Reviewing Ecumenical History
by Thomas Weiser
The Ecumenical Review
Date: 4/1/2000
Two years ago, the 50th anniversary of the founding of the World Council of Churches was celebrated in various parts of the world in various ways, academic and liturgical, culminating in a ceremony of recommitment at the eighth assembly in Harare. But expectations that such a jubilee might generate some major assessments of the history of the WCC remain unfulfilled. The Memoirs of W.A. Visser 't Hooft conclude with the New Delhi assembly in 1961. The second volume of A History of the Ecumenical Movement: The Ecumenical Advance, edited by H. Fey, leads up to 1968, thus covering only the first twenty years of the Council's existence (a third volume is in preparation). Major changes occurred in the Council's life and work in the 1960s and 1970s. Their implications have been and continue to be disputed and deserve critical examination.
Two publications on WCC history have recently appeared in Germany, prompted not by the ecumenical anniversary but by the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. They focus on the cold war period, which coincides with the first forty years of the WCC. The first, Nationaler Protestantismus und Okumenische Bewegung,(1) consists of three essays followed by a postscript on the Harare assembly; the second, Der Okumenische Rat der Kirchen in den Konflikten des kalten Krieges,(2) contains papers and summaries of discussions from a consultation at the Protestant Academy in Muhlheim, Germany, in 1999. The two books differ greatly both in size and in orientation.
The first is based on years of research in archives in different parts of the world -- Geneva (the WCC and the Lutheran World Federation), Philadelphia (the US National Council of Churches) and Germany (the files of Stasi, the state security agency of the former German Democratic Republic). In effect, the book is three independent monographs, each signed by one of the authors: Armin Boyens, a WCC staff member from 1961 to 1966, Gerhard Besier, professor at the University of Heidelberg, and Gerhard Lindemann, research assistant at the same university.
This volume of more than 1000 pages, accompanied by innumerable footnotes and forty pages of bibliography, suggests a truly comprehensive undertaking. However, the reader learns already in the preface that the authors, while writing independently from one another, are united in their concern "to lay bare ... the political and spiritual errors" committed by the churches and the WCC during the cold war period. Such a warning may be useful in dispelling any false expectations, but it also bares the authors' intention not to open up the debate but close it, to separate saints from sinners.
Of the three essays, the one by Boyens deals most directly with the WCC. For Boyens, the history of the WCC is basically divided into two periods. The first is the period from 1948 to 1966, when W.A. Visser 't Hooft was general secretary. It is the period of grace, the golden age of the ecumenical movement. The titles of Boyens' chapters on these years are all positive, speaking of the construction, defence and enlargement of the fellowship. The titles of the next three chapters call the ecumenical fellowship into question: "Facing Tests", "Showing Fissures", "Enduring Conflicts".
The fall from grace happened for Boyens under Visser 't Hooft's successor Eugene Carson Blake. Boyens accuses Blake and the subsequent general secretaries of having abandoned the carefully balanced stance regarding East and West that allowed for vigorous defence of those whose human rights were violated in communist-dominated countries of Eastern Europe. While the troubles started already in the early 1960s, in the wake of the admission of Eastern European Orthodox churches, particularly the Russian Orthodox, into WCC membership at the New Delhi assembly, Visser 't Hooft succeeded in maintaining the balance. For Boyens, the inclusion of liberation theology into the ecumenical debate and the establishment of the Programme to Combat Racism are the unmistakable signs of diminishing interest in human rights issues in Eastern Europe, and growing interest in maintaining good relations with church and state authorities rather than in defending the rights of dissidents.
Those already familiar with the history of the WCC and the controversies surrounding some of its policies will find nothing new in Boyens' account. One reads through the endless polemics with a certain sadness, a sense that, with the passing of ten years since the end of the cold war and with new and good information available, an opportunity has been missed to offer some new perspectives on WCC history, especially on those turbulent and crucial years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But the author, obviously unable to shed the cold war mentality, has filtered the huge amount of research which he undoubtedly accomplished through well-worn anti-communist lenses.
A particular problem arises from Boyens' hierarchical view of church and ecumenical life. Thus he reduces most of the WCC's work to the actions, decisions and especially the motives of either the general secretaries or a few staff members, as if it were in their power to start or terminate a programme, to engineer or prevent a nomination. Similarly, the relations between the WCC and the German churches are limited to exchanges between some WCC staff and the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD). This is a totally inadequate basis for evaluating a programme like the Programme to Combat Racism, whose constituency in Germany included many church groups and even official church bodies committed to mobilize support for some of the actions the EKD opposed. For Boyens, the encouragement given by the WCC to these groups amounted to interference in the internal affairs of a member church, "a clear violation of the WCC constitution" (p.245). The same top-down attitude determines Boyens' use of information from the archives of the Soviet and East German state security offices, which is alleged to furnish definitive proof of the WCC's "soft" attitude towards the communist regimes: they were "authorities", and the church delegates from these countries must have acted on their instructions.
In the second essay, "Protestantismus, Kommunismus und Okumene in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika" (Protestantism, Communism and Ecumenism in the USA), Besier scrutinizes some aspects of the work of the US National Council of Churches (up to 1950 the Federal Council of Churches) during the cold war period. Here too the story is told in terms of rise and fall, in this case of liberal Protestantism in the United States. Again, the post-war period between 1945 and 1960, when liberal Protestantism succeeded in both influencing US policies and maintaining support for its work among the rank and file in the churches, is contrasted with the period when the balance was lost, the 1960s, when the liberal churches, led by the NCC, first became heavily involved in the civil rights struggle, then when they joined the protest against the Vietnam war. Besier aims to show that these actions cost the churches much of their support at the grassroots level, that they even ceased to be "mainline" churches and that their role was taken over by the conservative wing of Protestantism, more in tune with "the American way of life".
