Religion: Churches and Change

The most important church conference since World War II began—and probably the most important until it ends—met at Toronto last week to consider the shape of things to come. Its consensus: 1) Hitler is fighting the war with an idea, 2) Christianity, to survive, must show the world it has a better idea, 3) this will require a drastically different social order in the post-war world, 4) the Church must offer some leadership toward a more constructive and more lasting peace than Versailles. The Church’s idea is, of course, Christ, but beyond that it seems, as interpreted, to have some sort of resemblance to the doctrines of Karl Marx—some sort of new Christian materialism for the underdog.

The delegates to this first North American Ecumenical (interchurch) Conference represented every major Protestant and Orthodox communion in the Western Hemisphere, some 35 denominations in all. They passed no resolutions, came to no formal conclusions. But in their speeches and the reports of their discussion groups they affirmed a sweeping set of principles which presupposes a new society as clearly as those adopted last winter by the Church of England’s great Malvern Conference (TIME, Jan. 20).

Abuse of National Sovereignty. Delegates applauded a speech by John Foster Dulles, famed Wall Street lawyer and potent Presbyterian layman: “This system of dividing the surface of the earth among some 60 nations, and allowing each to do what it pleases, has become as obsolete as the unregulated public utility. . . . The sovereignty system is no longer consonant either with peace or justice. It is imperative that there be transition to a new order . . . for the present system is rapidly encompassing its own destruction. The real problem is not whether there will be transition, but whether transition can occur without violent and unnecessary destruction of moral and political conceptions . . . evolved under the guiding influence of Christianity.” Lawyer Dulles’ proposal was particularly newsworthy because he heads U.S. Protestantism’s Commission to Study the Bases for a Just and Durable Peace.

Haves to Share with Have-Nots. Reasserted was a Federal Council pronouncement of last December, calling for “a world where economic opportunity is not the legal monopoly of those national groups which through accident or prior aggression have obtained control of the bounties of nature.”

Social Responsibility. Said one report: “People must be provided with basic shelter, food, fuel, clothing and health services, even if all the people, including the rich, have to be rationed.”

Modify Capitalism. Toronto echoed Malvern, declared that in North America as well as in Germany and England things are in such a pickle that a solution to the unemployment problem has been found only in armament programs. “We can well say, with our fellow Christians in England: ‘The system under which we have lived has been a predisposing cause of war even though those who direct and profit by it have desired peace.’ ” Solutions suggested: State planning, wider use of producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives.

Cooperation with Catholics. Pointing hopefully to the ten-point peace program jointly sponsored by the heads of Britain’s Anglican, Roman Catholic and Free Churches, a delegate urged that the Roman hierarchy in the U.S. and Canada collaborate with North American Protestants on a set of peace principles.

Unsecularize Education. “The part played by religion in education must be restored. . . . Christian laymen, now largely illiterate, must be educated.” The conference agreed that religion must speak more simply after Professor Gerald R. Cragg of Montreal wryly reported, “Theology is becoming more and more aloof from the modern man, and less and less intelligible to him. He cannot be blamed for feeling that the question of whether a theologian is intelligible to God is one on which God alone is capable of or interested in expressing an opinion.”

Church Unity, Home & Abroad. Said Dr. Gordon A. Sisco, general secretary of the United Church of Canada: “The move ment towards church union in the Far East, the rise of union churches in China, India and Japan, make our Protestant denominational type of foreign-missionary propaganda and administration progressively obsolete. The multiplicity of denominational churches in the rural villages and areas of the U.S. and Canada and the rapid rise of perfectionist sects to complicate the picture is the scandal of Christianity.”

Ecumenical conferences are like convoys; they move at the speed of the slowest sect. So on one major issue Toronto found no agreement: war. The Canadian churchmen unanimously backed their country’s stand. The Americans were split between isolationists and interventionists. But a clear majority of the Americans present agreed with Interventionist Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr: “We as a nation can not afford a Hitler victory, either politically or morally.” And most of those who did not favor the U.S. going to war indicated they would support their country if & when it did.

— Ordered closed last week for the duration of the war was the Vatican Library, one of the world’s finest. Reason: students of all nationalities sat around in it talking politics, instead of doing their research.