Religion: To End a Scandal

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Presbyterian Blake launched his sensation, appropriately enough, in an Episcopal church: San Francisco's Grace Cathedral. The occasion was the Sunday sermon at the beginning of the annual meeting of the National Council of Churches. A congregation that included some of the biggest wigs in Protestantism filed out 90 minutes later, whispering excitedly. For Presbyterian Blake had made a bold proposal—that the Episcopal Church and Northern Presbyterians together invite the Methodists and the United Church of Christ to form a new Christian church.

Hatfield & McCoy. Blake had chosen his nuclear churches cannily. The Methodists are an earthier offshoot of the Episcopalians, just as the United Church is a more freewheeling version of Calvinism than the Presbyterian. He purposely omitted the Lutherans and the Baptists, though he hopes they will eventually come in. The Baptists are too jealous of their congregational autonomy and are intransigent against infant baptism. The Lutherans in the U.S. are in the throes of pulling themselves together with mergers of their own (there have been 16 major Lutheran unions since 1820).

Blake's idea came to him about six weeks before preaching his sermon, but "it had been simmering for quite a long time." Even the 1960 presidential campaign had a share in his thinking, for "all the churches, including the Roman Catholic, came out badly."

The cornerstone of the Blake proposal is a blending of two important and divergent Christian traditions—the traditionalist catholic (not Catholic) churches, with their emphasis on sacrament and liturgy, and the Bible-centered reformation churches, with their emphasis on preaching and the "ministry of all believers." The idea is not as impossible as it sounds: Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists and Congregationalists united to form the Church of South India in 1947. Under way in North India and Ceylon are similar unions on which Blake modeled his own proposal. But among the vested interests and sentimental en trenchments of U.S. Protestantism, such a suggestion seems almost like proposing a marriage of Hatfield to McCoy. That it could be seriously put forward by so hardheaded and experienced a pro of churchmanship as Eugene Carson Blake has surprised many an old ecumenical hand and given new hope to many more. A Bill of Principles. Dr. Blake is an enthusiast: he acts not out of fear that Protestantism is withering away but because he senses a new dynamism in the Protestant churches and believes that unity is necessary to express it. He is well aware that it would be unwise to make too specific a blueprint at this stage; in his San Francisco sermon, he merely cited certain principles to be followed. On the "catholic" side:

¶ The new church would have to manifest its historic continuity with the church both before and after the Reformation.