What Hope?

Theologians, churchmen and their followers are getting set for a high-level hassle in August, when the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches meets in Evanston, 111 . Main theme of the Assembly: "Christ, the Hope of the World." European Protestant theologians, it is expected, will insist that the Hope is only in the strictly Biblical Second Coming of Christ and the End of the World, a theory that ecumenical Americans tend to leave to the fundamentalists and Adventist sects. Against this view many U.S. theologians will probably maintain that the Hope is in the gradual and practical Christian betterment of the world. In the current issue of the interdenominational quarterly, Religion in Life, pessimistic Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr asserts that the choice of theme was a bad idea in the first place.

It is silly, thinks Niebuhr, to advertise Christianity by insisting on what, to the secular-minded, will seem "fantastic," i.e., the Second Coming. "The New Testament eschatology is at once too naive for a sophisticated world and too sophisticated for the simple-minded modern man, who has become so accustomed to trying to make sense out of life by measuring history in terms of some scheme of rational intelligibility . . . While the present seems a very strategic era in which to restore a part of the New Testament faith which had become discredited and obscured, we need only to analyze the needs of our generation to recognize that it is not particularly redemptive to approach a disillusioned generation with a proud 'I told you so' and a fanciful picture of the end of history, or at least a picture which will seem fanciful to our generation . . . What would be more to the point is to bear witness to our faith in terms ... of watchfulness and soberness ... of faith and of love--which will appeal to a world in the night of despair as having some gleams of light in it, derived from the 'Light that shineth in darkness.' "

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