Review of Keith W. Clements, J.H. Oldham and George Bell: Ecumenical Pioneers
Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)
Review of Keith W. Clements, J.H. Oldham and George Bell: Ecumenical Pioneers (Fortress Press, 2022), pp. xv + 235. ISBN: 9781506470009.
By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester
The distinguished British ecumenist Keith Clements has made a vital contribution to the history of the twentieth-century ecumenical movement across many years. In particular, his fundamental study of J.H. Oldham (Faith on the Frontier: A Life of J.H. Oldham, T & T Clark, 1999) offered the first substantial examination of a missionary, organiser and Christian internationalist who has recently come to claim growing attention, from not only scholars of ecumenism but also historians of intellectual history. Meanwhile, Clements’ loyalty to the parallel figure of Bishop George Bell has been quite as vigorous. In short, this concise introductory book presents a valuable meeting between three figures, the author and his subjects, and the relationship certainly proves to be a fruitful one.
Christian internationalism has yet to find a secure place in the various histories of twentieth-century churches. Very largely this is due to a persistent emphasis on national categories and narratives, but denominational perspectives have also fashioned a great deal of what we expect to find in the foreground. All too often, Bell and Oldham may be observed, usually dutifully and briefly, hovering in the background of anything other than ecumenical surveys. In the final volume of the recent Oxford History of Anglicanism (OUP, 2019), Bell flits about here and there, but there is no very confident sense of where to put him for very long. Meanwhile, Oldham, the United Free Church layman, has almost vanished from ecclesiastical memory altogether. This is an authentic tragedy because it indicates how horizons have contracted across the western Protestant churches in the half-century since their deaths.
Clements begins with a photograph of the Fanø conference in Denmark in 1934, Bell perched on the front row with his wife, Henrietta, and Oldham at the very back, by an open door (as though, Clements remarks nicely, he has just turned up at the last minute from a committee meeting). Here, they are only two small figures in a very large ensemble indeed. Yet few church leaders laboured so vigorously and perseveringly to place Christian life and work in the heart of the great contexts of their age. Through their myriad activities, we find Christian ideas and arguments alive and at large in the world at war and at peace, exploring the new possibilities of international organization, democratic development, social progress and international law. Clements devotes a large part of his book to extracts from their writings, showing how ecumenical priorities blended with the questions that were thrown up by a disordered world. Oldham makes his appearance as a ‘wily prophet’, making his way artfully through great affairs and controversies not just by offering views of his own but also by orchestrating those of others within his various creations, from the symphonic 1910 Edinburgh conference and the great 1937 Oxford Conference on Church, Community and State to the wartime discussions of the Moot, a chamber ensemble which drew together figures like Karl Mannheim, Michael Polanyi and T.S. Eliot. While Oldham had to invent a role for himself based on rather little beyond an acknowledged place in missionary societies and the ecumenical circles, Bishop Bell had a public position which gave him a firm authority in the counsels of national life. If Bell lacked some of Oldham’s creative freedom, Clements shows that his presence was by no means less striking, productive or significant. They came across each other, and worked together, often enough. After all, they were influential citizens in the same world. Yet, disappointingly, there does not appear to be a profound friendship. There exists no very great volume of correspondence between them. One is left to wonder if most of the relationship lived in conversation.
In his conclusion, Keith Clements wonders whether all this toil and vision produced a long-term legacy – and finds that it does. Oldham came to embody the possibilities of Christian adventure (a word he liked to use) while Bell represented the costly realities of Christian sacrifice. Although both could be said to be very much men of their time, the goals for which they strived remained perfectly recognisable to their ecumenical successors, even if they fashioned them in different ways in later days. Plainly, the world of the early twenty-first century presents a very great deal that would have appalled both men. Their words resonate still – and now, perhaps, we may be less inclined to take them for granted than once we might have, not so long ago. If for no other reason, we might pick up a book like this to recall the warm visions that still endure, restlessly, beneath the cold surface of a neglected history.