While Besier, unlike Boyens, refrains from polemics and even from critical remarks that would make explicit his interpretation of developments, the choice of headings is indicative of his leanings. "The communist gospel is gaining ground, the American social gospel is losing influence" (p.414) describes the NCC's call for more imaginative US policies to counter the spread of communism in third-world countries. "The death of youth" (in English, p.418) may refer to the death of President John F. Kennedy -- or to the 10th anniversary of the NCC. The Vietnam war reflects the "moral defeat of the USA", whereas the Reagan years are announced as the "rebirth of moral America" (p.608). In his clearest show of anti-communist colours Besier labels the NCC churches "agents of revolution" for the mere fact that in 1966 the NCC department of international affairs contacted European churches and the Conference of European Churches to ask for support in their anti-war protests. Besier's chapter on the NCC publication Religion in Communist-Dominated Areas exaggerates its importance and takes the NCC's reluctance to support it financially, because of its obviously partisan approach, as proof that the NCC gave cooperation between the US and Soviet governments priority over promoting "credible testimonies from churches in the USSR" (p.470).
The third essay by Gerhard Lindemann examines the history of the Christian Peace Conference (CPC), founded in 1958. That part of ecumenical history during the cold war period saw the heaviest involvement of Eastern European governments and thus provides an opportunity for asserting that those governments influenced ecumenical history. The point is certainly made. At the same time, Lindemann misses the opportunity to offer a differentiated picture of the interplay between government and church actors. In fact, there is no indication that any source materials from the former or present CPC offices have been used. It is hard to believe that all this material has vanished; and if so, a serious researcher would have mentioned this rather extraordinary fact in the introduction. Moreover, many survivors of the movement, including long-time general secretary Jaroslav Ondra (who died this spring), would have been available for interviews.
Lindemann's description of the founding phase of the CPC in particular is based almost exclusively on data from state archives. While it is not explicitly affirmed that Josef Hromadka and his colleagues at the Czech theological faculties acted on orders from the government, the use of sources certainly creates this impression. One may therefore conclude that the one-sidedness is deliberate.
Within these limits, it must be said that Lindemann makes fairly objective use of the sources without undue inferences about the motives of the various actors. But a complete and balanced history of the CPC still needs to be written, and when it is, one may hope that it will do justice to the complex dynamics governing the relations between the communist authorities and the churches in the various Eastern European countries during the cold war period.
Widening the horizon
The subtitle of the second book, growing out of the Muhlheim consultation, is "Contexts, Compromises, Concrete Actions". Thus it takes us out of the narrow confines of the cold war perspective. Although only a third as long as the volume of Besier et al., it covers many more aspects of ecumenical witness and action and would merit a separate review.
The report opens with an extensive memorandum by Heinz-Joachim Held, a member of the WCC Central Committee and its moderator from 1983 to 1991. This is a personal attempt "to recall the past and restore transparency" (p.22) to the controversy over the "one-sidedness" of WCC policies on human rights. It is followed by summaries of presentations, discussions and personal testimonies reflecting intensive group work in four areas: political challenges for the WCC, ecumenical peace work, advocacy of human rights (mostly religious freedom) and theological developments. Three presentations were published separately.(3)
The great variety of approaches in the presentations and discussions avoids blanket indictment of WCC policies, allows for an appreciation of the dynamics at work in different situations and permits readers to draw their own conclusions. "Truth has many faces, and so does the way of speaking it" (p.9). A particular contribution is the light shed on the various ways church people tried to cope with limitations imposed by their governments, as described by participants who actually lived in Eastern Europe during the cold war. The contribution by Geiko Muller-Fahrenholz makes a convincing case that from the perspective of the people in the South, the cold war was a Northern issue inflicted on their countries by geo-political interests.
Thanks to its contextual methodology, bringing into play case studies, personal testimonies and exchanges between different generations and protagonists from both sides of the former cold war frontiers, this book lays the groundwork for writing future chapters in ecumenical history.
Placing the cold war into proper perspective will also require an assessment of Western anti-communism. Recently, on the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war, The New York Times editorialized that this had been "a senseless war" in which "more than 58,000 American servicemen lost their lives", not in defence of their country but to satisfy "the hallucination of men numbed, and trapped, by the liturgies of the cold war".(4) But the loss of US lives is only a fraction of the million or more Vietnamese who died in that war, and this in turn is only a fraction of the casualties during the wars in Asia, Africa and Latin America that were caused, supported or abetted by the West's cold war policies.
Extricating oneself from the trap of the cold war ideology is a precondition for proper analysis of the past. The volume by Boyens, Besier and Lindemann is proof of how difficult this is. Most people do not even try. The sudden and unexpected collapse of one side in the cold war has created the illusion of liberation. In fact, the past has simply been put aside as irrelevant, and people on both sides of the former cold war divide have fallen victim to what E. Hobsbawm calls one of the eeriest phenomena of the late 20th century: "the destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations".(5) For Hobsbawm the reasons for this disconnection are to be found in developments beginning in the early 1970s and leading to "a world which lost its bearings and slid into instability and crisis".(6)
Recovering the ecumenical memory
Hobsbawm's observation may also shed light on the ecumenical history of the last three decades, for the early 1970s were also crisis years in the history of the WCC; and it must be asked whether one reason for the lack of historical reflection on this period noted above is perhaps a loss of ecumenical memory due to this crisis. The crisis erupted around the Programme to Combat Racism, initiated in 1969 after a decision at the WCC's fourth assembly (Uppsala 1968) "to promote new efforts to eliminate racism".(7)
Racism was one of the major challenges confronting the WCC in the 1960s. During these years a number of defining "kairos" moments occurred. Some of these moments were challenges peculiar to the Council, but most of them also challenged the world at large. Two others which received particular attention at Uppsala were the challenge from the South and the challenge from youth.
Third-world churches had joined the WCC in considerable numbers in 1961, but it was in 1966 at the world conference on Church and Society in Geneva -- where not only churches but also grassroots movements, some of them sponsored by the churches, were present -- that their challenge to the WCC took shape. In response the WCC decided in 1969 to launch a programme of participation in development (CCPD), and in the 1970s the network of rural and urban mission in the third world was expanded. Especially through CCPD, "solidarity with the poor" became a major issue for the ecumenical fellowship in the 1970s.
