Christian Church Leader Backs Liberal Stand on Aid

The moderator of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) says he hopes that his denomination’s convention, now under way in Louisville, Ky., rejects a resolution asking that no mission funds be sent to support overseas groups that use violence or terror to fight oppression.

The official, the Rev. Thomas J. Liggett , a retired seminary president now living in Claremont, said the resolution arose in reaction to a Disciples grant made to the World Council of Churches’ Programme to Combat Racism for humanitarian needs of struggling South African groups.

Liggett praised the United Church of Christ, which recently voted to change a policy that had prohibited them from aiding groups using violence. The United Church of Christ, a denomination with close ties to the Disciples, will now consider requests for relief from organizations known for guerrilla action.

Liggett, a one-time missionary and educator in Argentina and Puerto Rico, was president of Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis from 1974 until his retirement last year. Elected moderator of the 1.1-million-member denomination two years ago, Liggett will end his term after presiding over the six-day Disciples’ General Assembly that ends Wednesday.

Agrees With General Board

In an interview earlier this week, however, Liggett said that he would not express his sentiments on resolutions while presiding over convention debates. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that many delegates would know that he agrees “overwhelmingly” with the generally liberal recommendations of the Disciples’ General Board on resolutions before the biennial General Assembly.

The General Board recommended adoption of resolutions urging U.S. diplomatic relations with Vietnam, endorsement of the farm workers’ grape boycott, creation of a U.S. peace tax fund as an alternative to supporting military budgets and support of the multination peace plan for Central America. The board has urged delegates to defeat resolutions that ask the church to declare homosexuality an unacceptable Christian life style and that propose demonstrations outside the Soviet Embassy on behalf of human rights in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.

In a speech prepared for delivery at the convention, Liggett urged fellow Disciples not to misidentify cultural norms with Christian faith. He cited what he called five serious errors in judgment by major groups of Christians over the last 150 years.

Forced Christianity

Starting with the early 19th-Century European imposition of westernized Christianity on natives of foreign lands, Liggett also cited Christian “support of slavery in the South of the United States, religious endorsement of the ideology of Adolf Hitler, ecclesiastical reinforcement of oppressive governments in Latin America and theological approval of apartheid in South Africa.”

The common thread, Liggett said, was that all “were unable to distinguish between the values and institutions of their culture and the core meaning of their religious faith.” In each case, later events or the building dissent of other Christians revealed those stances to be theological errors, he said.

Not that everything endorsed by government or culture may be bad from a Christian perspective, he said in the speech. In the interview, Liggett said he thought that “public opinion was moving in the right direction” by opposing U.S. government support to the contra forces seeking to overthrow the Marxist-oriented Nicaraguan government.