Religion: The Christian Hope

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The bus driver deftly dodged a group of bishops and gave plenty of room to an Indian theologian in a white turban. When the street ahead looked reasonably safe again, the driver turned to a newsman standing next to him. “So what are they going to do?” he grumbled. “Save the world?”

No one could expect salvation from the thousand-odd clerics, prelates and Christian laymen from the world’s four corners who had gathered in Evanston, Ill. Yet more and more people expected help—on earth—from Christianity. Every week, in pulpits, editorials, Parliaments and Chancelleries, in universities, clinics and at cocktail parties, Christianity is invoked. Juvenile delinquency? Broken homes? Neuroses? “The answer is a sound Chris tian upbringing.” High divorce rate? Alcoholism? Disintegrating ethics? “We need a firm Christian morality.” Is science getting out of hand? Are art and literature aimless? “Christianity gives the only aim.” Communism? “Only Christianity can defeat a false religion.” A more complex, highbrow version of this mood is expressed by British Historian Arnold Toynbee, who concludes his massive, ten-volume A Study of History* with the finding that the West can be saved from atomic war and utter downfall only by a renewed Christian faith.

This is a tall order for a religion that, only a few decades ago, seemed to many irrelevant to “progress.” Certainly the churchmen at Evanston could not try to provide earthly salvation, for that would be blasphemy; the kingdom of God must be sought for its own sake. But neither could they escape the atmosphere of urgency that surrounded their meeting. For the crescendo of ecumenical conferences of which Evanston is the climax† tells of a renewed Christian hope and a hunger for unity. These forces have brought together men and traditions that centuries of Christian history had driven asunder.

At Evanston this week, the delegates of the World Council of Churches looked to their leaders to draw out of the 200-odd meetings some message for the world. There was plenty of disagreement about what the message could be, and the disagreements were well publicized. Newspapers across the U.S. sprouted an unfamiliar word—eschatology—and reported the theological differences on whether the Christian hope lay in this or the next world. In a sense the very attention paid to this disagreement was more significant than the disagreement itself. In the 20th century it was big news that more and more people saw a hope in Christianity, not that there were theological differences about the nature of that hope. Reported TIME Correspondent Sam Welles from Evanston:

“This assembly seems to have reached more deeply and widely into Christian consciousness than any ecumenical meeting ever has. Right from the opening service, when thousands milled around the lawns, and the great “Festival of Faith” at Chicago’s Soldier Field, when 30,000 had to be turned away, the huge crowds attracted by this assembly have surprised everyone. And for a religious meeting, the press coverage has been unique. Western Union is dazed—except for a few major political conventions, it has never seen so many words filed for so many days in so many directions. This assembly argues much more freely than earlier ecumenical meetings seem to have done. People know that the movement is not going to split now, so they don’t tread on eggs the way they used to. While this assembly has not neglected theology, it has certainly shown a very practical viewpoint in discussion and in drafting. In the old 16th century English prayer-book phrase, its messages are much more “in a language understanded of the people” than those of previous assemblies, including Amsterdam. A good work for God and this world is being done here.”

In the Middle. Evanston was aglitter with ecclesiastical brass. Like a familiar litany, the famous names of church leaders were heard: the U.S. Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam; Britain’s Anglican Bishop Dr. G.K.A. Bell of Chichester; Reformed Church Pastor Dr. Marc Boegner, the grand old man of French Protestantism; Norway’s doughty Lutheran Bishop Berggrav. Among such leaders moved a cheerful, twinkle-eyed churchman with a ringing, ancient title and an extraordinary ability to find common bonds between the leaders of different traditions. He was perhaps a living symbol of the ecumenical movement. The Most Reverend and Right Honorable Geoffrey Francis Fisher, 99th Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of All England, and Metropolitan, is titular head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, the exemplary ecumenical church.

