War, Peace and the Church

Is America's war just and righteous? Yes, said the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. last week. No, it decided, 24 hours later.

Has the U.S. any business being in the war at all? No, declared the Northern Baptists.

These actions highlighted the annual meetings of two great U.S. denominations last week--the Presbyterian General Assembly at Milwaukee, the Northern Baptist Convention at Cleveland.

Presbyterians. At Milwaukee shrewd, silver-tongued ex-Moderator Hugh Thomson Kerr of Pittsburgh caught Presbyterian pacifists off guard on the next to last day. In a silencingly eloquent speech he got the Assembly to declare that "the cause for which our nation is at war is just and righteous, and that our freedom, our culture and our historic faith are dependent upon the outcome of this conflict." This is the nearest a major church on either side of the lines has officially come to calling World War II a holy war.

World War I's aftermath has made churches much more cautious than last time.

In his triumph, Dr. Kerr left a dangerously exposed theological salient by declaring that the Christian faith is "dependent upon the outcome of this conflict." Few theologians of any denomination hold such a belief. They say that Christianity can lose a war, can even go underground for centuries (as it did in the catacombs), but that, because of its divine origin, Christianity's fate is never wholly dependent on such worldly things as war.

Next day, less than three hours before adjournment, the pacifists counterattacked. Their leader was a bluff, hearty, don't-give-up-the-ship pacifist who bears a famed fighting name: John Paul Jones.

Dr. Jones once dramatized Pastor Martin Niemoller's martyrdom at the hands of the Nazis. He had himself hauled out of his Brooklyn pulpit by a posse dressed up like Gestapo agents before the eyes of his startled Brooklyn congregation.

Almost as dramatic were Dr. Jones's doings at Milwaukee. Unable on his first attempt to round up the two-thirds' majority required to get the war resolution reconsidered, he and his cohorts spent two busy hours lobbying among the Assembly's 900-odd Commissioners. Their renewed offensive won a break-through just before adjournment. Then they succeeded in striking out Dr. Kerr's fiery sentence, substituting the much more restrained: "We have no alternative as a nation but to engage in this war." Nevertheless, Presbyterians are still officially committed to "pray for and work for a righteous victory." The Presbyterians acknowledged that the U.S. was not entirely guiltless ("Our own hands are not clean, nor our own hearts without sin"), called on the U.S. to abandon isolationism forever and accept "her rightful share of the responsibility for building a world order," and declared that "our nation must be prepared . . . even at heavy sacrifice ... to enter a world society whose goal is a sovereign good which transcends national sovereignty."

Baptists. The Baptist interventionists were led by strapping, Bryanesque Dr. Daniel Alfred Poling, famed head of Christian Endeavor, who can usually sway any meeting to his will. This time the oratory with which he backed his resolution calling for "defeat of the Axis, the restoration of sovereignty to enslaved people and the triumph of freedom and democracy" drew more cheers than votes, was licked 3-to-2 on a standing ballot.

The Baptist convention unanimously voted to have the U.S. feed the starving millions of occupied Europe, and denounced any "postwar political and economic domination by a few powerful nations." It called on the Government to provide it with a means of sending its "Christian greetings" to the "churches of the nations with whose Governments we are now at war," on the grounds that "the tragedy of war . . . cannot dissolve the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love."

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