The Eighth Lambeth

"The Church is not something made by men. It is the instrument of the living God for the setting-forward of His reign on earth . . . This is an hour of testing and peril for the Church, no less than for the world. But it is the hour of God's call to the Church . . . For those who have eyes to see, there are signs that the tide of faith is beginning to come in."

With this firm keynote, 329 bishops and archbishops of the Anglican Communion reported last week on the results of the eighth Lambeth Conference.* On Oct. 10 their encyclical letter will be read to congregations around the globe in a hundred languages. Lambeth's proceedings do not bind the communion's 20,000,000 members. But as the London Times observed: "This solid body of coherent theological doctrine . . . must be regarded ... as a formidable fact in world thought and opinion."

No Affectation. Between their colorful opening service at Canterbury Cathedral (TIME, July 12) and an equally colorful closing at Westminster Abbey on Aug. 8, the prelates worked five weeks in private with a businesslike disregard for comfort or show. With brief intermissions for communal lunch and tea, they met in the bomb-scarred Great Hall of Lambeth Palace, the Archbishop of Canterbury's London residence. They sat on hard wooden chairs (former conferences used comfort able armchairs and each bishop took home his chair as a memento). "There has nev er," commented the Manchester Guardian, "been a Lambeth Conference so free from princely affectation." "A Fearless Witness." "Marxian Communism ," the conferees declared, "is con trary to Christian faith and practice, for it denies the existence of God, Revelation and a future life; it treats the individual man as a means and not an end ; it encour ages class warfare . . ." But the headway made by Communism is in itself a judg ment on church and society, for in many minds Communism has replaced the church as the challenger of oppression and poverty. The church's best rebuttal is to "be a fearless witness against political, social and economic injustice." A committee headed by Bishops J.W.C.

Wand of London and Norman B. Nash of Massachusetts was still more explicit: "Marxism, by an ironic paradox, is at some points nearer to Christian doctrine than any other philosophy in the field, and this makes its rivalry all the more formidable. It, too, is a 'heresy' of Christianity -- a secularized form of the Christian hope, drawing some of its springs from the Bible and presenting something like a cari cature of [what] a Christian civilization stands for." This analysis permitted Lambeth to go beyond the Vatican's flat anti-Communist stand and concede that "in many lands there are Communists who are practicing Christians," i.e., who believe in Marxist economic interpretation but repudiate Marxist atheism. When a Soviet correspondent asked the Archbishop of Canterbury for examples of such "Christian Communists," he was silenced by Canterbury's reply: "The members of the Russian Orthodox Church in your own country." The Archbishop added, "Not all anti-Communist forces are necessarily good forces."

"God in His World." Lambeth's two main considerations were "God in His World" and "God in His Church." On secular affairs the conference

P: Declared that "Christians must hate war" and urged "all nations collectively to control the manufacture and use of atomic power and to pledge themselves never to use it for the purposes of war." But there are "occasions when both nations and individuals are obliged to resort to war as the lesser of two evils."

P:Proposed that U.N. place Jerusalem tinder permanent international control. CJ Denounced racial discrimination as "inconsistent with . . . Christ's religion."

P: Condemned "the grave moral and social evils that have arisen in many lands through the prevalence of gambling . . ."

P:Urged stricter divorce laws in Britain, the U.S. and elsewhere.

"God in His Church." The Lambeth conferees were more cautious in handling religious affairs. Church unity took up much of their time, but small progress was made. They heartily endorsed the World Council of Churches. But when it came to actual church union, they could not agree about the new Church of South India (TIME, Oct. 13); "a substantial minority" were not ready to recognize its new bishops and clergy.

Lambeth concluded that "the time has not come for further formal consideration" of ordination of women to the priesthood.

On other rites of the church, Lambeth re-emphasized the conditions of baptismal procedure and reiterated the Anglican stand on the remarriage of divorced persons, with one slight change: a bishop may use his discretion on admitting to Holy Communion either party to a divorce who remarries. Previously, Communion could not be given to the remarried "guilty" partner in a divorce.

Grass Roots. Two strengths of the Roman Catholic Church have been its frequent international Eucharistic Congresses which all Catholics could attend and its "staff college" system whereby picked men from every country get part of their training in Rome. The Anglican Communion, though more systematically organized than most non-Roman churches, has had no international organization but the decennial Lambeth Conference. Lambeth approved plans for "a Congress, to be held between Lambeth Conferences, elsewhere than in the British Isles," of Anglican clergy and laity from all over the world. The Congress will probably be held in the U.S. in 1953. Lambeth also proposed the immediate "establishment at St. Augustine's College, Canterbury, of a Central College ... to which priests and others from every part of our fellowship may come to study together and to learn from one another in an atmosphere of scholarship and common life."

Despite its concern for the world and the universe, Lambeth did not forget the grass roots. On Oct. 10, when its encyclical is read in a hundred tongues, from Eskimo to Swahili, listeners will be advised: "The local congregation is the place where men must find the life of the Great Church, which is God's instrument for the world's salvation. See to it, then, that your congregation is a true community in Christ, that it may influence the common life of its whole neighborhood. Nothing that is good in the sight of God should be outside the Church's interest."

*Previous Lambeth Conferences: in 1867, 1878, 1897, 1888, 1908, 1920, 1930.

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