Witness Seminar, 3 — Transcript

seminar brings together key players in what can now most certainly be called the “Religious Cold War”, to examine Christian responses either side of the East‐West divide. My name is Dianne Kirby. I am a Cold War scholar on the coordinating committee of the research project “Christian World Community and the Cold War”. I am joined today by three very distinguished Christian activists who also happen to be scholars of religion, history, politics and theology. Norman Hjelm, Charles West and Paul Mojzes. I am going to begin by asking each in turn briefly to introduce themselves after which I will begin with the first question intended to start their conversation about their Cold War as churchmen. Over to you Norman.
Norman Hjelm: I am Norman Hjelm, undoubtedly the person with the least experience or insight concerning this subject. I was for six years the Director of Communication and for a while Acting Deputy General Secretary of the Lutheran World Federation in Geneva and I retired as Director of the Department of Faith and Order for the National Council of Churches in this country. I am a member of this project’s Coordinating Committee and I am attempting to learn more and more.
Charles West: I am Charles West. My last job was Professor of Christian Ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary. Before that I was an Associate Director of the Ecumenical Institute Bossey of the World Council of Churches. I also wrote a dissertation which was published as Communism and the Theologians. The stimulus for this was two years in Berlin, primarily for contacts with church people in Communist East Germany. Before that I was a missionary in China, both before and after the Communists took control there. I should mention that I am an ecumenical Christian, a product of the Student Christian Movement. But I had to join a church so I was sent to the least self‐conscious most ecumenical denomination possible, the Presbyterians. I have never regretted it.

Paul Mojzes: My name is Paul Mojzes, I am a native of Yugoslavia. I came to this country in 1957 as a student and then decided to stay. I am a United Methodist but I am also an ecumenical Christian. One of the ways in which I express my ecumenism is that for the last thirty or so years, forty years actually, I have been teaching religious studies at a Roman Catholic college in suburban Philadelphia named Rosemont College. I have also been very active in the same organization in which you [Charles West] have been active. Both of us were Presidents of Christians Associated for Relationships with Eastern Europe whose primary task indeed was, as the name indicates, to build these contacts and bridges between Christians in the United States and also in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Dianne Kirby: Let me kick us off with the first question. The concept behind the Witness Seminar was to explore the Cold War challenge to the Christian churches. However, what I am discovering from the churchmen (and women), so far, encountered, is that in fact, you challenged the Cold War. As Paul Oestreicher1 stated in the very first witness seminar2 his enemy was the Cold War. Is that a sentiment that you can identify with?
Charles West: Yes and no. Yes in the sense that we are all Christians and we were concerned with the witness to God and Jesus Christ on both sides of the iron curtain. That was our primary interest. That transcended, although it was relevant to, all politics. We did not like the Cold War. Nobody did. But the fact was that there was a nuclear standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States and we had to live and deal with that. So we had to work, countering ideologies and seeking justice on both sides of the iron curtain.
Paul Mojzes: Yes, the Cold War was actually a reality which we could not negate.
Charles West: That’s right.
Paul Mojzes: But we could try to see if we could lessen some of the tensions. Some of the tensions were artificially being pumped up by cold warriors on both sides of the big divide.
There was a relatively small but somewhat influential group of us who were trying to see if we 1

Canon Dr Paul Oestreicher was Secretary of the British Council of Churches’ East-West Relations

Advisory Committee. For many years Vice-President of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), in the 1960s he led the British delegation to the Christian Peace Conference in Prague before being forced to resign in 1968 at Soviet insistence.
2

Witness seminar one participants: Michael Bourdeaux, John Arnold, Xenia Dennen, Paul Oestreicher; Werner Kraetschell.
Chair: Dianne Kirby (November 29, 2012, London) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGJRZb1DPsA

can first of all maintain the contacts between Christians on both sides of the iron curtain that were being artificially increased by the day so that the wall was not only in Berlin, the wall was, indeed, along the entire divide between east and west and some of us for various reasons had a strong interest in keeping relationships alive and trying also to interpret what was going on, on the other side of the iron curtain to Christians in our own backyard because we ourselves were fairly well divided in terms of our attitudes toward the Cold War. There were among Christians in the US, and I am sure in other Western European countries, who were cold warriors who really were eager to see if their actions could bring about a demise not only of the system but actually often times there was the danger that a nuclear war could break out and civilization as we know it would have been destroyed. So we were trying to contribute to peace making wherever that was possible.
Charles West: As I saw the ministry of “Christians Associated for Relationships with Eastern Europe” (CAREE) in which we were both involved, we were trying to find another way of obedience to God than the fellow travelers on one side who felt that the Soviet Union was the great future and we had to go along with it, and the other side who felt that the only true Christians behind the iron curtain were in the resistance and were therefore the persecuted.
We were trying to help the churches in Eastern Europe to bear their witness and to strengthen their faith and through contacts, presence and prayer. I have to bring in myself as an example.
We spent two years, my wife and I, and incidentally two children, in Berlin primarily for contacts with East Germans. We were too young really to be official representatives; we were just fraternal workers. But they regarded us in the East as witnesses and examples of the Ökumene, as they called it, as symbols of the churches in the World Council of Churches from which we came, and which supported them with their prayers, fellowship, and when possible with funds.
Dianne Kirby: What date was this Charles?
Charles West: This was 1951 to 1953.
Dianne Kirby: So this was actually a very hot part of the Cold War because the Korean War is the backdrop.
Charles West: Exactly, exactly. Yes. I was invited by a German pastor who was trusted on both sides, to eat lunch with him in the East Berlin. He took me to a restaurant where there were many eastern government officials. He said it really did not make any difference, did it, which side attacked first in the Korean War. I said, on the contrary, that the World Council of Churches’ and therefore my opposition to the North Korean invasion was based on who attacked first. I lost it completely when I raised my voice because all of the East German

government officials were listening. With my American accent, I should have kept quiet. I said the wrong things.
Dianne Kirby: Can I just put a historical context into this because this period is very important.
At the inaugural Assembly of the World Council of Churches in August 1948 in Amsterdam.
(Willem) Visser ’t Hooft, who was the general secretary, said that the assembly was not going to allow itself to be instrumentalized by either East or West. (This is reflected in the report of Section III on Church and Society, where the Assembly was critical of both capitalism and communism, and developed a concept of “responsible society” which has been called a “third way”). However, in 1950 at the outbreak of the Korean War, the World Council of Churches did support the UN action. So a divisive factor comes in at the very beginning because the Chinese President actually then resigned his post; so the Cold War conflict, after that courageous stance in 1948, is brought into the ecumenical movement by Korea despite those transcendent ideals.
So your reaction isn’t unusual.
Charles West: No. There were seven honorary presidents elected at Amsterdam, representing the geographical and confessional spread of the ecumenical movement. One of them, T.C.
Chao of Yenching University in China, resigned from his presidency because of the action of the World Council of Churches in regard to the invasion of Korea.
Dianne Kirby: So I think what is important is that you do see the Cold War in the very first two or three years of the ecumenical movement’s existence becoming a divisive factor. And this is why your challenge to that decision is so critical, is so important.
Charles West: The World Council of Churches itself was challenging the concept of cold war, but recognizing it as a fact. The basis of the Central Committee’s decision in 1951 was precisely rejection of the Soviet war effort to try to conquer Korea. That was the reason they backed the UN action.
Dianne Kirby: So as a young man in East Germany, you with your wife, you felt inclined to the American side but at the same you recognized the depth of Christian sentiment that existed.
Charles West: I was provoked. I shouldn’t have responded that way in that set‐up. I should have recognized that I had to bear a Christian witness to these communist officials who were sitting in the restaurant, not an American position.
Paul Mojzes: But often times we were put into these difficult positions to decide when one should be diplomatic and watch out how one says things less one makes things worse for Christians over there but also for the relationship between east and west. And then there was also the need at times to speak boldly the truth to power, and I think our role often times, Charles you know that very well, in the Christian Peace Conference was we could say things as

Americans at those fora that Eastern Europeans were dying to say but did not dare to say because it would have ended their careers and their work and churches would be closed. And there were times, by the way, when we felt that we should quit because of some incidents like, for instance, the invasion of the Soviet Bloc into Czechoslovakia and terminating the Prague Spring. And, indeed, a lot of western groups did terminate their relationships at that time and we (in the U.S.) struggled mightily in order to justify our staying with the process because we were being asked by Christians privately, they could never say that in public, but privately they would approach us and say, “please don’t leave because your presence here is terribly important for us to be able to have a more balanced discussion about these issues.” Charles West: Where can I start to comment on this? Let me start with Károly Tóth, who was finally a Bishop of the Reformed Church in Hungary and the Reformed Church in Hungary is the only reformed church in the world that has bishops. But earlier he was the Ecumenical Secretary of the Hungarian Council of Churches and as such he was also involved in the Christian Peace Conference. And he drew me aside in Nairobi, Kenya, at the World Alliance of Reformed Churches meeting. (We could speak freely; no one was spying on us.) “You know, you are outside both of our spheres of influence.” And he said this after the Christian Peace Conference condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. But the next year when it met it was completely taken over by the Russian Orthodox and so on and they dismissed the General Secretary who was Czech (Jan Ondra) and Josef Hromádka, (the founder of the Christian Peace Conference), resigned from the presidency of the CPC (with a bitter letter), and then died three months later, I think of a broken heart. It was his great vision (of a free Christian witness helping to form a revolutionary society, destroyed). But when I am mentioning Károly Tóth it was two years later, it was 1970 and he said “I’ve been asked to be General Secretary of the Christian Peace Conference”. I gave him a whole lot of reasons why it was impossible. The CPC had lost all credibility in the last two years, and therefore, it couldn’t be a basis of dialogue anymore. (We talked for an hour.) And he said, “You know, you have told me your reasons are reasons why I shouldn’t take the position.”You know he was right because he said, “( As long as I am there) I can invite western participation in meetings of the Christian Peace Conference in Eastern Europe and you can say whatever you want to.” And he was good as his word. I was suspicious of him early, but I came to trust him.
Dianne Kirby: Would it be possible to go back and have you talk about the beginning of the Christian Peace Conference? Talk about Hromadka, the inspiration behind it, the vision? But I think what’s important for people in the West to understand is that from the western perspective, the political perspective, the Christian Peace Conference was simply a Communist front and the decision on your part as American churchmen, to have, if you will, an American branch (would appear suspect). I am very interested in that step because at that time in 1964,

again, still a very hot Cold War, hence I am sure it would have been a decision that was not widely understood, shall we say.
Charles West: I have got to talk about Josef Hromádka. Josef Hromádka was a Czech theologian. He had escaped from Czechoslovakia just before Hitler took it over and came to Princeton Seminary where he was from 1938‐1947. Nine years. Then he decided to go back to Czechoslovakia and take his place there even though there was the threat of communist takeover, which happened a year after he arrived. He accepted the coup d’etat by the communists. He incidentally was friends with many of the communist leaders who took over and he thought, this is where we are called to be Christians, and I know these communists, I know their heart is in many cases in the right place. They had to obey the Soviet Union really.
But when the Soviet Union organized the World Peace Council, and tried to bring the churches into it, Hromádka said, you will get nowhere with that. The churches will say they will give assent but they won’t participate really. So let me organize a Christian Peace Conference and you can have your people in there. And the Christian Peace Conference, was, in his mind an accommodation to the Soviet line because all of its resolutions produced the Soviet idea of peace. But it was also a place of dialogue. I was at the 1964 assembly of the CPC, and Hromádka came along and clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Charles, I hope you are talking with many people.” That was his real agenda, to get people talking, and (especially) to get easterners talking with westerners. So he was hoping to influence, and he thought he had influenced, the communists in (the Prague Spring of) 1968. The Prague Spring was to a large extent his success and at the same time he was trying to facilitate a dialogue between East and West.
Norman Hjelm: Would you go back twenty years before that, back to Amsterdam and the celebrated encounter between Hromádka and John Foster Dulles.
Charles West: Yes.
Norman Hjelm: Reflect on that a little bit.
Charles West: Where you there?
Norman Hjelm: No, No. My first time was 1952 at the Evanston Assembly of the World Council of Churches.
Paul Mojzes: I thought that Joseph Hromádka and John Foster Dulles‘ conflict was in Evanston, Illinois?
Dianne Kirby: No, it was Amsterdam, 1948.
Charles West: I was at Evanston.

Norman Hjelm: So was I.
Charles West: Good. Yes, those two speeches should be read now in the light of the failure of communism (and the confusion of capitalism today). In 1948, the third section of the report of the Assembly, developed the idea of a “responsible society” (as a Christian response and criticism of both). They condemned both laissez faire capitalism and communism and gave the reasons why. This was an echo of what Visser ‘t Hooft had to say about that and that was the concept of responsible society. (It) was an effort to take account of those criticisms of both sides, to project a more just society, and to influence both sides in that direction.
Norman Hjelm: We are inclined to understand the encounter between Hromádka and Dulles in terms of Dulles’ later career more than who he was in 1948. He was there not as the American Secretary of the State or anything like that.
Charles West: No, no, no.
Norman Hjelm: He was a Presbyterian layman.
Charles West: That’s right.
Norman Hjelm: Of considerable conviction and importance.
Charles West: And a representative of the Federal Council of Churches.
Norman Hjelm: Exactly. Yes.
Dianne Kirby: But he also… he did work with the Truman administration and in that period Harry Truman was trying to construct an international anticommunist religious front. He’d already had an exchange of letters with Pius XII and he made an approach to Visser ‘t Hooft to bring the World Council of Churches into the front. And then afterwards, in 1949, he flew the new ecumenical patriarch Athenagoras to Istanbul in his presidential plane. So Dulles was aware that the Americans (the Truman administration) did want to use religion and, obviously, were aware from World War ll that Stalin also, for his own domestic and international reasons, wanted to use religion. And I think what is important about 1948 is that there was an awareness on the part of those participating churches that each side in the Cold War wanted to instrumentalize them and this had to be resisted. This undermined, if you will, their witness.
So, from the very start, they take that position. But it is a very hard position as we mentioned with Korea, and as you mentioned from your personal experience, to sustain. So, by 1964, by which time the Cold War is well entrenched, I think it’s very significant that you set up the organization, that you do set up (CAREE) which is bound to be a suspect organization to many ordinary Americans and certainly fellow Christians. So perhaps you can talk about what made you take that stand? Because I’ve looked at your archives and there were all sorts of

difficulties, including finding the money to run what would be seen by many as something that is in collaboration with a communist front. So, perhaps you could, you could you know, talk to us about that time in 1964 when you made, if you will, your own courageous stand against the Cold War.
Charles West: A word about our reaction to the Soviet invasion and the taking over of the Christian Peace Conference by the Russian Orthodox and all of their satellite people in 1969.
We in the United States were always a Committee for the Christian Peace Conference not of the Christian Peace Conference, so that we did not have to follow their line. We still had a member of the Working Committee, Harold Row, who was of the Church of the Brethren, of blessed memory. He tried hard to modify the Soviet control over the Christian Peace Conference. We even invited the Polish interim General Secretary, Janusz Makowski, to our annual meeting. So we tried to influence them, but finally we realized two things: First, we could not allow a fellow traveling group to be organized on our left; and second, there were other possibilities of relationships with Eastern Europe which we could explore. So we then became Christians Associated for Relationships with Eastern Europe. For a long time we had as a subtitle: “and for relations with the Christian Peace Conference” Paul Mojzes: An Ecumenical Organization for Peace and Justice and for Relationships . . .
something like that.
Charles West: I think we had the Christian Peace Conference in there?
Paul Mojzes: Oh yes, and for relationship with the Christian Peace Conference.
Charles West: That’s right.
Paul Mojzes: It was a long, cumbersome title. That was the first year [1968] when I started relating to the organization and I remember very well the very painful discussion when this Polish Catholic layman had become temporarily the Secretary of the Christian Peace Conference. Not the president, Metropolitan Nikodim was the president and… and it was a very difficult struggle that we had, should we actually disband. Should we just say ok that’s the end, we cannot work with these folks any longer. It’s too clear that we really don’t have that much of an influence and then we ended up finding that an in between position (was possible) where we were no longer that closely associated with CPC but on the other hand we also wanted to explore all kinds of other channels, which we did actually. We had found then this is when we became interested in sort of the Christian Marxist dialogue. This is when we tried to discover new avenues for peace relationships through the Vienna Group of Rudolf Weiler and Vladimir Bruskov and we started having a series of east‐west peace dialogues that were….
Charles West: What was his Weiler’s organization?

