Perhaps the most astute observation made to the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches last month (see news story, Feb. 2 issue, p. 52) came from a Roman Catholic guest. On the confessional frontiers, said French priest J. M. R. Tillard, “the walls of mutual incomprehension are tumbling down.” But, he went on, “the involvement of Christians in the world’s problems and their identification with the aspirations of their peoples are raising new walls.”
These walls, which could become formidable, were between traditionally Christian lands and former mission territories, between East and West, between rich and oppressed. WCC policy, declared Tillard, is dividing Christendom into new blocs that may continue to love and help one another while understanding each other less and less, so that differences now “almost amount to conscious differences in the interpretation of the faith itself.” There was an unresolved tension between doctrinal unity and what the Frenchman called “radical involvement in human hopes.” His prescription: a mandate for the Faith and Order Commission to give a lead not only toward interconfessional unity but also toward “a unity which has to be maintained amidst all the repercussions of cultural, social, and political factors on the understanding of the faith.”
Far from accepting that prescription, the committee fired Lukas Vischer, long-time head of the Faith and Order Commission, a dismissal backed by general secretary Philip Potter and a WCC staff majority that favors tying theological work to an overriding commitment to social action programs. Third worlders called Vischer’s scholarly attention to the biblical and doctrinal bases for activism as “elitist and irrelevant.” Europeans saw in Vischer’s removal another indicator of a WCC “abdication of theology.”
Those who have traced ecumenical progress since Edinburgh 1910 view the downgrading of Faith and Order with foreboding. From its early priority, evangelism was shrunk progressively until subordinated to the quest for unity and to Faith and Order. Now unity itself is apparently being relegated to insignificance in the shadow of the social action concerns of Life and Work, the other WCC arm. The result was inevitable: the eroding of commitment to any common belief.
If a biblical basis is irrelevant, activism may take many forms. Vischer was reported as having said that where yesterday’s model was Mahatma Gandhi, today’s is Che Guevara. Failing a consensus within the council, leadership reverts to an elite—and this does appear to be the trend in the WCC. Cynthia Wedell, one of the WCC presidents, pointed out that “half the member churches cannot be represented even in the Central Committee, and many who represent their churches on commissions and committees have no direct access to the decision-making bodies of their own churches.” That can be compensated for when grass-roots church members and Geneva staff are committed to the same causes. But when they are guided by different stars, or marching to different drummers, the elite can take up a position that, if not arrogant, is highly condescending.
The WCC’s employees call on the churches to repent of those attitudes at variance with those of the Geneva staff. Arie R. Brouwer of the Reformed Church in America even voiced concern that the WCC might be “taken captive” by the needs of the member churches.
When member churches object to things said and done by the council on their behalf, they often have reason to believe that their protests are ignored, or dismissed as the result of inadequate communication or inadequate understanding, or attributed to distortion by “well-financed propaganda agencies in the media” that are hostile to the WCC.
This is nonsense. As Paul Crow, Jr., of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) observed, “When the World Council is clear about its own nature and calling, it will have no difficulty in interpreting that to the churches.”
The action taken in Jamaica will not contribute toward such a clarity. The questions posed by faith and order are of such magnitude that any unity that demotes or bypasses them can produce only some sort of pseudo-unity behind whose facade crowds a Babel of confusion.
What needs to be said about faith and order? John Calvin stressed an “indivisible connection which all members of Christ have with one another.” This conviction is undoubtedly valid. The rub comes in trying to define “members of Christ,” a consideration involving faith and doctrine. The WCC holds that a “member of Christ” is one who believes that Jesus Christ is God and Saviour. Around this theological pronouncement the council seeks to establish unity. Dissenting voices claim that this statement, while true, is inadequate. At the WCC’s second assembly (Evanston 1954), the Orthodox Church pointed out that theological inadequacy by saying: “It is not enough to accept just certain particular doctrines, … e.g., that Christ is God and Saviour. It is compelling that all doctrines as formulated by the Ecumenical Councils, as well as the totality of the teaching of the early, undivided Church, should be accepted.”
Since doctrinal consensus is essential, what minimal testimony, confession of faith, or creed, is required in order to preserve the purely preached Word of God? Here the problem of the WCC is not that it has said too much, but that it has said too little. It is, indeed, the silences of the WCC that are most eloquent today. One must guard, of course, against those who say too much by defining the particulars of the faith in microscopic detail and exclude everyone but themselves from fellowship.
The ecumenical dialogue, nonetheless, has all too often espoused a unity based on love—a love whose definition falls short of theological adequacy. To use love as an umbrella to cover doctrinal differences and deficiencies does not solve the basic problem. Doctrine does divide. It always has. It always will. It must do so, as the Bible does, in order to separate truth from error. On the other hand the kind of doctrinal jealousy that drives men to strain out a gnat while they swallow a camel is most unfortunate. The quarrel is not with the emphasis on love, but with the implication that since doctrine divides it should be avoided like the plague, and with the idea that doctrine and love in themselves are mutually incompatible, when both should be emphasized.
The same God who is love is also truth. Therefore love must correspond to truth. If it is not grounded in sound doctrine, love is not true love even though called by that name. Conversely, sound doctrine cannot be loveless; the Christian is commanded to love as an expression of the doctrinal framework of the faith. We wish this note were heard more clearly in WCC utterances today.
