Convened in Stockholm just ten days after the conclusion of the First Assembly, the IMCCAJ thankfully noted the statement on "The Christian Approach to the Jews" from Amsterdam and discussed it at some length, concentrating on the organizational prospects with the WCC more than on the main body of the Report from Committee IV(B). Hoffmann, though, "stressed that the report as such was a significant step, but would mean little unless there was aggressive follow up by the Committee and its affiliated societies to realize some of its implications."
In his own report to the meeting (which he had written while in Geneva prior to the Assembly), the director spelled out the issues that confronted the Jewish missionary effort. These were issues that, in some degree or another, had been present all along but had taken on new urgency in the post-war period and would continue to form the agenda of the Committee at its meetings held in the years between the Amsterdam and Evanston Assemblies of the WCC (1948-1954).
The New State of Israel
Prime among the pressing issues was the new State of Israel. "Whatever attitude one may take regarding Zionism, Palestine, and the establishment of Israel as a Jewish State," Hoffmann told the Committee members, "all must agree it involves a rebirth of Jewish nationalism which threatens to supersede and replace Judaism. Some ask is there any other raison d'être for preservation of the identity of the Jewish people than on the religious plane. What is God's design for Israel? That alone matters. Is not the creation of a Jewish State in the modern sense, a becoming like unto other peoples and a destroying of God's purpose for Israel, namely to remain a people apart and unlike other peoples? And if these questions are a challenge to Israel, how much more are they a challenge to the Church and her attitude to Israel in these days of momentous formative changes."
The perception Hoffmann had had in 1934 that "Religion seems no longer to be the Leitmotif of Jewish life" had become critical reality with the birth of the State of Israel fourteen years later--critical for Jewish religious life and, also, for the missionary approach to Jews. As astute an observer as he was, Hoffmann had not internalized the concept of the Jewish people in which "religion" and "politics" were so intertwined as to be incapable of differentiation. The wisdom the director and his colleagues had heard from Robert Brunner had not registered.
Nevertheless, when Hoffmann emphasized that all that mattered was God's design for the Jewish people he highlighted one of the strong points of the missionary movement, which was a theological, as opposed to a political, understanding of Jews and Judaism, including the Jewish state. The sentence inserted by the Alternates' Committee at Amsterdam represented the missionary position at its best when it appealed to the nations to respond to the State of Israel as "a moral and spiritual question that touches a nerve centre of the world's religious life."
The next year in Edinburgh (13-18 June 1949), Hoffmann pointed out that the creation of the State of Israel, was a "momentous event in the divine and secular history of the Jewish people" and "what it will bring, no one knows, but already there are many, and at times wild, speculations as to the future, both by Jews and Christians. The more ardent Zionists maintain that the creation of the Jewish State will provide a cure for all the ills of the Jewish people throughout the whole world. There are Christians who insist that the new State is the fulfilment of Biblical prophecy, and is the realisation of the design of God for the Jewish people. And so man continues to prophecy, oftimes impatiently, and unwilling to wait upon the Lord to dispose."
He asked then the specifically missionary question: "What is to be the situation religiously? Can Judaism in the new State and Church or Synagogue, as of old, be one? Most modern Jews are as irreligious as are Gentiles. If emphasis is placed on national loyalty rather than religious loyalty what is to be the status of Jews who are, or become, Christian by faith? Can they be Christians in faith and still remain loyal Jews nationally?...Will [missionary agencies] be permitted to continue, and if so, under what restrictions, if any, or will complete religious freedom prevail, as some Zionist leaders have assured?
Thus were posed two sides of the problem the State of Israel presented to the missionaries: the theological and the practical. The discussion on the theology problem continued at the Hemer meeting in 1951 (21-25 July), which Göte Hedenquist summed up in this way:
Is the establishment of Israel in fact a manifestation of God? Has a new stage been reached in the history of salvation? Is the present occupation of Israel a religious or a secular one, and if it is secular, cannot God make use of it for His purpose? It was pointed out that our Committee had to make up its mind whether Israel was a purely historical fact or something of eschatological importance, for on the answer depended our obligation and our work in that country. If it was agreed that the establishment of Israel was purely secular, then the Churches and Societies could work towards the development of an indigenous Church, but if it was judged to be an act of the Holy Spirit such as had not been witnessed for centuries, then we should be compelled "to take the shoes from off our feet," forgetting our own conception of church leadership, and, while standing ready to co-operate as our Lord directed, allow the Holy Spirit to develop His Church and raise His leaders on the spot.
