The delegates to the founding Assembly of the World Council of Churches did not engage in the boldness and stridency of the French proposal, but instead prepared a more modest theological document that was a fitting dénouement to the two decades of work by the IMC's Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews. Indeed it is a tribute to that work that "The Christian Approach to the Jews" was dealt with by the Assembly's Committee IV as the third of only four "Concerns of the Churches."

The rationale for such inclusion was given in the opening sentence of the report: "A concern for the Christian approach to the Jewish people confronts us inescapably, as we meet together to look with open and penitent eyes on man's disorder and to rediscover together God's eternal purpose for His Church." The delegates who compiled the report may have felt that the Christian approach to the Jewish people was inescapable, but the Assembly as a whole was capable of paying it little attention. Apart from the Report of Committee IV (3), Jews are not mentioned a single time in the minutes of the Amsterdam Assembly. In itself, that is not such a surprising fact, for, in general, the Assembly did not deal with specific issues and concerns. Particularly was this so with reference to mission, which had been, and remained, the responsibility of the International Missionary Council. What is surprising is that the Christian approach to the Jews should have been singled out for particular consideration. That it was may be laid to the influence, on the one hand, of the Protestant Federation of France and, on the other, to the efforts of the Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews, largely in the person of Conrad Hoffmann. And also the fact that "We cannot forget that we meet in a land from which 110,000 Jews were taken to be murdered" cannot be ruled out.

The Amsterdam statement, however, was not a response to the Shoah, though perhaps its influence may be perceived in the declaration about antisemitism, specifically the sentence that was later to be quoted in all but countless WCC and other ecclesiastical statements: "Anti-semitism is sin against God and man." This sentence--which, standing alone, comes closer than any other in church documents, before or since, to making antisemitism status confessionis or heresy--was prompted by the missionary imperative. Amsterdam's report on the Christian Approach to the Jews was, after all, a product of the IMCCAJ, which had repeatedly discussed antisemitism in the same terms as did Amsterdam--as a barrier to effective evangelism.

So at Amsterdam, the acknowledgment was made that "too often we have failed to manifest Christian love towards our Jewish neighbours, or even a resolute will for common social justice. We have failed to fight with all our strength the age-old disorder of man which anti-semitism represents....

"We call upon all the churches we represent to denounce anti-semitism, no matter what its origin, as absolutely irreconcilable with the profession and practice of Christian faith. Anti-semitism is sin against God and man."

And the section on "Barriers" then concludes: "Only as we give convincing evidence to our Jewish neighbours that we seek for them the common rights and dignities which God wills for His children, can we come to such a meeting with them as would make it possible to share with them the best which God has given us in Christ."

The clearest internal evidence of Hoffmann's and the IMCCAJ's influence on the Amsterdam statement is found in the lengthiest section in the report, entitled "The Christian witness to the Jewish people." These paragraphs could have been lifted from any number of IMCCAJ statements, for they reflected the position long argued by that Committee's director and many others. But it was entirely appropriate that, at the First Assembly of the World Council of Churches, a plea should be made for the parish approach.

"In spite of the universality of our Lord's commission and of the fact that the first mission of the Church was to the Jewish people, our churches have with rare exceptions failed to maintain that mission," the Amsterdam report confessed. "The carrying on of this mission by special agencies has often meant the singling out of the Jews for special missionary attention, even in situations where they might well have been included in the normal ministry of the Church. It has also meant in many cases that the converts are forced into segregated spiritual fellowship rather than being included and welcomed in the regular membership of the Church." The International Missionary Council's Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews, as one would suspect, found these sentences to be a powerful support in the years following the Amsterdam Assembly.

In its advocacy of the parish approach to the Jews, the Amsterdam drafters found themselves in general agreement with the Protestant Federation of France, though the latter held a position on antisemitism that would have been difficult for at least some of the Amsterdam delegates to swallow. Again, it is necessary to look at rather extended sections of the French paper in order to follow its argument and get the flavor of its mentality:

Christians should not reproach Jews for the mote which is in their eye, but give heed to the beam in their own. Above all they should not lose sight of the immemorial tradition of persecution which has developed defensive reflexes, quickened to acute sensitiveness by the horrors they have lived through during the Nazi régime. There are reproaches which we can no longer bring against them, even if we think them just; and searching examination is called for before we accept for ourselves the most legitimate. In particular all hope of a successful mission goes by the board if we start from the premise that Jews cannot be assimilated; and that is far from proof in the social, even if it is plausible in the theological world....

