Word: hooft
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Visser 't Hooft's chief reason for wanting the Russians is that the church in Russia needs all the outside support it can get, and that Russian Orthodoxy rounds out the representation of the World Council: the only major group now missing is Rome. He is not nervous about Christianity's ability to deal with the Russians face to face; instead he thinks that Christians should welcome all contact with them and try to penetrate their society in every possible way. Says he: "I have far less apprehension about what the Russians might do within the World...
Getting the Russians into the World Council drew from Visser 't Hooft perhaps the most brilliant single performance of his life-an illuminating example of how creeds are written. It took place in a Leningrad hotel, where he was breakfasting with an Orthodox delegation. At the time the constitutional definition of the World Council was: "A fellowship of churches which accept our Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour." The Russians complained that this definition overlooked the trinitarian basis of Christianity prized by Orthodox churches...
Visser 't Hooft recalled that Protestants had often voiced another complaint: the absence of any mention of Scripture. And he saw that he had a chance, by the right words, to stress the unifying elements of Christianity while diplomatically playing down differences. "So," he remembers, "I took the breakfast menu and wrote out a new formula." Last week in New Delhi the Council adopted Visser 't Hooft's breakfast-menu definition as the Council's new credo. It reads...
WILLEM Adolf Visser 't Hooft is to the World Council of Churches about what Dag Hammarskjold was to the U.N. As the Council's General Secretary, he builds church unity by accenting common beliefs, by deprecating differences, by shunning extravagant or unripe measures. Yet a quiet faith that all Christians, including Roman Catholics, must eventually unite gives his life a clear direction. It is a just barely permissible joke among his closest friends to call Visser 't Hooft "the Protestant Pope." He replies with a wintry "I'm not infallible"-which is a rueful recognition that...
...Family. He took his doctorate at the State University of Leiden with a dissertation on the background of the social gospel in the U.S. But he was not ordained because the Remonstrant Church, to which he belonged, stipulated that all ministers must be pastors, and young Yisser 't Hooft had been tapped by the late great U.S. ecumenist John R. Mott to become secretary of the Y.M.C.A. World's Alliance in Geneva. The Swiss city has been his headquarters ever since, and having since been ordained in the Swiss Reformed Church, he preaches every now and then...