Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War, and the Trials of the Protestant Left

1—The Roots of Ecumania

C h a p t e r O n e The Roots of Ecumania For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. . . . Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. —1 Corinthians 12:12, 27 As autumn leaves floated downward on yale’s campus in 1936, Robert Bilheimer was ecumenically reborn. The sophomore had been complaining vehemently about the church. His friend Fay Campbell sought clarification . “What do you mean by the church?” asked the Student Christian Movement (SCM) secretary. “These local churches and their denominations ,” Bilheimer retorted. Campbell countered with a different definition . “The church is the Body of Christ,” the people of God. Bilheimer fell silent, for that view of church hadn’t resonated with him before. Now it transformed his understanding of the Christian faith and, for the first time, ignited real passion for it within him. “That concept . . . burned its way into my mind and soul,” he explained. “That new vision produced a wholly new seriousness about ‘church,’ ‘ministry,’ and the Christian faith itself. I no longer saw these as optional or peripheral. . . . I had had, quite unwittingly, a classic SCM experience.”1 Bilheimer began exploring the ecumenical way of being Christian. He learned to see the church not simply as bricks and mortar or divided 24 E m b a t t l e d E c u m e n i s m denominations but rather as a worldwide “people amidst peoples” called to transcend individualism, nationalism, and culture.2 Ecumenists believed that God had already given spiritual unity to the church; the interconnected body of Christ existed in God’s eyes despite its schismatic divisions. Like the scattered pieces of a mosaic that discover their fullest shape only when joined together, ecumenists believed that each Christian faction needed the gifts of the others in order to be the church as God intended. When they transcended their cultures and truly listened to each other, ecumenists trusted that Christians globally could find some theological unity, some consensus, on the interconnected issues affecting humankind. They strove therefore to communicate to the world with one voice while holding their ecclesiastical differences in creative tension. These ideas resonated with Bilheimer, and spreading this form of Christian good news became his life’s mission. He joined the budding ecumenical movement, which was reconceptualizing the meaning of church and its relationship to society. The movement merged two formerly independent but interconnected branches. The “Faith and order” movement challenged Christians to discuss their doctrinal differences, seeking unity there; the “Life and Work” movement joined Christians together to do the good works commanded by Christ, making their faith relevant to people’s daily lives.3 Both were central to the church’s identity and power. Ecumenists saw good works as a tangible expression of theological beliefs, giving them life. These beliefs in turn gave reason, meaning, and motive to the church’s actions. Therefore, the ecumenical vision asserted that theological discussions, public witness, service actions, and church renewal were all interdependent and mutually reinforcing. In the mid-1930s, enthusiastic ecumenical leaders across the globe were formalizing their movement by creating an organized international body, a process that eventually flowered in the 1948 dedication of the World Council of Churches (WCC). The young Bilheimer played a critical role in the WCC’s formation, as it did in his. Shortly thereafter, in 1950, American ecumenists revamped their own overly stretched ecumenical body, the Federal Council of Churches, by merging it with other service and mission organizations to establish the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America (NCC). Bilheimer worked successively for both organizations, and throughout his career, he promoted the World Council’s traditional vision of ecumenism described above. In fact, when The Roots of Ecumania 25 Bilheimer directed the NCC’s International Affairs Commission during the Vietnam War, he put together a team so devoted to this vision that they were playfully, and sometimes pejoratively, called “ecumaniacs.”4 Born in 1917 to Gus Bilheimer, a secretary of the young Men’s Christian Association (yMCA), Robert was first exposed to ecumenical activities in his childhood home. John R. Mott visited frequently. The inspirational yMCA leader had birthed three worldwide ecumenical organizations, including the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) in which Bilheimer truly...