Please Turn the Page
After the success of the Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews and its leadership at the Amsterdam Assembly of the World Council of Churches in 1948, hopes were high for an even greater success at the Second Assembly to be held in Evanston, Illinois, 15-31 August 1954. The theme of the Assembly was particularly propitious: Christ--The Hope of the World. What better heading under which to present the fundamental missionary axiom that Jesus Christ was the hope of Israel, that through faith in Christ Israel would be saved?
The Committee had carefully planned for the Assembly in at least two important ways. First, it had seen through to publication the collection of essays edited by its director, The Church and the Jewish People, and, second, it had encouraged the American Section to hold a pre-Evanston conference on the Christian Approach to the Jews.
The Church and the Jewish People
It is not possible, nor indeed necessary, to discuss in detail the essays that make up The Church and the Jewish People, but will suffice to note that they encompass most of the issues that had confronted the Jewish missionaries over the years, as well as those, such as the State of Israel, of more recent origin. Thus, after an introduction by Bishop Stephen Neill, Karl Heinrich Rengstorf, of the Institutum Judiacum Delitzschianum in Münster, addressed "The Jewish Problem and the Church's Understanding of its Own Mission," and Gösta Lindeskog, University of Uppsala, performed the ever-recurring task of examining who the Jews actually are in "Judaism Today: An Evaluation of the Theological Situation of the Jewish People Today and of Contemporary Trends in Judaism."
A slightly unusual feature of the collection was the inclusion of articles by two liberal (Reform) Jews, Hans Joachim Schoeps, professor of the history of religion at the University of Erlangen, and Leo Baeck, pre-war chief rabbi of Berlin and, in retirement, occasionally teaching at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. Schoeps maintained that "the universal validity of the Law is lost; but this loss of the unchanging and universal Law is precisely what defines the modern situation....A deep insight into the nature of the Law is at the bottom of this. Judaism is not Law. It creates Law, but is not Law itself. It 'is' being a Jew." And Baeck asked, inter alia, "What is the manner, the style, of the Church when in its indisputable striving for its place and task in the world, it meets with others, in our case with the Jewish religion and the Jewish sphere? Does it take the truly religious course, that which is directed by a genuine pious feeling? Or does there, more or less distinctly, appear here another motive, another sentiment and desire? One could put it also thus: Is the approach, or perhaps even an attack, made here out of a sincere belief or only in the interest of a belief?"
The two essays dealing with the State of Israel by R. Clephane Macanna ("The Emergence of the State of Israel and its significance for the Church") and Hans Kosmala ("State and Religion in the State of Israel"), rather than discussing the Christian theological significance of the Jewish state, concentrated, in Macanna's case, on the missionary challenges in Israel and, in Kosmala's, on the current political and religious Israeli reality. Kosmala, however, added at the conclusion of his piece: "Instead of drawing any conclusions from the observations recorded in this brief account of State and religion in Israel today...the writer would rather content himself with cautioning Christian people against exaggerated and one-sided reports on the state of religion in Israel or certain religious developments. Such descriptions are often based less on facts than on hopes and wishes, or on disappointments."
And, then, given the demonstrated hostility of the missionaries to the so-called Goodwill Movement, Hedenquist's sense of the necessity for balance may be credited for the appearance of an article on "Co-operation between Christians and Jews: Its Possibilities and Limitations" by W. W. Simpson.
Hedenquist's own essay and the one by W. A. Curtis, General Secretary of the Church Missions to Jews in London, spelled out the IMCCAJ's insistence on the parish approach, H. L. Ellison wrote, as he often had before, on "The Church and the Hebrew Christian," and the concluding chapter, by Robert Smith, capsuled the IMCCAJ's theological rationale for the evangelization of Jews. There were no articles by North Americans.
The Church and the Jewish People was a fitting testimony to the Committee's active life and work since the Budapest/Warsaw conferences in 1927, giving evidence of the increase in sophistication and sensitivity that had come to characterize the Christian approach to the Jews within relatively few years. There is a world of difference between James Black in 1931: "How would you like to live your life and think your thoughts in the atmosphere of the Old Testament alone? It is a dim land of uncertainty compared with the assurance and joy of Jesus Christ," and Robert Smith in 1954: "The revelation on Mount Sinai and the Old Testament Covenant have real significance and continuing validity." At the same time, there is no difference at all between Black's "If I were only left with one statement to justify our Christian attitude to the Jew, there is one that would content me--that in the last resort it is a clear command of the Lord's to go into the world and proclaim the Good News" and Smith's "The fundamental basis of this concern is the belief that the Gospel must be extended to the Jews on the same terms as to other peoples." Everything had changed and nothing had changed.
Lake Geneva, Wisconsin
The pre-Evanston conference arranged by the American Section of the IMCCAJ convened 8-11 August 1954 at an Augustana Lutheran Church conference center on Lake Geneva, north of the Chicago suburb of Evanston where the Assembly was to be held. The agenda included the normal series of reports from various countries and addresses, inter alia, on missionary method and the implementation of the parish approach. One of these, by Frederick Neumann, pastor of a Congregational church in Brooklyn, New York, on "Christian Love and the Jews," was particularly significant, not only because it offered a North American viewpoint but, more importantly, because, while maintaining familiar themes, it demonstrated some of the nuances that had begun to appear in missionary thinking.
Neumann based his paper on the commandment to love the neighbor, which required him to ask the familiar question: "Who is the Jew whom we are charged to love?" For him this was a theological question, not one of ethnology, sociology, or psychology, which meant it was a question asked of Christians and the Church by God. And whenever "God summons us with one of His questions we cannot choose whether to reply or not. We have only the choice between a genuine and an evasive reply, but reply we must." The answer to God's question, he said, consists in taking Jews to be peculiar, strange, whom Christians know a priori to be (1) people of the Bible who, curiously, are still around though all other ancient peoples have long since vanished and (2) people who do not believe in Christ, though he is rooted in their own Old Testament. They don't even understand their own book! But Jews' "presence in the midst of us affords a powerful demonstration of a divine purpose," Neumann responded. "If anything, this mysterious purpose should arouse us to stand in awe before the Lord of history. Instead we react by finding the Jew a rather strange fellow. Is this...not an attempt to avoid replying?
With this "reply" in mind, the author outlined the responsibility God requires his people to exercise toward strangers and suggested that it be applied to Christians in their stance toward Jews: "The Jew who was once charged to love the stranger, not only in his practical dealings with him but also in communicating to him the treasures of divine revelation, now seems a stranger. But we as a Church, bound in our conscience not by the letter but definitely by the spirit of the Bible, are charged to share with him our distinctive treasure, the Gospel of Christ....The Jew is not only a full-fledged member of the civic community, he must also be regarded as a potential member of the parish. He must therefore be offered the Gospel in the same way as the Gentile."
The welcome to the stranger that Christianity inherited from the Old Testament precludes, not only even a trace of antisemitism but also the activity of "those Christians who want the Jew to be omitted from the missionary outreach of the Church....The real reason in this case...is the fear that it may disturb friendly relations, say, with the local rabbi or with attractive Jewish members of one of our social clubs....we must acknowledge that human fellowship which competes with the love of God is an idol." For Neumann, antisemites and goodwill proponents were, theologically speaking, equally opponents of the will of God.
When it came to how Christians offered the gospel to Jews, however, Neumann took issue with many of his predecessors. "If we obey God by offering the Jew a full share in our own self-substance as a Church, the Gospel of salvation, there is still something else which we must never withhold from him, not even in our thoughts--our respect for his freedom of decision....For not even God interferes with the freedom of decision which He grants us." The implications of this respect for freedom of decision called into question the idea, for instance, that Zionism was the result of Christian failure adequately to "serve" the Jews. "You have often heard people say," Neumann wrote, "that if only we Christians became more Christian the Jews would all become Christians. Is that true? Can we really assume that a revived Christianity would simply carry the Jews on its shoulders? The claim that everything hinges on our own spiritual renewal and progress must be limited, lest it encroach on the freedom of both God and our fellow-man."
There was more:
If there is nothing more important to know about the Jews than that they are forgiven, we must tell them....We cannot tell the Jews that they are forgiven unless we meet them at every level and treat them in every respect as people who are forgiven. That excludes not only the notorious and vulgar but also the more subtly disguised forms of discrimination, especially those that appear under a Christian masquerade. If you love the Jews with the love of Christ you will not assure them that you love them so dearly. Love is neither ostentatious nor self-conscious. Nor does it engage in glib talk. Any self-respecting Jew to whom you offer your Christian love on a tray will reply or at least think in his heart that he is not particularly interested in your gracious offer. Furthermore, if you presume that you can win Jews for Christ with your splendid moral example you have already discriminated against them....Our Father with His sense of humour may punish you by letting the Jew set an example for you.
At the level of everyday life, "at the civic level, Christian love meets the Jew as an equal partner. In all communities where they form well-organized, self-respecting communities our duty as Christians is not only to defend them when they are defamed or their rights are attacked, but positively to co-operate with them in their fight for unrestricted equality for all. The Jews need our collaboration as we need theirs." Was there a conflict between civic cooperation and evangelism? Not at all, though "a conflict seems inevitable only so long as our co-operation with the Jews is based on rational deductions from threadbare ethical ideas. Let us stop talking 'Christian principles.' Let us rather love the Jews as ourselves. Love them we must, if we understand what they are and what we are too. For we are all the beneficiaries of our Lord's dying prayer."
