What happened next: reflections on WCC assembly themes - World Council of Churches - "Turn to God - Rejoice in Hope": Unfolding the Eighth Assembly Theme

Ecumenical Review, The, April, 1998 by Patrick Henry

Eight years ago, for the January 1991 issue of The Ecumenical Review looking forward to the seventh World Council assembly (Canberra), I was asked to write a piece imagining the future of ecumenism in the ensuing forty years, Now I am asked to look the other way, and reflect on the journey of the WCC during its first half century, to be celebrated in the Jubilee eighth assembly in Harare later this year. Since writing the earlier article I have come across a remark of the English historian G. M. Young that captures, better than any other sentence I have ever read, the puzzle and the challenge lodged at the intersection of retrospect and prophecy: "The first lesson of history, and it may well be the last, is that you never know what is coming next."(1) Thirty-five hundred words for fifty years averages seventy words per year, and in this sentence I have already used twenty so what I say will be impressionistic. I am going to return to 1948, and think first about what might have seemed then a plausible prediction about the future, and compare and contrast that picture with what has actually happened, with "what came next".

There were "giants in the earth" in those days. Bell, Berggrav, Boegner, Kraemer, Mott, Niemoller, Niles, Oldham, Tomkins, Van Dusen, Visser 't Hooft, and the like brought with them into a new day the weight of their witness through the long dark night of Christendom's collapse. They were the channel through which the grand tradition, nearly two millennia long, of "God's Design" had survived its passage through the twentieth century's intensification of "Man's Disorder". By 1948 there were plenty of signs that the postwar world was full of peril (the Iron Curtain, mayhem in the Indian subcontinent, the election of the National Party in South Africa, to name a few), but I suspect that the church leaders gathered in Amsterdam believed that the Christian theological tradition as they had learned it and were teaching it was up to the challenge. The Tradition (to use the capitalized form that would soon become normative) was adequate; the problem was that the many traditions were frittering away the Tradition's power. Christendom was gone in Europe (it succumbed later in North America), but the leaders of the WCC were confident they knew who knew how to articulate God's design. There was widespread agreement on what constituted theological credentials.

Assembly themes are certainly not the only clues we have to the spirit of the WCC and its development, but they are instructive, because a lot of thought and discussion are devoted to their formulation, and their rhetorical shape tells us as much as their specific content about the ethos of ecumenism in their time. "Man's Disorder and God's Design" (Amsterdam 1948) is a brave declaration in face of worldwide catastrophe, and also a succinct summary of a characteristically Protestant, especially Reformed, assessment of the human situation. There would of course be fierce debates in those early years between neo-orthodox and other theologians, but the WCC at its founding had no doubt that original sin, pride, defiance of God were the theologically most significant human characteristics. The church, instructed by theologians who read the Bible in this way, could not claim to express God's design fully, but the church, so instructed, knew the design.

The Trinity

The name "God" appears again in the themes only now, half a century later, in "Turn to God -- Rejoice in Hope" (Harare 1998). The Trinitarian basis of the WCC is strong and sure, and true Trinitarianism always recognizes the activity of all the persons in each (and "God" suggests more than the First Person), but rhetorical signals from the themes in the intervening period suggest the Second Person is "more equal" than the others. What is even more striking than the appearance of Christ by name in four themes -- "Christ -- the Hope of the World" (Evanston 1954), "Jesus Christ -- the Light of the World" (New Delhi 1961), "Jesus Christ Frees and Unites" (Nairobi 1975), and "Jesus Christ -- the Life of the World" (Vancouver 1983) -- is the confident assertiveness of each of them. No one would suppose there was unanimity on the meaning of these images and verbs drawn from Scripture, but the themes themselves give no hint that Christ might be a "problem". And the addition of "Jesus" to "Christ" in the last three of these themes intensifies the particularity of specifically Christian claims. One might think that "Turn to God -- Rejoice in Hope" is a reassertion of a broader theological horizon after a long sojourn in a narrower theological field.

There are, to be sure, two other themes in the half-century of assemblies. "Behold, I Make All Things New" (Uppsala 1968) quotes God (Rev. 21:5). The theme must have been chosen many months prior to the assembly, and I wonder whether the formulators in prospect had any idea just how many things would be made "new" in 1968, one of the most chaotic years ever in the United States, and in much of the rest of the world too. The rhetorical difference from twenty years before, "Man's Disorder and God's Design", is striking. The earlier theme presupposed knowledge of God's design to correct man's disorder. The later theme disavows clear knowledge, except knowledge that God has promised to make all things new. An argument from design is giving way to an argument from trust. And the argument was not an easy one, for 1968 would challenge the trust of many Christians in God's design in making all things new.