The year 1998 sees the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of
the
World Council of Churches. Great, but subsequently largely
disappointed hopes, greeted it. The movement that led directly to
its formation had its genesis in the International Missionary Conference
of 1910, an event often cited in popular surveys as marking the beginning
of the Ecumenical Movement. This paper will, however, argue that
modern ecumenism has a complex series of roots. Some of them predate
that conference, significant though it was in leading to the ‘Faith
and
Order’ movement that was, in its turn, such an important contributor
to
the genesis of the World Council.Archbishop William Temple, who played a key role in both the ‘Faith
and Order’ and ‘Life and Work’ movements, referred to
the Ecumenical
Movement as the ‘great fact of our times’. This was a gross
exaggeration.
It is true that the movement engaged, from about 1920 onwards, a very
considerable amount of the energy of the most talented and forward-looking
leaders and thinkers of the Churches in the Anglican and
Protestant traditions. It remained, however, marginal in the life of the
Roman Catholic Church until Vatican II, despite the pioneering
commitment of some extremely able people amidst official disapproval.
Some leaders of the Orthodox Church took a considerable interest in the
movement. However, both the official ecclesiology and the popular stance
of most Orthodox precluded any real rapprochement with other Churches
on terms that bore any resemblance to practicality. Even in the Anglican
and mainstream Protestant Churches, the movement remained largely
one of a section of the leadership. It attained little genuine popularity,
a
fact that was frequently admitted even by its most ardent partisans. One
could well say that the Ecumenical Movement had only one really solid
achievement to celebrate in 1948. This was the formation, in the previous
year, of the Church of South India, the first Church to represent a union
across the episcopal–non-episcopal divide. This type of union has
yet to be
emulated outside the Indian sub-continent.One of the aims of this article will be to try to explain why success
in
India went unmatched elsewhere. The emphasis will be on the English
dimension of the problem, though many of the factors that affected the
English situation also obtained in other countries in the Anglo-Saxon
cultural tradition. This assessment must be balanced, however, by an
appreciation of the real progress made in terms of improved and even
amicable church relationships.
The influence of John Calvin’s theology on the World Council of Churches
