Church & State

Into Oxford's old Sheldonian Theatre to be welcomed by Oxford's doughty Yorkshire Chancellor, Lord Halifax, last week filed 800 grave churchmen from every part of the globe. They had come for a World Conference on Church. & State, first big international and interdenominational meeting of the churches since the Stock, holm Conference of 1925. As at Stockholm, there were no Roman Catholic delegates, and their absence was duly lamented in a welcoming speech by His Grace, the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. Then the Archbishop's onetime dean, the Bishop of Chichester, told the gathering that Bishop August Marahrens had decided not to come with his German delegation because at the last moment the Government had taken up the passports of the rebellious Confessional section.

"They faced obstacles too great to overcome," said cautious Cosmo Gordon Lang, "and it is not for us to comment on these obstacles." But to inquire, take counsel, an I commiserate over what has become a dramatic change of tide in the affairs of Church & State were precisely why most of the delegates were there.

The Conference was convoked by the Universal Christian Council for Life & Work, a co-operative committee established at the Stockholm Conference to further Christian unity which has been functioning quietly in Geneva ever since. Of its four sections, English, Eastern, European and American, by all odds the biggest and most active in calling the Conference was the last, headed by vigorous, 71-year-old Professor Emeritus William Adams Brown of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary, who is also the Council's active president.

For a Conference which many delegates were determined to develop into a frontal attack on Fascism, there might have been likelier promoters than Churchman Brown, the scion of the banking Brown Brothers who married Anne Spencer Morrow and Charles Augustus Lindbergh, who lives well on Park Avenue in Manhattan, and planned after the Conference to golf with other members of the Royal & Ancient Club of St. Andrews. Last week Dr. Brown was far less in evidence than such U. S. churchmen as Union's passionate Reinhold Niebuhr or deliberate Henry Sloane Coffin, Princeton Theological Seminary's John Alexander Mackay, Presiding Bishop James De Wolf Perry, of the Protestant Episcopal Church, President John Raleigh Mott, of the World's Alliance of Y, M. C. A.'s. Nonetheless, Dr. Brown not only raised $70,000 for the expenses of the U. S. delegation ($25,000 for the British delegates was provided by open-handed Lord Nuffield) but he has been circulating over the world for three years trying to interest churchmen in the Conference, helping with the preparation of papers, speeches, agenda, contriving through his Council to secure the release of prospective delegates from prisons and concentration camps. Last week Oxford graciously gave Dr. Brown the latest of his many doctorates of divinity.

Having split into a number of sections charged with preparing reports for general discussion, the assembled churchmen trooped off to committee meetings from which accumulated steam soon began to escape. Rugged-faced Reinhold Niebuhr threw his prepared speeches aside to declare: "If the millions who have drifted away from the Church may be classed collectively as the prodigal son, the church may be pictured in the guise of an elder brother who has antagonized him."

This point was made more sharply by Secretary Samuel McCrea Cavert of the Federal Council of Churches, who complained that a visitor to the U. S. "would not find Negro and white Christians worshipping together before God, who is the Father of both. He would not find the employer and his factory workers meeting in the same place of worship. . . . The hungry, the insecure and the dispossessed he would seldom find in any church at all."

But many a delegate thought that the Church Militant would have to be revived by philosophy. Reviewing the work of the Stockholm Conference, Professor A. Runestam of Sweden's University of Upsala mourned "a new quality, man's own devaluation of himself and his willingness to submit himself to some new authority. We need a new dynamic supernational Christianity." Theologian Emil Brunner of the University of Zurich pontificated: "That which is distinctively Christian cannot be expressed in systems and programs. . . . The Christian Church has no right to try to lay down a social program."

For the meat of their Conference, however, William Adams Brown and his colleagues were depending not on speeches but on the earnest, unspectacular committee meetings most of which, in deference to the times, went on in camera. William Adams Brown and many another delegate were primed to go from Oxford to the Conference on Faith & Order next month in Edinburgh.

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