What God Is Doing

War is a great tester of theologies. To consider and try to answer the hard questions Christians ask themselves in war, some Britons lately began The Christian News-Letter. Among them were the Archbishop of York, Lord David Cecil, Catholic Christopher Dawson, Anglo-Catholics T. S. Eliot and J. Middleton Murry, Detectifictioneer Dorothy Sayers, Theologians Nathaniel Micklem and Reinhold Niebuhr. Editor is Joseph Houldsworth Oldham, Presbyterian-turned-Anglican, leader in the slow-forming World Council of Churches.

Last week No. 0 and No. 1 of the News-Letter reached the U. S. Best bit of news: an anonymous article, What Is God Doing? Its answers:

"He is bringing out into the open forces in the world which would eat up the marrow of our life if we were not forced to see their effects in outward conflict. . . . Whatever men may do at least God is answering the prayer:

"From sleep and from damnation

Deliver us good Lord. . . .

"God is declaring that a state of thinly veiled conflict, the outbreak of which into actual war is only just suppressed, is not true peace. Mere absence of war is not His will for us nor our greatest good. . . .

"God is showing us in the policies we are resisting where men get to when they reject the Christian belief in God as Creator and Judge. . . . Violence and terror come then to be regarded as the indispensable means of the maintenance and continuance of a society which puts its own political exaltation in place of the divine law. . . . But God is showing also that this idolatry of political power which we see in the enemy is a reaction from a more disguised but not less real idolatry of commercial and financial values that has deeply infected the democratic peoples.

"God is breaking up through the war a number of artificial forms of organization and social tendencies which, if left undisturbed, would either destroy man or hinder the achievement of his full growth. A social worker is reported to have said before the war came that if, as she understood, the effect of a war would be to destroy half of London, including its slums, and scatter its population over the country, it might not be a wholly bad thing. . . . God is ... putting to us a searching question. Money can be found in any quantities to discharge shells gratis to the enemy; shall we again be fobbed off with the plea of poverty when the more modest demands of social decency again become clamant?"

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