For young people, the 1960s marked a transition from the "silent generation" to the "protest generation". The first signals of this change within the ecumenical fellowship were the WCC youth conference in 1960 and the World Student Christian Federation conference the same year. The 1960s witnessed protest movements of youth in various parts of the world -- notably Latin America, North America and Europe -- targeted at established institutions, whether religious, educational, political or economic, from which they felt excluded. In 1968 the WCC responded to the challenge by sharply increasing its staff for youth work.
In the early 1970s the WCC would also face the challenge of sexism. The role of women in church and society, already discussed at the Amsterdam assembly, had its kairos moment in the early 1970s, leading to the 1974 Berlin conference on sexism. The challenge was kept before the churches by study programmes, international conferences and more recently by a decade-long emphasis on the Churches in Solidarity with Women, concluding at the assembly in 1998.
Of these challenges racism elicited the strongest response at Uppsala. The intensification of the racial crisis in the 1960s, especially in the United States and South Africa, which both claimed to be governed by Christian values, forced the ecumenical community to acknowledge racism as not just one among many injustices, but a particularly Christian heresy and hence a challenge to Christians more than anyone else to pass from word to action.(8) No other programme of the WCC before or since has created such strong reactions, both positive and negative.
Boyens reserves his most virulent attack for the PCR. This is remarkable, since the issue of racism as presented at the Uppsala assembly bore no relation to the cold war. The amalgamation of the two was part of the attack on the Programme, an effort to prove that the WCC was associating with left-wing revolutionaries. The crisis created by this controversy allows for many interpretations -- and one's interpretation of it will determine one's understanding not only of the crisis but of the history of the Council and of the ecumenical movement over the last fifty years.
Joining the household of God
The perception of racism as a fundamental challenge for Christians and churches owed much to the notion of ecumenism that had evolved through successive WCC studies and programmes since 1948. By the time the PCR was launched in 1969, the meaning of the oikoumene had been widened to include the whole inhabited earth. The excitement pervading much of the ecumenical work in the 1950s and 1960s was due to the discovery of this reality, a worldwide reality, manifesting itself also beyond the life of the churches -- as for instance in the youth protests of the late 1960s, the civil fights movement led by Martin Luther King in the USA, or the "Prague Spring" of 1968. Ecumenical work concerned all of humankind, not merely the work of and relations between churches. From this perspective, racism was an eminently ecumenical issue.
Furthermore, being ecumenical meant seeing oneself as a member of the oikos, the household of God.(9) This metaphor emphasizes people and their relationships, their capacity or incapacity to live together. The fundamental ecumenical issue posed to Christians by PCR's call to actions of concrete solidarity with people in the struggle against racism was whether they would and should accept living in this enlarged household, where they would find themselves associated with groups and persons who were there not primarily on the basis of the Christian tradition but because of their being victims of racial discrimination. Essentially the same issue was subsequently posed, less dramatically, by the programmes on the church in solidarity with the poor and in solidarity with women.
But the issue was not faced in those terms. The questions debated during the PCR controversy were ethical, theological and ecclesiological. On ethical grounds, it was objected that such an association would entail an endorsement of violence. On theological and ecclesiological grounds, the notion of a wider household was criticized as a "secular" ecumenism which threatened to submerge the specificity of the churches' calling in a general search for a unitary world.
Both these questions were crucial and needed to be faced. But the time and place to raise them would have been after taking the risk of joining the household and then discussing them together with the victims. Instead, the debate served as a substitute for joining the household and thus deepened the crisis rather than resolving it. The churches continued to go their own ways and the WCC was forced "to go its own way with programmes and activities reaching out to groups and others".(10) The ecumenical history of the last 25 years must be understood in the light of this kairos.
The search for the reasons for the crisis has not yet gone much beyond attempts to fix the blame either on the churches or on the WCC. As to the latter, Boyens' essay is only the latest in a long series of witch-hunts. And one seeks in vain in the Muhlheim papers for any criticism that goes beyond pointing out failures in WCC policies and programmes. Fixing the blame is, of course, a classic way of dealing with crises and conflicts, but it only prolongs them. Rather, we need to reflect on the consequences of living in the household, the changes required and the costs to be counted.
The first consequence is to relinquish control. Living in the household means being part of it along with others, claiming no special rights and privileges, religious or otherwise, and especially not judging who else rightfully belongs to the household. Christians, Christian groups and churches, like other groups, always feel a need to set limits, borders that enable them to tell who is inside and who is outside. The programmes and actions in the struggle against racism, in moving towards solidarity with the poor, or towards a community of women and men were signs that the lines between church and world, while not abolished, are being redrawn in very different and often unpredictable ways, not unlike the redrawing of the lines between the "just" and the "unjust" provoked by Jesus' proclamation of the kingdom of God, or of the lines between Jews and Gentiles provoked by spread of the gospel throughout the oikoumene.
The need for limits is tied to the need for identity. Limits not only allow people inside to recognize each other as members of the same group in distinction from those outside, but also allow those outside to identify those inside. Thus both the church's identity and its place in society are secured by setting limits, especially when they are mutually agreed to by church and society. The life of the churches under the former communist regimes is a good example of the need for limits. Adherence to them often determined survival. In the household of God the limits do not disappear, but they constantly move and so can no longer form the basis for establishing identity. Christian and church identity have to be based on other grounds.
The cost of (ecumenical) living
Christians and churches moving towards the oikoumene will have to cope with loss of limits and of identity in the traditional sense, with disunity among members and loss of their established position in society. The experience of US liberal Protestantism as a result of its involvement in the civil rights struggle in the 1960s is a case in point. What emerged here was recognized later in the 1970s and early 1980s on a worldwide scale in the confrontation between the oikoumene of solidarity and sharing on the one hand and the oikoumene of domination and dependence on the other. In principle, discipleship under the Lordship of Christ always entails being confronted with the principalities and powers of this world. It is always costly, especially for the disciples. Perhaps the notion of the cost of discipleship did not receive enough attention in the wake of the enthusiasm for renewal of church and society in the late 1960s, thus leaving some churches unprepared for the subsequent crisis in their own ranks. Besier interprets the crisis of the liberal churches in the US in the 1970s and 1980s as a sign of their failure to be disciple. The interpretation of the history of the crisis in these churches will need to clarify much more the nature of the cost of discipleship.
