EVANGELICALISM AND THE ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT

NORMAN GOODALL

Among the many forces which contributed to the emergence of the ecumenical movement in its present-day form, a notable part was played by an organization which has the word “Evangelical” in its title. This is the Evangelical Alliance which was formally inaugurated in 1846. Among its declared purposes was the statement that it sought “not to create union but to confess to the unity which the Church of Christ possesses in His body.” The movement was launched in England and owed much to British leadership. It was not, however, a peculiar product of British insularity ; it was fashioned within a “common market” of Christian concern and dedication. Amongst others who were influential in the movement a German pastor (T. F. Knievel), a few years prior to the formation of the Alliance, had aroused great enthusiasm in Eng- land, France, Belgium and Switzerland through his eloquent pleading for “a spiritual union amongst all those in all lands who are fighting for God’s holy cause and for the pure Gospel.” Among the 800 delegates to the inaugural Assembly of the Alliance in London there were strong contingents from all the European countries, and almost concurrently with this initial step branches of the new organization were created in France, Bdgium, Switzerland and Scandinavia.

The links between this organization and those later developments which led to the formation of the World Council of Churches have been traced in Rouse and Neill’s History of the Ecumenical Movement. The point I would emphasize here is that in the dawn of the modern “ecumenical era” the terms evangelical and ecumenical were accepted as belonging together. In its early decades the Evangelical Alliance frequently used the term “ecumenical” to describe its own nature and organization and many of its leaders were also active in those other negotiations which, crossing the national and dmominational bound- aries, preceded the World Council of Churches as acknowledged instru- ments of the ecumenical movement.

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The ecumenical movement is larger than the WCC. The evangelical movement is also wider than the World Evangdical Fellowship, the body which now federates a number of national evangelical alliances or other comparable organizations. The movements are wider and deeper than any organizations which may seek to express and serve the movements from time to time. But is it necessary to speak of two move- ments, the evangelical and the ecumenical ? Half a century ago it would have been less usual to employ the terms in separation than it has since become. For the deepest reasons today it is urgent that we should again be able to think and speak of one movement, not two ; one movement which is at once ecumenical and evangelical. This assertion is made in terms of the distinction which I have just employed between movement and organization. At any given moment in history a great movement may require divers organizations through which to move. This is pro- foundly characteristic of any movement which we dare to identify as a movement of the Spirit. The concern here expressed is not for a vast organizational merger of all the organizations which serve the evangelical and ecumenical cause ; I am not pleading for another series of structural intcgrations. What is needed is a new recognition of the integral character of the two great Christian realities lying behind the words ecumenical and evangelical - the recognition of the one Spirit which gives them their meaning and is the secret of their potency and promise. What consequences this recognition may ultimately have for particular organizations is a secondary matter ; but long before any new structural changes might be called for, this recognition would effcct many transformations in the attitude to one another of those whose primary concern is with varying aspects of this one and indivisible movement. This would also affect organizational relationships, whether or not it affxted structures.

It is a matter for thankfulness that a good deal is happcning, in various parts of the world, which gives promise of progress in the dcsired direction. Yet those who are most deeply involved in this process recog- nize that there can be fcw short cuts in it and that its demands are deep and far-reaching. It is not a matter of cultivating a little more amiability or growing in courtesy and tolerance. It is true that situations exist in which a larger measure of these modest qualities would be a welcome improvement ! But while human frailty and other sad characteristics of our humanity have contributed to the prevailing separation of the terms ecumenical and evangelical, there are also factors which are deeply

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rooted in history and theology, in conviction and experience, which call for deep and patient work from us all, whichever of the two great terms in their current usage designates our primary interest and obedience.

While organizations are subsidiary to movements and ideas, some indication of the differences needing to be resolved can be given by summarizing a few of the factors which, in the last twenty years or so, have resulted in the Evangelical Alliance and kindred bodies playing a less central part in (or becoming opposed to) later developments in the ecumenical movement.

When such organizations as the Faith and Order Commission and the Universal Christian Council of Life and Work gave place to and became merged in a World Council of Churches, one of the most signifi- cant things in the new step was the introduction of the term church into the title of the new organization. Churches had, in fact, been represented in the periodical conferences sponsored by the earlier organizations, but when churches as such covenanted together in 1948 to form a stand- ing Council of Churches, a new degree of institutional responsibility and commitment was reached in the organization of the movement. In many respects this made the movement more responsible. It constituted a larger measure of corporate participation in it and it reflected that renewed awareness of the centrality of the concept Church to Christian thought and life which had become characteristic of the theological climate of the period. In all these respects the shift in the organization of the ecumenical movement from its earlier patterns to that of a Council of Churches was an advance.

But the step was not so regarded by many evangelicals. I confess it was a surprise to me some years ago to be told by a Swedish bishop that I could not hope to understand the religious situation in Scandinavia unless I realized how many people regarded the term church with suspi- cion. This remark did not refer to secular anti-clericalism ; my informant was speaking of the anti-ecclesiasticism of devout and zealous Christians. When I quoted this opinion to other friends in Sweden and Norway I was sometimes told that the issue had been put too bluntly, but there was general agreement that it points to an important fact. Some of the most vital religious forces in Scandinavia in the last century or so are those which have emerged through revival and pietistic movements which found the life and ethos of the church uncongenial to their aims and even an obstacle to them. Those involved in these movements may have remained - as most of them did - within the formal membership

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of the church but the place and pattern of their koinonia, the home of their Christian nurture and the base of their evangelistic obedience, at home or overseas, was not the church ; it was the “movement” or “fellowship” or “society” which had taken shape under the impetus of revival or renewal. The words koinonia and ecclesia had ceased to have any necessary relation to one another ; indeed, they were often felt to be antithetical. This process has not been peculiar to Scandinavia. Amongst other parallels the story of English Dissent and the birth of Methodism reflect similar features. But English Dissent was rooted in a strong sense of churchmanship ; it confronted the existing, dominant church with an alternative and reformed church order as well as a reforma- tion of its life. And even Methodism, with its initial organization of “societies” rather than churches, continued - in its main “Wesleyan” stream-to be church-conscious and to look towards a day when it could be at home within the church it had reluctantly left.

While some evangelicals, in Scandinavia and elsewhere, thus tended to see the church as over against the Gospel and in contrast to fellow- ship in the Gospel, there were others who, while working in and through the church, sat lightly to its order and its main institutional life. As one Anglican evangelical put it : “The church is a good boat to fish out of” ; he did not regard it as much more than this and questions of church order were no more fundamental than the design of the more decorative portions of the boat. This may still be said of much of that evangelical- ism which exists within the historic churches. Even where it brings to the life of the church great fidelity and devotion, it thinks of the Gospel and of evangelical experience and obedience in terms which make the institutional life and order of the church very subordinate. This is partly why there could be held under the aegis of the Evangelical Alliance such a service as the United Communion Service which took place early in 1963 in the Albert Hall, London (an historic concert hall) with Anglican and Free-Church ministers officiating. As one leader of the Alliance put it in describing the achievements of another evangelical gathering in Latin America : “The conference did not pretend to solve the vexed question of inter-church relationships, but it leaped over the barrier by emphasizing the fundamental things .”

From the kind of standpoint here illustrated, the organization of a World Council of Churches as an embodiment of the ecumenical movement gave rise to the fear that the movement was now imperilled by ecclesiasticism. The “official” churches - and especially the “officials”

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of churches-would seek to control a movement which hitherto had appeared to be less formal and more spontaneous. The word “bureau- cracy” was murmured and the spectre of the “super-church” began to appear. Unity would be interpreted, even more than hitherto - it was feared - as ecclesiastical diplomacy working tortuously towards a man-made uniformity, in contrast to the original resolve of the Evan- gelical Alliance “not to create union but to confess to the unity which the Church of Christ possesses as His body.”

It has not been easy to dispel such fears as these during the years since Amsterdam, especially amongst those who have not been direct participants in the work of the WCC. From a distance some trends within the Council seem to have strengthened rather than allayed these apprehensions. This is particularly true of the welcome accorded by the Council to the growing number of Orthodox churches within its membership and to the increased contacts with Roman Catholics, culminating in the Council’s willingness to be officially represented by an observer at the Vatican Council. What is not recognized - or has not been made known clearly and widely enough by the WCC itself-is that even the most radical challenges to “ecclesiasticism,” implicit in the positions described above, not only have strong representation within the membership of the WCC, but the issues posed by these challenges are at the heart of the discussions in which the WCC itself engages - whether between its own member-churches or with non-member churches such as Rome. These issues are central to the ecumenical problem and the ecumenical task : the question of the state-church and the free-church, the folk-church and the gathered church, the problem of (and earnest longing for) inter-communion, the peril of the “super- church,” the relation between ecclesia and koinonia, between Church and Gospel, the nature of the given unity in Christ and the authority by which and the power through which we may “leap over the barriers” when any other way forward remains an insoluble “vexed question” -these are not closed issues within the life of the WCC itself. They are the open questions for the facing of which the churches “stay together” in the Council. It can thankfully be recorded that there are now many evangelical leaders who are becoming more aware of this and are bring- ing their distinctive contribution into some of the World Council’s discussions. The forth-coming World Conference on Faith and Order at Montreal will be profiting by larger evangelical representation than hitherto. Some notable conferences at the Ecumenical Institute at

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Bossey in recent years have also provided welcome opportunities which have been generously taken, not least through the help of the Evangelical Alliance. In some countries comparable moves have been taken locally to begin or renew the evangelical-ecumenical conversation, as in the British Council of Churches and the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, or in the more informal steps illustrated by Dr. Eugene Smith’s article in the January issue of the Ecumenical Review and by the recent pamphlet-series Things we face together published by the World Dominion Press. This is a process which needs greatly to be extended and deepened all over the world.

* * *

While evangelicals have been concerned to interpret fellowship in the Gospel in terms unrestricted by Church order, they have never- theless stood firmly by their own conception of what should limit the range of Christian fellowship. This limitation is for them a doctrinal one ; it is in the realm of faith rather than order. In this respect the WCC is criticized not for ecclesiastical rigidity but for a supposed lati- tudinarianism.

It has sometimes seemed a little curious that evangelicals who happily participated in the work of the International Missionary Council, which had no doctrinal basis, became theologically critical of the World Coun- cil of Churches which, from the beginning, required of its member churches acceptance of a basis which explicitly acknowledged the divinity and saving work of Christ. Possibly this illustrates the fact that all of us when need arises tend to find theological grounds for other than theological fears or antipathies. Before the original basis of the WCC was expanded at New Dclhi I was told by a Norwegian evangelical that the basis was sadly deficient in its lack of explicit reference to Scripture. The likelihood that the phrase “according to the Scriptures” would in due course be inserted in the basis was already present, so I asked my friend whether this would remove his objection. “No,” he replied, “we should find something else then !” No doubt it is also true that when once the necessity or desirability of making explicit a doctrinal basis of fellowship is recognized there are bound to be acute differences regarding what is both central and minimal. Here there is a marked contrast between the brief basis of the WCC and the bases of the Evangelical Alliance and the World Evangelical Fellowship.

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The (British) Evangelical Alliance - the parent body of many other alliances and the one which originally bore the name World Evangelical Alliance - has a Basis of Faith which reads as follows :

“That the parties composing the Alliance shall be such persons only as hold and maintain what are usually understood to be Evangelical views, in regard to the matters of doctrine understated, namely : 1. The Divine Inspiration, Authority and Sufficiency of the Holy

2. The Right and Duty of Private Judgment in the Interpretation of the

3. The Unity of the Godhead, and the Trinity of Persons therein. 4. The utter Depravity of Human Nature, in consequence of the Fall. 5. The Incarnation of the Son of God, His work of Atonement for sin-

ners of mankind, and His Mediatorial Intercession and Reign. 6 . The Justification of the sinner by Faith alone. 7. The work of the Holy Spirit in the Conversion and Sanctification

of the sinner. 8. The Immortality of the Soul, the Resurrection of the Body, the Judg-

ment of the World by our Lord Jesus Christ, with the Eternal Blessed- ness of the Righteous, and the Eternal Punishment of the Wicked.

9. The Divine Institution of the Christian Ministry, and the obligation and perpetuity of the Ordinances of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.”

