Word: visser
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...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...
From the Y.M.C.A., Visser 't Hooft moved to the World's Student Christian Federation, and ten years later became General Secretary of the Provisional Committee that became the World Council of Churches at Amsterdam...
Swiss Theologian Karl Barth has had a vast influence on Visser 't Hooft. "Barth felt that the church had almost lost its soul in making adjustments to historical trends," he says. "He called the church again to be itself." He remembers that the "unofficial slogan" of the men who met at Edinburgh and Oxford in 1937 to launch the ecumenical movement was "Let the Church be the Church." And this, he says, "did not mean that the church should run away from the world. It did mean that the church was not merely an echo of trends...
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...
World War II had the unexpected effect of casting Visser 't Hooft in a new role-underground leader. Even before the war began, rescuing Jews and others from Hitler's Germany was one of his prime concerns. Karl Barth once told him of an imprisoned pastor Barth was especially worried about, and Wim remembered a beer-drinking session he had had in 1933 with a blackshirted Nazi who turned out to be Heinrich Himmler. So Churchman Visser 't Hooft wrote Nazi Himmler. recalling the incident, and succeeded in having the pastor released...