Word: hromadka
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...18th General Council of the World Presbyterian Alliance waited for the showdown. Even before the first session began, the delegates (representing 76 Reformed and Presbyterian church bodies with more than 45 million members) shifted their interest from theology to a theologian. In the limelight: Czechoslovakia's Dr. Joseph Hromadka, 70, wartime lecturer at Princeton, dean of Prague's Communist-controlled Amos Comenius Theological Faculty, a wheel in the World Council of Churches and a vice president of the Presbyterian Alliance. Hromadka has attended every postwar ecumenical congress, has raised serious problems about how Western Christians are to regard...
...elected the entire executive committee, including-despite objections-Communist-collaborating Dr. Josef Hromadka of Czechoslovakia...
...most experienced Protestant collaborators with a Communist regime, Czech Theologian Joseph L. Hromadka of Prague, called upon the World Council "to combat the petrified notions, prejudices, self-isolation and inner estrangement that prevail in both East and West." De-estrangement is already well under way: United Lutheran Franklin Clark Fry of New York announced that the Russian Orthodox Moscow Patriarchate was ready to arrange a conference some time next winter with representatives of the World Council...
...usual, there was no clear agreement on just what form that hope should take. Many churchmen, notably the Americans, emphasized "practical" action here and now. Said the World Presbyterian Alliance meeting at Princeton (where Hromadka spoke): "Strive to break down racial barriers . . . Promote understanding between classes . . . Provide an opportunity for every man ... to earn a livelihood . . ." Other churchmen, rallying round the eschatological view that sees the Christian hope at the end of the world and not in it, argued that Christianity's place was not primarily in political or ideological battles. Contemplating "the hydrogen and perhaps a cobalt bomb...
Altogether, Christianity could be seen as still a long way from the disintegration which Dr. Hromadka saw just around the corner. Before and since the Vandals sacked Hippo, Christianity survived many agonies. But the Vandals inside and outside the city in A.D. 1954 were a different breed from any who had come before. No Christian, 1,600 years after Saint Augustine's birth, could say with full confidence that the churches were winning the fight against them...