When the World Evangelical Fellowship (of which the British Alliance is a member) was formed in 1951 it adopted the following Statement of Faith which may, with interest, be compared with the above:

Scriptures.

Holy Scriptures.

“The Fellowship believes in, 1. The Holy Scriptures as originally given by God, divinely inspired,

infallible, entirely trustworthy ; and the supreme authority in all matters of faith and conduct.

2. One God, eternally existent in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

3. Our Lord Jesus Christ, God manifest in the flesh, His virgin birth, His sinless human life, His divine miracles, His vicarious and atoning death, His bodily resurrection, His ascension, His mediatorial work, and His personal return in power and glory.

4. The salvation of lost and sinful man through the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ by faith apart from works, and regeneration by the Holy Spirit.

5 . The Holy Spirit by whose indwelling the believer is enabled to live a holy life, to witness and work for the Lord Jesus Christ.

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6 . The unity in the Spirit of all true believers, the Church the Body of Christ.

7. The resurrection of both the saved and the lost; they that are saved unto the resurrection of life, and they that are lost unto the resurrec- tion of damnation.”

Here are two series of affirmations concerning the Christian faith, our understanding and articulation of it. Their range is vast and the particular formulations reflect struggles and controversies which have marked various periods in the history of Christian thought. The creeds and confessions of the two hundred member-churches of the World Council constitute other series of affirmations to which the churches have an acknowledged right to require the assent of their members. But is the World Council to adopt its own comprehensive creed and make this obligatory upon its member churches? Apart from the not- negligible fact that the World Council could never have come into existence by this means, would not this do what evangelicals themselves have feared-consiitute a more serious move towards making the World Council a church, if not a super-church? Here it is important to recognize that the brevity of the WCC basis does not mean that it is simply a shorter creed than some others. Its purpose is different from that of defining comprehensively the doctrinal basis or the confessional basis of a church. As the Evanston Assembly declared, it indicates the nature and range of the fellowship which the churches in the Council seek to establish among themselves and it provides the orientation point for the work which the Council itself undertakes. This orientation point is Christological ; it centres in the divinity and saving work of Christ “according to the Scriptures” and is the starting point from which the member churches “together seek to fulfil their common calling” to the glory of the Triune God. On this minimal but central basis the churches meet, retaining their inescapable responsibility for deciding upon the content of their own creeds or confessions and the place of these things in their worship, order and discipline, but gladly meeting to testify to one another concerning matters on which they differ as well as agree, seeking in respect of both agreements and differences to grow in apprehen- sion of and fidelity to “the unity which the Church of Christ possesses as His body.”

I write as one who is deeply committed to the World Council of Churches and who desires, for the greatest of reasons, to see that within the Council the terms evangelical and ecumenical shall always be held

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together. For me, as for others within the Council, one of the surprises and disappointments of the years since Amsterdam has been the fact that other evangelicals have been unable or unwilling to recognize that by coming together on such a basis as that of the WCC there is the opportunity, with unswerving loyalty to one’s own heritage and convic- tions, to enter into profoundly Christian relationships with others whose convictions and heritage contain very different ingredients. This is made possible by the common, initial acceptance of “Jesus Christ as God and Saviour,” the one centre, creative and redemptive, around which great differences can be brought into the open and the process of correction, reconciliation and growing into the truth can be pursued within the controlling and guiding power of the Holy Spirit. The process-it must be said again-calls for infinite patience and humility ; it offers no short cuts, but even within the process grace is bestowed and more of the unsearchable riches of Christ are made known to us. This is “ecumenical encounter” at its best and deepest, and for the good of all Christ’s people it needs the maximum, unreserved par- ticipation of those to whom the word evangelical is one of the dearest in the whole Christian vocabulary.

