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New Formula. At the center of it all—the 577 delegates and 200 staffers, 65 observers and 275 reporters, plus assorted wives and special guests—a stern, craggy Dutchman loomed over the Assembly like an orchestra conductor on a podium. Willem Visser 't Hooft is the prime professional of the international ecumenical movement, in which he has spent his entire working life, and the New Delhi Assembly is the crowning of his career, for he plans to retire some time before the next one—probably in Africa six years hence.
Each morning he appeared in the dining room of the Hotel Janpath at 8—"If my staff people have any problems, they can find me there." Three-quarters of an hour later, he was in his office to begin a day's work that combined the functions of guru, watchdog, troubleshooter, father confessor and cheerleader. Visser 't Hooft is especially pleased with the smooth sailing of the Russian Orthodox into the World Council; increasing the Orthodox representation was his longstanding concern.
Old-line ecumenists were swallowing hard at the prospect, and the political activists were far from happy about what the Russian Orthodox delegates might do to some of their pet resolutions. Visser 't Hooft fully understands their position: "I know that to bring in the Russian church is to bring in new problems. It will be more difficult to take those positions on international questions which we have taken in the past. We believe, however, that we simply have to accept that difficulty and seek to overcome it."
Visser 't Hooft's chief reason for wanting the Russians is that the church in Russia needs all the outside support it can get, and that Russian Orthodoxy rounds out the representation of the World Council: the only major group now missing is Rome. He is not nervous about Christianity's ability to deal with the Russians face to face; instead he thinks that Christians should welcome all contact with them and try to penetrate their society in every possible way. Says he: "I have far less apprehension about what the Russians might do within the World Council than I would if the Russian Orthodox Church remained apart from us, burying itself in its own mystical world and ignoring the Sputnik world outside."
Getting the Russians into the World Council drew from Visser 't Hooft perhaps the most brilliant single performance of his life—an illuminating example of how creeds are written. It took place in a Leningrad hotel, where he was breakfasting with an Orthodox delegation. At the time the constitutional definition of the World Council was: "A fellowship of churches which accept our Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour." The Russians complained that this definition overlooked the trinitarian basis of Christianity prized by Orthodox churches.
Visser 't Hooft recalled that Protestants had often voiced another complaint: the absence of any mention of Scripture. And he saw that he had a chance, by the right words, to stress the unifying elements of Christianity while diplomatically playing down differences. "So," he remembers, "I took the breakfast menu and wrote out a new formula." Last week in New Delhi the Council adopted Visser 't Hooft's breakfast-menu definition as the Council's new credo. It reads: