Activism Is No Virtue

In recent years, the loudest voices within U.S. Christianity have been those of radical theologians urging the church to greater involvement with world issues. The mood of activism reached a peak in Detroit last month, where the Conference on Church and Society, sponsored by the National Council of Churches, exhorted U.S. religious leaders to grant sanctuary to draft dodgers, accept violence as a valid response to certain social injustices, and incite a nationwide strike if the war escalates into an invasion of North Viet Nam.

Not all churchmen are enamored of the present passion for radical pronouncement. In a new book called Who Speaks for the Church? (Abingdon Press), Methodist Moral Theologian Paul Ramsey offers a thoughtful critique of the trend to neglect basic ethical ana ysis in favor of particular pronouncements on policy. No fundamentalist, Ramsey is a professor of ethics at Princeton and an ecumenical-minded writer on contemporary Christian problems. Nonetheless, he contends that the "social action curia" of the World and National Councils of Churches has re duced ecumenical ethics to a partisan political movement.

Truncated Barthianism. As a case history of activism gone wild, Ramsey offers a detailed analysis of the World Council's 1966 Geneva Conference on Church and Society, which he attended as an observer. An overwhelming majority of the participants, he says, were doctrinaire liberals who imposed on the conference a "truncated Barthi anism" -- a theology emphasizing Christ as a revolutionary figure. Proposals were perfunctorily debated (floor speeches were limited to an average of four minutes) and hurried through (no more than half of those present ever voted).

Nonetheless, in two weeks the 410 delegates rushed out 118 "conclusions." Predictably, one resolution declared that the massive American military presence in Viet Nam was unjustifiable. "Amid the gritty specifics, the crunch of political forces," comments Ramsey, "there are two sides to this and to most world questions to which Christians can with equal sincerity adhere." Another resolution stated without amplification that nuclear war "is against God's will"--ignoring the fact that "the morality of deterrence depends upon it not being wholly immoral for a government ever to use an atomic weapon."

Object of Ridicule. Far from making Christianity more relevant, says Ramsey, such woolly-headed pronouncements make it at best an object of ridicule, at worst a menace to prudent political judgment. The impact of these declamations is also weakened by the fact that the activist theologians cannot possibly speak for all Christians, given the differences of political viewpoints within the church. Ramsey finds a certain irony in the fact that the secularist syndrome is prevalent among Protestants, who are now seeking "to assume decisions that belong in the realm of the state." Ramsey argues that "not even the 'magisterium' of the Roman Catholic Church has in recent centuries, if ever, gone so far in telling statesmen what is required of them."

Ramsey concedes that the churches should be concerned with world problems. But he contends that such concern should be expressed less in "directives" and more in the form of broader spiritual "direction" that will constantly remind men of Christian ideals, without involving the church in differences over how to achieve them. Thus, he argues, churches should confine themselves to "cultivating the political ethos of a nation and informing the conscience of the statesman." Such a course, he concludes, means "leaving to the conscience of individuals both the task and the freedom to arrive at specific conclusions through untrammeled debate."

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