Anglicanism stands on the Great Divide of Christianity, facing in both directions. The firmly Catholic Church of England claims the apostolic succession, that chain of bishop-consecrating bishops. But it is also a church that was separated from Rome in the Reformation. The Church of England’s communicants run a gamut from High-Church Anglo-Catholicism, flickering with votive lights and aromatic with incense, to a Quaker-plain Low-Churchmanship that might make a Methodist uneasy. Archbishop Fisher himself reflects this elasticity. It is symbolized by the fact that he is a Freemason and yet feels sympathetic enough toward Rome to keep a picture of himself and Pope Pius XII prominently in his palace.

Says Fisher: “Perhaps we hold in our own fellowship more of the diverse elements . . . and live at closer quarters with them than is the case in any other communion in Christendom.”

A man of such flexibility can scarcely be a prophet, nor can his church be a crusading force. Geoffrey Francis Fisher brilliantly suits the present needs of the World Council, which, in order to stay together, must compromise. “In the very best sense of the words, he has been all things to all men,” wrote London’s Laborite Daily Herald of him in 1939 when he was appointed Bishop of London. “He will never lead a great spiritual revival of the Church of England. Equally, he will never say or do anything that will shock or derange his fellow Anglicans.”

The Headmaster. When Geoffrey Francis Fisher was appointed Bishop of Chester at the age of 45, one of the parish priests groaned: “He knows nothing about parochial work; he has no parochial experience . . . We prayed about this matter beforehand, and this is what we have got.”

Fisher is somewhat touchy about his lack of parish experience. Recalling that his father was rector at St. Peter’s Church, Higham-on-the-Hill in Leicestershire, he says: “I grew up in a country rectory. I was a part of the parish . . . I truly think I learned more about parish life and work in those 20 years than many priests ever learn.”

Young Fisher went to Exeter College, Oxford, where he distinguished himself by rowing on his college eight, played a good, steady center at Rugby, and chalked up a triple first in moderations, classics and theology. His decision to enter the church was so natural that he barely noticed it, and he breezed through Wells Theological College with straight A’s in a single year. Three years later, when he was only 27, he became headmaster of Repton, a first-rate English public school (known to U.S. moviegoers because part of Goodbye, Mr. Chips was filmed there).

Fisher stayed at Repton for 18 years. Old Boys remember the “Boss” for his dignified informality, his tremendous capacity for work, and his inexorable discipline. Learning that a boy had disobeyed a rule against departing for the holidays on a motorcycle, Headmaster Fisher dispatched a telegram to the boy’s home: RETURN TODAY OR NEVER. Back came the boy on his motorcycle. Fisher caned him soundly and sent him home again—on his motorcycle.

Geoffrey’s Whack. Headmaster Fisher became Bishop Fisher of Chester in 1932, seven years later Bishop of London. After that, his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury (ranking just below the Queen and the royal dukes and two above the Prime Minister) was almost a foregone conclusion. His predecessor, William Temple, told his wife a few months before he died: “I must give up in time to let Geoffrey have his whack.” Archbishop Temple, one of the greatest churchmen of modern times, was what show people call “a hard act to follow.” Prophet and preacher of social reform and church unity, he took England’s fusty bishoprics into his impatient hands and shook them till the dust flew. Geoffrey Fisher mounted the throne of St. Augustine* with humility and reluctance.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has a large and exacting job. Thrice a year he must preside over week-long sessions of the Church Assembly, which is the parliament of the church. Between sessions he must approve every significant action taken by the church. He is in charge of worldwide missionary work and is senior member, though without direct authority, of the Anglican Communion (estimated membership: 40 million), which calls on him for advice and counsel. He also serves as spiritual adviser to the royal family.

During the Queen’s coronation, Geoffrey Fisher became the most widely known archbishop in history and something of a U.S. television idol (Fisher himself regards TV as one of the century’s great evils, although Mrs. Fisher loves it). Ceremonial has never been his long suit, and he has been known to stop a procession to speak to a friend, but the world was stirred by the perfection of Fisher’s voice and timing, his respectful suggestion of fatherly solicitude for a young woman, his clear demonstration that Elizabeth was Queen only by the Grace of God.

