Religion: Toward Unity & Back

Crabwise march God’s churches, usually, as they creep slowly toward Christian Unity. For believers in this great concept, to which the Roman Catholics alone offer a great obstacle (papal supremacy), last week was an active one. Churchmen took two steps forward, only one step backward.

Forward. At the Oxford Conference on Church & State last summer (TIME, July 26), non-Roman churchmen from all over the world agreed in principle to the establishment of a World Council of Churches. To choose ten U. S. delegates to a preliminary conference which, in Utrecht, The Netherlands next May, will draw up a constitution for the Council, 30 U. S. churches claiming 30,000,000 members sent electors to a meeting at the National (Episcopal) Cathedral in Washington last fortnight. Having elected most of the delegates, leaders among the electors last week sought for a label by which they might designate the unity movement. “Protestant” and “evangelical” they decided against since their projected Council would include Anglicans and Eastern Catholics. “Non-Roman,” they felt, implied opposition to the Roman Catholic Church. So they decided to adopt and popularize the word “ecumenical,” from the Greek meaning “the inhabited world.”

Backward. Spiritual climax of the Washington gathering was a communion service in the Cathedral, conducted by Bishop James Edward Freeman, Dean Noble Cilley Powell and Canon Anson Phelps Stokes, to which believers of all faiths were invited. Such a service was conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury after the Oxford Conference last summer, with the stipulation that it did not set a precedent. To many an Anglican and High Episcopalian, “open communion” is fraught with danger. To them this celebration is no mere Lord’s Supper or fellowship meal; it is a sacrificial act performed by a priest of the historic ministry, or even (depending on their inclinations toward Catholicism) a repetition of the sacrifice of Christ upon the Cross.

As is usual after a joint communion service, there was outcry last week which suggested that such services still impede rather than aid the ecumenical movement. The High -Church Episcopal Living Church, in a 3,000-word editorial, riddled intercommunion as being contrary to the Prayer Book, disturbing to the faith of the faithful, fostering the idea that the Church is “just another sect,” denying the sacrificial quality of the celebration, tending toward sacrilege, admitting that human fellowship can be a substitute for “Divine Society.” Said the Living Church: “We ask for . . . sympathetic understanding in our disagreement with those who would make intercommunion a means to Christian unity rather than its goal.”

Forward. Made public last week in England was a plan, drafted by the two Anglican archbishops, eleven bishops and representatives of Nonconformist churches (Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Quaker), by which reunion is to be attempted between the Church of England and the Free Churches, whose total membership is 7,000,000. The plan contemplates a church governed by a general assembly, bishops, diocesan synods and congregational councils, new bishops to be chosen from the Free Churches on the basis of their membership. Within this church there would be great freedom of doctrine and worship, but Anglicans would be asked to insist no longer on the sign of the cross at baptism, the wearing of surplices, kneeling at communion. In return the Nonconformists would be expected to forget their oldtime objections to bishops. Said a pamphlet released with the plan: “To many Free Churchmen the word ‘bishop’ still denotes ‘the prelate’s pride of place and autocratic methods . . . but the evils of nonresidence and the habits of the grandee are things of the past.”