Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (161 page)

WORLD CHRISTIANITY REALIGNED: ECUMENICAL BEGINNINGS

In 1945, Europe was a continent of ruins, in the throes of the largest population movements in its recorded history, as displaced peoples sought their homes again or sought to escape assorted retributions, while others trudged wretchedly through the devastation to conform to new political boundaries created by the victorious Allies' power deals. A number of subsidiary wars still raged in the Balkans and on the plains of Eastern Europe. A horrified consciousness was dawning, although slow to find public expression for some decades, that several million people, mostly Jews, but also Roma, homosexuals, Freemasons, Jehovah's Witnesses and others who did not conform to Nazi requirements, had disappeared, not in warfare, but cold-bloodedly herded into human abattoirs for an anonymous and casually inflicted death. A large question mark hovered over the worldwide empires created by France, Britain and their satellites during the previous three centuries. British and French prestige in East Asia had been wrecked by Japan's conquests, and France's still more by German occupation; once again, questions arose among colonial peoples as to what benefits they might now gain from their part in a war created originally in Europe. The only power whose streets and fields remained unmarked by war and whose treasury was not empty was the United States of America. In one of the most imaginative and generous international deals in recorded history, although also with an eye to upstaging rival saviours from the Communist East, the USA's Marshall Plan began the financing of a recovery programme for Europe which undoubtedly saved the European peoples from falling into new frustration, nihilism or willingness to listen to demagogues, in the fashion that had so poisoned the interwar years.
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This was a moment comparable to the results of the devastation of Eastern Christianity in fourteenth-century Asia by plague, Mongol destructiveness and Islamic advance (see pp. 275-7). Since that great shift, the centre of Christian activity and decision-making had been Europe. Now, although the historic power centres were still sited by the inertia of history in Istanbul, Moscow and Rome, a clear-sighted observer might recognize not only that Orthodoxy was weaker than at any stage in its existence, but that Western Christianity in its Protestant and Catholic forms was flourishing more in America, Africa and Asia than in Europe. It was certainly true that as Europe painfully pulled away from its nadir, its churchgoing benefited for more than a decade from the weary desire to find some normality and decency after the nightmare. So churches became fuller in Britain in the 1950s. Anglican theology and literary creativity had rarely seemed so impressive or cosmopolitan, and the Church of England's Evangelical wing was returning from an edgy marginality, with the aid of public missions led by one of the more thoughtful American evangelists, the young Southern Baptist Billy Graham. Roman Catholicism too was steadily becoming a contender for acceptance in British national life - in other words, it was becoming less immigrant and Irish and more middle class. In the newly declared Irish Republic, Catholicism had never been so popular or all-embracing in national life, with no sense that there might be anything amiss - that was for the future.
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Pius XII presided over a Catholic Church which continued vigorously to grow throughout the world. He did his best to recognize that Europe was changing through its post-war rebuilding; he gave his whole-hearted support to the formation of Christian Democratic parties, to take a full part in the chastened democratic politics now virtually unquestioned west of what was being called the 'Iron Curtain' enclosing the Soviet Union's satellites, outside the continuing authoritarian and Catholic dictatorships of Spain and Portugal. But Pius's own conservative instincts mirrored Europe's widespread longing to find comfort in the past. In 1950 he used papal infallibility to define the doctrine of the bodily Assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven, a move which infuriated Protestant, Orthodox and Eastern Churches alike, and which did not please those Catholic theologians who cared about the doctrine's lack of justification in the Bible or in early Church tradition. Something like the Modernist campaign of Pius X gathered momentum against those whom Pius XII regarded as dissenters against Catholic truth. In his last years, the ailing Pope presented an increasingly pitiable figure, as he tried ever more frantically to be a universal teacher: Vicar of the
Encylopaedia Britannica
rather than Vicar of Christ. Symptomatic of his conscientious but inept effort to remain in dialogue with the contemporary world was his proclamation just before his death in 1958 that St Francis's associate St Clare of Assisi was now to be the patron saint of television. This was because, on her deathbed, she had been able to attend Christmas Mass in the neighbouring basilica in the form of a vision, a miraculous medieval outside broadcast.
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Catholic activity in the 1950s ran in parallel to but had very little contact with the proliferation and diversification of global Protestantism. Over the previous half-century, Protestantism had developed in two different new directions which themselves had increasingly little to do with each other: on the one hand, there was a self-consciously liberal exploration of faith and social activism, and on the other, a host of newly founded Churches, many of which identified themselves as Pentecostal, and whose congregations expressed themselves in full-blooded extrovert Evangelical style. Both these Protestant impulses in fact had a common root in anglophone Evangelicalism. Eventually it may be inappropriate to see them as polarities, but that is how it seemed in the twentieth century. Between them, there remained a great spectrum of Evangelical Protestant belief, much of which, in reaction to the liberals, increasingly took to itself the label 'conservative'.