A Humus Chap. Geoffrey Cantuar, as he officially signs himself according to ancient custom, is a natural-born conservative—with a small c, since archbishops are not supposed to have politics in public. One day he entered the House of Lords to find an advocate of artificial fertilizer debating a supporter of humus. “I have not the slightest knowledge of the subject,” he later admitted, “but instinctively I support the humus fellow against the artificial-fertilizer chap.”

One of the fertilizer chaps who have been a constant trial to Archbishop Fisher is that gaitered fellow traveler, Hewlett Johnson, the “Red Dean” of Canterbury. Foreigners are constantly confusing the dean with the archbishop. In dealing with the Red Dean, Archbishop Fisher has mainly contented himself with humor, e.g., “Dare I say that when he is at home, I wish he were overseas? And still more profoundly, when he is overseas, I wish he were at home.”

Not that Communism is a laughing matter to Fisher. In his quiet, casual way, he has rendered a devastating dictum on the subject: “There are only two kinds of people in the modern world who know what they are after. One, quite frankly, is the Communist. The other, equally frankly, is the convinced Christian . . . The rest of the world are amiable non entities . . .”

The Regular Fellow. Fisher can be adamant. Most notable example: his stand against church marriage of the divorced, whether the “innocent party” or not. When, in 1950, the then Queen’s niece, Lady Anson, innocent party in a divorce, was to marry Prince George of Denmark. Fisher ordered the clergyman who was to have performed the ceremony not to do so, also advised the Queen not to attend. The wedding was performed by a Danish Lutheran minister while the Queen discreetly cooled her heels in a drawing room.

“One child is not enough, nor is two,” according to Fisher. “Three would be all right, because then the children can outvote the parents.” He and his wife Rosamond (“Roz”), a greying, matronly and whip-smart delegate to Evanston, have six—all of them boys.* So far they have given the Fishers four grandchildren—all girls. “We just decided to change sexes,” explains the archbishop.

The Fishers live in a comfortable, six-room flat in 140-room Lambeth Palace, the archbishop’s official residence across the Thames from the Houses of Parlia ment. Here the archbishop works seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 11 or 11:30 p.m. He has the reputation of being a fine after-dinner speaker, good mixer and all-round good fellow. In New York in 1946, he loved to ride through the streets behind screeching sirens, and once he turned a street organ for charity. He is easily England’s most-traveled archbishop (“The world is covered with places I’m going to retire to—New Zealand, America and every county of England”). He is devoted to crossword puzzles (the one in the London Times takes him just under half an hour).

Fisher is conscientious about his pastoral responsibilities in his own diocese of Canterbury, preaches a carefully prepared sermon at least once a week, does his duty by ordinations, confirmations, baptisms, weddings and funerals. But he always looks beyond his own parish and his own church. He is devoted to the ecumenical movement. He broke all coronation precedents by arranging for inclusion of the Presbyterian Moderator of the Church of Scotland in the service. Against considerable initial opposition he has furthered the cause of the seven-year-old Church of South India, in which the Anglican Church merged with Methodist, Congregationalist, Presbyterian and Reformed churches.

In Evanston last week, Geoffrey Fisher was in his ecumenical element; no one knew so well how to untangle a snarled meeting with grace, good timing and a twinkle of the eye, how to quell a theological pillow fight with a headmasterly hand, or how to turn out a neat simplification for the benefit of third-formers.

When Fisher presided over a plenary session to elect new World Council presidents, Germany’s Pastor Martin Niemoller tried to upset the carefully worked-out slate with the proposal that one of the presidents should be a layman. Presiding Officer Fisher moved into action: smiling tactful, and ever the perfect parliamentarian, he dealt with the proposal, in the mildest of tones dared dissenters to speak up (none did), and carried the original slate with a big majority. There were some nays, but the archbishop suavely managed not to see or hear them. To a reporter, he said with deliberate folksiness: “What matters for a Christian in this world is that you do your best for the kingdom of God. The thing that none of us must ever say is, ‘We’re not doing too badly.’ If we ever say that, we’re sunk. But if we say, ‘Things may be frightful, but we’ll do our best,’ we’re O.K.” It was Fisher at his best: cheerful, politic, superbly skilled in handling people, a man with relatively few unshakable notions but thoroughly unshakable about those.

