It is not necessary to sort out the complicated and often confusing parliamentary procedure utilized by the World Council of Churches in order to detect the passions that went into the debate that ultimately left the Report on the Main Theme bereft of any mention of "The Hope of Israel." Three distinctly different perspectives were taken by delegates, reflecting their particular social and political contexts. The first, which insisted that inclusion of the hope of Israel was essential to any statement on the hope of the world, was held by a group of continental (plus some American) theologians who "had learned the meaning of Romans 9-11 in the battle against the Hitler persecution." The second position, which feared that any reference to Israel, no matter how thoroughly couched in theological language, would be damaging to the position of the churches in the Middle East, was held by churchmen from that region. And the third position, which was maintained by American lay people, rejected wording about the hope of Israel on the grounds that a missionary tone would alienate their Jewish friends. Thus was formed an unusual coalition of "goodwill" or dialogue advocates and Middle Eastern anti-Zionists to defeat the motion for the hope of Israel by one of the few formal votes taken at the Assembly--195 to 150.

What exactly did they argue about? Though it records significant portions of the debate, the official record of the Assembly fails to provide the answer to this question. Indeed, as Judith Elizur observed, "so thoroughly was the task of striking out all reference to Israel carried out that the reader is at a loss to know what the very discussion was about, since the published Assembly documents do not contain a single mention of the phrases which gave rise to the dispute!"

The observers from the IMCCAJ, however, were not constrained in such a way. Robert Smith provided the missing details:

There was no indication of the battle to come when Bishop Lilje of Hanover introduced the main theme discussions with a speech which summed up the criticisms of the advisory commission's report which had been voiced in the groups. The one sentence referring to Israel hardly seemed likely to arouse political passions: "The problem of Israel was considered an especially important single point not to be forgotten in any statement of the Christian hope." When the first draft of the findings was submitted in plenary session, we noted two short passages which stood out, rather awkwardly in the context, as positive and biblical statement of the missionary view of Israel. The first sentence, around which the debate raged, was so innocuous that it is still hard to understand how it could have been the cause of offense. It called for "a statement of the New Testament concept of the ultimate fulfilment of God's promise to the people of ancient Israel, and the consequent special responsibility of the Church of Christ for the proclamation of the hope in Christ to the Jews."

Extracts from The Evanston Report will illustrate, not only the shape of the debate but also the parameters of the controversy that would continue, in various permutations, far beyond the independent existence of the Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews.

Father Makary El Souriany (Coptic Orthodox Church): "Proposed the entire deletion of references to Israel in view of the special political problems vexing the Near East. He said the World Council must not single out one nation for special concern."

Mr. Charles Taft (Protestant Episcopal Church): "Particularly objected to references to the Jewish people....Such statements should not be foisted on a minority which did not agree with them. He did not believe that these references were 'the way to start a mission to the Jews.' They would jeopardize relations of members of the Assembly with their Jewish friends."

Dr. H. Berkhof (Nederlands Hervormde Kerk): "Did not want to offend, but had to say that Jesus Christ was born of Israel as fulfilment of the promises God gave to His people. There were no political implications in such a statement. Chapters 9-11 of the Epistle to the Romans meant that Christians looked to Israel in a special spiritual sense."

When it was all over, a "Statement on The Hope of Israel" signed by twenty-four European and American delegates, among them Pierre Maury, T. F. Torrance, Joseph Sittler, J. L. Hromadka, and Martin Niemöller, was presented and duly received by the Assembly for inclusion as an appendix to the official report. The Statement, which made clear that "Our concern in this issue is wholly biblical and is not to be confused with any political attitude toward the State of Israel," quoted from the Lake Geneva Findings and added, "We cannot be one in Christ nor can we truly believe and witness to the promise of God if we do not recognize that it is still valid for the people of the promise made to Abraham."

What had really happened? No one summed it up better than Willem Visser 't Hooft, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches:

As the crucial vote was taken and I could clearly see from the platform what side the various national delegations were taking I said to myself: the spectre of Hitler is present. Not in the sense that anyone was infected by Hitler's anti-semitism. No, in a quite different way. I saw that the churchmen from countries which had been, for longer or shorter periods, under the national socialist regime had practically all come to feel that Israel had not only a central place in the past history of salvation, but also in the future of salvation. As they had had to face the demonic hatred of the Jews they had found deep meaning in St. Paul's interpretation of the destiny of Israel in the ninth, tenth and eleventh chapters of the Epistle to the Romans. Those who had not been so close to the terrible drama of the extermination of Jews in Europe could not see it this way. They felt that to single out the Jews, to give them a special place in history, was--in spite of all good intentions--a sort of discrimination. It was their votes, together with the small number of votes from Near Eastern Christians who were afraid of political misunderstandings, which constituted the majority.

