A Crisis of Motivation

The scene at Uppsala smacked more of a New Left "demo" than of a religious body in pious conference. Two student pickets who attempted a sidewalk teach-in were dragged off by Swedish cops. Some conferees slipped away to watch an underground flick replete with scenes of pot-smoking derelicts, shaggy folk singers and a minister who--in anguish at the chaos and cacophony of life in the cities--strips to the buff atop his pulpit. In other ways as well, the 701 Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox delegates to the World Council of Churches' Fourth Assembly were exposed last week to an array of provocative ideas.

The central theme of speeches and skull sessions alike was the gulf between rich and poor nations, and the moral dilemma posed by that fact for churchmen. Zambia's President Kenneth Kaunda struck the keynote --"the end of an era of optimism," and the "disappointment and disillusionment" of the newly independent nations. In underdeveloped countries, he charged, the West "seeks only maximum profit and makes development a mere windfall gain --mere crumbs falling from the rich man's table." Simplistic as it sounded, Kaunda's speech reflected the mood of the "third world" as voiced at Uppsala.

Through Disorder. Economist Barbara Ward deplored the "air of platitude, lassitude and repetition" that infuses the affluent world's "war" against poverty. She called for a tax on developed countries equal to 1% of their gross national products. The lien--$17 billion--would go directly to poor lands, and would amount to only one-third of the West's annual increase in combined G.N.P., Dr. Ward contended. "It just means getting richer slower between Christmas and Easter, and that includes Lent. Let us tuck away in one corner of our Christian memory the delicious fact that the English-and French-speaking members of the Atlantic world spend $50 billion a year on drink and tobacco."

Most moving to the churchmen was an address on Christianity and the Negro by Novelist James Baldwin. The Negro's freedom, Baldwin charged in an odd metaphorical mix, has been "frozen or strangled at the root" because "the Christ I was presented with, though he was born in Nazareth under a very hot sun, was presented to me with blue eyes and blond hair; and all the virtues to which I, as a black man, was expected to aspire had by definition to be white."

The churches' assault on social or economic injustice is complicated, of course, by their own persistent schisms --a fact emphasized at Uppsala by Britain's peppery Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Michael Ramsey. He criticized as flatly "wrong" the Roman Catholic Church's insistence that Protestant-Catholic marriages be performed in the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the ecumenical trend was evident at the assembly. Although the Vatican is not a member of the World Council, the council elected nine Catholic theologians to its Faith and Order Commission, which deals with barriers to church cooperation. It was the first time that Catholics had been named official members of a W.C.C. agency. Protests and appointments aside, Willem Visser 't Hooft, former W.C.C. general secretary, made a special plea for unity. "The crisis of modern religion is a crisis of motivation, of fundamental attitudes," he said. "No amount of moralizing can help us if we do not recover in theology the clear Biblical doctrine of the unity of mankind."

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