Evanston often required all of his talents. Rare was the conference room, corridor, hotel suite or street corner in Evanston that was not the scene of a red-hot discussion.

True to expectations, the main theme, “Christ—the Hope of the World,” caused the most fuss. The report prepared for discussion by an advisory commission of 32 theologians found little support among the delegates. Some felt that the original document was too pessimistic, some that the non-Christian religions were slighted, some that it was too “Western” in tone.

New York’s Greek Orthodox Archbishop Michael felt that the commission report was too lenient to Communism, and Anglican Layman George Goyder, director of a British paper firm, rose to criticize it as lukewarm. “Simple people all around the world,” he said, “are waiting for a simple declaration as to where this assembly stands on the question of the Second Coming. I’m not a Seventh-Day Adventist, and I’m not a German theologian. But I believe we must preach the Second Coming.”

Sometimes the debate recalled the wor ries of platform writers at political conventions. Some delegates, for instance, deplored the absence of any reference in the report to the eventual conversion of the Jews in “fulfillment of God’s promises to the people of ancient Israel.” Delegate Charles Taft (lawyer-brother of the late Senator) led the attack on this position: “I think it would jeopardize my friendships and my relations with my Jewish friends.” Middle Eastern delegates objected on the ground that the implication of special favors for Jews in the Christian scheme of things must further arouse the Arab world against the Christian churches in the Near East.

Apart from being an ancient and meaa-ingful question of theology, the issue of the Second Coming often has practical, worldly consequences. Emphasis on the next world has given many a neutralist a spiritual justification for accommodating himself to Communism. On the other hand, the “activist” view, which insists that the Christian hope is to be realized in time and place, has informed much of the social conscience of capitalism.

The delegates finally sent the commission report, unapproved, to the member churches for further study, but hopefully suggested that perhaps the disagreements were more superficial than at first appeared. Said an assembly statement: “But even our difficulties provided us with a common bond, as, confronted by this great theme, we saw our differences and disagreements become diverse insights into its richness.”

The Race Question. Pointed exchanges were commonest in commission meetings that were closed to press and public. Among the liveliest were the sessions on race relations, for here the delegates were reminded again and again of the churches’ mission in Asia and Africa, where Communism is the competition. Said the Rev. Peter K. Dagadu of the Gold Coast: “Africans regard most white people as their masters and bosses, not their friends. Only when the offer is sincere enough to prove to the African that he is being regarded as a brother in Christ will he be willing to share religious experience.”

In the end there was little doubt as to where the assembly stood on race relations. Said one report: “Wherever Christians find themselves separated by caste, class, racial or other barriers, they will boldly cross them . . .”

The Men of Evanston. Much of the Evanston debate went on in Northwestern University’s McGaw Hall, where delegates sat under high, bare steel arches. Yet there was a special kind of excitement at Evanston that could not have been created by organ music and pageantry: it was provided by the delegates themselves. Anyone who wanted to sense the distant scenes of Christianity’s mission, the hymn of its work and the constant drama of its struggle for souls had only to meet the delegates.

The newly elected presidents of the World Council told part of the story. They included Henry Knox Sherrill, 63, Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, a go-getting, kindly churchman who is used to fashionable Boston parishes but is also a pioneer fighter for Christian unity; tough old (74) Bishop Otto Dibelius of Germany’s Evangelical Church, part of whose diocese is in the East zone and who has time and again defied the Communists; Archbishop Michael 62, head of the Greek Orthodox Church in North and South America, whose flock numbers some 6,500,000 communicants; Theologian John Baillie, 68, onetime Moderator of the Church of Scotland, a Highlander who is an authority on moral philosophy; Metropolitan Juhanon Mar Thoma of the Mar Thoma Syrian Church of Malabar, India, one of the oldest churches in Christendom. There were other delegates, some hitherto obscure, who made their mark at Evanston. Among the outstanding leaders:

BISHOP SANTE UBERTO BARBIERI, 52. Methodist of Buenos Aires also elected to the Council presidency. An Italian silk-weaver’s son who started to read for the law while he rode about Brazil on a bony horse selling jewelry, Bishop Barbieri today heads a constituency half the size of the U.S.