These questions, which were asked by H. L. Ellison during the Hemer meeting, strangely seem not to have been followed up directly, despite their obvious relevance. Instead, in practice the answer was adopted that Israel was, first and foremost, a secular state with, perhaps, just a tinge of eschatological significance. Thus Robert Smith, editorializing in News Sheet, wrote that it was necessary to "recognize first of all that this Israel is a new thing which God has created. 'The former things are come to pass' (Is. 42,9). The dreams and myths have played their part in bringing this new thing to birth. Now it will be shaped by history, by the circumstances in which it was born, by the land itself, by the people who come to dwell in it, by the God whom they choose to serve."
But the Israelis were not hospitable to Christian missions and many of the missionaries who had worked in Palestine had left at the time of independence or before. A somewhat different "approach" was required and it was provided by the Svenska Israelsmissionen, which undertook to establish the Swedish Theological Institute in Jerusalem. This Institute, which opened its doors on 1 February 1951 under the temporary directorship of Hans Kosmala, was designed, not for overt missionary activity but for the comparative study of Judaism and Christianity using the possibilities available in Israel for studying the world of the Bible as well as Jewish religion and thought.
The Beirut Conferences
Simultaneously another, and entirely different, "approach" was being made concerning the State of Israel and the conditions resulting from its establishment. Both the World Council of Churches and the International Missionary Council were greatly concerned about the Arab refugees in the wake of the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli war. Quite apart from missions to Jews, the IMC and its member societies and churches, particularly those in Britain and the United States, had long had extensive missions in the Middle East primarily working among the Arab Muslim population. As for the World Council, its Department of Inter-Church Aid and Service to Refugees could apply the experience it had accumulated while helping Jewish refugees from Nazism toward assisting Arab refugees in the Middle East. The IMC was worried about its mission stations and those to whom it ministered; the WCC was worried about people who had no place to go. So, with the action of the Amsterdam Assembly in mind, they together called a conference, held in Beirut during May 1951, to consider what could be done about and for the Arab refugees.
The outside participants, with few exceptions, were British or American representatives of Christian missionary or aid agencies, including missionaries active in the region. In addition representatives from the major Orthodox churches had been invited. The omission of official representation from the IMCCAJ could have been an oversight but more likely was a conscious decision taken to avoid potential conflict with those who could have been advocates of the State of Israel. Nevertheless, Dr. Charles T. Leber, one of two IMCCAJ vice-chairmen, was present in his capacity as chairman of the Division of Foreign Missions of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, as was the Rev. William W. Simpson, Secretary of the International Council of Christians and Jews, who was identified as representing the Near East Study Group in London. Among those listed as visitors was the Lebanese Minister of Justice and the Director-General of UNWRA (United Nations Works and Relief Agency).
Willem Visser 't Hooft, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, outlined the three main purposes of the conference: (1) to show that Christians were concerned about the plight of the Palestinian refugees, (2) to call upon the Churches in all countries and especially upon those who could help to take this need far more seriously than they had done hitherto, and (3) to discover how the Churches could help and cooperate in the task.
This was a conference on relief to refugees and, as such, efforts were made to keep it that way by not straying into the murky waters of Middle East politics. However, it was a difficult trap to avoid. "We are convinced," the Conference Statement read, "that there can be no permanent solution of the problem of the Palestinian refugees until there is a settlement of the outstanding political differences between the Arab States and Israel. Churches are not competent to lay down the lines of a political solution."
Nevertheless, the next paragraph of the Statement sets out political guidelines: "Such a settlement will have to contain provision for the return of a certain number of refugees to their original homes. It must also include a general plan of compensation for refugees whether they return or not. We urge that, on both counts, the settlement should be not only just but generous. Yet, while we recognise the basic right of all refugees to their own homes and property, nevertheless a careful appraisal of the total situation has compelled us to conclude, however, that many Palestinian refugees will have to settle in new homes."
Elfan Rees, director of the WCC Service to Refugees, pointed up the difficulty the Conference had had on this very point. "It was on this issue of remedies" he wrote, "that the Conference had to take its most serious and important decision. It met at a psychological moment when, despite continuing public pronouncements to the contrary, many leaders in the Near East were beginning to recognise, however reluctantly, that resettlement in new homes was the only possible and practicable solution. At the same time, no convincing pronouncement had been made to this effect and it was a challenge to the integrity of the Conference whether it was prepared to state this inevitable but unpalatable conclusion in positive terms."
