To End a Scandal

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Disunity in the name of Christ is a scandal and a shame, but it is nothing new--even Jesus had to deal with it. One day his disciples found a stranger casting out devils in Jesus' name and warned him to quit, on the ground that "he followeth not with us." Christ rebuked them. "Forbid him not," he said, "for he that is not against us is for us'1 (Luke 9: 49-50).

It has been as hard for history's Christians to heed this tolerant teaching as it was for the disciples. Quirks of custom and filigrees of doctrine, thunderbolts of power politics and showers of private revelations, have split and fissured the masonry of the church time and again throughout the centuries. The Protestant Reformation triggered a chain reaction of Christian fission that reached its explosive peak in the New World; in 1900 the U.S. had no fewer than 250 different kinds of Christianity.

Many Protestants glory in this freedom and individualism--and many of them worry about it. One of the earliest worriers was the founder of Protestantism's Reformed tradition--John Calvin of Geneva. Wrote he to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. chief architect of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer: "The churches are so divided that human fellowship is scarcely now of any repute ... So much does this concern me that if I could be of any service. I would not begrudge traversing ten seas for this purpose."

One-Man Movement. Calvin crossed no seas at all, but one of his modern followers is just as ready to cross stormy seas in the cause of Christian unity. He is a squarejawed, hazel-eyed man of action, whose three euphonious names --Eugene Carson Blake--have become synonymous in church circles with efficient organization, knowing diplomacy, and zeal for unity.

Dr. Blake's activities make him sound like a one-man ecumenical movement. On the World Council of Churches he is a member of three of the top committees. On the National Council of Churches, of which he is a past president, he is a member of the General Board. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the World Presbyterian Alliance.

Theoretically at least, these are all spare-time activities. Dr. Blake's regular job for the past ten years has been Stated Clerk--permanent executive officer--of the Presbyterian General Assembly, an elected body that is the heart of the government of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (Northern Presbyterians), who number 3,259,011. Last week and this, in Buffalo, as Dr. Blake took charge for the tenth year of the General Assembly, the prime item on the agenda represented the highest ambition of his career--the "Blake Proposal" for the creation of a new, still-unnamed Protestant church out of four old ones. His plan has been Topic A in the ecumenical movement since he put forth his proposal last December.

Presbyterian Blake launched his sensation, appropriately enough, in an Episcopal church: San Francisco's Grace Cathedral. The occasion was the Sunday sermon at the beginning of the annual meeting of the National Council of Churches. A congregation that included some of the biggest wigs in Protestantism filed out 90 minutes later, whispering excitedly. For Presbyterian Blake had made a bold proposal--that the Episcopal Church and Northern Presbyterians together invite the Methodists and the United Church of Christ to form a new Christian church.

Hatfield & McCoy. Blake had chosen his nuclear churches cannily. The Methodists are an earthier offshoot of the Episcopalians, just as the United Church is a more freewheeling version of Calvinism than the Presbyterian. He purposely omitted the Lutherans and the Baptists, though he hopes they will eventually come in. The Baptists are too jealous of their congregational autonomy and are intransigent against infant baptism. The Lutherans in the U.S. are in the throes of pulling themselves together with mergers of their own (there have been 16 major Lutheran unions since 1820).

Blake's idea came to him about six weeks before preaching his sermon, but "it had been simmering for quite a long time." Even the 1960 presidential campaign had a share in his thinking, for "all the churches, including the Roman Catholic, came out badly."

The cornerstone of the Blake proposal is a blending of two important and divergent Christian traditions--the traditionalist catholic (not Catholic) churches, with their emphasis on sacrament and liturgy, and the Bible-centered reformation churches, with their emphasis on preaching and the "ministry of all believers." The idea is not as impossible as it sounds: Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists and Congregationalists united to form the Church of South India in 1947. Under way in North India and Ceylon are similar unions on which Blake modeled his own proposal. But among the vested interests and sentimental en trenchments of U.S. Protestantism, such a suggestion seems almost like proposing a marriage of Hatfield to McCoy. That it could be seriously put forward by so hardheaded and experienced a pro of churchmanship as Eugene Carson Blake has surprised many an old ecumenical hand and given new hope to many more. A Bill of Principles. Dr. Blake is an enthusiast: he acts not out of fear that Protestantism is withering away but because he senses a new dynamism in the Protestant churches and believes that unity is necessary to express it. He is well aware that it would be unwise to make too specific a blueprint at this stage; in his San Francisco sermon, he merely cited certain principles to be followed. On the "catholic" side:

P: The new church would have to manifest its historic continuity with the church both before and after the Reformation.

