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The National Press Club - Washington, DC - November 9, 1998 Text of Parker T. Williamson's speech prior to leaving for World Council of Churches meeting in Harare, Zimbabwe The Basis of Christian Unity: Reflections on the Origin of the World Council of Churches Parker T. Williamson The Presbyterian Layman Monday, November 30, 1998 Fifty years ago, in August, 1948, 350 Christians from 147 churches in 40 countries gathered in the city of Amsterdam to forge a truly remarkable alliance. Emerging from the rubble of a world-wide war, they came with hope in their hearts. Inspired by their first love, they named Jesus Christ the one Lord who transcends every lesser loyalty. In that corporate confession, the World Council of Churches was born. To Whom Shall We Go? In Europe, Africa and Asia - on every shore - memorials to men and women who had been struck down in their youth told a horrible tale. Craters where cathedrals once stood, tombstones aligned as far as the eye could see, proved our capacity - yes, even our propensity - to do inhuman things. The war had brought us to our knees. We had been forced to face graphic and heart-rending evidence that sin means nothing less than death. Counterfeit saviors had done us in. Masses once mesmerized by utopian ambition suffered the ruinous result of human pretension. We were left with one question and one answer, "To whom shall we go? You have the words to eternal life." In that post-war moment, a commitment to Jesus Christ was reborn. Christians were seized with a passion for the gospel. Churches grew. Mission societies dispatched evangelists to faraway places. Scripture was translated into many languages. Evangelism and Ecumenism Out there on the front lines, in places that had never heard the gospel,mission workers who called themselves Methodists and Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Baptists and others, found that the person who united them was stronger than the differences that divided them. Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior of the whole world, had made them one. Oikoumene, literally, "the whole inhabited earth," was the word that came to the fore in Amsterdam. The mission imperative to proclaim the gospel throughout all the earth inevitably makes us oikoumene, ecumenical. Amsterdam gave expression to the fact that the evangelical movement and the ecumenical movement go hand in hand. Proclaiming the name of Jesus Christ, a centrifugal thrust, also means coming together in Jesus Christ, a centripetal thrust. The more vigorously we move outward with the gospel, the more we find ourselves moving toward one another. Sending and Receiving But the Amsterdam Assembly realized that while sending forth the gospel is a Christian imperative, receiving it from those to whom it has been sent is no less so. In birthing the World Council of Churches they declared that Christian faith must not suffer cultural isolation. It is both in giving the faith and in receiving the faith from those to whom it has been given that our experience of Jesus Christ comes full circle. Bishop Lesslie Newbigin, a principal founder of the World Council of Churches, saw the necessity of this cross-cultural exchange. Jesus Christ was not an amorphous, disembodied concept, Newbigin explained. "Jesus Christ was the incarnate one, God's self expression in the life of a particular human being who inhabited a particular culture, spoke a particular language, embodied a particular tradition." And so he is today. With each new convert, the gospel finds a home in a unique cultural personality. the missionary whom we dispatch to another land cannot be divorced from his or her own language, traditions, affinities and values. And when the gospel takes root in a person of another culture, although the eternal reality of Jesus Christ, Son of God, does not change, the convert receives this Christ through his or her own unique set of filters and will now articulate that gospel in a language quite different from the one in which it was received. Thus the gospel finds its fullest expression when mission-sending cultures also become mission-receiving cultures. It is in this gospel exchange, this fellowship, this koinonia, that each of us is enriched by a gospel that has become embodied in another person. The Amsterdam Assembly declared, "The World Council of Churches is a fellowship of churches which confess the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour according to the Scriptures, and therefore seek to fulfill together their common calling to the glory of the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit." "According to the Scriptures" Those 350 Christians who gathered in Amsterdam affirmed a unity of faith amidst their diversity of cultures. They had no intention of becoming a mere society of religious ideas. What Scriptures says about "the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour" would be the content of their corporate confession. Thus Jesus Christ would be no mere product of human imagination, but the historical person to whom Scripture attests. Thus Jesus Christ would not be a mascot, some imaginative icon applied to a multiplicity of humanly-conceived ideologies. Confessing the Jesus Christ whose life, death and resurrection is recorded in Scripture would form the basis of the World Council's unity. The Amsterdam Assembly understood that unity is a gift, not an accomplishment. It is the result, not the goal of Christian faith. The World Council of Churches would be an expression of that unity which Jesus Christ gives to all who follow him. It would be a "fellowship" of churches who - each in its own cultural particularity - confess "one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all." Fifty Years Later The world has taken several turns since 1948, and it remains for others to assess the current council's faithfulness to Amsterdam's vision. Forced to undergo restructure by diminishing financial resources, the council will consider a new statement of its nature and purpose when it meets in Harare, Zimbabwe. Inevitably, whose who gather there must answer the question that was addressed by their predecessors fifty years ago: What is the basis of our unity? Secular visions of world order had taken their toll when the Amsterdam Assembly addressed that question, and commissioners were in no mood to encourage additional ideological aspirations. Instead, they turned to the only one capable of making all things new, and they found a basis for their unity in the Lord Jesus Christ. The discovery that they made on that occasion is no less valid today, "for there is no other name under heaven given among us by which we must be saved." |
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