There were some emotional reactions to the vote. But there was really no reason for anyone to feel self-righteous. The minority had to admit that before the days of Hitler they had practically all, including Karl Barth himself, interpreted St. Paul's teaching on this point in a more or less allegorical rather than a historical way. And the majority had to learn that the minority had not the slightest intention of discriminating against the Jews, but was motivated by shame that the churches had not understood in time the full spiritual dimension of the Jewish question. This process of clarification would however take time. We would have to wait till the third Assembly to arrive at a common statement on the subject.

Christian Conviction and Attitudes

After things had settled down a bit, Göte Hedenquist told the British Section of the IMCCAJ that a "leading churchman" had said to him, "You must not be discouraged. Just have patience. Twenty years ago you wouldn't have had those 150 votes in favour of a reference to Jewish missionary work. In another twenty years, after hard work in trying to bring this whole issue down to the Churches and to make them aware of their responsibility, you may have the whole Assembly on your side."

Unfortunately for the IMCCAJ and its cause, such was not to be the case, for two decades later world events, if nothing else, decidedly were against it. Nevertheless, the Evanston result was not the debacle for the Committee it initially appeared to be, on at least two counts: the mission to Jews was revealed to be far more of a concern within the churches than the missionaries had even dared to hope, and progress toward the IMCCAJ's long-standing goal of getting the International Missionary Council and the World Council of Churches to take it more seriously was accelerated.

Several churches took official action as a result of the Assembly's decision not to include the hope of Israel in its report. The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland actually approved the minority statement and the Evangelical Church in Austria announced the minority also represents its position. The Hungarian Ecumenical Council (representing the Lutheran and Reformed Churches) sent a lengthy response in which it argued that "There is a growing clarity as to the urgency of the demand that the present idea of mission to the Jews be replaced by another conception. We must give up the conceited idea in terms of which the mission to the Jews is but a species of the mission to the Gentiles, and accept the new conception of having a special approach to the Jews, a special preaching of the Gospel which must have its particular place in the life and ministry of the Church." Moreover, numerous church and secular periodicals took up the theme, deploring the Evanston action (or inaction). Though this type of reaction was limited to European churches largely, it meant that, for the first time, the question of the Christian approach to the Jews had reached a broader audience than the missionaries had been able to command previously.

The Assembly, adopting a favorite device of legislative bodies when faced with an unsolvable dilemma, had requested the Central Committee to see to it that a further study of the Church and Israel be conducted, which it fulfilled by handing the request over to the Joint Committee of the International Missionary Council and the World Council of Churches. This body naturally conferred with the IMCCAJ and the result was a consultation held 12-18 September 1956 at the Ecumenical Institute at Château Bossey, near Geneva, on the theme, "Christian Conviction and Attitudes in Relation to the Jewish People."

That was not the theme originally proposed by the IMCCAJ. The original proposal had been to hold a conference in June 1955, jointly sponsored by the International Missionary Council and the World Council of Churches, on "The Christian Hope and the People of Israel." But "some difficulties had arisen to prevent this" and the matter was taken up by the Joint Committee when it met in Davos, 21-24 July 1955. The basis of the Joint Committee's discussion was a confidential memorandum in which Norman Goodall presented a position that vividly pointed up the tension between those, such as the missionaries, who wanted to deal with "the Jewish problem" as a theological matter and those who saw it in a broader ecumenical context.

For Goodall the Middle East presented three interrelated tasks for the ecumenical movement: "(i) the continuation of the historic missionary work of the Church; (ii) the work of relief and rehabilitation of refugees, and (iii) the promotion of ecumenical relationships between 'ancient' and 'younger' churches. The first two of these tasks are now being deeply frustrated by 'the Jewish problem.' As regards refugee work, sooner or later the point is reached where the Arab response is 'Not relief but recompense'--and recompense means securing from the Jews either compensation for loss or the right to return to former dwelling-places, or an installment of both these things, with all the political and frontier readjustments which this would involve....The 'Jewish problem' affects no less clearly and sharply the continuation of the historic missionary task in the Middle East. This mission has been directed towards both Arabs and Jews but in both these directions the position has greatly hardened since the establishment of the State of Israel."

Goodall had reservations about the extent to which the Joint Committee should become involved in this complex arena, however, and it was with some reluctance that he agreed to take on the responsibility for arranging the conference on condition that it be done in cooperation with Göte Hedenquist and the IMCCAJ. Moreover, the scope of the conference needed to be enlarged.