It could be argued that Rees was engaged in wishful thinking. Michael Christopher King, writing with the hindsight the passage of time allows, remarked that the conference delegates
were gravely misled over the willingness of the Palestinians to be resettled in Arab lands outside Palestine. General Kennedy [Director-General of UNWRA] had told them of the refugee's unwillingness to exchange tents for barracks, as this might, in their view, adversely affect their claims to return to their own homes. Nevertheless, the conference reported that "in general refugees are willing to accept opportunities to earn a livelihood (in neighbouring Arab lands)". The conference was indeed realistic in recognizing the impossibility, in any period which they could foresee, of the return of the refugees to their own homes. Perhaps if there had been more Palestinians at the conference it would have been realized that it was equally unrealistic to suppose that they would accept resettlement anywhere else.
What King did not mention was that the conference could have benefited from the presence of more continental Europeans, to balance the British and Americans, in which case the traditional Jewish missionary stance would certainly have been more in evidence and attention paid to Israel's difficult but successful settlement of the million or so Jewish refugees who had fled Arab countries to find their own new homes in the Jewish state. As it was, political problems overwhelmed the practical humanitarian concern to find new homes for displaced Arabs--the Palestinian refugees stayed in the camps.
Charles Leber gave a brief report on the Beirut conference to the IMCCAJ at Hemer in which he noted that he had found in Israel "great achievements and good care taken of Jewish immigrants [he did not describe them as refugees], but that religious leaders there, for the most part disregarded the Arab refugee situation. The Arabs, for their part, were unwilling to admit that they could not return to their homes in Israeli territory and were slow in formulating resettlement plans and caring for refugees." He feared that "the attitude of Israel towards Arab Refugees, and the extreme nationalist attitude of the agents of Israel in Britain and the USA, will cause a wave of anti-Semitism to rise in those countries, which would be disastrous."
The Beirut conference was generally considered to have been successful in that it stimulated the giving agencies in the churches to provide necessary funds for refugee relief and encouraged the wider spread of information about the plight of the refugees. Yet despite the immense efforts of relief agencies, church and secular, and an outpouring of money from church members, the problem did not go away. Consequently a second conference was held in Beirut in May 1956 composed almost identically (though with a few more Palestinians, as the refugees were called by that time) to the first conference.
Elfan Rees, by this time an advisor on refugee affairs to the WCC's Department of Inter-Church Aid and Service to Refugees, was disappointed and somewhat bitter. He called attention to the fact that WCC-sponsored conferences in Hamburg (1949), to deal with eastern European refugees, and in Salzburg (1950) on refugees of German nationality had made such progress that no one even considered the need for a second conference. But the first Beirut conference had insisted that the essential prerequisite of any solution to the Palestine refugee problem was an early general political settlement. Since that political settlement had not been achieved, the number of refugees had increased and the difficulty of handling the problem along with them. There were possibilities and, moreover, available funds, for resettlement outside Palestine. For Rees it was a moral question: "Why should we go on giving relief, which is a degenerating palliative anyway, to people for whose problem a solution can be found, even if it is not the solution that they most desire....the only ones who are in receipt of international care and maintenance are the Arab refugees." Rees was convinced that repatriation was, in any event, not possible whereas "political considerations aside, the Arab refugee problem is by far the easiest post-war refugee problem to solve by integration. By faith, by language, by race and by social organization, they are indistinguishable from their fellows of their host countries."
The response to Rees was given in the conference statement: "We are not here to pronounce on the details of political solutions. But we repeat that political measures hold the key to meeting the human problem. Therefore this conference is convinced that the churches throughout the world have a threefold duty: They must acquaint themselves thoroughly with the facts and make them as widely known as possible. They must insist that governments redouble their efforts to contribute to a just political solution. With equal urgency, they must appeal to governments and to all Christian people to provide adequate funds for the needs of refugees." And, the statement urged, "Every effort must be made by positive acts of justice to give [the refugees] new hope in the future."
Whereas Elfan Rees had spoken of morality, the conference statement spoke of justice. In the coming years, during which no political solutions were to emerge, justice would completely replace morality as the operative category.4 And the separation between the fundamentally theological position of the Jewish missionaries and the fundamentally political stance of the main body of the International Missionary Council and the World Council of Churches would become fixed. In the next chapter we shall see how it came to an explosive head at the Evanston Assembly.
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