The last 25 years have also been characterized by a trend described as a "return to religion" and away from what was considered secularism or "secular ecumenism". This trend was to satisfy the need for clear limits and thus a clear distinction between the religious and the secular. But while the need may have been satisfied for some, it also leads to the opposite result in that it makes evident that the oikoumene of God does not respect the lines drawn by religion, and that on the other hand the oikoumene of domination reaches deep into the ranks of all religious groups.
The preceding observations highlight two crucial aspects for understanding the ecumenical history of the last three decades: the cost of discipleship and the interaction between the oikoumene of solidarity and the oikoumene of domination. Their analysis requires recourse to two major biblical notions which hitherto have played only minor roles in the ecumenical debate.
The first is the meaning of the cross. To be sure, the cross has always been placed in the centre of the Christian faith in the ecumenical debate as the chief theological symbol -- displayed in innumerable churches and homes -- of God's unlimited love or of the price paid for human sinfulness. But despite its ubiquity it has never become an hermeneutical tool for understanding history and Christian involvement in it in the same way as the Exodus of Israel from Egypt or Jesus' proclamation of good news for the poor. Yet when the cross is seen as an event in history, it becomes the paradigm for the cost of discipleship. For the crucifixion, as told in the four gospels, is first of all a story about the death of a man at the hands of an angry crowd unanimous in condemning him. As Rene Girard has shown in his pioneering studies on the origins of violence, such unanimity would, within the religious-cultural context of Jesus' time, normally have been proof that the victim was guilty and that his removal had freed the community from whatever evil had befallen it.(11)
The passion story in the gospels is unique in that it shows the victim being innocent and the community engaging in arbitrary violence. Ever since then, victims have begun to speak up against violence, all the way from the early martyrs to the modern day victims of human rights violations -- though few of course are aware that Jesus' crucifixion is the original model for their protest. Each authentic protest of the innocence of victims is now a sign that the household of God is established in history. Furthermore, Jesus' crucifixion helps us to understand why living in the household is inevitably connected with cost, with suffering. For while Jesus' crucifixion has once and for all revealed the tree nature of violence and thereby fundamentally de-sacralized it, it has not eliminated it. The meaning of the history following the crucifixion is to "complete what is lacking in the afflictions" of the crucified (Col. 1:24), that is, it is apocalyptic, revealing the innocence of victims and the arbitrariness of violence.
We are not used to reading the passion story as a story of revelation, because revelation, like the crucifixion, is not one of the current hermeneutical tools. Traditionally, revelation applies to God who chose to be revealed, first in the history of Israel and, for Christians, supremely in Jesus Christ. But in the Bible the revelation of God and his love is always accompanied by the revelation of sin and violence, as the crucifixion demonstrates.
The same duality prevails in Revelation: visions of the Lamb of God, of the elders of the twelve tribes of Israel, of the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven alternate with visions of horror, famine and death, the ones conditioning the others. It is a major mishap in the history of biblical interpretation that the two aspects of this revelation have been tom apart and that the use of the term "apocalyptic" is reserved for the horrors while in theological discourse the term "revelation" refers only to God. Once we overcome this dichotomy, revelation in the sense of the double revelation may serve as a tool for interpreting historical developments, for discerning the signs that indicate the presence of the oikoumene of God as well as of the oikoumene of domination. Such an understanding alone may prevent us from seeing things only in black or in white.
Hearing and doing
Racism in the 1960s in South Africa and the United States marked a kairos, a special historical moment of apocalyptic clarity about the arbitrariness of violence and the innocence of the victims. It was a call to the followers of Jesus, the quintessential victim, that their place was to be alongside the victims and thus to manifest in the face of the oikoumene of domination the presence of the household of God. The Uppsala assembly heard that message and through establishing PCR the WCC tried to convey it to the churches. The became indeed a sign of solidarity and was understood as such by the victims, but it did not succeed in conveying the message to the churches that they themselves should be such signs. The message was drowned in the controversy over the messenger. The churches have not become anti-ecumenical, but along with the message they also have lost the ecumenical memory, similar to the man described in the letter of James who observes himself in a mirror "and goes away and at once forgets what he was like" (1:24).
The crisis is a crisis in the ecumenical fellowship, and it is not surprising that the debate over the nature of this fellowship has lately intensified -- as was evident, for instance, in the deliberations of the WCC assembly in Harare. The analysis attempted here suggests that this preoccupation is a consequence of the unresolved crisis of the 1970s and that the nature of the fellowship and the particular challenges it faces today can only be clarified as we overcome the loss of ecumenical memory and recover the vision of the household of God.
NOTES
(1) Berlin, Duncker and Humblot, 1999.
(2) Frankfurt, Lembeck, 2000.
(3) In Okumenische Rundschau, Vol. 49, Jan. 2000, which also contains an article by J. Althausen which was not presented in Muhlheim.
(4) Reprinted in the International Herald Tribune, 26 April 2000.
(5) Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, New York, Vintage, 1996, p.3.
(6) Ibid., p.403.
(7) N. Goodall, ed., The Uppsala 68 Report, Geneva, WCC, 1968, p.241.
(8) Cf. Konrad Raiser, Ecumenism in Transition, Geneva, WCC, 1989, pp.9f.; and the report of general secretary Philip Potter to the Vancouver assembly, in D. Gill, ed., Gathered for Life, Geneva, WCC, 1983, p. 197.
(9) Potter, loc. cit., p.209.
(10) Ibid., p.208.
(11) Cf. R. Girard, The Scapegoat, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins U.P., 1986.
Thomas Wieser was a leader in the Swiss and American student Christian movements during the period 1946 to 1960, and later a staff member of the WCC's Commission on World Mission and Evangelism.
