The Fifteenth Corbishley
Memorial Lecture 1991
The Role of the Churches in the
International Order
By
The Most Revd and Rt Hon Dr John HabgoodArchbishop of York
Foreword by Professor George Wedell
The Wyndham Place Trustees invited the Archbishop of York to deliver the 15th Lecture in memory of Thomas Corbishley because they knew him to be the leading Anglican thinker about Christian responsibility in the public sphere. Dr Habgood's lecture on The Rote of the Churches in the Intemational Order has fully justified this choice.
Drawing on his extensive experience of work with the World Council of Churches, the Archbishop has been able to trace the development of the Council from its formal establishment in Amsterdam in 1948 to the present day. Given the rush for development and independence in all parts of the world since the second World War, the response of the Churches to the emerging world society with its multivariate social, political and economic problems was bound at times to be uncertain. The tension between the historic immobilism of some churches, and the uncritical reflection of secular movements by others has from time to time blurred the Council's witness in the international arena. But Dr Habgood's analysis affirms that withdrawal into a religious reservation is not an option; that the Churches have to engage the principalities and powers at the political and economic levels if they are to be true in their calling.
The Trust is glad to be able to make this important lecture available to a wider audience.
The Rule of the Churches International Order
I can recall a conversation some ten years ago with a Russian theologian about the USSR's failure to make any meaningful response to the revolution in Iran. He described how foreign policy had been paralysed because there was no place for any such event in Marxist-Leninist theory. Nor was it only Marxist theoreticians who were taken by surprise. In 1979 religion stepped onto the international stage in a way which confounded social and political analysts of every hue. And it has continued to do so.
The ten years which followed have seen the breakdown of standard sociological theories about the progressive marginalization of religion - its retreat from public life to private life. It is now clear that modernization does not, as was once supposed, lead inexorably to secularizatlon. The main impetus behind Islamic fundamentalism has arisen not from an ignorant peasantry, but for the most part from those who are young, upward moving and scientifically or technologically educated. And it is not only in the Middle East that the religious dimension in politics is impossible to ignore. The religiousness of America is not an inexplicable and fading aberration, but seems to be a central element in national self-understanding. The revolutions of 1989 and onwards, though not inspired directly by religion, have almost invariably included religious factors. Indeed the transformation in Poland can be seen as starting ten years earlier with the first visit by the Pope. The East German and Romanian revolutions began in churches. Lutherans in East Germany had developed a theological critique of Communism which made them natural leaders when the decisive moment came. In Romania the situation is much more complex because the Orthodox Church had for the most part become subservient to the regime: it was a Protestant pastor who sparked off the revolt. In the USSR the role of religion has been full of ironies. I took part in a meeting of church leaders in Moscow in July of 1989. We were addressed in one of the great halls in the Kremlin by the then Prime Minister, Nicole Ryzhkov, who spoke about the great importance of the churches in providing a moral and humanitarian basis for society in a time of transition.
The Russian Orthodox Church now faces a daunting, and perhaps impossible task, in trying to fill a huge ideological vacuum.
In South Africa, I believe, the main hope for a stable future lies in the willingness of the Churches to work together. And in Zaire the churches seem to be the only credible institutions left.
Perceptions about the role of religion in the modem world have indeed been changing. Further symptoms of the change are to be found in the cluster of feelings and shifts of attitude associated with post-modernism, environmentalism, the reactions against the dominance of economics and against bureaucratization, the search for 'soul'. The European Community, in recent months, has deliberately been opening doors to the churches as allies in broadening its concerns beyond the market to the underlying values and social provisions needed to undergird it.
In a word, the role of the churches in the international order is now in the melting pot. The churches in many parts of the world are faced with dramatic new opportunities and dramatic demands on their resources. The fact that we here in Britain tend to be locked all too frequently in stale old domestic controversies should not blind us to what is happening elsewhere.
