Southern Presbyterians Join COCU

Nobody thought it had a chance this year.

Participation in the Consultation on Church Union by the Presbyterian Church in the United States was thought to be possible only many years from now, if ever.

But when the Presbyterian General Assembly adjourned less than a week before the beginning of COCU’s scheduled Dallas sessions, the Southern denomination’s highest court had voted to become a full participant.

No presbytery or other official body had asked consideration of COCU this year; such bids had been rejected in other years. So six individual commissioners (delegates) put COCU before the assembly in a resolution. The four ministers signing the resolution were among original members of “A Fellowship of Concern,” an unofficial group within the denomination seeking more social action and broader ecumenical connections. One of the ministers is chairman of a denomination committee studying the church’s structural shape; another is the second-ranking executive Of the Board of Christian Education. The others were young pastors from border synods of Virginia and Missouri.

The two lay signers were the first woman ever to serve as a standing committee chairman and a man from the Central Texas Presbytery, which is asking permission to merge with a local presbytery of the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A.

Their resolution was given little chance when it was referred to a standing committee on opening night. A few minutes later, when the result of the moderator election was announced, the proposal was taken more seriously. The Rev. Frank H. Caldwell’s victory over two other nominees for the denomination’s highest office put a different light on all proposals to alter interchurch relations. He got 307 of the 458 votes cast on the first ballot. Long known as an advocate of church union, he was one of the leaders of the unsuccessful attempt at merger with the then Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. twelve years ago.

Before becoming executive director of the Presbyterian Foundation in Charlotte, North Carolina, two years ago, Caldwell was for twenty-eight years president of Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, jointly owned by the Southern and United Presbyterian churches.

The new moderator told the press he did not see “the live possibility” of union with United Presbyterians in the “near future.” Asked about COCU, he said only that he thought Southern Presbyterians “ought to be close” to the Blake-Pike talks. The “wise course,” said Caldwell, is to emphasize the denomination’s relationship to the Reformed Church in America. A plan of union for these two denominations is now being drawn up by a negotiating committee.

Examples of other Caldwell views: “The ‘death-of-God’ boys are dealing with a real problem but are dealing with it wrongly” and “the spirituality of the Church” is an out-of-date tenet.

The assembly’s Inter-Church Relations Committee entered marathon sessions while the assembly received a variety of other reports. After twenty-one hours of deliberations, it brought in recommendations late on the fifth day. Meanwhile, the special panel on conversations with the Reformed Church got a vote of confidence and authority to continue (with only a few audible nays).

The interchurch committee’s recommendations seemed contradictory: (1) continuing talks with the Reformed Church; (2) setting up a special group to begin talking with United Presbyterians; and (3) joining COCU as a full participant instead of an observer.

Both the Southern Presbyterian General Assembly and the Reformed Church General Synod in earlier years had rejected joining with United Presbyterians and/or the Blake-Pike talks while their own courtship was in progress. Some manifestations of Southern Presbyterian interest in United Presbyterians have threatened support of the talks within the Reformed Church.

Those seeking an end to Reformed talks did not like the committee’s recommendation for continuation, but they saved their energies to work for United Presbyterian and COCU affiliations.

The proposal on United Presbyterians, which included possible union plans, drew heavy fire. Veteran church leaders who were pro-union twelve years ago opposed the recommendation, calling it a danger to ecumenical progress. In a two-to-one vote they got through a substitute calling for an existing agency to continue transactions with United Presbyterians (instead of a special one to discuss union).

COCU was next. A substitute motion was quickly on the floor, suggesting that instead of becoming a full participant, the denomination should increase the number of observers at COCU meetings. The issue was left hanging at the 11 P.M. adjournment.

Commissioners came back the next morning, prepared with speeches and motions. Caldwell was asked to rule the recommendation on COCU out of order on grounds that the denomination’s Book of Church Order authorizes union only with bodies “whose organization is conformed to the doctrine and order of this Church.” The moderator ruled that the proposal was constitutional, and by a voice vote the house sustained his ruling.