Paul Mojzes: It was called the Peace Research Center of the Catholic Theological Faculty at the University of Vienna and he was the social ethicist of that group and he initiated a very interesting kind of a contact with an International Peace Institute which was clearly a Soviet front agency situated in Vienna also because Vienna was a city like Berlin divided into four zones and the Soviets got the right to have their institutions present in Vienna and….
Charles West: At the time it was the capital of an independent Austria.
Paul Mojzes: Yes. Indeed. So you know we diversified our contacts and became interested in other contacts and, of course, in the meantime, by the way, the political situation tended to improve so the travel to Eastern Europe was no longer solely possible through an invitation by the Russian Orthodox Church or by CPC. We were then able to travel also sort of in our own ways and make contacts not only with the official representatives of the churches but also the dissidents. And so we were able to play a fairly nuanced role which, of course, was not understood and appreciated by those people on the right of us who were critical of us and basically assumed that we were stooges in the hands of the KGB and related agencies. Of course, in the east they thought that we were CIA and in the west they thought that we were KGB agents. And we were neither.
Charles West: I think that you and I both have a file in the Stasi (and the KGB) and in the CIA.
Paul Mojzes: Probably, probably. I have never been interested enough to check.
Charles West: No. Nor I.
Dianne Kirby: One of the points that was made by John Arnold, the former Dean of Durham involved in the British side, if you will, on the East‐West Relations Committee… one of the points he made about the importance of these sorts of witness seminars is that very often these intelligence files either side of the East‐West divide have been used for malicious reasons, to slander people and their actions, to sort of support a construct of history that suits the present political order, if you will. So for instance he was very concerned about the fact that prior to the end of the Cold War everybody dismissed everything that came out of Eastern Europe. Whereas since the Cold War they tend to believe everything that comes out. But he feels the archives are not reliable and, you know, the importance of this sort of conversation in particular is very important if you want to identify who were the good communists, the noble communists, particularly in Christian circles. So again, in the first witness seminar Paul Oestreicher talked about Nikodim and he talked about the “great” Nikodim. And I am just wondering, because this had to be a challenge for you dealing with Christians from (the Soviet bloc), when you knew that many of them had their instructions before they went to various conferences or one of the meetings being held by the communist authorities, how did you discern who you could trust?

Charles West: I have to talk about Nikodim in this regard. I first met him when he came to the Ecumenical Institute, Bossey, and he was a jolly fellow. He liked his wine and he was just an ebullient kind of guy. That was in the late 1950s I think. When the National Council of Churches organized the delegation to visit at the invitation of the Russian Churches, which meant the Russian Orthodox Church really primarily and Nikodim as head of its foreign office, the question was how far we could trust him. We (the National Council) had not trusted Nikolai, (his predecessor), who died in 1958 or 1959. We just didn’t trust him but the question was should we trust Nikodim. We were in his hands. I remember Eugene Carson Blake who was then Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church… Wait a minute… was he already General Secretary of the World Council of Churches?
Norman Hjelm: No, I don’t think so.
Charles West: No, no. He came later. He said, “You know… I trust that man. I see him enthusiastically and deeply participate in the liturgy. He talks like a man of the church. That is where his heart is. His heart is in the Church.” Then in 1972 we sent another National Council of Churches delegation to the Soviet Union, but this was more substantive. We had papers, they had papers, and so on. And what we said was that we wanted to talk to Marxist philosophers in the Soviet Union. We made this request known to Archbishop Yuvenaliy who was a fairly young man, younger than us. He was flustered, he wasn’t sure about that, but he said “I’ll ask”. But Nikodim said: “I’ll organize it,” and he did. Then he sat there through the whole session where we engaged in controversy with Marxist philosophers and grinned the whole time. These were things they would like to say but they couldn’t.
Paul Mojzes: Could not. Right. Right, right. Yes.
Dianne Kirby: Going back again to something that Paul Oestreicher talked about. He said there were scoundrels, in certain churches there were scoundrels, but he said you had to love them as well because at the end of the day through their activities in the Christian sphere they were preserving the faith. Still he found it very hard but had to love them. But I am still interested in how do you discern who were the scoundrels? Who put politics or their careers first and foremost? And who were more genuine? And certainly I think that point that you made about the liturgy is significant. The Archbishop of York, (Cyril Forster Garbett, 1942‐55), when he went to the Soviet Union during World War ll and watched the patriarch and the metropolitans, exactly as you said, performing the liturgy, felt afterwards, “These are Christians. And it’s as Christians that I can trust them.” So, what were the measures you would choose to decide who can you trust?
Norman Hjelm: Well some people choose I think the wrong measures. I have a very close friend whom some of you know in the Slovak Republic, Julius Filo. He’s been identified in an

American Book as a fellow traveler. He was my colleague in Geneva. He became Bishop of the Lutheran Church in the Slovak Republic and he is now a professor at the Comenius University of Bratislava. And he said to me that in a certain way “We were all collaborators.” I discussed this with him and gave him the book. It was a Harvard Professor who identified him as a collaborator. And he said the only piece of evidence they have is that “Every month I had to report to the authorities in Bratislava and I had to get their permission to join the staff of the Lutheran World Federation in Geneva.” And by that token, he said, we were all fellow travelers because you couldn’t be a citizen of the country without reporting. And that criteria is not going to tell you who the scoundrels were.
Paul Mojzes: No. No.
Norman Hjelm: Anymore than it tells you who the really faithful people were.
Paul Mojzes: For instance… his predecessor as a bishop, Jan Michalko … I would put him in the category of a fellow traveler. Julius Filo I would not.
Norman Hjelm: No I would not.
Charles West: Yes Paul Mojzes: Here’s how I personally reacted… I think… I think some of it came to me due to where I grew up. I grew up in the communist country. Not as severe a form of communism as in the Warsaw Pact group of communist countries. But growing up there one developed a kind of a sense for where people stand. Now, of course, it means that you got to know them. You got to talk to them and before too long one sensed where they were kind of standing. Another thing that was very important is to read up on what was happening in those countries. You could tell because the communist countries differed tremendously one from the other.
Charles West: Yes. Yes.
Paul Mojzes: And the problem that was taking place in the West was that often times they looked at the whole group as if they were all like, let’s say, in the Soviet Union. Or in Bulgaria, let’s say, which was one of the more severely oppressive countries. Whereas in other countries, like Poland and like certain times in Czechoslovakia [it was different]. Czechoslovakia went in and out of the oppressive and the more permissive [category] and so on. I think one could get a fairly good sense; my advantage, by the way, as being an American from Eastern Europe was that people could quickly say, “you know how it is. We have to say publicly this and that. But you can see through what we are saying. We don’t have the full freedom to speak up exactly how we feel.” But privately, often times, we would sit down with people and they would say, “well you know… you know how it is, you know.” And we did. By the way, from

