North American Conference Affirms Principles For New Social Order

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 108, 18 July 1941, Page 9

North American Conference Affirms Principles For New Social Order

SOME months ago we published a report from the American news-magazine "Time" on the Church of England Conference convened at Malvern by the Archbishop of York. From the same source we now reproduce the report on another church conference-this time at Toronto-which "Time" claims to have been even more important. Again, the subject under discussion was the new social order arising from the war.

HE most important church conference since World War II. beganand probably the most important until it ends-met at Toronto last month to consider the shape of things to come, says Time. Its consensus: (1) Hitler is fighting the war with an idea, (2) Christianity, to survive, must show the world it has a better idea, (3) this will require a drastically different social order in the post-war world, (4) the Church must offer some leadership toward a more constructive and more lasting peace than Versailles. The Church’s idea is, of course, Christ, but beyond that it seems, as interpreted, to have some sort of resemblance to the doctrines of Karl Marx-some sort of new Christian materialism for the under-dog. The delegates to this first North American Ecumenical (inter church) Conference represented every major Protestant and Orthodox communion in the Western Hemisphere, some 35 denominations in all. They passed no resolutions, came to no formal conclusions. But in their speeches and the reports of their discussion groups they affirmed ‘a sweeping set of principles which presuppose a new society as clearly as those adopted last winter by the Church of England’s great Malvern Conference.