Liberal Protestantism after 1900 chose a very different path from either the Holiness/Keswick styles of the conservatives, or the proliferation of identities in the new Churches. Increasingly it seemed to dominate most of the older Protestant Churches - Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican and Methodist - while the Baptists tended to be more resistant. This new liberalism was a wider phenomenon than the liberal Protestantism whose stronghold had been in nineteenth-century Germany. It could include within its ranks such formidable critics of Schleiermacher and the older German theology as Karl Barth, whose approach to the Bible owed much to the continuing progress of critical biblical scholarship, even though he drew his own emphatic conclusions about the exclusive claims of scripture on Christian commitment. Liberals showed plenty of enthusiasm for missionary activism, but this increasingly included an emphasis on justice and equality in the world, as a necessary reflection of the Christian message - what in North America was commonly called a 'Social Gospel'.

During the twentieth century, liberal Protestantism embarked on a new adventure in Christian reunion. It elaborated a new effort to break down Church boundaries and heal the various breaches stemming from the Reformation. Liberal Protestants were open to the nuanced Catholicism of High Church Anglicans and the similar movements in northern European Lutheranism, and they saw their task as renewing an authentic Catholicism for the whole Church, just as John Calvin had once envisaged in Geneva. Hence the description of the project with a word borrowed from the first councils of the early Church, and echoing the title which the Patriarch of Constantinople had long fostered for himself: 'Ecumenical'.
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In the end, this Ecumenical Movement was to become much wider than its Protestant origins, but that was still in the balance in the 1940s, when the Movement gained its institutional expression in a new organization, the World Council of Churches.

The Ecumenical Movement started as an outcrop of the Protestant missions of the nineteenth century. Its particular spur had been the puzzle of India: apparently the most promising missionary prospect for Christian faith but in reality the least receptive (see pp. 892-5). The leading organizer in the Ecumenical Movement for the first half of the twentieth century, J. H. Oldham, came out of this experience; he was born in India, and married the daughter of a former British Governor of Bengal, whom he had met during missionary work in Lahore. His religious experience well illustrates the trajectory of liberal Protestantism. Amorphously Evangelical in background, the young Joseph delighted his devout father by his conversion experience during the American revivalism of D. L. Moody's last English mission, and he spent time working in one of Edinburgh's leading Free Church of Scotland congregations, but his Christian commitment moved steadily away from the world of Holiness fervour, or premillennialism. His Establishment background reasserted itself, but in a remarkably creative way: he retained the Evangelical characteristic of indifference to denominational boundaries. Like many Protestants moving away from their early Evangelicalism, he began to see missionary activity as ministry not just to individual bodies but to society as a whole. Missionaries must share the good news through effective (and Western) medicine, rigorous (and Western) education and Western-style progress towards the elimination of racial discrimination or colonial exploitation. The first envoys of the London Missionary Society to the Pacific back in the 1790s would have recognized many of Oldham's preoccupations.
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Besides his extraordinary capacity for organization and detail, Oldham had a genius for sympathetic relationships with Church leaders and with those whom he sensed were destined to be leaders for the whole Church - Bonhoeffer and George Bell among them. He was at home in the Athenaeum, that stately London Clubland headquarters for Englishmen marked out by culture and talent rather than illustrious pedigrees - bishops flitted in and out of the doors of the club, and it served as Oldham's Vatican. A voracious reader in German theology, he reached out to the great theologians of northern Europe - Karl Barth and Barth's friendly liberal Protestant rival Emil Brunner, as well as Bonhoeffer, were among his friends - and he devoted his life to persuading as many Churches as possible to cooperate.
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His first triumph as administrator was a Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910, the largest and most comprehensive such gathering so far held. For the first time, there were invitations to Churches beyond Europe and America (and not just Protestant Churches), although these had their limits: there were no Africans on the guest list. India, with all its problems, remained at the forefront of preoccupations.