"To this end, I propose that . . . the reunited Church shall provide at its inception for the consecration of all its bishops by bishops and presbyters both in the apostolic succession and out of it from all over the world, from all Christian churches which would authorize or permit them to take part." P: The new church must confess belief in the Trinity and must administer the "two sacraments instituted by Christ"--the Eucharist and baptism. "It will not be necessary, I trust, for a precise doctrinal agreement to be reached about the mode of operation of the sacraments."

On the side of the "reformation"' tradition, Blake suggested that: P:"The reunited Church must accept the principle of continuing reformation under the Word of God by the guidance of the Holy Spirit ... If the catholic must insist on taking the sacraments more seriously than some protestants have sometimes done, so protestants in the reunited Church must insist on catholics' fully accepting the reformation principle that God has revealed and can reveal Himself and His will more and more fully through the Holy Scriptures.'' P: The government of the new church must be democratic rather than hierarchical, recognizing that "all Christians are Christ's ministers, even though some in the church are separated and ordained to the ministry of word and sacrament." P: In order to recapture the brotherhood and sense of fellowship that should exist in the church between its members and its ministers, "let us make certain that the more status a member or minister has, the more simple be his dress and attitude . . . 'My brother' is a better form of Christian address than 'your grace.' ' P: "Finally, the reunited Church must find the way to include within its catholicity (and because of it) a wide diversity of theological formulation of the faith and a variety of worship and liturgy."

"The major stumbling block to union." said Dr. Blake last week, "is the problem of ordination. The Episcopalians cherish their apostolic succession as essential--they believe that every bishop is linked all the way back to Peter by the hands placed on his head in ordination. They insist on the laying on of hands. But some Congregationalists and Presbyterians who would be made into bishops in the new church are inclined to say 'Nobody's going to lay a hand on me.' And there are Methodist bishops who would balk at another ordination ceremony on the ground that it makes their present ordination seem invalid."

Among Presbyterians themselves, Blake thinks the main obstacle to union is reluctance to have bishops. As for the Congregationalist members of the United Church of Christ, the greatest difficulty will come in becoming a church rather than a loose association of autonomous congregations. Among Methodists, says Blake, the problem is "mathematics--sheer size. The Methodist-Episcopalian reunion talks, which have been going on officially for 13 years, are laboring under the difficulty that the Methodists outnumber the Episcopalians 3 to 1. But in the four-church merger I have proposed, it wouldn't be like that."

Blake's first concrete task is to persuade his own Presbyterians to start negotiating union, and it is this job that he tackles this week in Buffalo. Going for him is the fact that he is the church's most influential officer. The Moderator, top spot on the Presbyterian table of organization, is a chiefly honorary post, whose occupant spends much of his one-year term on an inspirational tour of member churches. Dr. Blake is no Pope or Metropolitan; as the humble title suggests, the Presbyterians' Stated Clerklike the U.N.'s Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold--is given some authority and left to make of it what he can by using prestige, persuasion and his working control of the organization. Blake gets $18,500 a year, is midway through his third term, which ends in 1963.

In turning his influence and skills to the task of church unity. Blake can emphasize the great body of common beliefs of the reformed churches, which he shares with some 50 million Christians around the world. The keystone tenet of the reformed faith is the absolute sovereignty of God, who stands at the head of bis church without the mediation of any hierarchy and makes himself known through interpretation of his written word--the Bible. Combined with the doctrine of sin ful man's redemption by Jesus Christ and the need to do God's will, this stress on God's majesty produced the Calvinistic corollary that all men are equal before their Creator and that the necessary ministers and governors of the church are called and elected by the body of believers, rather than appointed from above.

