerance are rising in several lands apparently ready to revive a medieval mentality.
One is Spain, where 500 Protestant clergymen plan to hold a strategy meeting next month on how to oppose the new “religious liberty” law. Its requirements so violate positions supposedly espoused by the United Nations and Vatican II that Protestant churches refuse to apply for legal recognition. Meanwhile Spanish police have closed a Southern Baptist mission and threaten to shut down other efforts. Spain has a long-standing concordat with the Roman Catholic Church.
Another is Greece, where military putschists who claim to have saved that land from Communism have stripped away even the fragmented liberties that evangelical Christians had enjoyed. Now evangelicals are required to designate themselves as Protestants (which is equivalent, in the Greek Orthodox context, to calling themselves Swedenborgians in America); all their publications, the New Testament included, must bear the words “of Protestant origin.” Evangelical tract distribution is banned. Strong censorship has been imposed on evangelical publications; literature may not be sent through the post office. Even house prayer meetings are banned.
Another area is Eastern Europe, where children are now said to be taken from parents who teach them Christianity. Last month, a Christian woman in White Russia was reported sentenced to death for slaying her daughter—a charge that, if true, would have made the case one for the psychiatrist rather than the executioner.
In the Middle East, Israel’s annexation of old Jerusalem leaves in doubt the future of evangelical missions, in view of Israeli restriction of Christian activity to enterprises that were active at the time of statehood.
It is curious that the World Council of Churches, which holds dialogues with Marxists, flirts with Rome, and embraces the Orthodox churches, said nothing significant about religious liberty in Crete. Instead of unequivocally condemning the Spanish limitations requiring non-Catholic churches to register annually as “civic organizations” and to submit membership lists to the government, the Central Committee noted that this appears to “fall short of the positive standards” demanded by the churches. The committee did resolve to advance evangelism jointly with Roman Catholics and conservative Protestants. Freedom to proclaim Christ’s evangel would be one good emphasis with which to begin.
Putting Missionaries Out Of Business
“Missionary go home” just about epitomizes what was said at a conference sponsored by the National Council of Churches’ Division of Overseas Ministries last month at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Key speaker M. A. Thomas of the Mar Thoma Church, director of the Ecumenical Center at Bangalore, India, told missionaries from thirty-four countries and ten Protestant denominations that the work of missions is not conversion.
Mouthing the syncretistic-universalistic line of many ecumenical spokesmen, Father Thomas said that the goal of mission is the re-creation of society. Those engaged in “the struggle for civil rights, feeding the starving in Bihar, defying racist discrimination in South Africa, striving for dignity and social justice” are “partners of God in mission.”
The missionaries who felt Father Thomas had cut the nerve of missions got no help from the other chief speaker, the Rev. David M. Stanley, a Roman Catholic. He claimed that “Christ was already present in the pagans to whom he [the Apostle Paul] preached.”
Christians grounded in Scripture will reject these views. The Church needs more, not fewer, missionaries. The wishful tunes of syncretistic Pied Pipers must not deter evangelicals from their missionary duties.
Hate Begets Hate
As the brown-shirted, swastika-adorned leader of the minuscule American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell was more tolerated as a buffoon than feared as a purveyor of hate and violence. His virulent attacks on Jews and Negroes, his strident advocacy of Aryan superiority, and his disruptive demonstrations showed him to be an outrageous power seeker. At the time of his death last month, he commanded fewer than 100 active “storm troopers” in his nine-year-old party.
Rockwell’s violent death, inflicted by a sniper who police claim is a former Nazi Party member, demonstrated once again that those “who take the sword shall perish by the sword.” Army officials acted properly in refusing to permit his followers to conduct Nazi rites in Culpeper Cemetery. Such a ceremony would be an affront to the memories of the gallant men—some of whom died to defeat Nazism—whose bodies rest there.
Rockwell’s death can serve a purpose if it reminds us that hate begets hate, and leads us to devote ourselves to justice and love as the means of countering evil.