that perspective I didn’t trust Nikodim that much. I had a more… not negative. I wouldn’t say negative. I think he was a victim of his time. There was only… he probably did the right thing in the context of the society in which he lived. Probably… perhaps the only really good thing that he was able to do. All the other alternatives that were in front of him would have been a lot worse for the church then what he had selected to do. So from that perspective I understand where he was. But on the other hand he did become in some way a tool for being manipulated by his government. And sometimes, by the way, our own leaders here in the United States… church leaders… were also somewhat manipulated by the [our] system.
Norman Hjelm: One of the great gifts of the modern ecumenical movement was surely the fact that there was contact and communication and consequently trust and knowledge of each other. In a sense there were no predecessor organizations and we scarcely knew Christians from other parts of the world. The ecumenical movement has brought us together. That didn’t make us infallible in our judgments by any means but it gave possibilities… We could say to our government, for example, “You know, not all Russians are that way because we in the church know something different.” We could say that with confidence even though some in the church were, as you put it before, scoundrels. Well… you go ahead.
Charles West: Yes. Orthodox are different from Protestants… and their concept of the church and its relationship to the culture of the nation, and therefore to the government, is different. I came home from Russia in 1962 impressed with the St. Sergius cell in the Trinity Monastery in Zagorsk, where there was a series of pictures around the wall. The first was him [St. Sergius] going out into the wilderness and praying. The next was the animals coming to make friends with him. The third was his hut with those of a few monks who had joined him in the wilderness. The fourth picture was a whole Monastery that had grown up. Finally as one went around the room, the last picture was the Grand Duke of Russia coming to him with all his army to the Trinity Monastery to receive the blessing of Saint Sergius before its battle with the Mongols. That is their concept. The Orthodox Church embraces the whole world and all history.
Paul Mojzes: Yes.
Charles West: In their liturgy, they go through the whole history from creation to the final consummation of all things in Christ. And they say we are the reality of Russia, including the Communists. But what of Russia today? What is their relationship?
Dianne Kirby: One of the things that interested me looking at the CAREE files was this question of understanding. I can see from the correspondence that people are coming to understand that they don’t understand and that the other side don’t understand either. In other words, you are beginning to realize that what you mean by different things, in terms theological in

church circles, as well as politically, are different to one another. So in a way do you think the context of the Cold War actually helped you get a deeper understanding of your Christian fellows from other faiths behind the Iron Curtain?
Paul Mojzes: Yes… well, you know that we were an ecumenical organization. I mean truly ecumenical. Almost all of us were members of different churches. Starting with Mennonites and the Church of the Brethren from peace church tradition all the way to Episcopalian and Roman Catholics … and actually Orthodox, not many Orthodox, but you know there were people like Leonid Kishkovsky who were Orthodox participants in that process. And it’s interesting that our denominational differences never interfered in our relationship. We lived ecumenism. We were as if we were really one single church body in a way.
Charles West: Yes.
Paul Mojzes: And we worshiped together before our meetings, we prayed, we did discuss, sometimes we had fairly lively differences of opinion… how to approach things and so on. But we worked very well and we did have usually some churches on that side of the divide who were members of our own denominations. So, like, if you were Lutheran and there were Lutheran Churches in the east and you were Presbyterian and there were Reformed (Presbyterian) Churches in the East or you were Methodist and there were Methodist Churches in the East… so were able to . . .
Charles West: And Orthodox.
Paul Mojzes: And Orthodox and so we were able to work with our… with a people who were members of our own church communities and have something in common right then and there and understand each other… we had this ability to figure out how this works and then we thought that our role was basically twofold in CAREE, as I understand it. One of them was to keep the channels of communication open and to present our witness as Christians from a different part of the world than theirs. Right? And then on the other hand we always had this awareness that many people in our own country had no understanding and no appreciation of what was going on on the other side. There was an automatic position of animosity. You know and were willing to almost go like to a nuclear war in order to show the supremacy of our way of life and so on. And then we started… we understood that we had a function also of disseminating information, right… that’s when we started publishing first the “Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe,” then later on that got transfigured into “Religion in Eastern Europe.” We started publishing books and so on by which we were hoping to communicate to different people who were increasingly traveling to Eastern Europe. To be able to go knowing what was going on… you [speaking to Norman Hjelm] told me earlier before we started this discussion that you went to Geneva really quite innocent of what was going on in

