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WCC split hinted over "What is Holy Spirit?'

 
Published March 23, 1991|Updated Oct. 13, 2005

By most accounts, a dramatic and pivotal moment occurred last month at the assembly of the World Council of Churches, the organization that loosely links 316 churches with a collective membership of 400-million Christians. On Feb. 8, the second day of the two-week meeting, Dr. Chung Hyun Kyung, a Presbyterian theologian from South Korea, addressed most of the 3,500 delegates and observers from 100 nations, who were gathered in Canberra, Australia. Her topic was the meeting's theme: the Holy Spirit and the renewal of creation.

Amid the sound of gongs, drums and clap sticks, the 34-year-old churchwoman was joined onstage by young Korean dancers wearing white like herself and two Australian aborigines in loincloths and body paint.

She invited the audience to follow the custom of aboriginal Australians and other Asian and Pacific people by taking off their shoes to honor their "holy ground" and preparing to encounter God's spirit.

What followed would entrance many in her audience and anger others, even to the point that they would talk about leaving the World Council. It would also underscore a problem faced by believers since Christians confronted Hellenism: how to express their belief in terms meaningful to their local culture without abandoning their essential Christian distinctiveness.

Reading from a rice-paper scroll, Chung invoked the spirits of women and men oppressed through the ages. "Come," she began, "spirit of Hagar, Egyptian, black slave woman exploited and abandoned by Abraham and Sarah, the ancestors of our faith."

"Come," she eventually concluded, "spirit of the Liberator, our brother Jesus."

Included in her litany were Joan of Arc and other women burned as witches, all the victims of the Crusades and of Western colonization, Jews killed in the Nazi gas chambers, Vietnamese napalmed and boat people starved, those "smashed by tanks in Kwangju, Tiananmen Square and Lithuania," soldiers, civilians and sea creatures dying in the Persian Gulf fighting.

She also summoned "the spirit of the Amazon rain forest" and of "Earth, air and water, raped, tortured and exploited by human greed."

Then, deftly rolling the scroll into a cone, she set it aflame and let the ashes drift into the air.

In the soft-spoken presentation on the Holy Spirit that followed, Chung, who studied in the United States, drew not only on biblical images of Babel, Mammon and repentance but also on Korean concepts of wandering "ancestor spirits" and "Ki," or "life energy."

She portrayed the Holy Spirit in terms of Kwan In, the enlightened one who delays her passage to nirvana so as to help others achieve enlightenment and who is popularly venerated in Korea as a goddess of compassion and wisdom.

Chung received a standing ovation. But as Jean Caffey Lyles reported in the weekly Christian Century, one Eastern Orthodox delegate noted, "There was passionate applause, but there was also passionate silence."

Leaders of Eastern Orthodox churches were distressed by what they considered an illegitimate blending of pagan and Christian elements. In a statement issued at the end of the meeting, they said, "Our tradition is rich in respect for local and national cultures, but we find it impossible to invoke the spirits of "earth, air, water and sea creature."'

Expressing "disquiet" at any dialogue with religions that might not be scrupulously true to "biblical faith," the statement asked whether the World Council had not strayed from its chief aim of restoring unity among Christians.

"Has the time come," the leaders asked, for the Orthodox "to review their relations with the World Council of Churches?"

Some will see from the Canberra episode only confirmation of the frequent charges that the World Council has traded its theological birthright for the pottage of whatever currents run strongest among Third World intellectuals.

Some delegates thought there was little chance that the Orthodox churches, which represent 160-million Christians, would withdraw from the world group. But the Rev. Joan Campbell, who headed the American office of the World Council until becoming the new secretary general of the National Council of Churches, said the possibility should be taken seriously.

Yet this clash at Canberra could be seen as an extremely healthy one. As Ms. Campbell said, it put on the table not only the question of adapting Christianity to local cultures but also the basic issues of what limits to diversity Christian unity demands and how those limits are set.

Compounding the drama in Canberra, Chung's presentation had been preceded by one from Patriarch Parthenios of Alexandria, Egypt. The patriarch's text was not at all stodgy, but it was read, lecture-like, by another Orthodox cleric because the Persian Gulf war had kept the patriarch at home. Thus the invidious contrast between the old and the new, between the bearded and black- garbed male hierarch and the youthful and white-robed female radical.

But the World Council of Churches remains the only place where a patriarch from one of the first great centers of Christianity and a feminist liberation theologian from a church less than a century old could not only be joint keynote speakers but also embrace the hope that, however long it takes, their successors will someday be united, sharing the same communion table both as recipients and as ordained celebrants.