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The Predicament of Christian Social Thought after the Cold War Paul Abrecht An historical study of ecumenical social thought shows that from the beginning of the Life and Work movement following the first world war to the present time the ecumenical community has periodically been obliged to assess and respond to a rapidly changing social-political context. This has required not just changes in ecumenical social policies but also the rethinking of theological and ethical approaches to them. The discipline of ecumenical study developed from this awareness of the need from time to time to review and renew Christian perceptions of the world social situation and of the function of the church in society. Today, the ecumenical movement is once again at such a turning point. The formulations of Christian social responsibility which served the ecumenical movement in the 1970s and 1980s appear less relevant in the present world situation. For example, the economic policies developed by the churches and the ecumenical movement in the 1970s to identify with the poor in their struggle for justice, especially in the third world, have not produced the hoped-for results. And despite growing world concern, the churches have yet to witness together concerning threats to the environment and the related problems of fair sharing of scarce natural resources. Undoubtedly the most startling new development confronting the world and the churches in recent years is the upheaval in the former communist countries which has resulted in the overthrow of socialism in Eastern Europe and in the USSR, and the present disarray in China and other socialist countries. On none of these issues do the churches and the ecumenical movement have at present a credible response. Indeed they have still to address them in depth. The most recent ecumenical conference on 0 Dr Abrecht was director of the Church and Society Sub-unit of the WCC from 1948 to 1983. He was the organizing secretary of the 1966 conference on Church and Society. 318

The Predicament of Christian Social Thought after the Cold War

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Page 1: The Predicament of Christian Social Thought after the Cold War

The Predicament of Christian Social Thought after the Cold War

Paul Abrecht

An historical study of ecumenical social thought shows that from the beginning of the Life and Work movement following the first world war to the present time the ecumenical community has periodically been obliged to assess and respond to a rapidly changing social-political context. This has required not just changes in ecumenical social policies but also the rethinking of theological and ethical approaches to them. The discipline of ecumenical study developed from this awareness of the need from time to time to review and renew Christian perceptions of the world social situation and of the function of the church in society.

Today, the ecumenical movement is once again at such a turning point. The formulations of Christian social responsibility which served the ecumenical movement in the 1970s and 1980s appear less relevant in the present world situation. For example, the economic policies developed by the churches and the ecumenical movement in the 1970s to identify with the poor in their struggle for justice, especially in the third world, have not produced the hoped-for results. And despite growing world concern, the churches have yet to witness together concerning threats to the environment and the related problems of fair sharing of scarce natural resources. Undoubtedly the most startling new development confronting the world and the churches in recent years is the upheaval in the former communist countries which has resulted in the overthrow of socialism in Eastern Europe and in the USSR, and the present disarray in China and other socialist countries. On none of these issues do the churches and the ecumenical movement have at present a credible response. Indeed they have still to address them in depth. The most recent ecumenical conference on

0 Dr Abrecht was director of the Church and Society Sub-unit of the WCC from 1948 to 1983. He was the organizing secretary of the 1966 conference on Church and Society.

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social issues, the world convocation on “Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation” (JPIC) meeting in Seoul, in March 1990, does not, in its report, even mention the political-social issues posed by the end of the cold war; on economic issues it merely reiterates the need for the churches to identify with the poor, without offering new concrete, credible suggestions on how this might be done. And on the environmental issues, it fails to go beyond already familiar generalities.

Undoubtedly it is the crisis and collapse of socialism which poses the most difficult questions for contemporary ecumenical social thought. Ecumenical thinking about economic justice over the last fifteen years has constantly emphasized the importance of building “a new world economic order”, and since the model for this new economic order was some form of “socialism”, its present crisis constitutes a major problem.

It is not surprising that many in the ecumenical movement and in the member churches have been slow to address this issue. Christian social thought, as this has developed over the last twenty years (1969-89), has been largely concerned with the evils of “capitalism” and the world economic system which it has produced. The collapse of socialism in Central and Eastern Europe and its disarray throughout the world has shocked those who pinned their hopes on the socialist model. It was assumed that the socialist system could be overthrown only by attacks from hostile outside forces, not by an internal uprising against it. It is disconcerting that these East European countries and the USSR should now have to rebuild as so-called market economies, with a new emphasis on private enterprise and private property; that they should be obliged to depend on hitherto despised Western capitalist economies for financial and technological assistance. As each day brings new revelations of the social, economic and political injustices and inefficiency of the former socialist systems, dismay increases among those who had placed their hopes in a socialist-type liberation from capitalism. Clearly this eventuality was not foreseen and the ecumeni- cal movement is now obliged to examine the immense problems it poses. It is therefore not too surprising that the Seoul convocation on JPIC was not prepared to cope with such a fundamental challenge.