The Roman Catholic Church has, of course always been consciously international Its possession of the Papal States has given it an entree into international politics, which other churches have never possessed and not really wanted. Nevertheless I think it is true to say that its first steps in tackling some of the modem questions raised by a changing international order were taken at just about the same time as other churches were feeling their way towards the same kind of issues. I have in mind the papal Encyclical of 1891 on the new understandings of society and the State, and its splendid sequel, Centesimus Annus, promulgated by Pope John Paul II earlier this year. There is an alternative lecture which ought to be given on that tradition perhaps a more appropriate one than this in view of our wish to honour Thomas Corbishley. But in what follows I am going to concentrate on a different tradition the development of social and international thinking in the World Council of Churches (W.C.C.) and I do so because that is where for the past twelve years my own involvement has been.
Churches cannot be true to their message if they ignore the International dimension. Christianity, like Islam, is a missionary faith, and both faiths, unlike Judaism, have seen the world as their parish. In fact the decisive break between Christianity and Judaism was on precisely this issue, whether the faith was potentially universal or whether it was the faith of a chosen people of limited extent. It is also regrettably true that Christian churches have frequently lost their universal vision and been captured by various nationalisms - and still are in many parts of the world. But it is rare to find a Christian church these days which does not have some inkling that it belongs to something wider, something supranational, something, in the broadest sense of the word, ecumenical. In the past hundred years that wider dimension has increasingly been represented, not just through missionary endeavour but through a concern for the well-being of the world as a whole. The growth of international aid, the more modern interest in world development and international justice, the long-standing concern for peace and the humane conduct of war, and the huge network of contacts and cross linkages which now exist between churches in every part of the world all these are evidence in their different ways that the international dimension of church life is taken seriously. And all of them. at least in the non-Roman Catholic Churches, have been linked more or less closely with the growth of the ecumenical movement, which itself developed out of an awareness of the implications of world mission.
All churches, however, face similar dilemmas in tackling social and political questions because all are aware of the religious ambivalence of political power. In all our traditions there are terrible examples of the abuse of power and of the dire effects of too loose a linkage between political and religious interests. Difficult political problems as in the Middle East or Ireland, become virtually insoluble if religious affiliations and alignments are invoked in support of political differences. Some of the present divisions in Yugoslavia and other Balkan States have a potentially dangerous religious dimension to them. And who needs reminding of the sad record through history of the religious persecution of minorities?
Yet it can be equally dangerous to withdraw from political concern when the only effective voice against injustice or tyranny, or narrow nationalism can come from a body which claims to speak in the name of a higher authority. And it is riot just in such extreme negative contexts that religious realities have political implications. Political life, and especially democratic politics, need a secure basis in moral values, and morals without roots in a structured system can become perilously fragile. It is not surprising when, in a democracy, politicians look to churches for moral legitimation, and it is not unreasonable for churches to try to provide it: but cautiously, and always conscious of a fundamental Christian dualism between God and Caesar, between being in the world and yet not being captured by the world
It is the tensions in this dualism which have shaped the changing involvement of the ecumenical movement in some of the international issues of this century, and which provide the basis for the story I now want to tell.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early years of this, the idea of an international order which the churches could play their part in creating and maintaining, fitted well the picture of an expanding church gradually spreading its civilizing influence over the globe. Colonial law and order went hand in hand with missionary enterprise, and the disaster of the first World War only strengthened the case for effective instruments to administer such law worldwide. Much ecumenical effort was put into building up "the brotherhood of man" under "the fatherhood of God", and the churches were active in a whole series of conferences and campaigns, in the interests of peace and friendship and understanding and the development of international law, the League of Nations and ultimately the United Nations.
This work still continues. Right at the beginning of its life in 1946 the W.C.C. took the decision to establish a Commission of the Churches on International Affairs, and this has always seen a major part of its task as relating to the U.N. as an officially recognized consultative body as well as to many non-governmental organizations. One of the Commission's first tasks was to participate actively in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Since then it has worked consistently for the implementation and development of such rights. Though it has never been shy of criticizing particular political regimes, its main thrust has always been to work with the powers-that-be in the interests of stabilizing and strengthening an albeit imperfect world order.
Undergirding this vision of world order has been the belief that the unity of the church is, or ought to be, in some sense a microcosm of the unity of humanity. Ecumenism, in other words, is not merely a churchy thing, still less a bureaucratic exercise in ecclesiastical joinery. The patient building of international trust, and of instruments to embody that trust, is part and parcel of the same impulse which leads Christians to look for their unity in Christ. Thus the W.C.C. has tried to hold the two tasks together, and the phrase 'The Unity of the Church and the Unity of Humankind" was explicitly part of its agenda from 1971 to 1981. Since 1981 there has been a greater willingness to recognize that other faiths are not going to go away, and that the world is irreducibly pluralist. It has become obvious that the notion of international order is much more complex than it once seemed but a striving for order has remained an important part of the churches' task.
Alongside this concern there developed a strong ecumenical tradition of constructive social criticism, particularly in the period from about 1930 to about 1970. The impotence of the League of Nations, economic collapse, the huge suffering of the Second World War, and the social disruption which followed it were the background against which innumerable church conferences tried to articulate some vision of a less disordered world imbued by sanity, fairness and security. One of the fruits of all this thought was the idea of the 'Responsible Society", and this dominated ecumenical thinking on social matters for some 20 or 30 years. The Responsible Society was defined by the first Assembly of the W.C.C. In 1948 as
"one where freedom is the freedom of men who acknowledge responsibility to justice and public order, and where those who hold political authority or economic power are responsible for its exercise to God and the people whose welfare is affected by it." .
In other words the ideal was a free democratic society, resting on a shared moral basis, whether Christian or not, in which people accepted responsibility for themselves and for each other under constraints which transcended particular political or economic systems. This may now seem rather platitudinous but in the world of the 1940s it was nothing of the kind. Nor a dozen years later was it to sound platitudinous as an ideal for developing countries beginning to discover the implications of self determination.
What eventually pushed it off the ecumenical agenda had more to do with method than content and it is worth pausing for a moment to spell out what that method was.
It had been introduced into the ecumenical movement by J.H. Oldham, one of the two main lay architects of the movement, in the early 1930s. His method was to seek out lay experts who he believed could best help the churches understand the social and political crises of the day. They were usually inveigled into the job by lunches at the Athenaeum With the help of these experts the main themes were teased out, and formed the agenda for prolonged interdisciplinary dialogue between expert groups of laity and theologians. Reports were then offered to the churches for study and action. Though a familiar method in all sorts of contexts nowadays, it was something of an innovation then and it produced some quite impressive results. Many people of real calibre who wanted to look deeper into the moral and spiritual implications of their own expertise were attracted into such groups, and a generation of theologians was forced to look at problems which it had hitherto ignored and to respect and to learn from the expertise placed at its disposal. I myself had the good fortune to attend the last great conference at which some of the fruits of this method were brought together, though by then for reasons which we shall see, it was already on the verge of collapse. This was the 1979 World Conference on Science Faith and the Future held in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Conference brought together an astonishing array of some nine hundred scientists, technologists, theologians, church leaders, industrialists and politicians from every part of the world. It nearly collapsed because the method and the assumptions underlying it were no longer universally acceptable. In fact the most dramatic moment in the Conference came when a group of scientists from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and the Pacific denounced the supposed objectivity of what they called "Western" science and technology, and urged "the scientists of the world to accept as the sole purpose of their work the alleviation of misery of the poor and oppressed".
What had happened in the intervening period, between the heyday of the Oldham method and such radical denunciation in 1979, was a massive change both In the composition of the W.C.C. and in its agenda. From the early 1960s onwards Third World issues and perspectives began to predominate. The Oldham method was viewed with suspicion as elitist, abstract, Western in style and orientation, and lacking the revolutionary potential which radicalized Christians were more and more reading into the Gospels.