Perhaps one could be forgiven for imagining that Neumann was directly responding to John R. Mott's call in 1931 for a Christian approach to the Jews.
Against the backdrop of addresses such as this and the discussions flowing from them, the Lake Geneva conference produced a set of Findings that were specifically for transmittal to the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, one of them clearly prompted by Neumann's address, though it did not catch the full import of what he had had to say: "It was recommended that the Christian witness to the love of Christ should be expressed in life and action in order to overcome discrimination and injustice, and to make the Christian influence so felt in community life that the Jew may recognize the transforming power of the Gospel."
In light of the ensuing controversy at the Assembly, the lines from the WCC's Advisory Commission on the Main Theme quoted in the Findings turned out to be particularly relevant: "God's revelation of His faithfulness to His promises was given in His dealings with Israel. Throughout her long history this people learned to know the mighty hand of God in acts of deliverance and judgment, and to cherish the hope for a Kingdom in which God's will should be done. This indestructible and life-giving hope is what gives unity to the whole history of Israel and makes it the story of a single pilgrimage."
The Findings put the IMCCAJ on record as being "convinced of the importance of this emphasis in the sphere of the Christian Approach to the Jews. The Christian hope cannot be fully comprehended without relation to the hope of Israel, manifested not only in the Old Testament, but also in God's continuous dealings with the Jewish people. The existence of the Synagogue and of the Jewish witness to the God of Abraham after two thousand years of Christian history is a challenge to the Church. The Church cannot rest until the title of Christ to the Kingdom is recognized by His own people according to the flesh."
And, then, the Lake Geneva conference "recommended that the Findings of the Evanston Assembly on the main theme of the Christian Hope and on Evangelism be studied in their relation to the Christian Approach to the Jews."4 Little could they know what would happen with the main theme when the Assembly went to work on it only a few days later.
"The Hope of Israel"
With the possible exception of "interfaith dialogue" at the 1975 Nairobi Assembly, no issue was ever to be more traumatically problematic in World Council of Churches Assemblies than the debate over the "Hope of Israel" at Evanston in 1954. It began in the initial discussion on the report of the Advisory Commission on the Main Theme, which Henry P. Van Dusen introduced by saying that he "seriously questioned whether major revision would be an improvement. Endorsement of the statement with authority for minor revision was all that was required." Such was not to be the case.
The expectation of major consideration for the Christian Approach to the Jews at Evanston had been dampened by Norman Goodall at the Canterbury meeting the year before when he had "warned the Committee of the many 'central' issues all pressing for special consideration." He had added that if "fundamental theological issues were reached, then by implication they would include the specific issues of Judaism, Islam, etc. In addition to the Commission on Evangelism, Dr. Goodall hoped that the concern of the IMCCAJ could be submitted to the Inter-Group Relations Committee as well as the group engaged in the preparation of a document on the Assembly theme."
Unlike Amsterdam, there was no special committee at Evanston to deal with the Christian Approach to the Jews. And certainly there were no IMCCAJ officials in position to influence the drafting of resolutions, as Conrad Hoffmann and Göte Hedenquist had been six years earlier. Hedenquist was a "consultant" (that is, coopted staff), as was Adolf Freudenberg, but Birger Pernow, Clephane Macanna, and Robert Smith were present only as "accredited visitors."
Though The Church and the Jewish People and the Findings of the Lake Geneva conference were available to the delegates, there was no mention of the Jewish people in the report of the committee responsible for evangelism, though in fairness it must be said that neither was there reference to any other specific "target" groups and scarcely even any geographical areas. The sole specification of the IMCCAJ appeared in a resolution on intergroup relations:
While the questions of the Christian approach to the Jews and of anti-semitism present certain problems in the realm of racial and ethnic tensions, this Section was, by its terms of reference, precluded from giving attention to them. It nevertheless reaffirms that anti-semitic prejudice is incompatible with Christian faith, and it recommends to the Central Committee that the study of anti-semitism be pressed forward in conjunction with the International Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews.
Opposition to antisemitism had secured a firm and permanent position on the ecumenical agenda, though not for the reason the missionaries had posited throughout their history and at Amsterdam, i.e., as a barrier to evangelism. Instead the phrase, "antisemitism is sin against God and man," would forever be part of the inter-group, and human relations, and human rights lexicon.