Eastern Europe and that it was very helpful to you when people like that German… tell us that story, that’s a very good story, I think, of how you got to Geneva and . . .
Norman Hjelm: Well, I came to Geneva in 1985. Let me tell you two stories from my experience. An Oberkirchenrat from Stuttgart was on my commission and he came especially to Geneva to have lunch with me. The only item on his agenda was to try to get me to understand the German Lutheran Churches, which I certainly didn’t understand at all. But more interestingly, that same year ‐‐ I had been in Geneva only two or three months and I really had had no international experience. I began to travel a fair amount, but in an executive position.
And I went to a meeting in Budapest of about a half a dozen people who were responsible for communication in ecumenical and church organizations. Metropolitan Pitirim was there from Moscow along with about half a dozen others and we met with the Minister for Religious Affairs of the Hungarian Communist Government. He was most gracious and we were in a beautiful room and … Charles West: What year was this?
Norman Hjelm: 1985. He asked us to introduce ourselves. He knew everybody but when he came to me and I said my name, he stopped me right away and said he wanted to welcome me to his country and to this group and he also said, “I want you also to know that we know everything about you.” Now the Lutheran World Federation had had its assembly in Budapest in 1984 and I was elected at the assembly to my position as LWF Director of Communication but I was not myself at that assembly which was the first such ecumenical event held behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. Evidently when I was elected the Hungarian government investigated me. And they quite properly said “We know everything about you.” I just asked myself what in the world have I gotten into. I had been in my job about two months. That also taught me some realities about circumstances in other parts of the world that I was totally unfamiliar with.
Charles West: A question to you about that assembly. It was in Budapest in the communist period in 1985? Right?
Norman Hjelm: 1984.
Charles West: 84. What was your reaction to the election of a Lutheran Bishop from Hungary… I forgot his name… Norman Hjelm: Zoltán Káldy.
Charles West: Yes… as President of the Lutheran World Federation. That was much criticized.
What is your take on that?

Norman Hjelm: Well, it was an enormous struggle. I wasn’t at the assembly but I did get to know Bishop Káldy. The tradition since 1947 at every assembly of the Lutheran World Federation was that someone from the host church or the host country was elected president.
So you had Anders Nygren elected to be the first president in 1947 in Sweden. And Franklin Clark Fry was president at the Minneapolis Assembly in 1957. In 1984 the assembly was in Budapest. Káldy’s history was well known because Lutherans since the 1950s were very much aware of Bishop [Lajos] Ordass… Charles West: Yes.
Norman Hjelm: … who had been bishop of the Lutheran Church in Hungary and was placed under house arrest two different times by the Communist government. And Káldy had come in as bishop of the Church when Ordass was under house arrest and Kaldy was perceived to split the Church psychologically if not administratively. And Káldy was regarded by many really as a fellow traveler. He was a member of the Parliament of Hungary although that was regarded by some as an honorific thing for a Bishop of the Church.
Paul Mojzes: All the Bishops automatically… Norman Hjelm: … became members of Parliament .
Charles West: Ex‐officio in a sort of sense.
Norman Hjelm: And the election (at the Budapest Assembly of the LWF) was bitter. It was the first contested election in the history of the Federation. A woman from Denmark (Bodil Søling) was the primary candidate against Káldy. There was an incident at the Assembly associated with a dissident, a Lutheran Pastor named Zoltán Dóka. And you may know more about this (Charles) than I do, but he tried to get the Assembly to take a stand against Káldy and the leadership of the host church, the Lutheran Church of Hungary. The government, of course, was behind Káldy and the Assembly could never have been held without the total approval of the government.
Charles West: Of course.
Norman Hjelm: And a person like one of the leaders in our Cold War study, Risto Lehtonen (from Finland) was the LWF executive most heavily involved in negotiations with the government. (Risto discovered afterwards that the government had a code name for him coming in from Geneva to Budapest.) In spite of the controversy, Káldy was elected. I met him a couple of times over the next two years but he died shortly thereafter. He had a stroke in the Zurich airport flying back to Budapest from Geneva. So we will never know what the political consequences of his presidency might have been. The German Vice President, Johannes

Hanselmann became president following Káldy’s death. But the story of the Hungarian Lutheran Church between the period of Ordass and Káldy is still going on. It’s not a united church at this point.
Paul Mojzes: There is a lot of debate.
Norman Hjelm: There is debate, controversy, enmity within that church, going back to the period when the primary question was between being a member church of an international communion like the Lutheran World Federation and the role of the Communist government in connection with that membership.
Dianne Kirby: So this is a legacy of the Cold War?
Norman Hjelm: Yes indeed. They have been solved much easier in some countries than in others and Hungary is not a good story and I understand it is [also] not a good story for the Reformed Church.
Charles West: That is right. You are largely [also] describing the conflict in the Reformed Church.
Paul Mojzes: Yes.
Dianne Kirby: I think it is very interesting what you are saying about the government knowing “everything there was to know” about you in 1985 which was in the final years of the Cold War because clearly the Communist authorities throughout the Cold War saw religion as very important, particularly, as the archival evidence shows, that they did feel that the American churches, in particular, were very important politically. That they could have influence politically. So in a way it makes sense that they would want to know who the churchmen, particularly the churchmen who were interested in and coming to Eastern Europe, because what they would hope obviously, is that you would influence a more benign policy toward them back at home, that you would (facilitate better) understanding.
Norman Hjelm: This is one of the hard lessons that I learned. I never had any connection with the Christian Peace Conference. I knew about it. I was not involved. It was startling to me when I came to Geneva and the Lutheran World Federation to realize how seriously governments behind the Iron Curtain took the churches, ecumenical bodies, and confessional bodies. It was inconceivable to me as an American that there should be a Ministers for Religious Affairs as there were in virtually all of the countries.
Charles West: Yes. Not in the West.