A commissioner argued that the authorization being sought was only to “talk,” not to unite. Another claimed the Book of Church Order did not limit mergers to Reformed bodies. Another said the world would not wait “while we mend our fences seriatim.”

The substitute motion calling for observer status only lost on a standing vote. Full participation was then approved on a standing vote with about a two-thirds majority.

After the votes on union, a perennial discussion of membership in the National Council of Churches hit the floor. The assembly, although faced with probably the largest number of overtures ever sent to it against NCC, reaffirmed membership.

Another hard-fought issue was a proposal to establish a Council on Church and Society. Veteran “moderate” leaders successfully removed a provision that would have allowed the new group to speak to the church and society at any time on critical issues. As finally approved, the council will have the power only to propose pronouncements to the assembly. A predecessor body also had this authority. The new unit will have an enlarged staff and will be chosen by boards of the church, rather than the assembly. The assembly rejected a South Carolina presbytery’s request that the Division of Christian Action be censured for providing a conference platform for the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., last year at Montreat, North Carolina, where this year’s assembly was also held.

The church’s long-standing refusal to condemn capital punishment also became a thing of the past. Appeals of a Georgia state trooper, an Alabama judge, and an Arkansas lawyer fell on deaf ears; the assembly condemned the death sentence.

The body also endorsed for the first time an entire policy statement of the National Council of Churches. Last December’s NCC board pronouncement critical of U. S. policy in Viet Nam was endorsed, with the assembly adding that this was not its final and only comment on the subject.

The assembly took another unprecedented step in authorizing a “pastoral” committee to inquire into “apparent unrest and disorder” in the Synod of Mississippi. The move was termed an untimely and unnecessary one by signers of a minority report, but a voice vote approved the commendation. A related resolution asked for an agency of the assembly to check into the propriety of Southern Presbyterian ministers’ serving in the new Reformed Theological Seminary in Mississippi, which is not related to any of the church’s judicatories. Such a study was authorized.

The New ‘New Confession’

Amendments to make the so-called “Confession of 1967” more biblical will be recommended to the United Presbyterian General Assembly next week by an official study committee.

In the confession, given preliminary approval by last year’s assembly, the Bible is referred to as “the normative witness” to Christ. If the special fifteen-member committee’s changes are adopted, the confession will call the Bible as the “unique and authoritative” witness to Christ and candidates for ordination will need to subscribe to this view.

A declaration that “the one sufficient revelation of God is Jesus Christ” has been retained. The Scriptures are said to be “the words of men,” but also now “given under the guidance of the Holy Spirit” and “received and obeyed as the word of God written.”

Other amendments seek to make more explicit the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and the necessity of belief.

A 210-word discussion of sex has been added. It may raise some controversy in that it is noncommittal on the morality of premarital intercourse, homosexuality, and birth control, except to say that “anarchy in sexual relationships is a symptom of man’s alienation from God, his neighbor, and himself.”

The committee has been studying the confession for a year. It considered some 1,100 written suggestions (some running as long as twenty pages) and listened to twenty-two ministers and ruling elders in a special hearing.

Methodists: 200 Twice

One good bicentennial deserves another. So at the close of the 200th anniversary celebration of American Methodism in Baltimore last month, Charles C. Parlin suggested a second one be held in 1984 in the same city. He said the next one should be held jointly with Roman Catholics, who date their American origins to the same city and same decade.

1766 was the start of Methodist preaching in the New World; the church was not founded until 1784. Like most anniversary celebrations, the 1966 program was a potpourri of hoopla, nostalgia mixed with future glances, and such drawing cards as Lyndon B. Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Lawrence Cardinal Shehan.

The cardinal, a leading ecumenist, said Catholics had been very suspicious of Protestants, feeling for instance that they held “a view of Christ inconsistent with his full divinity.” But today’s emphasis is on common belief. In addition, he said, Catholics are moving closer to a Protestant view of the Bible, while many Protestants have changed their attitude toward Mary.

But intra-Protestant ecumenism is a more pressing issue for Methodists. This November’s special conference will decide on a merger with the Evangelical United Brethren that would make the new denomination America’s largest. It might also have to make an in-or-out decision on the Consultation on Church Union.

