"Church, Bible & Spirit"

The late vacuum-cleaner tycoon, William Henry Hoover, made a fortune out of helping to clean man's material house. To help clean man's spiritual house as well, Hoover left $50,000 to the Disciples of Christ "for the publication of writings on Christian unity." But in 1945, after 13 years of such propaganda, the Disciples decided that the money could best be used for a lectureship on the same significant subject. The Disciples Divinity House at the University of Chicago was made sponsor.

Last week, in the University's musty old Mandel Hall, the first Hoover lectures were delivered before a thousand-odd Chicagoans. The lecturer: liberal, ecumenical-minded Bishop Angus Dun of Washington, D.C. Said Episcopalian Dun:

"We Christians are like a family which has lost track of its relatives, even of the names they have come by in the changes and chances of time. The presence in our one world of the many divided churches is so established a fact that most professing Christians take it for granted.

"The churches behave like families when one of their number proposes marriage into another family. Yet all have shared memories of a common origin and inheritance. They live on and by its memories. This shared and unifying memory of the one church must be rediscovered."

Such a reunited church, prescribed Bishop Dun, must include the three main divisions of the Christian confession: 1) the Anglican, Roman and Eastern Catholics, who see the Church as "the great institution established on earth by God to bring men into right relations with Himself and with one another under Him"; 2) the "classical" Protestants, who make the Bible the center of their belief and church life; and 3) the Quakers and other groups who see the church as "the fellowship of the Spirit or the community of the perfect way. . . .

"Some will prefer to say 'Church, Bible and Spirit, but the greatest of these is Bible,' or 'Church, Bible and Spirit, but the greatest of these is Spirit.' What we must all learn to say is 'Church, Bible and Spirit, these three remain.' "

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