1,000 Against War

Some people apparently think that the ministers who have been preaching peace will naturally back down now and find good reasons for changing their minds on the problem of the Christian in the time of war.

So last week said the Rev. Allen Knight Chalmers, pastor of Manhattan's Broadway Tabernacle (Congregational) and an outstanding U.S. pacifist. To answer the "some people." Dr. Chalmers had rounded up some 1,000 fellow diehards. They nailed their colors to the mast by signing the following affirmation:

As a Christian, I see no possibility of reconciliation between the central teachings of Jesus and the necessary operations of war; as a loyal citizen, devoted to the cause of liberty and democracy, I am unalterably opposed to the present threatened belligerency of this country. Both as a citizen and as a Christian, therefore, I must in loyalty to conscience affirm my pledge not to use my ministry to bless, sanction or support war.

The signers, Protestants all, represented about one-half of 1% of the Protestant ministry--which has as a whole unmistakably shown itself to be moving towards the interventionist side. The 1,000 signatures, however, showed a better percentage of Protestantism's big names. Some of them:

Harry Emerson Fosdick of Manhattan's Riverside (Rockefeller) Church; Ralph Washington Sockman of Manhattan's Christ Church (Methodist); George Arthur Buttrick, last year's president of the Federal Council of Churches; Abraham J. Muste, labor preacher and secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation; Arizona's Episcopal Bishop Walter Mitchell; W. P. Reager, president of the California Council of Churches; Kenneth Scott Latourette and Halford Edward Luccock, both influential at Yale's Divinity School; Georgia Elma Harkness, ablest U.S. woman theologian; Ernest Fremont Tittle, Evanston, Ill.'s popular Methodist preacher; Paul Bentley Kern, Methodist bishop in Nashville, Tenn.; Bernard Chancellor Clausen, much-publicized Pittsburgh Baptist; W. Appleton Lawrence, Episcopal bishop of Western Massachusetts (see P. 65).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.