In hints and open assertions, others expressed reservations. Bishop F. Gerald Ensley, ecumenical commission chairman, said Methodists need not “uncritically go along with what some so-called ecumenists proclaim to be the true church. The study of the New Testament has not brought to light a universal pattern.” And EUB Bishop Reuben Mueller, president of the National Council of Churches, said ecumenism need not mean “one great over-all super-Church. There is something more important than the uniting of churches of like faiths—and that is unity of the Spirit.”

Moral Rights And Human Rights

Mormons were told about racial tolerance at their semi-annual general conference in Salt Lake City this month, but there is no change in basic racial doctrines, which are both offensive to Negroes and potentially troublesome for Mormon Presidential possibility George Romney, governor of Michigan.

Hugh B. Brown, first counselor to aged Prophet-President David O. McKay, told the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that there is “a real unity in the human race.… All men have a right to equal consideration as human beings regardless of their race.”

As human beings, perhaps, but not as Mormons. Negroes can join but are barred from the Melchizedek Priesthood, lowest rung in the ladder of church life. The church believes this line is drawn by God, who judges men for spiritual valor in an unremembered pre-existence.

A political fuss formed a backdrop for the conference when the John Birch Society scheduled a major dinner during it. Birch buddy Ezra Taft Benson, one of the church’s Twelve Apostles and agriculture secretary under President Eisenhower, was on the program to welcome the organization’s leader, Robert Welch, who said that Mormondom is “a very good recruiting ground.” The Mormon First Presidency put a front-page notice in its daily paper disclaiming any connection with the Birch Society, and Benson didn’t turn up at the dinner.

The conference reported there are now 2,395,932 Mormons, including 18,165 active missionaries.

The Methodists pulled one of the most bizarre and apt publicity gimmicks of the year by having a dozen ministers portray circuit riders. Wearing an assortment of beards, wigs, and colonial costumes, they spent weeks traveling to the Baltimore meeting on horseback and preaching along the way. Upon arrival they were laden with anecdotes. Another stunt was the predictable time capsule, whose contents include a postage stamp honoring Ulysses S. Grant, a President noted for traits other than his Methodism.

Other parts of the past got rougher treatment. In a lecture on art, Roger Ortmayer, former editor of motive, termed the famous Sallman painting “a woman with whiskers called Christ.” Professor J. Edward Moyer said the denomination’s greatest hymn-writer of the past century, Fanny Crosby, had “much emotion, but little theological substance.… We have grown to a more profound understanding of the faith.”

One of the circuit riders reported that “people along the road desperately want gospel preaching and altar calls,” and asserted, “This is our future.” Baltimore Mayor Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin told dramatically of the difference in his home after his father’s conversion during a Methodist revival service. But he later said “less emphasis on personal salvation” is needed.

McKeldin tied his political programs directly to Christianity, and that night President Johnson did similar proof-texting for the Great Society, using in particular the Methodist Social Creed of 1940. Hours before, Columbia University Professor Seymour Melman had issued a scathing attack on the Johnson administration for pouring untold billions of America’s limited resources into war and space programs, while basic human needs were left unmet.

Martin Luther King, Jr., said that when Rip Van Winkle went up to the hills, a sign in the village carried the picture of King George, and that after his long sleep he found a picture of George Washington there. He said the church is similarly in danger of “sleeping through a revolution which will change the face of the world.”

The civil rights leader urged Christians to state repeatedly the essential sin and immorality of racial segregation, to mobilize educational resources to erase the idea that there are superior and inferior races, and to attack poverty vigorously. He said Dives did not go to hell because he was rich, for it is not a sin to be rich, but because “he was a conscientious objector in the war on poverty.”

King admitted that “Negro community standards lag,” but he said that “criminal responses are environmental, not racial,” and that many use “the tragic results of segregation as a justification for continuing it”

He said the emphasis on education rather than legislation to improve civil rights is a “half-truth.” He admits that “We can change hearts only through education and religion. I am a preacher and I’m in the heart-changing business. I preach regeneration, conversion, and the new birth day after day, week after week. “You can’t change hearts by law, but you can restrain the heartless. You can’t make somebody love me, but you can restrain him from lynching me.” He asked Methodists to back Johnson’s new proposal for a national fair-housing law.

