Religion: The Age of Syncretism

One of the great gatherings of Christianity will take place next month in a nation whose population is 98% nonChristian. In New Delhi, India, delegates from 175 Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox churches in more than 50 countries will meet in the third assembly of the World Council of Churches and address themselves to the problems and possibilities of the church in the world. When they plunge into their 17-day agenda, says one of U.S. Protestantism’s top thinkers, the delegates should face up to the fact that since the World Council’s first meeting, in Amsterdam in 1948, a “new age” has emerged, with big questions for Christianity.

Writing in the current issue of the quarterly Theology Today, Presbyterian James I. McCord, 41, president of Princeton Theological Seminary, maintains that the first characteristic of the new age is “the dawn of universal history”—a worldwide interdependence which has brought to an end the time when each nation could make its separate history.

For the Christian, says McCord, this raises the question of the uniqueness of Christianity. “Inevitably, the dawn of universal history will be a stimulus to syncretism”—the combining of elements from different religions. “Our most widely read historian. Arnold Toynbee. is an apostle of an amalgam of Christianity and Mahayanian Buddhism.” And the syncretist “is an indication of the necessity of a Christian apologetic that will take seriously the new conditions that have emerged and the new context out of which the syncretistic question is asked.”

Another mark of McCord’s new age is a loss of Christian confidence. The church, he writes, “has begun to wonder openly about her role. She has become introverted, turned in on herself, and has broken off contact with the world that she no longer knows. She was unable to capitalize on the revival of interest in religion after the war, is depressed about her failure in mission, and contents herself with endless surveys and meetings in an effort to knock something together that might get her off center.”

Christians, says McCord, should accept the new age as a gift of God. “What is needed is ‘Christians who remain Christians,’ to use a phrase of Albert Camus, In a powerful essay in his posthumously published Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, Camus exclaims: ‘What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out loud and clear; for between the forces of terror and the forces of dialogue, a great unequal battle has begun.’ Notice his grouping, the forces of dialogue, men who acknowledge other men as persons, against the forces of terror.”

Camus died without hearing that clear voice from the Christian camp, and now the forces of 50-megaton terror bray louder than ever. McCord concludes with another Camus passage: ” ‘We are still waiting, and I am waiting, for a grouping of all those who refuse to be dogs, and are resolved to pay the price that must be paid so that man can be something more than a dog.’ “