Norman Hjelm: Not in the West. Who takes church seriously in the West? That was sort of the attitude that I had and that was a great learning. I had no other experiences and maybe this would add a little dimension to this conversation. We have spoken only about the East/West in terms of Europe and the Soviet Union and the United States, but the global character of the Cold War and how it affected the Third World came to me most directly in Ethiopia where beginning in the 1980s during the time of the first of the more recent famines, the Lutheran Church in Ethiopia, the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus, became the fastest growing Lutheran Church in the world, it might still be for all I know. There are over ten million Lutherans in Ethiopia. The Lutheran World Federation, with financial support largely from Sweden and the United States, established in Ethiopia in the 1950s the most powerful radio station in all of Africa with about twenty studios. Its signal went all the way to Hong Kong. It was called “Radio Voice of the Gospel” and in 1976 or 1977 when Mengistu became the Communist leader of Ethiopia, that station suddenly became the “Voice of Revolutionary Ethiopia,” The Communists just took it over and one of my jobs, more than ten years later, was to negotiate with the Communist government a compensation claim with that government. It was an extraordinary experience for me personally in that I was the first Westerner to return to the radio station. It was a mess. They had destroyed perhaps the greatest collection of tapes of indigenous African music that had existed in the world … smashed to pieces. But much of what the Communists knew about the Lutheran Federation they learned from East Germany. My department was responsible for the German Language News Service that went to East Germany as well as West Germany, but before it could be distributed in East Germany it had to be reviewed by the authorities and sometimes they would not allow news releases to be distributed to the churches. One issue of the News Service I was responsible for ‐‐ although I didn’t know what was going on ‐‐ had criticized human rights abuses in Ethiopia under Mengitsu. It was just before the Lutheran World Federation had a Council meeting in Addis Ababa and the Ethiopian government tried really to get us out of holding that meeting. They learned about it from East Germany where the Germans reviewed the German language edition. The LWF General Secretary called into his office both myself and the German Language editor and read the riot act to us for not knowing the Communist world. That world was very inter‐related. A power like East Germany made sure that satellite countries knew what was relevant for them.
Charles West: In connection with Ethiopia, I have quite a different story, of the Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, Paulos. He came to Princeton Seminary as a simple Ethiopian Priest, Gebre Yohannes, to study for a Ph.D. in church history. He went back to Ethiopia before he finished to become a Bishop.
Norman Hjelm: He became the Archbishop of… what do they call it?

Charles West: That was later. When the Communists under Mengistu overthrew the Emperor, Bishop Paulos was imprisoned with his fellow bishops, and a new hierarchy was established.
The question was how we would get him out. Princeton Seminary was involved. He had to finish his doctorate. That was the basis of our appeal. But influence in the Communist world was needed. So President of the Seminary James McCord, who was also at the time President of the World Alliance of Reformed Chuches, knew Bishop Tóth in Budapest, Hungary. He asked Tóth if he could use his influence through the Christian Peace Conference to get Bishop Paulos out of prison. What arguments Tóth used I don’t know. He probably said it was contrary to their interests to have this man in prison. In any case Bishop Paulos was released from prison and sent to Budapest. From there he came back here and completed his doctorate, and eventually went back to become the Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
Norman Hjelm: I didn’t know that story. I had dinner with him the night before he flew back to Addis Ababa to become Patriarch and he took my name and address and said, “If something bad happens I am going to get in touch with you.” I never heard from him again.
Charles West: Laughter.
Norman Hjelm: He died just a year or so ago.
Charles West: He died last year.
Dianne Kirby: That is such… quite an amazing story in showing different dimensions of religion and the Cold War globally, particularly with the communist dimension. This might be a good time to stop for lunch.

Afternoon session
Dianne Kirby: The first half of our conversation focused very much on Christian‐Christian relations and I know that you have all engaged and have written about Christian‐Marxist dialogue; so perhaps we could give that some consideration because that was a very crucial element of the Christian experience of the Cold War. And for instance, Charles, I know that this relates very much to your time in Berlin, and I know that you have written extensively about your encounter with Marxism as being a vital part of your approach to Christianity.
Charles West: Well, first of all, I deepened my faith and I gained a broader perspective of Christian‐Marxist relations through my experience in East Germany. As an exhibit, let me quote

my friend and mentor, Johannes Hamel. My wife and I translated some of his writings, and published them in a book, A Christian in East Germany (1960). Before we met him, we received a general letter of his entitled, “God’s Beloved East Zone”. As to what he meant by that, let me quote him, in our translation.
“Let me say it clearly to start with. It is a good and precious thing to preach here in the East that Jesus Christ alone is Lord and Savior who refreshes the weary and the suffering, that he has found the lost and strayed and that no one can tear them from his hand or take from them the peace which the almighty Father gives. What could be better for a man or a woman, what could be more necessary or healthy, than to be present where this message goes forth, to hear it, to believe it, obey it and bear witness to it?”(p.30).
That was his affirmation of Christian presence in communist society. There were dangers and problems and he gave examples in his book. Some of them I experienced myself. First of all there is the exercise of freedom. A pastor once asked a member, “Why do you go to Church?” He replied, “First, I am part of the community of trusted friends. Second, I hear a free word spoken and it makes me free. The freedom the gospel gives was the central reality.” Another example: Hamel describes a girl student who was a member of his Christian Student Community. She was told that unless she joined the Free German Youth (which was a communist mass organization) that she could not graduate and she could not pursue further studies. Out of consideration for her family and her career, she joined it, and confessed to the pastor that she was trying, but having trouble, to juggle her faith with membership. Finally she decided she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t be these two persons in that situation so she went to the communist authorities and the Free German Youth authorities and told them she was leaving. And they said “What? You are within weeks of examinations, what are you going to do?” And she replied, “Because I was afraid for myself, I joined you. Now that I am free from myself I am leaving.” The interesting thing that happened was that the communist officials were so impressed that they said to her, “Can’t you decide to be a Marxist and join us. We need people like you.” Freedom in Christ was the issue, in an unfree society.
The second was the question of truth. I remember hearing a pastor say that his parishioner had said that his son had said to him; “I lie every day in school. If I didn’t you would go to jail.” So children grow up with this double tongued relationship because they are confronted with one truth in school and another truth at home. Truthfulness and personal integrity was the issue, in a society where survival requires deception.
Third was the question of justice. Somebody has been unjustly accused or condemned for “incitement to boycott of democratic institutions,” a general term for criticizing the government’s policies. How do you stand up when injustice is being done and how do you protect the victims? You may succeed; or you may land in prison yourself.