BISHOP LESSLIE NEWBIGIN, 44, a Newcastle shipowner’s son who went to India as a Church of Scotland missionary 17 years ago, became one of the first bishops of the new Church of South India. In his diocese most people are still so poor that ministers cannot live on their salaries, have to find other work. Says the bishop: “Ours may largely be a tentmaking ministry, in the sense that St. Paul supported himself as a tentmaker.” At Evanston brilliant, hard-driving Bishop Newbigin is head of the committee charged with drafting the assembly’s final message.

CANON OLIVER S. TOMKINS, 46, of Lincoln, England is the theological brain of Evanston. A member of the “Faith and Order Department,” he drafted dozens of working papers. Born in China, the son of a clergyman, Tomkins knew the dangers of missionary work from childhood. Says he calmly: “I reckon I’m the last man to have had an uncle eaten by cannibals.”

Freedom & Capitalism. Late last week the debate at Evanston reached perhaps its most significant topic: “The Responsible Society.” At Amsterdam six years ago, the Council had published a report that condemned in the same breath both Communism and “laissez-faire capitalism.” At Evanston last week, the Council made a sharp and heartening about-face. One of the men most responsible for the change was Delegate Charles Taft, who set up his own committee soon after Amsterdam to draft a more constructive message. Similar discussions were held in Britain, France and The Netherlands. The report:

¶ Solidly came out for political freedom. “No one form of government has a universal claim on Christians, but there are several conditions which Christians, by active participation in political affairs, should stand for . . . Every person should be protected against arbitrary arrest or other interference with elementary human rights. Every person should have the right to express his religious, moral and political convictions . . .”

¶ Strongly supported economic freedom. While the state should act against “depression or inflation”, there is a danger that “the union of political and economic power may result in an all-controlling state.” There has been “a fresh recognition of the importance of relative freedom in enterprise . . .”

¶ Strongly condemned Communism. “Christians . . . may contribute to the creation of the necessary conditions for coexistence . . . [But] this . . . does not alter the mission of the churches to bear witness in the face of all atheistic and self-righteous ideologies …”

¶ Suggested that the way to fight Communism is for Christians to “work for social justice and political freedom for all … ”

¶ Pointed out that “enemies of essential human freedom appear on both the political right and left.”

In a complementary report on foreign policy, the assembly viewed with alarm the H-bomb, suggested that its use should be banned.

What would Evanston accomplish? No one could say as yet how many of the world’s amiable nonentities or dedicated Communists (in Canterbury’s phrase) the assembly would move to become dedicated Christians. But the churches at Evanston showed that they could speak with a strong voice on the century’s great issues, and had eloquently reasserted the sovereignty of God’s kingdom over modern man’s confused structures and frustrated ambitions. Concluded one assembly report: “The church knows that in obedience and prayer our efforts will bear fruit. For God has called us to freedom, to be servants of one another through love. And He who calls us is faithful, and He will do it.”

* In four final volumes to be published by Oxford this fall.

† Some earlier ones: Edinburgh (1910 and 1937), Stockholm (1925), Lausanne (1927), Oxford (1937), Amsterdam (1-48), Lund (1952).

*In 597 a monk named Augustine arrived in Thanet, Kent, sent from Rome by Pope Gregory the Great to revive Christianity in England, where the Germanic gods were riding high. On Christmas Day of that year, Augustine is said to have baptized over 10,000 converts in the neighborhood of Canterbury.

* Henry, 37, a barrister, caused a stir in 1948 when he married a Roman Catholic girl; Francis, 35, is headmaster of St. Edward’s School, Oxford; Charles, 33, teaches at Harrow; Humphrey, 31, is a TV producer; Robert, 28, is an M.D. currently serving in the Royal Navy; and Temple, 24, teaches at Repton.