Britain: Ecumenical ‘Scrabble’

At the biyearly meeting of the British Council of Churches last month, the Archbishop of Canterbury, its chairman, expressed his simple ecumenical formula: push any doors that are pushable. His BCC colleagues gave the impression of slightly apprehensive pleasure that things are moving along so fast. The Rev. John Weller, acting general secretary, warned of the dangers in freeing “a sort of Gadarene rush of ecumania”; the Bishop of Bristol, Dr. Oliver Tomkins, saw the present ecumenical possibilities as an unfinished game of Scrabble, with incomplete words tapering off in all directions (the metaphor caught the imagination of some delegates, who built further on it).

But it was an English Presbyterian who voiced the cautious surprise in BCC circles that union by 1980 might after all be more than wishful thinking. This Dr. Whitehorn did by applying the words of a Cambridge don of yesteryear about another radical project: “I’ve always been in favour of the admission of women to the university, but I never thought it would come in my time.” The council was asking member churches to make detailed proposals to their own assemblies in 1968 about the 1980 unity goal.

The council meeting generally reflected the hopeful traveling that is being done in Britain. There were the usual frequent and respectful allusions to Vatican Council II: fulsome greetings to the Roman Catholic observers present; and tributes to Dr. Visser ’t Hooft on his retirement from the World Council of Churches. The prevailing euphoria permitted even a somewhat vague official admission of “the need to maintain and strengthen effective dialogue between evangelicals and ecumenicals”—an area in which there has been some BCC feet-dragging in marked contrast to WCC overtures to evangelicals.

The BCC, which has stuck out its neck on South Africa and Rhodesia, agreed on a ten-point resolution on Viet Nam for transmission to the British government. This advocates, among other things, the stopping of military action on both sides, a phased withdrawal of American troops, negotiations in which the Viet Cong participate, and the bringing of Red China into the world community of nations.

After hearing the report of the working party on “World Poverty and British Responsibility” (a splendid piece of work to be published shortly), the council declared that “for as long as a part of the human family lives in misery, no part of the universal Church ought to remain undisturbed, least of all in a country which is increasing in affluence.” On this also the council proposes to make various requests to the government. When this report was mentioned the previous day at a press conference, a BCC official had called it “heresy” to suppose that we ought first to concern ourselves with poverty at home. While most Christians would agree, at least one listener reflected on how rarely we hear the word “heresy” on ecumenical occasions!

Greetings were sent by the council to the Right Rev. C. Kenneth Sansbury, Bishop of Singapore and Malaya, who returns to England in early summer to become the BCC’s general secretary.

J. D. DOUGLAS

The Toils Of Greece

It looks as though Greece’s six-month-old ecclesiastical conflict is being resolved. The government appears ready to accept an illegal maneuver carried out by a majority of the Greek Orthodox hierarchy—the unconstitutional election of fifteen new bishops to fill long-vacant sees, and the transfer of two other prelates to more lucrative positions (see December 17, 1965, issue, page 36).

The decision was challenged in the Supreme State Council by the leader of the minority of churchmen who oppose such unlawful maneuverings. He sought an official public ruling that the elections were invalid. At the last moment, the government postponed the hearing until November 25. Ostensibly this was to allow further time for settlement, but authoritative church sources in Athens see it as another sign that the state is prepared to legalize the church majority’s fail accompli.

The crisis was responsible for a snub to King Constantine and Queen Anne Marie when they went to Mesolonghi for celebrations marking an incident in the Greek war of independence. Local people would not participate in a church service because of the ban on the local metropolitan, one of the unrecognized bishops. At the traditional blessing of the waters at Piraeus, the port of Athens, the king was not present because the celebrant was Metropolitan Chrysostomos, leader of the rebel bishops (later given a suspended sentence for “illegally usurping” authority).

The conflicts have produced suggestions that church and state should be separated in Greece. Protestant leaders would welcome such a move, but they realize that tight links between the two make a change impracticable.

G. Z. CONSTANTINIDIS

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