This document provided by HighBeam Research at http://www.highbeam.com
The Ecumenical Review
Date: 4/1/2000
Two years ago, the 50th anniversary of the founding of the World Council of Churches was celebrated in various parts of the world in various ways, academic and liturgical, culminating in a ceremony of recommitment at the eighth assembly in Harare. But expectations that such a jubilee might generate some major assessments of the history of the WCC remain unfulfilled. The Memoirs of W.A. Visser 't Hooft conclude with the New Delhi assembly in 1961. The second volume of A History of the Ecumenical Movement: The Ecumenical Advance, edited by H. Fey, leads up to 1968, thus covering only the first twenty years of the Council's existence (a third volume is in preparation). Major changes occurred in the Council's life and work in the 1960s and 1970s. Their implications have been and continue to be disputed and deserve critical examination.
Two publications on WCC history have recently appeared in Germany, prompted not by the ecumenical anniversary but by the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. They focus on the cold war period, which coincides with the first forty years of the WCC. The first, Nationaler Protestantismus und Okumenische Bewegung,(1) consists of three essays followed by a postscript on the Harare assembly; the second, Der Okumenische Rat der Kirchen in den Konflikten des kalten Krieges,(2) contains papers and summaries of discussions from a consultation at the Protestant Academy in Muhlheim, Germany, in 1999. The two books differ greatly both in size and in orientation.
The first is based on years of research in archives in different parts of the world -- Geneva (the WCC and the Lutheran World Federation), Philadelphia (the US National Council of Churches) and Germany (the files of Stasi, the state security agency of the former German Democratic Republic). In effect, the book is three independent monographs, each signed by one of the authors: Armin Boyens, a WCC staff member from 1961 to 1966, Gerhard Besier, professor at the University of Heidelberg, and Gerhard Lindemann, research assistant at the same university.
This volume of more than 1000 pages, accompanied by innumerable footnotes and forty pages of bibliography, suggests a truly comprehensive undertaking. However, the reader learns already in the preface that the authors, while writing independently from one another, are united in their concern "to lay bare ... the political and spiritual errors" committed by the churches and the WCC during the cold war period. Such a warning may be useful in dispelling any false expectations, but it also bares the authors' intention not to open up the debate but close it, to separate saints from sinners.
Of the three essays, the one by Boyens deals most directly with the WCC. For Boyens, the history of the WCC is basically divided into two periods. The first is the period from 1948 to 1966, when W.A. Visser 't Hooft was general secretary. It is the period of grace, the golden age of the ecumenical movement. The titles of Boyens' chapters on these years are all positive, speaking of the construction, defence and enlargement of the fellowship. The titles of the next three chapters call the ecumenical fellowship into question: "Facing Tests", "Showing Fissures", "Enduring Conflicts".
The fall from grace happened for Boyens under Visser 't Hooft's successor Eugene Carson Blake. Boyens accuses Blake and the subsequent general secretaries of having abandoned the carefully balanced stance regarding East and West that allowed for vigorous defence of those whose human rights were violated in communist-dominated countries of Eastern Europe. While the troubles started already in the early 1960s, in the wake of the admission of Eastern European Orthodox churches, particularly the Russian Orthodox, into WCC membership at the New Delhi assembly, Visser 't Hooft succeeded in maintaining the balance. For Boyens, the inclusion of liberation theology into the ecumenical debate and the establishment of the Programme to Combat Racism are the unmistakable signs of diminishing interest in human rights issues in Eastern Europe, and growing interest in maintaining good relations with church and state authorities rather than in defending the rights of dissidents.
Those already familiar with the history of the WCC and the controversies surrounding some of its policies will find nothing new in Boyens' account. One reads through the endless polemics with a certain sadness, a sense that, with the passing of ten years since the end of the cold war and with new and good information available, an opportunity has been missed to offer some new perspectives on WCC history, especially on those turbulent and crucial years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But the author, obviously unable to shed the cold war mentality, has filtered the huge amount of research which he undoubtedly accomplished through well-worn anti-communist lenses.
A particular problem arises from Boyens' hierarchical view of church and ecumenical life. Thus he reduces most of the WCC's work to the actions, decisions and especially the motives of either the general secretaries or a few staff members, as if it were in their power to start or terminate a programme, to engineer or prevent a nomination. Similarly, the relations between the WCC and the German churches are limited to exchanges between some WCC staff and the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD). This is a totally inadequate basis for evaluating a programme like the Programme to Combat Racism, whose constituency in Germany included many church groups and even official church bodies committed to mobilize support for some of the actions the EKD opposed. For Boyens, the encouragement given by the WCC to these groups amounted to interference in the internal affairs of a member church, "a clear violation of the WCC constitution" (p.245). The same top-down attitude determines Boyens' use of information from the archives of the Soviet and East German state security offices, which is alleged to furnish definitive proof of the WCC's "soft" attitude towards the communist regimes: they were "authorities", and the church delegates from these countries must have acted on their instructions.
In the second essay, "Protestantismus, Kommunismus und Okumene in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika" (Protestantism, Communism and Ecumenism in the USA), Besier scrutinizes some aspects of the work of the US National Council of Churches (up to 1950 the Federal Council of Churches) during the cold war period. Here too the story is told in terms of rise and fall, in this case of liberal Protestantism in the United States. Again, the post-war period between 1945 and 1960, when liberal Protestantism succeeded in both influencing US policies and maintaining support for its work among the rank and file in the churches, is contrasted with the period when the balance was lost, the 1960s, when the liberal churches, led by the NCC, first became heavily involved in the civil rights struggle, then when they joined the protest against the Vietnam war. Besier aims to show that these actions cost the churches much of their support at the grassroots level, that they even ceased to be "mainline" churches and that their role was taken over by the conservative wing of Protestantism, more in tune with "the American way of life".
