Malcolm Muggeridge On Ecumenicalism (1969)

Malcolm Muggeridge, Jesus Rediscovered

(Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday & Co., Inc.; 1969), p. 134.

‘A visit to the World Council of Churches at Uppsala in Sweden confirmed my feeling that institutional Christianity is quietly but inexorably extinguishing itself.

Ecumenicalism is predominantly, I should suppose, a response to this sense of being about to become extinct, rather than to any zeal for union as such.

The most vital elements in the Christian story have, in any case, derived from dissidence rather than agreement – St. Francis, Ignatius Loyola, Luther, Pascal, Wesley, Kierkegaard, etc.

At Uppsala, as one clearly saw, they were able to agree about almost anything, because they believed almost nothing.

They reminded me of a pub turnout in my youth, with ten or a dozen drunks holding on to one another, swaying to and fro, but managing to remain upright.

Alone, they would infallibly have fallen into the gutter.’

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