A "Horrible Decree." The man who bequeathed this great tradition to Christianity was born a Frenchman (in 1509) and trained as a lawyer. But as a young man at the University of Paris, John Calvin caught the fervor and excitement of Luther's break with Rome and became one of the keenest theological thinkers Christianity has produced. Most of his body of thought, set forth in his book, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, first written when he was only 26, has survived the passage of time. One major Calvinist tenet now generally discredited is the doctrine of predestination--which he himself called "the horrible decree."

Calvin founded this belief on the inexorable deterministic logic of Augustine in that saint's 5th century controversy with Pelagius, the British heretic. Pelagius' heresy--too widespread in the modern world to raise an eyebrow--was that Adam's disobedience had affected no one but himself; all men are not born sinners, but free to opt for good or evil, salvation or hell. Standing firmly on Scripture, both Augustine and Calvin after him held that Adam's fall was man's; all men are born in sin and deserve damnation. God in his love sent men the means of salvation in Jesus Christ, but obviously all do not repent and mend their ways and receive Christ; most go to the hell they merit.

Calvin postulated that since God as Creator of all things is omniscient, knowing the future and the past as one, he knows in advance who will be saved. And since God is omnipotent--able to save all men if he wills--the damned are damned by God's consent, damned eons before they were born, and there is nothing they can do about it.

To predestination Calvin added such corollary conclusions as "particular redemption" (God's picking and choosing the elect), "moral inability" (the impossibility of doing anything to save oneself), "invincible grace" (the impossibility of doing anything to damn oneself if God has decreed otherwise) and "final perseverance" (the guarantee that all the elect will reach heaven--no matter what).

The School of Christ. On this theology Calvin turned Geneva into a stern city where civic and church rule were one. Everybody had to go to church on Sunday, and heresy was punished by death, as--in some cases--was adultery. Fornication was punished by exile or drowning. In the four years between 1542 and 1546, there were 58 executions and 76 banishments in a city of about 20,000. Yet to those with a taste for it, Geneva under Calvin seemed almost like an earthly outpost of the Kingdom of God. The famed Scottish reformer, John Knox, lived there for three years and called it "the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the Apostles."

Far from making do-nothing fatalists of men, Calvin's doctrine of the elect attracted millions all over Europe and America and made them dedicated doers. Calvin, who was confident of his own election, found the dreadful doctrine "productive of the most delightful benefit." The same warming certainty of salvation helped the Huguenots stand fast in France; it stiffened the Dutch defending Holland and nourished the Puritanism of

England; it helped John Knox's Kirk become Scotland's established church, and spread through the colonies as Congregationalism in New England and Presbyterianism in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Toward Homogenization. The Presbyterianism of Eugene Carson Blake has come a long way from Geneva. Young America had much to do with the change. Again and again the old-line, hard-shell predestinarians--who believed in expounding the Word on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, confident that the elect would get the message--were successfully challenged by the evangelicals, who felt that the Holy Spirit needed all the help he could get from a good preacher.

In the "Great Awakening" of colonial days, it was the "Old Side" v. the "New Side," and Jonathan Edwards bringing sinners to their trembling knees with detailed word pictures of hell. Edwards and his followers did much to erode Calvinist determinism by interpreting Adam's fall as not laying irremediable guilt upon man, but only an inclination to sin. After the Revolutionary War, it was the "Old School" and the "New School," which subordinated the sterner tenets of the reformed faith to the idea of God's love. The liberalizers won out in the '20s in a battle in which the conservatives began calling themselves fundamentalists.

Americans on the move to new communities today tend to take their faiths with them, but they switch them easily under a variety of influences. This may betoken the decline of Protestantism, or it may be a kind of built-in unity movement on the grass-roots level. For if U.S. Protestants think of themselves as Presbyterians or Methodists, they tend more and more to pick their churches because they are within walking distance, or because their friends go there, or because they like the preacher--all too few care passionately about doctrinal differences between the limestone church with stained glass, the spired white clapboard and the Georgian brick. Typical is a Hollywood man whose parents were Lutherans and then Methodists; he became a Presbyterian "because the bass soloist's position was open."

One element in this homogenization of U.S. Protestantism is the decline of ethnic differences between Americans; many a church used to be kept alive by the national loyalties of first-generation citizens and the parental loyalties of their children. Another element is the pressure on Protestantism of an expanding Roman Catholic Church, which is currently growing more than twice as fast as the leading Protestant denominations.

These pressures toward union please Gene Blake. "I don't believe it is God's will to have so many churches in the United States," he says. Too many people, he feels, are willing to settle for unity among the Christian churches rather than out and out union. ''The other day, a student at Union Theological Seminary asked me why the goal shouldn't be intercommunion rather than union. Well, if you're going to make the effort--the prodigious effort--for intercommunion, why not go all the way and try for union itself?"

A Boy With Drive. Blake's drive to go all the way for church union is typical of him; one of his older brother's earliest recollections is of Gene as a five-year-old, charging into a horse-drawn cab so hard that he went right on through and out the other side. But Gene Blake as a 54-year-old charges with his head up. He is a savvy salesman-executive who remembers first names, keeps up his contacts, runs two offices of his church (in Philadelphia and Manhattan) and gets around.

Blake was born the son of a salesman for the Inland Steel Co. in St. Louis. "My father always taught a Sunday school class," he recalls. "Even when we moved around--to Winnetka or Bronxville--it was never more than a month before we were members of the local Presbyterian church. We had morning prayer each day at home, and of course we said grace at meals."

Persistence & Ambition. At Princeton, Blake went out for football, Christianity and philosophy--more or less in that order. Of the three, football was the most frustrating. In his sophomore year, five men who played his position--guard--were given letters; Blake ranked sixth. In his junior year, two guards got letters; Blake was third. "The experience of just barely missing my letter for those two years was almost a trauma," Blake admits. But senior year made up for it--he got a large P for his sweater and was picked for several all-Eastern teams. "I suppose I can say that persistence is one of my qualities--it was certainly true with football," says Blake. "And I probably have more ambition than most people."

Organization Man. Blake's religious life at Princeton also had its traumatic side. Before Blake arrived in 1924, Frank Buchman--patriarch, prophet and founder (in 1938) of Moral Re-Armament--had swooped down on Princeton with what was later to be known as the Oxford Group, M.R.A.'s predecessor. Blake found the college seething with eager young men taking their friends to weekend "house-parties" to change their lives by "God-guidance" salted with public confession of teen-age sins.

His brother Howard, studying for the ministry in Princeton Seminary, was an ardent Buchmanite, and until recently worked fulltime for Moral Re-Armament. Gene mingled with the Buchmanites until one day a wire came from Buchman announcing that he had had "guidance" that Blake should bring John D. Rockefeller III to New York to have a chat with Queen Marie of Rumania. Blake wired back that this might be Frank Buchman's guidance but it was not his. "From then on," he says, "I decided to be an organization man--that is, to work through the regular machinery of the church."

Lahore to Pasadena. At first he thought he might want to be a missionary, but a year of teaching at missionary-run Forman College in Lahore. India (now Pakistan), killed his enthusiasm for a missionary career. Returning home in 1929, Blake married Valina Gillespie and spent the first year of his seminary training studying theology at New College, Edinburgh, then went back to Princeton Seminary until his ordination in 1932.

Minister Blake's first post was as assistant pastor of Manhattan's now demolished Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas, where, even the sexton told him he "ought to shout more." He decided that he was "a better popularizer than a scholar," and should give up a hankering he had for seminary teaching. He got a call to Albany's First Presbyterian Church, went on five years later to the Presbyterian Church in Pasadena, Calif., where he stayed for eleven years before the General Assembly elected him Stated Clerk in 1951.