At its last meeting before the Canberra assembly in March 1990, only ten days after the Seoul meeting, the central committee of the WCC considered “Issues Arising out of Developments in Central and Eastern Europe”. The result was a statement welcoming “these events which are bringing new liberties and processes towards participatory democracy to many countries”. At that moment, however, the central committee could do no more than call upon the WCC member churches “to enter into dialogue with the churches in Europe in search for new models of social and political justice, ensuring the widest possible participation in decision-making structures”.

In these circumstances it is necessary to consider three questions: (1) How did Christian social thought evolve over the years of the Cold War (1947-89); what happened in this period which might explain the present ecumenical predicament? (2) What ethical insights about political and economic justice emerge from the process of reorganization now under way in the former socialist countries? (3) In light of the above, how might we begin to reconstruct ecumenical social thought in the new world context?

The first question requires a historical account of the way ecumenical social thought about capitalism and communism evolved in the years of the Cold War. As for questions 2 and 3, at this juncture I can only outline briefly some possible answers.

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The historical basis of the present predicament For the purpose of this brief survey I divide the “Cold War era” into two distinct

phases: 1. 1948-68: When the WCC and the member churches questioned the ideologies of

both laissez-faire capitalism and totalitarian communism, and urged the churches to work for a “Responsible Society”.

2. 1969-89: When, as a result of the growing disenchantment with the Western liberal democracies, and the hopes aroused by new militant socialist movements, the ecumenical concern for social justice was reinterpreted primarily as opposition to all forms of capitalist society.

A few remarks about each of these phases. Phase 1: The Cold War conflict facing the churches at the first WCC assembly in

Amsterdam (1948) obliged them to hold together two seemingly contradictory con- cerns: (1) to witness for freedom and justice in the midst of growing ideological and political conflict between the Western democracies and Eastern European commu- nism; ( 2 ) to work for peace and to help prevent the bitter ideological conflict from leading to war between East and West in Europe.

The dramatic debate at the Amsterdam assembly between the conservative Ameri- can layman and diplomat, John Foster Dulles, over-confident in his defence of the “free-world”, and the Czech theologian, Joseph Hromadka, naive in his defence of Stalinist communism, undoubtedly helped the assembly delegates to realize that they must find a way between these opposing perspectives. It was in this setting that the assembly accepted the idea of the Responsible Society as the criterion for determining Christian thought and action in the conflict between these competing political- economic systems. This concept remained the guiding principle of ecumenical social thought for the next twenty years.

As set out in the report on social questions at the Amsterdam assembly, this concept affirmed that Christians should

reject the ideologies of both communism and laissez-faire capitalism, and should seek to draw people away from the false assumption that these extremes are the only alternatives.. . It is the responsibility of Christians to seek new, creative solutions which never allow either justice or freedom to destroy the other.

Six years later at the second assembly (Evanston, USA, 1954) the WCC reaffirmed this formulation, viewing Responsible Society as

... a criterion by which we judge all existing social orders and at the same time a standard to guide us in the specific choices we have to make. Christians are called to live responsibly, to live in response to God’s act of redemption in Christ, in any society, even within the most unfavourable social structures.

The 1954 assembly emphasized that, in the contemporary world, disputes about “capitalism” and “socialism” are misleading.

Each word is applied to many different social forms and economic systems. It is not the case that we have merely a choice between two easily distinguishable types of economic organization. Private enterprise takes many shapes in different countries at different stages ... and is profoundly affected by the forms of government regulation ... In some countries the “welfare state” or the “mixed economy” suggests a new pattern of economic

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life; others may be regarded as “capitalist”, but the capitalism of today is very different from the capitalism of even twenty or thirty years ago. The concrete issues in all countries concern the newly-evolving forms of economic organization, and the relative roles of the state, organized groups and private enterprises.

The ecumenical idea of Responsible Society did not satisfy everyone. Some said that the formulation was biased in favour of Western liberal democracy; they wanted a more neutral ecumenical position between the socialism of the East and the capitalism of the West. Others said the term was biased in favour of socialism! In this period there were also bitter theological disputes about the true Christian position in the ideological struggle.] And in 1950, when the WCC central committee, meeting in Canada, supported the United Nations action to resist the invasion of South Korea by North Korea aided by the Soviet Union, some Christians in Europe and America protested that the WCC had become identified with one political-ideological perspective. The ecumenical understanding of Responsible Society was tested again when the Soviet army invaded Hungary in October 1965, to put down the popular uprising there. The WCC expressed its sympathy with those Hungarian church leaders who supported the struggle for freedom and began a programme to aid Hungarian refugees. As a result the WCC was accused by some East European churches of giving aid and comfort to the revolt.*

Despite such disagreements, there was general acceptance in the member churches and other world Christian bodies of the idea of the Responsible Society. The political commission of the World Student Christian Federation in its own study of The Christian in the World Struggle (195 1) largely supported the WCC formulation. In the years between 1949 and 1961, the idea of Responsible Society was also accepted as the guiding theme in the Asian churches and in the early years of ecumenical work on Christian social responsibility in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. It was in this theological-ethical context that the five-year WCC study of the common Christian responsibility in a time of nation-building and rapid social change was organized. Generally speaking, the concept of Responsible Society encouraged Christian support of the kind of social democratic movements which developed in most Western European countries following the second world war.

After the third WCC assembly in New Delhi (1961), ecumenical perspectives on the Cold War began to shift, due largely to political and economic developments in the third world which were reflected in the life of the WCC through the increasingly active participation of member churches from these countries and from Eastern Europe, many of which joined the WCC in this period. Such differences came to the fore in the 1966 world conference on Church and Society in Geneva.

Phase 2: The 1966 world conference on Church and Society was the first occasion when the new member churches from Eastern Europe and from third-world countries participated fully in a worldwide ecumenical discussion of social questions. It was a time of growing political-ideological conflict: the war in Vietnam, the cultural revolution in China, and the new left student movements in Western Europe and in North America. At this moment East-West ideological tensions became linked with the increasingly tense North-South issues. While the 1966 conference explicitly reaffirmed the Responsible Society approach to the struggle between capitalism and communism, it also acknowledged that increasingly “circumstances in the modem world force men to revolution against an unjust established order”.3 But a group of

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younger theologians wanted a stronger Christian affirmation of the need for revolu- tionary change. They believed that the world social situation obliged the churches to adopt a radical new ecumenical witness for justice, based on a “Theology of Revolution”.

The chief advocate of this view at the 1966 conference was Richard Shaull, a professor of ecumenics at Princeton Seminary and a former Presbyterian missionary worker in Latin America. He and other speakers criticized the social ethics of Responsible Society as Western reformism; what was needed, they said, was a totally new economic and political order to meet the demands for social justice. While this was a minority view in 1966, by 1968 the ecumenical movement was coming under increasing pressure to adopt a “revolutionary” approach. This drew very largely upon ideas derived from Cuban, Vietnamese, and Chinese style socialism and anti- colonialism.

By 1971, parts of the ecumenical movement, especially the World Student Christian Federation, were caught up in the “worldwide euphoria about socialism” characteristic of this p e r i ~ d . ~ By 1971 the discussion of “theology of revolution” was transformed by Gustavo GutiCrrez and other Roman Catholic theologians from Latin America, into “a theology of liberation”. Over the next 18 years this revolutionary Christian movement became increasingly influential as the theological-ethical inspiration for most ecumen- ical thought and action about political and social justice.

A group of younger theologians from the third world and from the West who were active in the World Student Christian Federation in the period 1968-75 advocated such a revolutionary approach for the Christian students. In 1968 Shaull had become chairman of the WSCF and he challenged the church and all Christian organizations, especially the Christian student movements, to a radical renewal in order to become the spiritual agents of revolutionary social change. His central ideas at this point have been summarized as follows:

He “called into question all inherited forms of Christian institutions, Christian commit- ments, expressions of Christian faith ... (and) preached constantly the necessity to give up inherited identities, to die to the past, to institutional securities, and to abandon as a bold step of faith all traditional expressions of Christian communities.. . only out of the ashes of the forsaken institutions and identity of the church a new Christian identity might emerge.5

If similar revolutionary views within the World Council of Churches did not employ the same dramatic eschatological language this was not because of substantial disagreement; groups there also began to advocate total change in church and society, the casting off of old political and social alliances which prevented the emergence of a truly faithful church. This was the way “to the new society and the new man”.6

The transition from thinking about the Responsible Society to the revolutionary vision of a new world of equality and justice allowed for no halfway measures - the goal was to work for total liberation and justice within history. This would be reached only by rejecting all forms of “Western oppression” which in their view derived from the capitalist system and its culture in inequality and dominance. Thus was established the link between Marxist socialism and a radical (secularized) Christian eschatology.

As with so many Christian sectarian movements in the past, the power of this new militant Christianity lay in its confidence that it had found the truth that would lead to the liberation of church and society, not in the distant future, but in the life-time of this

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generation. There was of course opposition to this viewpoint, but by 1973 it had gained control of the World Student Christian Federation.’ By the time of the fourth WCC assembly in Nairobi (December 1975) it had become the basis for a broader ecumenical commitment to struggle against the world capitalist system. Eight years later, the sixth assembly (Vancouver, 1983) largely reaffirmed this position.

Looking back today, we can interpret specific sections of the Nairobi statement on “Human Development: Ambiguities of Power, Technology, and Quality of Life” as a plea for a moral crusade by the churches on behalf of the poor. The churches are called to support a radical populist movement to overthrow the structures of oppression, represented by the Western capitalist system, with its transnational corporations and their worldwide control of economic life.8 The Nairobi statement is confident that such “people’s movements”, emerging in developed and underdeveloped countries, based in people’s power, would become the critical force in the struggle against poverty and for justice. The role of the churches and of the ecumenical movement is clear: “to share with the oppressed their struggle for liberation”.

The 1975 statement contains few details regarding the structural or institutional shape of the new world order. But in the following years the World Council produced additional statements outlining characteristics of the sought-for new world order. A 1982 report by the WCC Commission on the Churches’ Participation in Development recommended a process of “socialization” to replace capitalism. lo Such proposals were endorsed by the sixth WCC assembly (Vancouver, 1983) which expressed its confidence in people’s movements and the need for solidarity of all oppressed groups in a common struggle against sexism, racism and classism, which it said were linked in a “web of oppression and injustice”.

This was no doubt the high point of ecumenical liberation docmne. By 1985 it was already clear that the revolutionary vision was fading: the collapse of the Chinese cultural revolution in the period after 1975 and the terrible violence of the Cambodian revolution greatly diminished the enthusiasm which such revolutionary movements had once generated.

Undoubtedly this emphasis on Christian action for revolutionary change in the years 1970-89 helped make the churches more aware of the needs of the poor and called attention to the abuses of transnational business as “a system of power”. But the attempt to define an alternative economic order, a revolutionary new world economic system, one which did not depend, nationally or internationally, on the economic institutions of the world market system, was never intellectually or politically realized. The proponents of the proposed new order were more explicit about what they opposed in the present system than about the character of the new one which they envisaged. Their views represented a mixture of Marxist economic doctrine and elements of the kind of Christian social idealism well known in the heyday of the Social Gospel. The help of economists was solicited but the primary emphasis was on the insights of the oppressed peoples over against those of economic “experts”. There have been attempts to develop alternative economic systems based on “economic theologies”, building on what the Bible or Christian doctrine has to say about a just economic order. 11

Today as a result of the upheaval in Eastern Europe and the overthrow of the socialist system, this type of “revolutionary” Christian thinking about economic and political justice, which so largely influenced ecumenical social thought in the 1970s and 1980s, is facing its own identity crisis.

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The controversy about JPSS and JPIC In these twenty years of ecumenical work on social issues the previous

“Responsible Society” approach to Christian social ethics did not disappear entirely. The ecumenical study programme on “The Future of Man and Society in a World of Science-Based Technology” (1969-74), organized by the Department on Church and Society, questioned the content and method of the revolutionary “liberationist” social ethics outlined above. Its reflections on the impact of technology on society, on limits to growth, environment, and appropriate technology, assumed conflicts of interest which could not be resolved simply by “giving all power to the poor”, by tearing down present structures without some idea of what could be put in their place. On many problems like the environment, limits to growth and the changes introduced by modern science and technology, the poor and other oppressed groups might be just as benighted as the rest of the population.

The world conference on “Science and Technology for Human Development” (Bucharest, 1974), convened by Church and Society, challenged Christian social thought to include the idea of the “sustainable society”. This term is now accepted as a breakthrough in ecumenical social understanding, but at the time it was strongly opposed by those striving for “revolutionary change” in the world economic system. Nevertheless, the Nairobi assembly proposed that the WCC should undertake an integrated inter-unit study of the Just and Sustainable Society, later to become the Just, Participatory and Sustainable Society (JPSS) project.

After nearly three years of work on this theme the underlying theological and ideological differences had not been resolved. The meeting of the WCC central committee in 1979 which received the report of the advisory group on JPSS was itself divided on these issues and no final report was forthcoming. The Vancouver assembly in 1983 proposed a new effort to integrate these ecumenical social concerns: a WCC programme on Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation (JPIC). This was also to fail for three reasons: (1) The persistent disagreements about the theological-ethical starting point for ecumenical social thought and action which had hampered the JPSS study were not addressed. Since the JPSS programme had foundered because of such differences, there was no reason to expect that the new programme could succeed without resolving the conflicting points of view. In the new JPIC project the populist revolutionary ideology was simply assumed as the starting point without supporting analysis or consideration of alternative points of view. ( 2 ) By including peace, the scope of the programme was vastly enlarged, adding to the difficulty of arriving at a working consensus on the theological-ethical issues. (3) The introduction of a new term, “integrity of creation” (in place of sustainability), posed new and difficult theological issues.

The JPIC preparatory process failed to cope with these problems. In addition the attempt to formulate “covenants” between churches and Christian action groups on specific points of common social concern created new confusion and disagreement about the function of the church in society. Most important of all, the inability of the convocation to agree on an “exposition” or interpretation of the present social situation and the causes of injustice and violence in our times resulted in a series of concluding affirmations and covenants so abstract and so generally phrased as to be of little use in guiding Christian social thought and action in the world. Thus, the message of the

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Seoul convocation simply assumes that the differing views about JPIC in the churches and in society can be readily overcome:

Our contexts and perceptions [of JPIC] are different indeed. Yet we have to overcome our divisions.. . There are no competitive efforts for justice, peace, and the integrity of creation. There is one single global struggle.

Now is the time to consolidate all struggles for justice, peace and the integrity of creation. We must free ourselves from bondage to power structures which blind us and make us accomplices in destruction. Christians have to move out into the world to which Jesus came.

Now is the time for the ecumenical movement to articulate its vision of all people living on earth and caring for creation as a family where each member has the same right to wholeness of life. While this vision is spiritual in nature, it must be expressed in concrete action. 13

The report also declares that we must “work for a just economic order and for liberation from the foreign debt bondage”, but the meeting was unable to agree on the practical steps which would give meaning to this and similar general propositions.

Thus, after twenty years of “revolutionary” thought and action on economic and social justice issues, ecumenical thought in these areas is at a dead end. There is no longer a theological-ethical consensus which commands any measure of agreement. Cut off from its historic theological-ethical roots and obliged to recognize that the concept of a revolutionary transformation of the world economic and social order is an illusion, ecumenical social thought faces a predicament of historic proportions. How shall it be reconstructed? What precisely is the function of the church in modem society?

Some still doggedly hope for a quick rebirth or reconstruction of the “revolutionary vision”. But it is now pretty obvious that the present situation does not promise a quick turn-about in the prospects for the socialist vision. The immense social tensions and dislocations resulting from economic reorganization of the former socialist countries offer little hope in that direction. In these unfavourable circumstances, and in view of the present confusion, there is, I think, little likelihood of a rapid renewal or reformulation of ecumenical social thought, even less of the ecumenical movement soon being able to address contemporary economic and political realities in a more effective way.

How long will this situation continue? What steps could be taken to begin the process of ecumenical recovery?

Reading the signs of the times: lessons from the collapse of Eastern European socialism

The first step surely is for the WCC and the churches to evaluate the experiences of the years since 1969 in light of the world situation after the Cold War. There is need to take stock of the changes brought by the collapse of socialism. The material for the Canberra assembly, section I1 (in Resources for Sections) illustrated a common temptation: to say, “Yes, socialism has failed but so has the market system.” This seems to suggest that there is a third way, but no one has yet indicated what that might be.

It is, I think, important to acknowledge that at two critical points the collapse of the socialist system reinforces earlier ecumenical teaching about Christian responsibility in economic and political life:

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- by emphasizing anew the importance of democratic openness in the realization of

- by reinforcing the historic ecumenical critique of the Marxist view of society and

The importance of democracy: The emphasis of glasnost in Eastern Europe is clearly the most striking feature of the new political discussion in these countries. It confirms the historic ecumenical insight regarding the interdependence of democracy and social justice. The communist assumption that the working class was the only group in modem industrial society which could lead the way to complete social justice has to be discarded. The idea that the leadership (dictatorship) of the proletariat (the poor in liberationist terms) could not possibly do anything contrary to the best interests of society, that it was the guarantor of social fulfilment, is now recognized as a fundamen- tal illusion of Eastern European socialism, a point which the ecumenical discussions in 1948 had clearly underlined. As Reinhold Niebuhr stated in his address to the Amster- dam assembly, the church must surely help the poor to obtain justice, but it must have no illusions about what happens when the poor man becomes a commissar!

For the moment, and apparently for some time to come, Eastern European peoples must continue to struggle with the consequences of “the long dark night of Stalin- ism”. l4 As contemporary Russian social scholars make clear, Stalin’s policy of liquidating dissenters and independent thinkers was particularly devastating in the area of economic policy, depriving the country of its best economic minds.I5 The state bureaucracies which are largely responsible for the economic stagnation, corruption and demoralization of the people are still largely in place. Secrecy concerning vital economic and industrial statistics still prevents corrective action. l 6

Confirmation of the ecumenical critique of Marxism’s spiritual and ethical illu- sions: As we have seen, in its 1948 critique of communism the WCC pointed to its false “promise of complete redemption of man in history” and “the belief that a particular class by virtue of its role as the bearer of a new order is free from the sins and ambiguities that Christians believe to be characteristic of all human existence”. The studies by the Soviet reformers confirm this judgment. Their examination of the fundamental assumptions of Marxist socialism accords with the historic ecumenical critique. For example, it is recognized that in reorganizing the Soviet economy there is a need to take greater account of the role of personal creativity and the self-interest of the workers, of the fact that workers might have different and competing social and economic interests. The classical socialist view of property as the “collective posses- sions of the whole society” is now viewed as founded on an unrealistic and simplistic view of human nature. A leading Soviet economist explains why, in terms reminiscent of the ecumenical critique of an earlier era.

economic justice;

of social justice.

The potential danger in this is that property belongs to everyone but to no one in particular. The individual or group feeling of ownership is deadened. The attitude to public property that may arise is that it is nobody’s business, with many difficulties arising as a consequence. Workers may use public resources uneconomically, they may work less well in the social economy than for themselves. The attitude to machinery in state factories is quite different from that, say, to personally owned cars.. . One of the important problems of an effective system of economic management under socialism is the problem of inculcating in every worker the feeling of being a co-owner. No single measure can succeed in doing this. A whole integrated system of measures is needed.

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It is one of the ironies of the present situation that the “liberationist” movement in the churches, which in these twenty years adopted the socialist vision of achieving an economic order free of injustice and class distinctions, is now obliged to correct its theology and ethics in light of the tragic outcome of the socialist experiment.

Next steps in the reconstruction of ecumenical social thought What kind of economic order and justice should Christians work for in the post-Cold

War era? To some, it will seem like a defeat to give up the heroic revolutionary struggle for a “new world economic order”; they cannot accept the failure of the “socialist” vision and a return to the idea of the Responsible Society. Such an approach does not look “prophetic” as that term has been used in recent years to proclaim the liberation of the oppressed within history.

However, there is no disguising the fact that the present approach to ecumenical social thought lacks credibility and needs to be substantially reformulated. It has caused the churches to lose credibility with their own members and with society at large. It is therefore important for the churches to take stock of the new political and social situation. Clearly this will take time. In the past the churches worked for years, in study, discussion and consultation together, before they could arrive at a measure of agreement on the critical social issues. After the 1925 conference on Life and Work, it required more than ten years for the movement to put aside the idealistic and utopian social ideas of the 1920s and develop a new, more realistic social ethics for the different world situation of the 1930s. It required another eleven years before this new theological-ethical approach was adopted as the basis of the social action of the new World Council of Churches. Another long period, nearly 15 years, went by before the growing number of WCC member churches were able to meet together in a world context to define their responsibilities in a time of revolutionary political, economic and technological change. Today, after twenty years of commitment to liberation thought and action in the hope of building a new world society, we see the illusions this involved, but there is no agreement on what should take its place. It is unrealistic to suppose that in the present crisis, the churches or any representative group of Christians will soon agree on a new understanding of the Christian responsibility in society.

The process of theological and ethical reconstruction will this time be especially difficult because the spirit of dialogue and the discipline of cooperative “study” of social-ethical issues by the churches, involving different points of view, has been neglected and has to be recovered. The present confusion about the relation of study to action and about the contribution of the social and physical sciences in Christian social thought is a further grave hindrance to new thinking.

But it is impossible to believe that the ecumenical movement has lost the capacity for renewal and for the self-criticism which such renewal implies. After all, that is what its faith is all about.

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NOTES

’ Undoubtedly the most memorable controversy was between the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, carried on through an exchange of articles in the period 1950-56. Niebuhr’s articles were collected and published in Essays in Applied Christianity, ed. D.B. Robertson, New York, 1959. See the section “Barthianism and the Kingdom”, pp.163-190. Nevertheless the Hungarian churches were not obliged to withdraw from the World Council of Churches. Nor did this episode prevent further meetings of European churches (East and West) and the formation of the Conference of European Churches in 1961. See Christians in the Technical and Social Revolutions of Our Time, Geneva, WCC, 1967, p. 122. But the conference did not endorse revolutionary change without qualification as the full text makes clear: “In spite of many differences, our ecclesiastical traditions agree that the function of the state in God’s purpose is to provide, if necessary by lawful coercion, that order which enables men to live in peace and justice with one another. Human experience as well as holy scripture shows us that the power of law is required to compel man to respect the rights of others. While this remains true in our day, many circumstances in the modem world force men to revolution against an unjust established order. The right to revolt is recognized by Christians, but the problem which revolution poses for Christian ethics needs further study. In general, the churches have not condemned the use of force, when it bas been according to accepted rules and to preserve or to create a just order in society.” The phrase comes from Anders Aslund, Gorbachev’s Struggle for Economic Reform, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1989, p. 10. Mr Aslund is a Swedish economist who spent three years in the 1980s in the USSR studying its economic problems. This description is taken from an unpublished paper, prepared for the WSCF History Project, which the author, Risto Lehtonen, has kindly permitted me to quote. Mr Lehtonen was general secretary of the WSCF in the turbulent years 1968-72, the period when these ideological struggles reached their peak. They led to a deep crisis in the student Christian movement, its break-up and its development as a “rather narrow, one-cause, one-issue movement with political action as its aim, isolated from churches and from the organized ecumenical movement”. For one of the classic formulations of this viewpoint see Gustavo GutiCrrez, A Theology of Liberation, Maryknoll, NY, Orbis, 1973, p.40.

’See Risto Lehtonen, Story of a Storm, Geneva, WCC, 1972. ‘Breaking Barriers: Nairobi 1975, ed. David Paton, London, SPCK, 1976, p.131.

“The participation of the Christian community in the struggle against poverty and oppression is a sign of the answer to the call of Jesus Christ to liberation.” [bid., p. 133.

lo Towards a Church in Solidariv with the Poor, Geneva, WCC, 1982. I ’ A recent attempt to define such a “Christian” economics is to be found in the book Global Economy by the

German theologian Ulrich Duchrow (WCC, 1987). Duchrow maintains that he is fulfilling his task as a Christian theologian by explaining what the church must think and do economically if it wishes to follow “the God who leads the poor and oppressed people to freedom”.

”See “Science and Technology for Human Development”, report of the 1974 world conference in Bucharest, Romania, Anticipation, No. 19, November 1974, p. 12.

l 3 “Now is the Time: Final Document and Other Texts”, world convocation on “Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation”, Seoul, 1990, WCC, Geneva, p.61.

l4 The phrase is from Gorbachev’s Struggle for Economic Reform, op . cit. , p. 11. 15For a vivid description of Stalin’s suspicion of economists and an account of “How the Science of

Economics was Uprooted under Stalin”, see Abel Aganbegyan, Moving the Mountain: Inside the Perestroika Revolution, London, Transworld, 1989, p. 124. Aganbegyan is regarded as the USSR’s most eminent economic thinker today.

Abel Aganbegyan, The Challenge: Economics of Perestroika, London, Hutchinson, 1988, p. 196. I6Aslund, op. cit. , p.15.

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