(6 of 7)
Karl Barth raised this controversy in unmistakable terms at Amsterdam. "We ought to give up," he declared, "every thought that the care of the church, the care of the world, is our care . . . This is the final root and ground of all human disorder; the dreadful, godless, ridiculous opinion that man is the Atlas who is destined to bear the dome of heaven on his shoulders . . . We are not the ones to change this evil world into a good one. God has not resigned His Lordship over it into our hands ... By God's design is not meant something like a Christian Marshall plan ... All that is required of us is that in the midst of the political and social disorder of the world we should be His witnesses, as disciples and servants of Jesus."
Christian Message. The Americans were not slow to point out that this extreme Barthian view seemed to have an organic kinship with Europe's ruins, and ignored the Christian's moral responsibility to add works to faith. But even Barth, like John Calvin before him, is a paradoxical blend of passive theology and furious personal activity in wrestling with contemporary problems. If the churches can be both active and Christian, they can still meet the secular challenge.
In its diligently plodding fashion, Amsterdam did try to meet the challenge. At the closing service there was a prayer for Lutheran Bishop Lajos Ordass of Hungary, "appointed a delegate to this Assembly who has just been arrested"—phrasing more akin to a chancellery's dignified note of protest than to the Acts of the Apostles. But on this diplomatic and administrative level, Amsterdam set up a better human means toward the blessed end of Christian unity than the world had known since the first great schism, between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, in the year 1054. And Amsterdam's final "Christian Message," to be read in member churches throughout the world, did rise above the legal level:
"Our coming together to form a World Council will be vain unless Christians and Christian congregations everywhere commit themselves to the Lord of the Church in a new effort to seek together, where they live, to be his witnesses and servants among their neighbors . . .
"It is not in man's power to banish sin and death from the earth, to create the unity of the Holy Catholic Church, to conquer the hosts of Satan. But it is within the power of God. He has given us at Easter the certainty that His purpose will be accomplished. But by our acts of obedience and faith we can on earth set up signs which point to the coming victory . . . Let us give ourselves to those tasks which lie to our hands and so set up signs that men may see."