At the IMCCAJ meeting in Oslo, 26-31 August 1955, the director reported that he had received a letter from Norman Goodall communicating the results of the Joint Committee's discussion. "The most immediate decision for us to make now," Goodall had written, "concerns the proposed Bossey consultation, with the Joint Committee's suggestion that it should be officially sponsored by WCC and IMC and that both subject and participation should be somewhat enlarged. You will note the suggested new title, namely Christian Convictions and Attitudes with Regard to the Jewish People. We want, if possible, to achieve two things. First, I don't want us to lose the special significance of the kind of theological discussion which you originally had in mind....At the same time there is a strong desire that the consultation should not be confined to theologians and that the more strictly theological debate should be related in very living fashion to the many-sided crises which are focused primarily in the middle East and which have their reflections throughout the world."

In the discussion following, Robert Smith, who had represented the IMCCAJ at the Davos meeting, indicated that Goodall, as his letter to Hedenquist made clear, had favored a "wider" conference, while Visser 't Hooft had preferred a more strictly theological focus. Of these two options, the latter clearly was the choice of the Committee as expressed by H. L. Ellison who thought that if "in this enlarged Conference people were brought together who had never thought at all about the theological implications and whose main concern was what was happening in different parts of the world, theology would disappear or become so broad that it would achieve no useful purpose." The decision was taken finally to agree to the new title, with the understanding that Ellison's concern would be kept in mind.

As it turned out, neither Ellison nor other IMCCAJ members need have been concerned. When the Bossey conference convened, its sixteen full-time participants (including Goodall and Visser 't Hooft) virtually all were of missionary and/or theological orientation and all were Europeans, including the two who came from Israel and Jordan. H. Richard Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, from the United States, had been urged to attend but, even after considerable persuasion on the part of Norman Goodall, declined for personal and family reasons--though they also had theological reservations.

Richard Niebuhr wondered "how well I can co-operate with a missionary approach to the Jews. Perhaps that will not be dominant but the interest will be directed toward clarifying 'Christian Convictions and Attitudes to the Jewish People.' I do want to clarify my own ideas on this subject and I do believe that the Christian churches need to work solidly and faithfully at self-understanding vis-a-vis Judaism."

Paul Tillich, in declining, wrote that he had "a very limited knowledge of the Jewish situation in USA and could certainly not speak as an expert in this respect. But I believe that in your outline one subject is missing: 'The lasting mission of the Jewish spirit to the Christian churches' (namely the mission to represent the prophetic spirit against Christian sacramentalism and rationalism). It is this point which for a long time has made me hesitant about the Christian mission to the Jews. Many personal experiences with my Jewish friend (sic) have strengthened my hesitation."

The statement produced at Bossey was, despite the absence of major North American theologians, theological through and through, treating of (1) the sovereignty of Christ, (2) "salvation is of the Jews," (3) the Jewish people in relation to the Christian hope, (4) the continued existence of the Jewish people after the coming of Christ, (5) Jew and gentile within the Church, and (6) the Christian responsibility toward the Jewish people. The question of the State of Israel was discussed in the section on the continued existence of the Jewish people in terms of nationalism: "Concerning this new situation of the Jews, there are diverse views within the Church, as there are indeed diverse views amongst the Jewish people themselves. Our uncertainty over the issues of Jewish nationalism reflects our failure throughout the world to solve the issues of nationalism. We cannot say a plain yes to the forces of nationalism, for that would be to endorse forces of corporate selfishness and antagonism with all the suffering they cause. On the other hand we cannot say a plain no , because the Church does not stand for a vague cosmopolitanism."

The statement did not add a great deal to what was already in the thinking of the missionaries, but an emphasis on Romans 9-11, particularly in the addresses by Walter Horton and Wilhelm Vischer, was a harbinger of the direction in which Christian reflection would increasingly move. Vischer also introduced a provocative understanding of the Jewish people in his interpretation of the Great Commission. After quoting the verse (Matthew 28:19) in which Jesus charged his disciples to make disciples of all the nations (toutes les nations), Vischer asked, "Les Juifs, sont-ils compris dans 'toutes les nations'?" Non. En effect dans l'Ancien et dans le Nouveau Testament, l'expression 'toutes les nations' designe les peuples non-israélites, les 'paiens'. Israel est distingué de toutes les nations par le fait que Dieu l'a 'elu,' et qu'il l'appelle 'mon peuple.'"

Theologically, the missionaries to Jews were beginning to construct, upon the foundations laid decades before, a fresh and promising theological understanding of the Jewish people, and in that they were considerably in advance of most of the rest of the Church. But they were novices in the ways and means of the ecumenical councils. The members of the Bossey conference had hoped their statement would become the basis for a position paper to be adopted by the World Council, but they failed to take adequate account of the voices they had heard in the Evanston debate and in Norman Goodall's insistence upon "wider" participation.

In the end, the Bossey statement was published in the Ecumenical Review with a clear notice that it represented only the conference members and not the World Council of Churches. And there the matter rested.