Religion: The Calvin Lineage

At Princeton Theological Seminary last week, 400 delegates bravely battled the heat and the static in the little receiving sets that picked up the French, German and English translations of what was going on. Whatever it was, they could be sure it was Presbyterian. The 17th General Council of the World Presbyterian Alliance, representing 40 million communicants in 46 countries, was in session. Among other accomplishments, the delegates 1) adopted a new, more centralized constitution to replace the original adopted at London in 1875, 2) gave themselves a breath-taking new name: “The Alliance of the Reformed Churches Throughout the World Holding the Presbyterian Order,” and 3) elected the Rev. Marcel Pradervand of Geneva, executive secretary of the council for the past six years, to the new office of general secretary.

The Rev. Henry Pitney Van Dusen, President of Manhattan’s Union Theological Seminary, placed the Reformed churches squarely in the center of the ecumenical movement, recalled Calvin’s own plans for a Protestant federation: “Ardor for the ideal of Christian unity [is] laid as an inescapable obligation upon all those who acknowledge the spiritual lineage of John Calvin.”

Present from behind the Iron Curtain was Czechoslovakia’s Joseph Hromadka, wartime lecturer at Princeton and Dean of Prague’s state-controlled Theological Faculty, who collaborates with the Communists. Dr. Hromadka listened as Dr. Eugene Carson Blake of Philadelphia said pointedly: “When in the considered and prayerful judgment of a church [its] freedom . . . is essentially abridged by state or society, it is the duty of the church to say no to the state and no to the society . . .”