He now lives in New Canaan, Conn., where he delights in playing golf, which he hopes keeps down his weight--a hefty 220 well carried on a 6-ft. frame. Says one of his golfing partners, the Rev. Donald Campbell of the First Presbyterian Church in Stamford, Conn.: "Gene's game is dynamic and daring. He shoots anywhere from 84 to 94. I think my game's just as good as his, but he's such a fierce competitor that he beats me three games out of every four.

"He could have been enormously successful in business--head of one of our big corporations. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Gene could hold his own in quality of leadership with any of the big businessmen I know."

Warning for Ecumaniacs. In Buffalo's Klemhans Music Hall last week. Stated Clerk Blake, the fierce competitor, was pleased when the 988 commissioners (delegates ) of the 173rd General Assembly elected a new Moderator who was openly in favor of his unity proposal: Layman Paul D. McKelvey, 53-year-old president of a Los Angeles real estate investment company. Moderator-elect McKelvey lost no time in making his position clear, but he had a warning, too, for the "ecumaniacs" in his own and other churches: "The main purpose of the church is the salvation of man--the exposure of the whole man to the Gospel."

Stated Clerk Blake is confident that the General Assembly will follow his leadership along a road that within ten years (he estimates ) may merge 18.9 million Protestants in a giant church, combining the best elements of traditionalist catholic beauty and structured Calvinist form. But what of the other three partners in his proposed union?

Decisions to Come. What separates the churches are matters that were once, and to many still are, matters of intense conviction. Tradition becomes more than habit: it inspires affections and loyalties. Insofar as the differences are theological. Dr. Blake, out of his years of attending interfaith meetings, has shown a subtle awareness of what is central to other faiths and what may lend itself to accommodation if laymen and clergy can be convinced that the end is not a watering down but a strengthening of Christianity.

None of the other three churches have taken an official position on merger That will come as they gather over the next three years in meetings equivalent to the Presbyterians' assembly. Individual churchmen from the other denominations praise or criticize the proposal freely Episcopal Bishop Stephen Bayne, lately of Washington and currently in London as executive officer of the Anglican Communion, finds it "somewhat naive." Editor Peter Day, of the high church Episcopal weekly The Living Church, thinks that the desire for unity is less than it was 20 years ago. "Episcopalians, Methodists and Presbyterians are saying, 'Why talk about it? We're doing fine as we are.' In the abstract, though, nobody will vote directly against unity--that would be like voting against Mother." Episcopal Bishop James Pike, in whose ban Francisco cathedral Blake announced his proposal, has no patience with ecumenical hairsplitters. "Any group or individual," he says, "has not only the right but the duty to hold out against unity if it threatens what he considers an essential of the Gospel. On the other hand, I think ne has no right under God to hold out against unity for something that is not essential to the Gospel." Congregationalist Listen Pope, dean of Yale Divinity School, thinks that Blake's proposal could give Protestant opinion a badly needed "central, united voice."

"The Peril Is Delay." Many critics of Blake's plan feel that its principal drawback is the unmanageable size of the church that would result. "I don't see how it could be run except on an authoritarian basis," says Methodist Bishop Gerald Kennedy of Los Angeles. "That's fine for the Roman Catholic Church, but I think that a great many Protestants would be shocked at the thought. I'm deeply suspicious of the present trend toward monolithic organization. You see it in government and in business. I regret to see it in religion." Methodist Bishop Lloyd Wicke of New York is "not convinced that denominationalism is an absolute evil. Fragmentation has always been both the bane and the genius of Protestantism--giving the individual the right to express himself in chaos and unity."

But a third Methodist bishop, John Wesley Lord of Washington, D.C., is one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the Blake plan. "It is a proposal of historic significance," he says. "We can no longer afford the luxury of our separate ways. Unification will be the most difficult task of the century. It is easier and more satisfying to live one's religious experience in a familiar context of old and accepted beliefs. But the church, or communion, or denomination, is never self-sufficient, and must not succumb to this illusion.

"It's not a question of timing. The peril is in delay. The situation reminds me of a sign you sometimes see on the corrugated road's of Africa. It reads: TOO ROUGH TO

GO SLOW."

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