While Besier, unlike Boyens, refrains from polemics and even from critical remarks that would make explicit his interpretation of developments, the choice of headings is indicative of his leanings. "The communist gospel is gaining ground, the American social gospel is losing influence" (p.414) describes the NCC's call for more imaginative US policies to counter the spread of communism in third-world countries. "The death of youth" (in English, p.418) may refer to the death of President John F. Kennedy -- or to the 10th anniversary of the NCC. The Vietnam war reflects the "moral defeat of the USA", whereas the Reagan years are announced as the "rebirth of moral America" (p.608). In his clearest show of anti-communist colours Besier labels the NCC churches "agents of revolution" for the mere fact that in 1966 the NCC department of international affairs contacted European churches and the Conference of European Churches to ask for support in their anti-war protests. Besier's chapter on the NCC publication Religion in Communist-Dominated Areas exaggerates its importance and takes the NCC's reluctance to support it financially, because of its obviously partisan approach, as proof that the NCC gave cooperation between the US and Soviet governments priority over promoting "credible testimonies from churches in the USSR" (p.470).
The third essay by Gerhard Lindemann examines the history of the Christian Peace Conference (CPC), founded in 1958. That part of ecumenical history during the cold war period saw the heaviest involvement of Eastern European governments and thus provides an opportunity for asserting that those governments influenced ecumenical history. The point is certainly made. At the same time, Lindemann misses the opportunity to offer a differentiated picture of the interplay between government and church actors. In fact, there is no indication that any source materials from the former or present CPC offices have been used. It is hard to believe that all this material has vanished; and if so, a serious researcher would have mentioned this rather extraordinary fact in the introduction. Moreover, many survivors of the movement, including long-time general secretary Jaroslav Ondra (who died this spring), would have been available for interviews.
Lindemann's description of the founding phase of the CPC in particular is based almost exclusively on data from state archives. While it is not explicitly affirmed that Josef Hromadka and his colleagues at the Czech theological faculties acted on orders from the government, the use of sources certainly creates this impression. One may therefore conclude that the one-sidedness is deliberate.
Within these limits, it must be said that Lindemann makes fairly objective use of the sources without undue inferences about the motives of the various actors. But a complete and balanced history of the CPC still needs to be written, and when it is, one may hope that it will do justice to the complex dynamics governing the relations between the communist authorities and the churches in the various Eastern European countries during the cold war period.
Widening the horizon
The subtitle of the second book, growing out of the Muhlheim consultation, is "Contexts, Compromises, Concrete Actions". Thus it takes us out of the narrow confines of the cold war perspective. Although only a third as long as the volume of Besier et al., it covers many more aspects of ecumenical witness and action and would merit a separate review.
The report opens with an extensive memorandum by Heinz-Joachim Held, a member of the WCC Central Committee and its moderator from 1983 to 1991. This is a personal attempt "to recall the past and restore transparency" (p.22) to the controversy over the "one-sidedness" of WCC policies on human rights. It is followed by summaries of presentations, discussions and personal testimonies reflecting intensive group work in four areas: political challenges for the WCC, ecumenical peace work, advocacy of human rights (mostly religious freedom) and theological developments. Three presentations were published separately.(3)
The great variety of approaches in the presentations and discussions avoids blanket indictment of WCC policies, allows for an appreciation of the dynamics at work in different situations and permits readers to draw their own conclusions. "Truth has many faces, and so does the way of speaking it" (p.9). A particular contribution is the light shed on the various ways church people tried to cope with limitations imposed by their governments, as described by participants who actually lived in Eastern Europe during the cold war. The contribution by Geiko Muller-Fahrenholz makes a convincing case that from the perspective of the people in the South, the cold war was a Northern issue inflicted on their countries by geo-political interests.
Thanks to its contextual methodology, bringing into play case studies, personal testimonies and exchanges between different generations and protagonists from both sides of the former cold war frontiers, this book lays the groundwork for writing future chapters in ecumenical history.
Placing the cold war into proper perspective will also require an assessment of Western anti-communism. Recently, on the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war, The New York Times editorialized that this had been "a senseless war" in which "more than 58,000 American servicemen lost their lives", not in defence of their country but to satisfy "the hallucination of men numbed, and trapped, by the liturgies of the cold war".(4) But the loss of US lives is only a fraction of the million or more Vietnamese who died in that war, and this in turn is only a fraction of the casualties during the wars in Asia, Africa and Latin America that were caused, supported or abetted by the West's cold war policies.
Extricating oneself from the trap of the cold war ideology is a precondition for proper analysis of the past. The volume by Boyens, Besier and Lindemann is proof of how difficult this is. Most people do not even try. The sudden and unexpected collapse of one side in the cold war has created the illusion of liberation. In fact, the past has simply been put aside as irrelevant, and people on both sides of the former cold war divide have fallen victim to what E. Hobsbawm calls one of the eeriest phenomena of the late 20th century: "the destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations".(5) For Hobsbawm the reasons for this disconnection are to be found in developments beginning in the early 1970s and leading to "a world which lost its bearings and slid into instability and crisis".(6)
Recovering the ecumenical memory
Hobsbawm's observation may also shed light on the ecumenical history of the last three decades, for the early 1970s were also crisis years in the history of the WCC; and it must be asked whether one reason for the lack of historical reflection on this period noted above is perhaps a loss of ecumenical memory due to this crisis. The crisis erupted around the Programme to Combat Racism, initiated in 1969 after a decision at the WCC's fourth assembly (Uppsala 1968) "to promote new efforts to eliminate racism".(7)
Racism was one of the major challenges confronting the WCC in the 1960s. During these years a number of defining "kairos" moments occurred. Some of these moments were challenges peculiar to the Council, but most of them also challenged the world at large. Two others which received particular attention at Uppsala were the challenge from the South and the challenge from youth.
Third-world churches had joined the WCC in considerable numbers in 1961, but it was in 1966 at the world conference on Church and Society in Geneva -- where not only churches but also grassroots movements, some of them sponsored by the churches, were present -- that their challenge to the WCC took shape. In response the WCC decided in 1969 to launch a programme of participation in development (CCPD), and in the 1970s the network of rural and urban mission in the third world was expanded. Especially through CCPD, "solidarity with the poor" became a major issue for the ecumenical fellowship in the 1970s.
For young people, the 1960s marked a transition from the "silent generation" to the "protest generation". The first signals of this change within the ecumenical fellowship were the WCC youth conference in 1960 and the World Student Christian Federation conference the same year. The 1960s witnessed protest movements of youth in various parts of the world -- notably Latin America, North America and Europe -- targeted at established institutions, whether religious, educational, political or economic, from which they felt excluded. In 1968 the WCC responded to the challenge by sharply increasing its staff for youth work.
In the early 1970s the WCC would also face the challenge of sexism. The role of women in church and society, already discussed at the Amsterdam assembly, had its kairos moment in the early 1970s, leading to the 1974 Berlin conference on sexism. The challenge was kept before the churches by study programmes, international conferences and more recently by a decade-long emphasis on the Churches in Solidarity with Women, concluding at the assembly in 1998.
Of these challenges racism elicited the strongest response at Uppsala. The intensification of the racial crisis in the 1960s, especially in the United States and South Africa, which both claimed to be governed by Christian values, forced the ecumenical community to acknowledge racism as not just one among many injustices, but a particularly Christian heresy and hence a challenge to Christians more than anyone else to pass from word to action.(8) No other programme of the WCC before or since has created such strong reactions, both positive and negative.
Boyens reserves his most virulent attack for the PCR. This is remarkable, since the issue of racism as presented at the Uppsala assembly bore no relation to the cold war. The amalgamation of the two was part of the attack on the Programme, an effort to prove that the WCC was associating with left-wing revolutionaries. The crisis created by this controversy allows for many interpretations -- and one's interpretation of it will determine one's understanding not only of the crisis but of the history of the Council and of the ecumenical movement over the last fifty years.
Joining the household of God
The perception of racism as a fundamental challenge for Christians and churches owed much to the notion of ecumenism that had evolved through successive WCC studies and programmes since 1948. By the time the PCR was launched in 1969, the meaning of the oikoumene had been widened to include the whole inhabited earth. The excitement pervading much of the ecumenical work in the 1950s and 1960s was due to the discovery of this reality, a worldwide reality, manifesting itself also beyond the life of the churches -- as for instance in the youth protests of the late 1960s, the civil fights movement led by Martin Luther King in the USA, or the "Prague Spring" of 1968. Ecumenical work concerned all of humankind, not merely the work of and relations between churches. From this perspective, racism was an eminently ecumenical issue.
Furthermore, being ecumenical meant seeing oneself as a member of the oikos, the household of God.(9) This metaphor emphasizes people and their relationships, their capacity or incapacity to live together. The fundamental ecumenical issue posed to Christians by PCR's call to actions of concrete solidarity with people in the struggle against racism was whether they would and should accept living in this enlarged household, where they would find themselves associated with groups and persons who were there not primarily on the basis of the Christian tradition but because of their being victims of racial discrimination. Essentially the same issue was subsequently posed, less dramatically, by the programmes on the church in solidarity with the poor and in solidarity with women.
But the issue was not faced in those terms. The questions debated during the PCR controversy were ethical, theological and ecclesiological. On ethical grounds, it was objected that such an association would entail an endorsement of violence. On theological and ecclesiological grounds, the notion of a wider household was criticized as a "secular" ecumenism which threatened to submerge the specificity of the churches' calling in a general search for a unitary world.
Both these questions were crucial and needed to be faced. But the time and place to raise them would have been after taking the risk of joining the household and then discussing them together with the victims. Instead, the debate served as a substitute for joining the household and thus deepened the crisis rather than resolving it. The churches continued to go their own ways and the WCC was forced "to go its own way with programmes and activities reaching out to groups and others".(10) The ecumenical history of the last 25 years must be understood in the light of this kairos.
The search for the reasons for the crisis has not yet gone much beyond attempts to fix the blame either on the churches or on the WCC. As to the latter, Boyens' essay is only the latest in a long series of witch-hunts. And one seeks in vain in the Muhlheim papers for any criticism that goes beyond pointing out failures in WCC policies and programmes. Fixing the blame is, of course, a classic way of dealing with crises and conflicts, but it only prolongs them. Rather, we need to reflect on the consequences of living in the household, the changes required and the costs to be counted.
The first consequence is to relinquish control. Living in the household means being part of it along with others, claiming no special rights and privileges, religious or otherwise, and especially not judging who else rightfully belongs to the household. Christians, Christian groups and churches, like other groups, always feel a need to set limits, borders that enable them to tell who is inside and who is outside. The programmes and actions in the struggle against racism, in moving towards solidarity with the poor, or towards a community of women and men were signs that the lines between church and world, while not abolished, are being redrawn in very different and often unpredictable ways, not unlike the redrawing of the lines between the "just" and the "unjust" provoked by Jesus' proclamation of the kingdom of God, or of the lines between Jews and Gentiles provoked by spread of the gospel throughout the oikoumene.
The need for limits is tied to the need for identity. Limits not only allow people inside to recognize each other as members of the same group in distinction from those outside, but also allow those outside to identify those inside. Thus both the church's identity and its place in society are secured by setting limits, especially when they are mutually agreed to by church and society. The life of the churches under the former communist regimes is a good example of the need for limits. Adherence to them often determined survival. In the household of God the limits do not disappear, but they constantly move and so can no longer form the basis for establishing identity. Christian and church identity have to be based on other grounds.
The cost of (ecumenical) living
Christians and churches moving towards the oikoumene will have to cope with loss of limits and of identity in the traditional sense, with disunity among members and loss of their established position in society. The experience of US liberal Protestantism as a result of its involvement in the civil rights struggle in the 1960s is a case in point. What emerged here was recognized later in the 1970s and early 1980s on a worldwide scale in the confrontation between the oikoumene of solidarity and sharing on the one hand and the oikoumene of domination and dependence on the other. In principle, discipleship under the Lordship of Christ always entails being confronted with the principalities and powers of this world. It is always costly, especially for the disciples. Perhaps the notion of the cost of discipleship did not receive enough attention in the wake of the enthusiasm for renewal of church and society in the late 1960s, thus leaving some churches unprepared for the subsequent crisis in their own ranks. Besier interprets the crisis of the liberal churches in the US in the 1970s and 1980s as a sign of their failure to be disciple. The interpretation of the history of the crisis in these churches will need to clarify much more the nature of the cost of discipleship.