Finally the question of responsible vocation? What is Christian vocation in a collectivist society?
People were facing that all the time. Here was a farmer whose farm was being collectivized.
Here was a manufacturer whose factory was being taken over. Here was a small shopkeeper who had to belong to an association which determined what he could sell and when he could sell it. How do you exercise Christian responsibility in a society where decisions are made from above according to a plan in which you have no part?
Did I mention freedom from fear? That was the basic liberation Christian faith gave: freedom from fear of the spies who might report on you, freedom from fear of the police who might turn you over to the Russians and you might end up in Siberia. All of these fears were partly real, partly exaggerated, and led many to idealize the West and want to escape to it. “Inner emigration” Hamel and my friends in the east called it. A number of times I experienced East Germans saying to me, “how long do we have to hold out? How long do we have to wait, until you come and rescue us?” Addressing me as an American and not as a Christian. This attitude deepened the fear that one may be found out. The only escape is a freedom from fear which enables conversation, because as long as the officials think they can manipulate you, dominate you, you can’t have a free conversation with them. I lived with people who in Christ knew that freedom, for two years.
That was what drove me to write a dissertation on “Recent Theological Encounters with Communism”. I dealt with Emil Brunner who treated Communism as just totalitarianism ; with Josef Hromadka, who accepted communism and who worked with it; with Paul Tillich whose religious socialism claimed, unsuccessfully, to understand the Communists better than they understood themselves; with Reinhold Niebuhr, who was in his early years, interested in revolution; and with Karl Barth. The reason for Karl Barth, the largest section of the book, was that East German pastors would tell me what, besides the Bible, helped them. They said, Martin Luther and Karl Barth. Barth was a theologian of the Swiss Reformed Church, but a Reformed Lutheran, as all good Reformed Christians are.
Speakers: Laughter by several parties.
Charles West: My East German friends were not concentrating on the differences between Lutheran and Reformed. They thought of themselves as being one church confronting communism inspired by Martin Luther and Karl Barth.
Dianne Kirby: I think that one of the things that is important about the period that you were there which is the early 1950s, the experience that you related in particular about them saying to you when is the West, when are the Americans coming to free us ‐ remember this is when you have got the Eisenhower/Dulles presidential campaign against Truman and there rhetoric is very much that Truman was soft on communism and allowed Eastern Europeans to be

enslaved, and I know that from looking at Foreign Office documents that there was concern in Britain that the rhetoric coming out of America would encourage East Europeans to believe the West had an interest in liberating them, which of course it didn’t. This was rhetoric. So that would explain the sort of attitude which you encountered. It would also mean that the authorities (the communist regimes) would also believe it and would be more rigorous, shall we say in their surveillance. Of course the Cold War was so long and it goes through different stages.
Charles West: I remember going in to the American High Commission in Berlin, and speaking with a woman employee. I said I was primarily there for contacts with East Germans. She asked me, “Why do they stay? Why don’t they come out?” She couldn’t understand how one could be a Christian in East Germany.
Dianne Kirby: Is it this encounter with Marxism in East Germany that makes you more receptive to Christian‐ Marxist dialogue? When does Christian‐Marxist dialogue first become a reality?
When does it first emerge?
Charles West: Well, Paul can speak on this.
Paul Mojzes: Yes. Yes. I think it’s the late 40s, early 50s but let me preface it with something else. What made the relationship between Christians and Marxists very different from the outset is the very severe criticism on part of Marx and his followers of religion as a phenomenon. He basically precluded the possibility that people with religious convictions can contribute something to a new society, a new world order that he had envisioned, and so there were people in the 19th century who were interested in Christian socialism but that didn’t go anywhere, particularly after the Bolshevik Revolution, because the Bolshevik Revolution went way beyond what Marx envisioned in terms of his critique of religion. They didn’t want only to permit religion to die away. They wanted to bury it, right? And so, it was a question of survival in the Soviet Union from 1917 until about the end of World War II. It [religion] almost didn’t survive. I mean that oppression was, I think, perhaps the greatest persecution of Christians in all of Christian history. I don‘t think there is anything even in the early church that resembles what was happening in the Soviet Union and so, needless to say, Christians were afraid of communism and not looking forward to falling under communist influence. They were looking for liberating themselves from communist influence. But after World War II we know what happened. Namely the rest of Eastern Europe also fell into the Soviet orbit. So now here are these Christians who really nearly, without really having much of a chance, I mean some people can run away but you can’t empty all of Eastern Europe of population. Right? They might have wanted to run away if they could have but they couldn’t.
Charles West: They tried it in East Germany, and that was the reason the wall was built.

Paul Mojzes: Right. Right. So then what happened is that Christians were now trying to see how can they accommodate themselves to the new situation. The vast majority of Christians were really not interested in Marxism as a philosophy. They thought it was alien, it was atheistic, there was nothing in it for them, and they just looked for ways of how to survive and there were a number of avenues that they tried to survive and we are not going to go into that today. But slowly some Christians started reading Marx, particularly when Marxists themselves started reading Marx beyond the kind of standard classics which were approved through the lens of Leninism and Stalinism. As long as it was only Leninism and Stalinism there wasn’t really that much in there that could excite a Christian, philosophically or theologically. And then came in the late 40s or early 50s the discovery of early Marx by some other Marxists. They were obviously immediately censured by the materialist branch of Marxism as being revisionist, which is the great sin. That is the heresy of Marxism and they were being pushed to the margins. Except, interestingly enough, there was enough among those Marxists, enough intellectual vigor and courage, because it did take courage, by the way, to speak out, to start writing and so on. And then when Christians started seeing where these people are much more flexible, much more looking at the world, inc