* * * Long before the formal inauguration of the World Council of Churches

there were developments in the ecumenical movement, its organizations and programmes, which began to give anxiety to some evangelicals on the ground that the central task of evangelism was being obscured or distorted by preoccupation with social and political affairs. There were evangelical critics of such undertakings as the Conference on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship held in Britain under the chairman- ship of William Temple in 1924, and this anxiety was not likely to be allayed by the launching of the Universal Christian Conference on Life and Work a year later. This development continued - with correspond- ing uneasiness on the part of some evangelicals - when, in its continua- tion of the work begun by the Life and Work Movement, the World Council of Churches went further into questions concerning the nature of a Christian society and the meaning of Christian responsibility in the social and international order. It may be worth recalling here that much of this same anxiety had found expression when in 1930 the Inter- national Missionary Council set up its own Department of Social and Industrial Research. What haunted many evangelicals as they watched

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these developments was the recollection of the “social gospel” period earlier in the present century, when it seemed that - especially in the USA - a facile optimism about the course of human history, combined with a shallow theological mood, was equating the Kingdom of God with suburban comfort on earth ; it was becoming blind to the Gospel of the Cross with its terrifying implications concerning the nature of man and his radical need of rcdemption ; it was missing the splendour and awe of that conception of human destiny which is inseparable from an eschatological hope.

That a mere “social gospel” is an emaciated Gospel cannot be denied. That the trend here indicated carries with it the danger apprehended by some evangelicals needs always to be borne in mind. Yet to dismiss this development within the ecumenical movement during the last 25 years - and especially its articulations since Amsterdam - as no more than a relapse to the mood of a shallow period, is another profound and sad misunderstanding of what has been happening at this point in the ecumenical movement. With all its fluctuating insights and unresolved problems, this phase of the movement has at its heart two great convictions and perceptions. The first is Christological : it is trying to take with full seriousness the implications of the truth that in Christ the Word became flesh, the Word which was in the beginning and without which was not anything made that hath been made. It seeks to penetrate more dceply into the meaning of Christ’s Lordship over all creation, his Lordship over history, his death and atonement for the world and the commission laid by him upon his disciples that they should go into all the world. In the light of these things the question of the right ordering of socicty is not simply a question about the well- being of man: it is a question of obedience to Christ, the acceptance or denial of his Lordship over the world. Sccondly, this conviction is accompanied by the perception that the humanity for which Christ died and to which the Church proclaims his saving power is not a col- lection of atomised individuals, each a wholly indcpendznt unit. We are members one of another; our individuality is inseparable from our corporate humanity, and we circumscribe Christ’s saving work if we do not seek to apprehend the work of grace in society and to lay open the corporate structures of our temporal existence to his rule and recon- ciling work.

Here, again, is an undertaking in which the characteristic concern of evangelicals - in the sense in which this term is used in this discussion

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-is urgently needed. No new or recovered insights into the meaning for this world of the Incarnation and Atonement must ever be allowed to foreshorten our horizons and to make men indifferent to all those dimensions of our life in Christ into which we shall only enter when the fashion of this world has passed away. No dzepening perception of the complex nature of man as one inseparable from his ftllows, in life and death, must be allowed to blunt the edge of personal and individual responsibility for decision or to dim the splendour of our individual and personal participation in the work of grace. This characteristic emphasis of one element in evangelism is vital to the churches’ under- standing of their apostolic calling and mission today ; but unless this in its turn is set within the larger context of the full range of Christ’s saving work, even an evangdicalism which has retained some authentic notes may be woefully impoverished. In so far as the developments here alluded to - concerning Christian responsibility for society in the light of the Incarnation - are characteristic of the ecumenical movement today, this points to another great area of Christian thought and endeavour in which, for all who care about fidzlity to the Gospel - and for those to whom the Gospel has still to be proclaimed - the words evangelical and ecumenical need to be seen in their inseparable unity.

* * * This article has concentrated on three great areas in relation to

which misunderstandings and sometimes radical diffirences of convic- tion have in recent decades tended to separation between fellow-Chris- tians. As a result, I believe there has been impoverishment within two movements - evangelical and ecumenical - which by their essential nature are meant to be one. As I have repeatedly recognized, the process of recovering a sense of the unity of these movements, not merely in their organizational expression, but in their theological wholeness and spiritual indivisibility is one which calls for humility, patience, open- ness of heart and mind and docility of spirit. These are qualities which have their human aspect ; they need to characterize our relationships to one another. But their power is only released when the humility, patience, openness of heart and mind and docility of spirit are first directed to him who is himself the Evangel and whose love embraces the Oikumene. Then, once again Christ’s people may be caught up into a single movement of the Spirit, a movement that is both ecumenical and evangelical.