Anti-semitism is far more than one such prejudice. For anti-semitism, "to be or not to be" is the basic question in our relations with the Jews. It is essential that Jews and Christians should drive it out of the field in alliance, not with uncoordinated arguments on different fronts. So long as a Jew can suppose that Christians as a whole are anti-semitic, or that the Church does not fight anti-semitism in every shape and form, there will inevitably be a movement of repulsion, turning Jewish eyes away from the Gospel which their sincerest friends in the Church want to lay before them.

The position that had prevailed in the IMCCAJ and which was reflected in the Amsterdam report--that antisemitism is bad and must be rejected, but, most especially, it must be overcome because the mission to Jews is doomed so long as it continues or is thought to continue--was here presented in the typical stark manner of the French statement. But then a distinction was made between antisemitism and anti-Judaism that was the logical next step from the missionaries' distinction between the religious and ethnic elements in the Jewish people. "It follows," the Commission on the Witness to Israel concluded,

that, unless we are to be at cross purposes, a clear distinction should be drawn between anti-semitism and the anti-Judaism which is involved in every summons to conversion, and concerns the Church too, for the Church has constant need of conversion and a constant tendency to Judaism. All suggestions that as a Christian one is really a Jew are special pleading. The aim of general conversion cannot be anything less than the spiritual destruction of Judaism. There we meet a "rock of offense", for the sincerest Jews regard themselves as a Remnant necessary for the preservation of the world and, in this world, of the Law of Sinai. But Christians, even when they tell them that the Remnant is unfaithful, cannot forget that the preservation of Israel until the last days is one of God's mysteries.

Though language such as this was not included in the Amsterdam document, the concept that the survival of the Jewish people was "one of God's mysteries" was noted: "For many the continued existence of a Jewish people which does not acknowledge Christ is a divine mystery which finds its only sufficient explanation in the purpose of God's unchanging faithfulness and mercy (Romans xi, 25-29)."

Those who would shrink from anti-Judaism, according to the French position, end up "admitting that there are Jews and Greeks within the Church, admitting that God (or at any rate His unfaithful Church) has respect of persons, and recognizing the possibility of separate Jewish-Christian churches.

"Moreover, as long as the anti-semitism of certain Christian groups forces Missions to the Jews to contemplate the possibility of creating such communities, we may wonder who needs the Gospel first, and ask ourselves whether we are not putting the cart before the horse in accepting such a necessity. For if we do so the wall of separation is not broken down."

With regard to the question of assimilation by Jews into the surrounding culture, which the French believed was not only possible but necessary, the IMCCAJ disagreed strongly, for it had from its very beginning with the Budapest and Warsaw conferences insisted that the "best" of Judaism should be retained by converts, that, in fact, Jews who became Christian should remain Jews. Assimilation was to be avoided for the sake of the converts themselves. At the same time the IMCCAJ also rejected the notion of creating a Hebrew-Christian Church, for that would have been to undercut the parish approach. The French position was more consistent with generally accepted tradition than the IMCCAJ's and, in being so, highlighted a practical problem, which was at the same time theological, that the Committee was never to solve: is it really possible to be a Jew and a Christian at the same time? is it really possible to be a Jew culturally but a Christian religiously?

When the Report of Committee IV(B) came to the floor of the Assembly plenary, the debate was engaged by delegates who held views and understandings of Jews and Judaism that differed from the fundamentally missionary stance of the Committee. For instance, the Rev. Ernest Perkins (Methodist, UK) thought that many factors had not adequately been dealt with, among them "(1) it did not sufficiently emphasise the need for co-operative action between the Christians and Jews; it should be more emphatic; (2) it was not enough to condemn anti-semitism; the causes--religious, social and economic--of that attitude must be considered."

Dr. Herman Heering of the Remonstrant Brotherhood (Netherlands) rejected the entire Report: "It contained many telling statements, but to all who had at heart the sufferings of the Jews it must seem impossible to preach to a people which had gone through so much. They must first be given an opportunity of living at all. The statement seemed to him hypocritical, and he moved that it be dropped. The motion was not adopted."

When the Report as a whole came to a vote, the majority of delegates agreed with Dr. Benjamin Mays (National Baptist Convention, USA), who "praised the Report, which would make a deep impression, he thought, on the Jewish people. It made clear that we wanted to bring the Jews into full Christian fellowship here and now."

The final section of the Amsterdam Report, which concerned "The emergence of Israel as a state," was of a quite different nature from the sections preceding. The State of Israel and the Zionist movement that produced it was then, and is now, such a complicated and important subject that it deserves a chapter of its own.