There was increasing emphasis on widespread participation in every process of decision making, with particular attention paid to hitherto poorly represented groups: women, youth, black, third world, poor, disabled, and latterly, so-called indigenous peoples - Aborigines and native Americans. Prophetic witness from situations of dire poverty or oppression began to take precedence over careful social analysis. What had formerly been a global concern with international order and the structures needed to maintain it, turned towards a more localized series of issues within states, and not merely between them. The role of liberation movements and the rights of minorities have occupied much recent ecumenical attention. The sense of powerlessness experienced in economically weak countries in the face of transnational corporations has been a constant source of complaint - whether justifiably or not. Questions about the location of power, and particularly about the consequences of militarism in unstable or oppressive regimes, have seemed more urgent and important than supposedly abstract questions about social or international order.
I have done no more than list a few of the shifts of perspective in this second stage of the W.C.C.'s history. It is possible to mark the transitions by seeing what happened to the concept of The Responsible Society. In 1978 this was abandoned in favour of a new slogan - the Just, Participatory and Sustainable Society. It was not everybody's idea of a snappy title; but the notion of being responsible no longer seemed adequate to those whose experiences had been shaped by poverty, oppression, racism, the traumas of decolonization, and above all by the need to be involved in assessing the purposes.behind development programmes and their likely effects. The 1978 Assembly meeting in Nairobi defined development as "essentially a people's struggle in which the poor and the oppressed should be the active agents and immediate beneficiaries". Hence "just and participatory". 'Sustainable' was a new concept, and a useful one, a first recognition of environmental issues, echoing the subsequently much criticized report by the Club of Rome on Limits to Growth.
Unfortunately 'sustainability' proved to be the Achilles heel of this particular slogan. Church representatives from developing nations were less than enthusiastic about committing themselves to limits merely because the affluent West was beginning to feel guilty and threatened by its own extravagance. A sustainable society" began to look uncomfortably like one in which poor nations were trapped even more irrevocably in their poverty.
The idea of 'participation' created some problem too. It is one of the tragedies of the W.C.C. that in trying to escape from its old elitism through its commitment to wide participation it has also managed to lose much of its expertise. I shall return to this theme a little later.
'Justice', the third ingredient of this slogan is as we all know easy to aspire to, and hard to define. It alone survived in the new slogan, born in 1983 and now the main focus of much of the W.C.C.'s current work. "Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation" is vaguer than its predecessor. Its main merit is that it links together social, international and environmental issues which in ordinary political life have frequently been kept apart, though perhaps less so nowadays. The burning oil-fields of Kuwait symbolize effectively the environmental implications of war: The threat to the rain forests in Central America has to be understood in the context of gross social inequalities and grinding poverty, both of which have international as well as national dimensions. Examples are legion. As a focus for a multitude of practical concerns, and as a warning against one-sidedness, the slogan has some inspirational value. But as a guide to policy making it has proved virtually useless because its terms are too large and ill-defined. Justice and peace are as easily commendable as motherhood and apple pie, whereas the phrase "integrity of creation" has defied all exegesis. A world conference on the theme in Seoul in 1990 produced only an incoherent hotchpotch of well-intentioned exhortations. And the W.C.C. Assembly in Canberra earlier this year fared not much better.
I tell this sad story of decline in precision and effectiveness without in any way wishing to be cynical: The churches have genuinely tried to listen to the cries of anger and suffering in so many parts of the world and have done it rather well: One of the great present strengths of the W.C.C. is that it can act as a sounding board on a world stage for those whose political plight or sense of injustice or warnings about disaster, might otherwise never be heard. It is immensely valued by Christians, in countries where churches are tiny minorities, by those 'living under oppressive regimes, and by those who feel their political powerlessness. It matters hugely to them that their problems can be voiced and they can feel under protection from a world-wide Christian body. Powerful resolutions about the world's trouble spots can be surprisingly important to those who live in the middle of the trouble. And those of us who live in more comfortable circumstances can learn a good deal about ourselves in a world forum where such issues are aired by people who are not afraid to say what they think.
There is a strongly positive side, therefore to the changes which have overtaken the W.C.C. in the last thirty years. But there has also been a disastrous loss of credibility, particularly in the realm of social, economic and political policy. This has made the churches much less effective on the international scene than one might have expected at a time when religion is once again coming centre stage. To see why, I want to explore two related reasons, first by returning to the theme of participation, and secondly by illustrating the effects of loss of expertise.
Participation is in one sense what world Christianity is all about. We are members one of another. Human life has a God-given dignity and worth such that everybody matters, and everybody's contribution to the building of true human community is needed. There may be various ways of enabling people to participate in this process, but there should be no doubts about our goal. Nor is there any doubt that bodies like the W.C.C., which have taken such participation seriously have raised the self-consciousness and morale of many people who would not otherwise have thought of themselves as in any sense Christian decision-makers.
The so-called "preferential option for the poor', now an official part of Roman Catholic teaching as well as a keynote in W.C.C. thinking, points in the same direction. It is not just about righting economic imbalances but about empowering the marginalized. lt has deep roots in Christian theology, not just in the marry Biblical references to God's concern for the poor. But in the central event of Christianity itself. On the cross God is revealed in weakness, identified with outcasts, and manifests his true nature, not in an exhibition of power, but in the acceptance of suffering. "He saved others, Himself he could not save." And so, if this is God, this God made poor for the sake of a disordered world, our own efforts at rebuilding this world have to begin precisely where God is - among the poorest.
That in a nutshell is what I think the preferential option for the poor is about. It is a theological insight not a reflection of economic envy. And it makes the valid point that if we want to understand the true character of a society we need to look a it from below, at the point where the shoe pinches, or even where there is no shoe to pinch. Participatory programmes which entail giving prominence to that kind of perspective are surely part of Christian witness to the nature of God and the unity of mankind.
But what do we do with this perspective from below? Do we allow it simply to dictate our decisions? Or do we incorporate it into all our thinking as a vital element in a more complex process of decision-making? Is a preferential option for the poor a preferential option simply to endorse and adopt the declared wishes of the poor, or rather to take due account of their needs and the validity of their experiences?
The treatment given to Aboriginal people at the Canberra Assembly of the W.C.C. last February is a good illustration of the dilemma. Much attention was rightly given at the Assembly to the shameful treatment of the Aborigines during the colonial era, and their present marginalization within Australian society. They were given a prominent place in the Assembly worship and in its programme: The churches made a strenuous effort to hear them, to accept their anger and look for ways of redress. But such is the emotional pressure built up where sympathetic listening feeds into the stream of innumerable other discontents and guilt feelings, that it becomes hard to say no to manifest nonsense.
In preparation for the Assembly Aboriginal leaders had drawn up their own statement setting out their hopes of improving their status, and within this the idea of Aboriginal sovereignty had come to have high symbolic value. It became a kind of focus for aspirations about a fair deal in compensation for loss of land. Nobody seems to have imagined setting up an Aboriginal State. But the use of the word 'sovereignty' as seen from below carries very different connotations when set out in a resolution by the world's churches. The churches, for example, were called upon "to recognise, acknowledge and vigorously support self-determination and sovereignty of indigenous people, as defined by them, in church and society."
Elsewhere the Assembly said: "We recognize that indigenous peoples of Australia were independent self governing peoples long before Europeans invaded their land, and that they have a right to regain such control over their land under their own rule." Some resolution! But of course nobody meant it in any straightforward sense. They meant to express sympathy and solidarity, but what they actually said was absurd. The only effect of it could be to reduce the credibility of those who said it. What is missing from all this, as it has been missing, alas, from so much recent work emanating from the W.C.C., is the broad critical understanding of a complex subject, which is precisely what the old elitism used to provide. Unless the voices of the poor are somehow taken up into a larger frame of reference, those who stand in solidarity with them will themselves cease to be heard.
This brings me to my second reason for fearing that the new prominence religion has acquired in world affairs is not going to be used effectively - the loss of expertise.
