The world is slowly edging away from the brink of war. Tensions have begun to recede. The Olympics will go on in Moscow, with several leading nations absent. The hostages in Iran remain in custody. Negotiations for a settlement in Afghanistan have yet to begin. But both in Iran and in Afghanistan, there is some hope, though not much. Our very unsatisfactory machinery for peace-keeping cannot be discarded as totally ineffective; though infinitely capable of improvement, one does not despair about it.
The tensions generated seem to have served their basic purpose. Defence budgets have been boosted. More large corporations have secured defence contrasts. Some sagging economies have been temporarily shored up. The dreams of the Soviet Union to reduce military expenditure and concentrate on peaceful construction have again been shattered. A powerful new wave of anti-sovietism and anti-communism has been generated. The ground gained by movements for peace and disarmament has been taken away. Things are back to square one -- the Cold War. Most of us prefer that to a hot one.
The biggest casualty seems to be the cause of justice. These are a few gains -- the Commodities Fund, the Science and Technology Research Fund, and little else. But poverty still stalks to earth in triumph, in company with malnutrition, illiteracy and ill-heath. There is as yet no great challenge to these forces. The two big forces which can offer the challenge are inactive. Those who control the resources of the earth and the science and technology, are too callous to challenge the spectres. Their distorted vision tells them that these spectres are their friends. The other big force -- the people's power -- is still unawakened and unorganized. They do not as yet see who their friends and enemies are. So they allow themselves to be brainwashed by their enemies and exploiters.
The voice of the Church must speak effectively to the conscience of humanity at this time. We need both deep understanding and enormous courage to see reality as it is and to witness to God's will in it. That is a great challenge to the leaders of the Church, to the Pope as well as the central Committee of the World Council of Churches meeting this August in Geneva.
The Ecumenical Prospect - A New Orientation?
The "great new fact of our time" to which Archbishop William Temple drew our attention in the twenties of our century begins to lose its lustre. The Church has been established in practically every country-- except perhaps in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Outer Mongalia. But the unity of the Church still eludes our grasp -- even the grasp of our vision, for we do not know what this unity should look like.
Brakes are on everywhere in the ecumenical movement -- though the drivers are talking to each other from their parked cars. No agreement as yet about the direction in which to move.
One possible direction seems to attract many and scare others -- the common campaign for a world of peace with justice. Our civilization has now come to one of its great historical moments -- facing the possibility of its decay and disintegration. Civilizations come and go. None lasts for more than a few hundreds of years. But humanity goes on. Values also transmigrate from one civilization to a later one. What we need today is a reaffirmation and re-embodiment of these values -- highlighting them in consciousness by symbol and celebration.
Science and Technology together constitute such a major value in our civilization -- much more than in any previous civilization known to us. Yet the nature of Science-Technology has now been recognised to be ambiguous. It gave us access to fantastic realms of knowledge and power, such as no previous civilization known to us ever possessed. But it also has exposed us to great depths of hell -- nuclear holocaust, bacteriological warfare, poisoning of air, water and earth and large-scale organised economic exploitation, just to mention a few of these internal depths.
The second big vision that our civilization has shown us is that of a world where the whole of humanity can live together in peace with justice and dignity, with no one denied his or her basic needs. We know that this is possible.
Perhaps the great new orientation of the ecumenical movement is the hitching of this great access to knowledge and power called Science-Technology to the second vision -- that of a world where humanity can live together in peace, without want or war, in justice and dignity.
This would mean a gigantic effort to link the religions and humanist vision with the vast power of science-technology, through an adequate political economic control by the people. Maybe such an effort, monumental as it is, can be sparked by the ecumenical movement, without abandoning its other legitimate concerns for the unity of the Church and service to those in need.