The last 25 years have also been characterized by a trend described as a "return to religion" and away from what was considered secularism or "secular ecumenism". This trend was to satisfy the need for clear limits and thus a clear distinction between the religious and the secular. But while the need may have been satisfied for some, it also leads to the opposite result in that it makes evident that the oikoumene of God does not respect the lines drawn by religion, and that on the other hand the oikoumene of domination reaches deep into the ranks of all religious groups.
The preceding observations highlight two crucial aspects for understanding the ecumenical history of the last three decades: the cost of discipleship and the interaction between the oikoumene of solidarity and the oikoumene of domination. Their analysis requires recourse to two major biblical notions which hitherto have played only minor roles in the ecumenical debate.
The first is the meaning of the cross. To be sure, the cross has always been placed in the centre of the Christian faith in the ecumenical debate as the chief theological symbol -- displayed in innumerable churches and homes -- of God's unlimited love or of the price paid for human sinfulness. But despite its ubiquity it has never become an hermeneutical tool for understanding history and Christian involvement in it in the same way as the Exodus of Israel from Egypt or Jesus' proclamation of good news for the poor. Yet when the cross is seen as an event in history, it becomes the paradigm for the cost of discipleship. For the crucifixion, as told in the four gospels, is first of all a story about the death of a man at the hands of an angry crowd unanimous in condemning him. As Rene Girard has shown in his pioneering studies on the origins of violence, such unanimity would, within the religious-cultural context of Jesus' time, normally have been proof that the victim was guilty and that his removal had freed the community from whatever evil had befallen it.(11)
The passion story in the gospels is unique in that it shows the victim being innocent and the community engaging in arbitrary violence. Ever since then, victims have begun to speak up against violence, all the way from the early martyrs to the modern day victims of human rights violations -- though few of course are aware that Jesus' crucifixion is the original model for their protest. Each authentic protest of the innocence of victims is now a sign that the household of God is established in history. Furthermore, Jesus' crucifixion helps us to understand why living in the household is inevitably connected with cost, with suffering. For while Jesus' crucifixion has once and for all revealed the tree nature of violence and thereby fundamentally de-sacralized it, it has not eliminated it. The meaning of the history following the crucifixion is to "complete what is lacking in the afflictions" of the crucified (Col. 1:24), that is, it is apocalyptic, revealing the innocence of victims and the arbitrariness of violence.
We are not used to reading the passion story as a story of revelation, because revelation, like the crucifixion, is not one of the current hermeneutical tools. Traditionally, revelation applies to God who chose to be revealed, first in the history of Israel and, for Christians, supremely in Jesus Christ. But in the Bible the revelation of God and his love is always accompanied by the revelation of sin and violence, as the crucifixion demonstrates.
The same duality prevails in Revelation: visions of the Lamb of God, of the elders of the twelve tribes of Israel, of the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven alternate with visions of horror, famine and death, the ones conditioning the others. It is a major mishap in the history of biblical interpretation that the two aspects of this revelation have been tom apart and that the use of the term "apocalyptic" is reserved for the horrors while in theological discourse the term "revelation" refers only to God. Once we overcome this dichotomy, revelation in the sense of the double revelation may serve as a tool for interpreting historical developments, for discerning the signs that indicate the presence of the oikoumene of God as well as of the oikoumene of domination. Such an understanding alone may prevent us from seeing things only in black or in white.
Hearing and doing
Racism in the 1960s in South Africa and the United States marked a kairos, a special historical moment of apocalyptic clarity about the arbitrariness of violence and the innocence of the victims. It was a call to the followers of Jesus, the quintessential victim, that their place was to be alongside the victims and thus to manifest in the face of the oikoumene of domination the presence of the household of God. The Uppsala assembly heard that message and through establishing PCR the WCC tried to convey it to the churches. The became indeed a sign of solidarity and was understood as such by the victims, but it did not succeed in conveying the message to the churches that they themselves should be such signs. The message was drowned in the controversy over the messenger. The churches have not become anti-ecumenical, but along with the message they also have lost the ecumenical memory, similar to the man described in the letter of James who observes himself in a mirror "and goes away and at once forgets what he was like" (1:24).
The crisis is a crisis in the ecumenical fellowship, and it is not surprising that the debate over the nature of this fellowship has lately intensified -- as was evident, for instance, in the deliberations of the WCC assembly in Harare. The analysis attempted here suggests that this preoccupation is a consequence of the unresolved crisis of the 1970s and that the nature of the fellowship and the particular challenges it faces today can only be clarified as we overcome the loss of ecumenical memory and recover the vision of the household of God.
NOTES
(1) Berlin, Duncker and Humblot, 1999.
(2) Frankfurt, Lembeck, 2000.
(3) In Okumenische Rundschau, Vol. 49, Jan. 2000, which also contains an article by J. Althausen which was not presented in Muhlheim.
(4) Reprinted in the International Herald Tribune, 26 April 2000.
(5) Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, New York, Vintage, 1996, p.3.
(6) Ibid., p.403.
(7) N. Goodall, ed., The Uppsala 68 Report, Geneva, WCC, 1968, p.241.
(8) Cf. Konrad Raiser, Ecumenism in Transition, Geneva, WCC, 1989, pp.9f.; and the report of general secretary Philip Potter to the Vancouver assembly, in D. Gill, ed., Gathered for Life, Geneva, WCC, 1983, p. 197.
(9) Potter, loc. cit., p.209.
(10) Ibid., p.208.
(11) Cf. R. Girard, The Scapegoat, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins U.P., 1986.
Thomas Wieser was a leader in the Swiss and American student Christian movements during the period 1946 to 1960, and later a staff member of the WCC's Commission on World Mission and Evangelism.
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posted by Eric Nicolai @ 5:34 p.m.
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