Editor EMILIO CASTRO

Managing Editors T. K. THOMAS MARLIN VANELDEREN

Book Review Editor THOMAS F. BEST

Editorial Assistant JOAN CAMBITSIS

The quarterly of the World Council of Churches

Editorial

Christianity was born in a Jewish cultural milieu. Ever since the gospel message crossed the borders of Jewish thought and life, the church has grappled with the question of gospel and culture. St Paul’s struggle in the letter to the Romans to understand the relation between Jews and gentiles and the account of the classic meeting of the first ecumenical council in Acts 15 to resolve the question of circumcision and observance of the law are examples within the New Testament itself of such grappling that has gone on through the centuries. The great diversity of theological thought forms, church life, liturgy and church government is the result of this encounter of the Christian faith with cultural traditions - a fact that is not always recognized or admitted. A fuller realization of this truth can provide the humility that is fundamental to the search for Christian unity in our time.

This encounter of the Christian message with cultures became a particularly difficult issue when the gospel was carried to Asia, Africa, Latin America, etc., where communities had celebrated centuries of cultural traditions based on other ways of understanding reality. In Asia, for example, the cultural traditions have been supported by well-developed religious systems with scriptural and philosophical undergirdings that reach back to many centuries of religious thought, experimentation and practice.

Within the modem ecumenical movement the World Mission Conference of Edinburgh 1910 and the subsequent meetings of the International Missionary Council have provided the platform for the discussion on the gospel and its relation to the great world religions and cultures, particularly within the Protestant tradition.

Hendrik Kraemer’s thoughts, influenced by those of Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, have deeply influenced Protestant thinking in this area over the decades. But are they really and challengingly relevant for our times? That is the question addressed by the papers presented at a recent symposium and included in this issue of The Ecumenical Review.

THE ECUMENICAL REVIEW

Kraemer was one of the pioneers of the modern ecumenical movement. He was a member of the Provisional Committee of the World Council of Churches, and the first director of the Ecumenical Institute in Bossey.

Kraemer was also a great strategist of the missionary movement. For a number of years he served as a missionary in Java, Indonesia. He was in one sense the main architect of the 1938 Tambaram meeting of the International Missionary Council, and the book he wrote in preparation for it, The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World, has influenced decades of missiological thinking since then.

Visser ’t Hooft said of Kraemer:

The real originality of his missionary attitude lies precisely in the dialectical combination of an uncompromising Christocentric theology with patient, loving attention for the spiritual life of the people to whom the Gospel is to be brought. It is not too difficult to find men who refuse to deviate an inch from the affirmation that the revelation in Christ is unique and absolute. It is not too difficult to find others who show a profound understanding for the spiritual content and structure of the religions of Asia and Africa. But there have not been many of whom these two things can be said at the same time, and among these few Kraemer is the most lucid expositor of the dialectical tension of the genuine missionary approach.

The year 1988 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Tambaram meeting, and also the hundredth anniversary of Kraemer’s birth. A seminar held in January last year at the Madras Christian College, the venue of the 1938 meeting, dealt with issues of dialogue and mission against the background of Tambaram thinking and in the light of subsequent developments. The papers presented at that meeting have been published in the July 1988 issue of International Review ofMission.

How may the questions raised by Kraemer be answered today in the so-called first, second and third worlds, dominated as they are, broadly speaking, by technological, ideological and religio-cultural world-views?

The other symposium mentioned above, this time to mark the hundredth anniversary of Kraemer’s birth, tried to answer that question. It was held in June last year and five of the papers included here were originally presented at that meeting. It met at the Hendrik Kraemer Institute in the Netherlands, and looked at world cultures and world religions from a broad perspective. Kraemer was a life-long student of world religions, and has written extensively on related issues, his thought largely moving within the category of “biblical realism” and the concept of “radical discontinuity” which had made such an impact in Tambaram and led to so much controversy afterwards.

In an overview of the symposium L.A. Hoedemaker wrote:

It is not obvious that the life and thought of Hendrik Kraemer should still draw a great deal of interest in the context of present-day ecumenical discussions. His contributions are not questioned, not even by those who disagree with him. But many feel that he represents an ecumenical age and a style of thinking which have largely become things of the past. No longer is our theology cast in the moulds of great systematic thinkers like Barth, Brunner, Tillich and Niebuhr - and Kraemer worked in that context. No longer do we approach non- Christian religions as comprehensive units which can as such be distinguished (and unfavourably at that) from Christianity - and many Kraemer-interpreters feel that he did just that. Nevertheless, the symposium on the occasion of his hundredth birthday was a success - a success in the sense that basic issues of the present-day missionary and ecumenical movement apparently could still be connected with basic challenges implied in his work. Of course, no clear-cut conclusions could be reached in such a short time. But it

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EDITORIAL

turned out to be an exciting adventure to unite representatives from the third, second and first worlds, Kraemer scholars and sceptical students, ecumenical professionals and grass- roots workers in mission and ecumenism, Catholics, evangelicals and ecumenicals, in an effort to listen once again to a man who was an ecumenical path-finder in several ways.

In a paper published here, Hoedemaker assesses the contemporary relevance of Kraemer’s thought, in the light of the doubts and reservations expressed at the symposium in Holland and the seminar in Tambaram. Together, these papers, and some of the other contributions in this issue, attempt to tackle an issue of crucial ecumenical importance.

EMILIO CASTRO

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