Crucially, Oldham and his fellow organizers recognized the peculiar difficulty and also the peculiar potential of Anglicanism, an episcopal Church which set great store by its episcopal structure, and which contained a battle of Protestant and Catholic identities, themselves encapsulating the great divide in the Western Church caused by the Reformation. High Church Anglicans, those who treasured Catholicity and were often suspicious of Protestants in their own Church, let alone those beyond, were persuaded to attend Edinburgh, where they were given the chance to see that there was value in working with other Protestant Churches. They could offer their own long-standing contacts with Orthodox and Catholic churchmen - some Anglo-Catholics had been seeking corporate reunion with Rome and the Orthodox since the 1850s - and that opened up possibilities for ecumenism beyond Protestant Christianity, albeit at this stage very tentative.
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Above all, the delegates dispersed from a successful and exciting event with a recognition that it was no longer possible for Churches to work apart in spreading a message of unity and love; that insight applied to Europe as much as to India. They sent a message to 'all Christian lands' which saw the next ten years as 'a turning-point in human history' - so it proved, but not in the way that they cheerfully expected.
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The First World War was instead another salutary call to humility for European Christianity.

Two bishops, one American Episcopal and the other Swedish, now turned the message of the conference into more permanent conversations. Charles Brent was a missionary bishop in the then American-ruled Philippines: he proposed a series of discussions and conferences which would consider issues of 'Faith and Order' - that is, what the Church believed and how it structured itself. This would help to clarify its mission in new settings, but it would have the potential to produce a coherent reaction to all that the Enlightenment had meant for Christian self-understanding, for good or ill, and such conclusions might reveal new ways of healing ancient wounds within Christianity. The Swedish Lutheran Primate, Archbishop Nathan Soderblom, concentrated on the other challenge facing the Churches in this age of dislocation and anxiety: the exploration of credible guidelines for being a Christian in modern society. Stockholm was the setting for the first conference on 'Life and Work' in 1925: another formidable task of organization for the indefatigable Oldham. Notably, a few representatives of Orthodoxy were in attendance, and their numbers grew despite the gulf in understanding which separated them from Protestant or even Anglican views of what constituted the Church.
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These two movements eventually amalgamated in 1948 into the World Council of Churches, which, with its acquisition of an imposing headquarters in Switzerland and a central Secretariat, seemed to be bidding to become the Christian equivalent of the new United Nations, the organization created in 1945 in succession to the discredited League of Nations. Indeed, to an extent seldom remembered until recent years, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which the United Nations proclaimed in 1948 was the product of the same ecumenical liberal Protestant nexus of clerics and laypeople which looked back to the Edinburgh Missionary Conference.
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Simultaneously Anglicanism was asserting its own place in the centre of ecumenical discussions, although the outcomes of its initiatives revealed a variety of drawbacks. From the 1920 Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops, there was heard what has been called 'probably the most memorable statement of any Lambeth Conference'.
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The bishops seem to have been shocked by the traumatic experience of the war into producing a document rather un-Anglican in its dramatic tone, one of those rare examples of official Church pronouncements which might be called prophetic. It was an
Appeal to all Christian People
to seek 'a Church, genuinely Catholic, loyal to all Truth, and gathering into its fellowship all "who profess and call themselves Christians," within whose visible unity all the treasures of faith and order, bequeathed as a heritage by the past to the present, shall be possessed in common'.
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The problem was how to make any sense of the various responses. Many in the English Free Churches were enthusiastic, but they spent the rest of the century making little headway in the face of a constantly confused Anglican reaction to their overtures. Anglicans were always fatally divided between Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals who could not agree on what was important about being an Anglican, alongside the 'central' Anglicans, perpetually irritated at what they regarded as the unhelpful posturing on either flank.