The need for expertise in economics, for example, has become urgent in the search for some third way between socialism and capitalism in Eastern Europe. The churches there have looked for guidance to the churches of the West, which are themselves in disarray because so much ecumenical thought on economic issues has been tied to socialist models. Development and the needs of the third world have been the keynote. In 1967 Pope Paul VI went so far as to state "development is the new name of peace". More recently the role of Transnational Corporations in developing countries and the laissez-faire image of capitalism derived from Latin America and the experience of Third World debt, have set the scene for economic discussion. Economists who might have given a more favourable view of democratic capitalism have simply not been heard. The main aspiration has been for what was called "A New Economic Order", and its heavily interventionist character has not really been questioned. Property has been seen primarily in terms of power, and little attention has been paid to its relation with freedom and democracy.
A recent essay by an Indian economist, a key figure in the W.C.C's economic thinking, tries to respond to the events since 1989, and is properly critical of centralized command economies. Nevertheless when the author goes on to lay down some general principles for the future, he includes these:
The alternative system
"must institutionalize the responsibility to decide what will be produced, how much will be produced, and how production forces will be put to use to meet today's needs and the needs of the future. In thus submitting economic processes to conscious social decision it must ensure that its decision-making arrangements are genuinely democratic and participatory".
Isn't this where we came in?
The Canberra Assembly had no specific advice to offer Eastern Europe, but it said this about economics in general:
'The vast and shameful arms trade illustrates clearly the immorality of our world economic order: it is one of the root causes of the Gulf War. The international ecumenical movement has for years criticized the lack of economic democracy, social injustice, and the stimulation of human greed. But flagrant international inequality in the distribution of income, knowledge, power and wealth persists. Acquisitive materialism has become the dominant ideology of our day. The irresponsible exploitation of the created world continues. Changes will only come by active opposition and informed and responsible social pressure . . ."
Pressure to do what? It would be unfair to criticize an inspirational statement of this kind if there was some solid thinking which lay behind it. But the people capable of doing this thinking, and coming to a realistic assessment of what is practically possible, are no longer there.
As I said at the beginning. I have been telling a sad story a story partly in self-criticism because I myself have been heavily involved in the W.C.C., and believe in its importance despite its obvious shortcomings. It has fumbled badly in a world which has been changing out of all recognition. I could have spoken about other failures, in particular its failure to make a credible response to the Gulf War which took place while the Canberra Assembly was meeting. In fact it was only the British who had the temerity to maintain in public that Iraq's invasion of Kuwait could not be allowed by the international community to stand, and that there might actually be good reason for resisting aggression - by force if necessary. But they carried no conviction. Anti-colonialism, anti-militarism, anti-Americanism, an instinct to side with the underdog, and above all a lack of consistent theological thinking about the conditions under which war might justifiably be waged, made it impossible for the arguments in favour to be received. But even so it is important that they were stated and heard.
Nevertheless despite its failures and its incompetences, the existence of a world Christian forum dedicated to wrestling with the world's problems in a sign of hope. I have criticized it for twelve years because I want it to be better. But I have been committed to it for twelve years because a Christianity which paid no attention to global issues, and was unwilling to learn, however uncomfortably, from different world perspectives, would be faithless to its calling.
The W.C.C. tries to do this, and my hope is that as its members work through the stage of anger and frustration at the manifest injustices of our present world, they may begin to see once again the need for careful, balanced, professionally informed analysis. They need to bridge the gulf between prophetic denunciation and sensible policy-making. And I hope they may gain some encouragement to do this from those who are themselves involved in world affairs and who believe in the need for a credible Christian voice, able to command attention and respect.
I suspect that the present resurgence of religion in many cultures around the world is not just a blip in the chart. It represents a deeply important element in being human, because the essence of our humanity, as I see it, is the drive towards self transcendence.
However inept, therefore, the attempts of the churches to respond to the hugely complex social and political demands of our times, they still have something of inestimable value to offer in setting them in a larger context. World-embracing Christian concern and the wide variety of world Christian experience provide part of that context.
But the level on which each person has to come to terms with God and with their own selves is another part of it. That is why I am going to end this lecture with a quotation perhaps the most perceptive Christian commentator on the world scene this century - Reinhold Niebuhr.
-
"Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.
-
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.
-
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.
-
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own standpoint.
Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness."