LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1962, Page 24

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24 DOCTRINAL-DEVOTIONAL ESSAYS

The Division of Interchurch Aid and Service to
Refugees has helped to resettle more than 200,000 ref-
ugees. This is certainly a necessary and noble work.
In the Division of Ecumenical Action especially youth
work has been studied. At the Ecumenical Institute at
Bossy in Switzerland, Christians of all races have been
exploring the meaning of the Christian Gospel for the
work and witness of the church to the world. In the
Division of Studies the World Council of Churches calls
upon the world’s best minds to help analyze and to
suggest Christian approaches to the ever-new problems
confronting the Christian church, especially in the area
of missions and evangelism. Finally the Commission
of the Churches on International Affairs keeps the
churches apprised of world problems insofar as they
have relevance for the Christian faith and life.

We have tried in the above to give a brief picture
of the aims and of the work of the World Council of
Churches, which is not the Ecumenical Movement itself
but is at present the chief and certainly the largest
group professing to be prosecuting ecumenical aims.

A small opposition group of fundamentalists, organ-
ized also at Amsterdam, also in the year 1948, in op-
position to the W.C.C., the International Council of
Christian Churches, is little heard from by comparison.
When we speak of the Ecumenical Movement we gen-
erally think of the W. C.C. and the churches associated
with it.

That the problems which led to the founding of the
W.C.C. are real and the aims of the W.C.C. as stated
are laudable we would not for one moment deny. Nor
would we wish to intimate for one moment that the
work of the World Council of Churches and of other
ecumenical groups has beén without real benefit for
these groups. When we consider that the church has
not only been divided into many denominations to her
own shame and to the scandalizing of the heathen but
that denominations themselves have been cleft down
the middle between conservatives and liberals and at
times even between fundamentalists and modernists,
then we can realize that for many denominations the
apparently positive platform on which the churches are
asked to enter into fellowship with each other, namely,
the confession of Jesus Christ as God and Savior, has
been a genuine blessing. This we must confess as we,
a confessional church, standing squarely on the Scrip-
ture and confessing the Biblical Gospel, view and eval-
uate this movement.

We are, however, as a confessional church also
constrained to ask a number of very earnest and search-
ing questions.

' The first has to do with the formal principle of the
Reformation and of our Confessions, that it shall be
the prophetic and apostolic Scriptures alone according
to which all teachers and doctrines shall be judged.
Into the Ecumenical. Movement, -as it is represented in
the World Council of Churches, have gone the modern-
ists from former times, perhaps reformed, perhaps not;
the higher critics who in many instances have sought

to destroy confidence in the Holy Scripture; and the
neo-orthodox, who, while generally more conservative,
are nevertheless a far cry from the attitude of our
Confessions toward the Scriptures. What we must ask
about earnestly is the attitude of the churches in the
Ecumenical Movement toward the Scriptures. Could
such a position as our Confessions take — and as we as
a confessional church must take — be maintained if we
plunged into the Ecumenical Movement and joined the
World Council of Churches?

The other question which we must earnestly ask is:
What happens to the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ
in the Ecumenical Movement as represented by the
World Council of Churches? True, one of the avowed
aims of the World Council of Churches is the proclama-
tion of the Gospel in all the world without scandal flow-
ing from divided churches. But what happens to the
Gospel in the Ecumenical Movement? Into this move-
ment have gone churches which have never had a full
understanding of the Gospel.

We cannot here enter into the theological depths
of the question. But where the doctrine of original sin
is minimized, as it is in many churches, there the Gospel
cannot remain pure. Where the social gospel displaces
the Biblical Gospel, there is no longer a real Gospel
but a false gospel. And it is a fact that the social gos-
pelers of a past generation are now part and parcel of
the Ecumenical Movement. And some of the expres-
sions in the documents of this movement leave one in
doubt whether all the talk about the Gospel means the
Gospel as set forth in the Scriptures and in the Lu-
theran Confessions.

Evangelicals who have studied the Ecumenical
Movement and its documents have rightly chided the
movement for not being definite and clear enough in
their statements about the person of Christ, although
it must be stated that some individuals in the Ecumen-
ical Movement have spoken clearly and Biblically. We
must agree with an evangelical critic of the Ecumenical
Movement, J. Marcus Kik (Ecumenism and the Evan-
gelical, Philadelphia: The Presbyterian and Reformed
Pub. Co., 1958), who finds that the Ecumenical Move-
ment “fights shy of sharply defining the Christian faith
for fear of its disturbing element” (p.64). We miss in
the documents of the Ecumenical Movement the clear
statement of the Gospel of the incarnation of the Son
of God, of His vicarious suffering and death for the sins
of mankind, of the doctrine of justification by grace for
Christ’s sake through faith.

As a confessional church, loyal to our Lutheran
Confessions, our feet firmly planted on the prophetic
and apostolic Scriptures as the source of our faith and
the standard of judgment and on the Holy Gospel as
the very heart and core of the Scripture, we must ask
the ecumenist: What happens to the Scripture in your
movement? What happens to the Biblical Gospel?
According to the answers to these questions we must
finally judge the Ecumenical Movement and be guided
in our actions with respect to it.