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Review of Keith W. Clements, J.H. Oldham and George Bell: Ecumenical Pioneers

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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.

 

 

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Review of Andrew Chandler, British Christians and the Third Reich: Church, State, and the Judgement of Nations

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 29, Number 1/2 (Summer 2023)

Review of Andrew Chandler, British Christians and the Third Reich: Church, State, and the Judgement of Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). Pp. x + 422. ISBN: 9781107129047.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Andrew Chandler has written an engaging study of the substantial preoccupation and response of diverse British Christians to Nazism, the German “Church Struggle,” the persecution of the Jews, and the Second World War. Chandler has been immersed in this history for over 30 years, and the resulting depth of knowledge shines through in the thoroughness of his research and the perspicacity of his historical judgments.

At the outset, Chandler argues that British Christians and the Third Reich is an argument for the validity of a transnational approach to British history—one exploring not those networks rooted in the British Empire but rather those networks rooted in “that liberal moral consciousness which extended the boundaries of conventional politics in the age of mass democracy” (1). He aims to demonstrate “that the relationship between British Christianity and the Third Reich is indeed a solid subject and that it is one of significance” (2) to the ways we find patterns in and write about the past, and does so by means of a chronological study drawing on a rich array of sources, including correspondence, memoranda, published books, polemical pamphlets, British parliamentary debates, records of various church assemblies, and the vast output of both church and secular press.

As the study of British Christians rather than simply British churches, Chandler’s work explores the way Christians and Christian thinking about Nazi Germany was brought to bear in ecclesiastical, political, and cultural spheres. To that end, he begins with an overview of the way in which British Christianity (Anglican, Catholic, and Free Church) was engaged with both domestic and international political concerns, through a wide variety of institutions, conferences, and (especially) publishing endeavours. Doctrinal concerns, Chandler notes, did not generally stand in the way of interaction and cooperation among the many Christian leaders and intellectuals he analyzes. These include various Anglican prelates (Cosmo Lang, Herbert Hensley Henson, William Temple, Arthur Headlam, George Bell, Arthur Stuart Duncan-Jones) and lay leaders (James Parkes, Sir Wyndham Deedes), Catholic standouts (Cardinal Bourne, Arthur Hinsley, Christopher Dawson, Michael de la Bedoyere), and Free Church notables (Henry Carter, J.H. Rushbrooke, Alfred E. Garvie, Nathaniel Micklem, William Paton, J.H. Oldham, Dorothy (Jebb) Buxton, Bertha Bracey, Corder Catchpool) whom he describes in a series of helpful biographical sketches near the beginning of the book (33-50). These are among the primary figures in Chandler’s study, the ones whose words and deeds stand in for “British Christians” more generally. It could be argued, of course, that these men and women were hardly representative of British Christians as a whole, but as spokespersons for broad swathes of British Christianity, they represent at least the attitudes and ideas in play at the leadership level of the churches—ideas communicated through church hierarchies and denominational networks, as well as through a myriad of church publications.

Chandler frames his history in five eras: during 1933-1934, British Christians first encountered Nazi Germany, developed views about it, and explored potential responses; 1935-1937 was marked by debates about whether to accept or oppose Nazism, in which Christians tended to land on the critical side; 1938-1939 introduced urgent debates about “German expansion and western Appeasement,” new and more violent attacks against Jews in Germany, and the growing likelihood of war; from 1939-1943, Britain led the war effort for democracy and against Nazi-occupied Europe, and Christians grappled with the “themes of collaboration, complicity, and resistance;” and 1943-1949 revolved around conceptual debates about “justice and judgment” and real problems of Allied occupation and humanitarian crises (8-9).

In the first section, on the period of the Nazi seizure and consolidation of power, Chandler argues “it was not true” that international opinion was slow to note and criticize Hitler’s regime (51). Yet there were doubts about whether the Treaty of Versailles would bring a lasting peace and many political attacks against democracy. Within weeks of the Nazi seizure of power, British Christians understood that Nazism was a challenge to the international system, a danger to both its political opponents and German Jews, and a dictatorial threat to German churches. While those like the Quaker Corder Catchpool in Berlin and International Student Services official James Parkes in Geneva served as important sources of information, others like Archbishops Lang of Canterbury and Temple of York consulted with government representatives and British Jewish leaders and launched debates in the House of Lords. Laypeople like Quaker Bertha Bracey established organizations like the Germany Emergency Committee, while churchmen of all stripes wrote protests in the church press.

During the eruption of the German “Church Struggle,” British Christians learned much about the diverse positions of Christians in Germany towards the Nazi state. “What is at once striking,” Chandler notes, “is the strength of the British response to these affairs” (86). The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Council on Foreign Relations was the site of much of the early conversation about the German turmoil, with information supplied by ecumenical figures like Bishop Bell of Chichester. Indeed, Arthur Stuart Duncan-Jones, Dean of the Chichester Cathedral, travelled to Germany and met pro-Nazi “German Christians,” opponents who would eventually form the Confessing Church, and even (surprisingly) Hitler himself. The result was a nuanced view of the situation, but also one that urged caution with respect to intervening in German church affairs (90).

Chandler describes the growing conflict between Bishops Headlam of Gloucester and Bell—the former overly sympathetic to the Hitler regime and prone to antisemitic remarks and the latter (along with Archbishop Lang) increasingly critical of the Nazi regime and its allies in the German Christian Movement. Bell also became quite involved in the emerging Jewish refugee crisis, while Archbishop Temple attempted to intercede with Hitler himself—just one of many interventions by British Christians against the German government. Chandler explains that by the summer of 1934, the German Foreign Office was expressing concern over the effect of German church affairs on international opinion, and British protests against antisemitism were also growing prominent. International Christian gatherings like the 1934 Baptist World Congress and the Life and Work Conference in Fanø were also taken up with the German church situation.

In the section covering 1935-1937, Chandler argues that the growth of a movement favouring rapprochement with Germany should not lead us to undervalue the resistance that remained within liberal democratic society. “British Christians were often found to be an expressive element of this [resistance], and they played a prominent part in maintaining a critical consensus when it might easily have lost its force and subsided” (139). Germany was, after all, still a racial dictatorship. Jews were, afterall, still a persecuted minority there. Christians too were still harassed and persecuted. Concentration camps still threatened, and the refugee crisis continued to grow. Indeed, while the direct interventions of British Christians waned, having grown less successful with the increasing confidence of the National Socialist state, new humanitarian ventures became a means by which British Christians could respond to the crisis in the German church, state, and society.

For instance, Quaker Dorothy Buxton travelled to Germany and spoke out (somewhat controversially) against the concentration camps in which the Hitler regime incarcerated its political opponents. Bishop Bell was reluctant to follow her lead, especially with a new round of conflict in the German “Church Struggle.” Public speeches and letters of protest concerning the treatment of the German churches were offered up by a range of British Christians: former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, Bell, Temple, Bishop Henson of Durham, Moderator of the Federal Council of Free Churches Sidney Berry, and others. All of these protests found their way to Berlin, and Bell also visited Germany, meeting with both political and ecclesiastical leaders. An important moment came in November 1935, when Bell introduced a motion expressing “sympathy ‘with the Jewish people and those of Jewish origin’ in Germany” in the Anglican Church Assembly. When opposition to the motion emerged, Bishop Henson gave an impromptu and explosive address denouncing Nazi Germany, carrying the day (157-159). At the same time, on the ground, Catchpool and other Quakers in Berlin were attempting to aid concentration camp prisoners and protect Jewish institutions under threat.

The year 1936 saw yet more British Christian criticism of Nazi Germany, with a sharpening focus on its pagan and totalitarian nature. Alongside these continuing protests, there were new examples of concrete action, such as the creation of the International Christian Committee for Refugees, chaired by Bell and supported by Lang in an effort to aid so-called non-Aryan Christians (not least, children) in need of new homes outside of Germany. But the reports of British Christians visiting Germany were mixed. A.J. Macdonald of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Council on Foreign Relations played down the situation, arguing that German pastors just wanted to get on with their work and that only those who opposed the state politically landed themselves in trouble. Bell found the situation much more serious, though his German church contacts were pessimistic about and even reticent of foreign intervention. And the Congregationalist Principal of Mansfield College (Oxford), Nathaniel Micklem, discovered an underground German church fearful of arrest by secret police. In 1937, attention shifted to Roman Catholic opposition to Nazism with the publication of Pope Pius XI’s Mit brennender Sorge (“With Burning Concern”) encyclical. British Catholics were well aware of how much relations between Germany and the Catholic Church had deteriorated. Meanwhile, Anglican and Quaker attempts to raise money for non-Aryan Christian refugees fared poorly and the ongoing argument between Bishops Headlam and Bell over the church’s stance towards Germany only muddied the waters. But the arrest and incarceration of Confessing Church leader Martin Niemöller sparked a new round of British Christian protests in late 1937 (195-195).

Concerning the build-up to the Second World War, Chandler asks how the morality of the appeasement policy and the presence of a significant pacifist minority coexisted with the ever-growing refugee crisis and the public scandal concerning Pastor Niemöller, “the most famous political prisoner in the world” (204). On the one hand, Chandler notes,

Appeasement sought to avoid another Great War and this resolve possessed the authority of a national consensus. In March 1938 the Church Times pronounced, ‘Is it not the law of God to try friendship and understanding?’ From the spring of 1938 the policy of the Chamberlain government found the winds of Christian opinion blowing supportively in its sails. (208)

On the other hand, criticisms such as Duncan-Jones’ The Struggle for Religious Freedom in Germany described the religious mysticism of Nazi Germany as “fundamentally irreconcilable” with Christianity and lambasted the oppression and “cruelty of Moloch” (205-206). Buxton, Bell, Lang, Micklem, and others continued to protest Niemöller’s incarceration, while the refugee crisis grew ever worse with the annexation of Austria. Bell, in particular, understood that political events were overshadowing the “Church Struggle” and that British Christian intervention no longer had any effect whatsoever in Germany (218-219).

But if the Munich Agreement had been greeted with calls for a national day of thanksgiving (Lang) and if Te Deums rang out in Catholic churches, the Kristallnacht Pogrom of November 1938 brought all that to a halt, shocking British Christians and shattering hopes for peace. Archbishop Lang published an indignant letter (“A Black Day for Germany”) which was later affirmed by the Church Assembly. The Catholic Herald described Nazi “sub-human behaviour” while the Baptist Times argued, “The time for silence is past.” As the Munich consensus disintegrated, British Christians invested new energy into refugee work, which was boosted by the government decision to allow child refugees to enter Britain. Sponsorships abounded. Church statements grew firmer, too. In a March 1939 House of Lords speech, Lang urged “the massing of might on the side of right,” and when Hitler launched the war in September, he announced in the same chamber that, “I shrink indeed from linking our broken lights and our fallible purposes with the Holy Name of God, yet I honestly believe that in this struggle, if it is forced upon us, we may humbly and trustfully commend our cause to God” (260, 269).

Chandler devotes no less than 100 pages to the period of the Second World War. In the main, he notes how, with London as the international capital of a war-torn continent, British Christians engaged in new patterns of association and collaboration, not least between Protestants and Catholics and between Christians and Jews. Through these, Christians responded to the moral challenge of National Socialist ideology and politics. In the main, the European conflict was justified by Christian leaders of all kinds as a “righteous war” (273). Hitler and Nazism were condemned as evil, even as church leaders expressed sympathy for the German people, whom they regarded as deceived and led astray. Many German exiles came to London, where they collaborated with German and British Christians on publications and radio broadcasts. Though relations with the German churches were effectively severed by the war, fragments of news painted a bleak picture. The moral stance of most leading British Christians discouraged the idea of a negotiated peace, though the Vatican was working diplomatic channels intensely and ecumenical representatives in Geneva kept their hopes alive.

Among Catholics, Cardinal Hinsley, Archbishop of Westminster, rose to prominence as a supporter of the war. At a 1940 National Day of Prayer Mass broadcast by the BBC, he declared, “Can any Christian now hear with indifference that clarion call to defend the right; to protect the souls of millions of our brethren cruelly assailed and oppressed?” The war, he continued, was a “just crusade for the deliverance from evil which rests its strength on force alone” (287). Similar rhetoric abounded across the Christian spectrum, as the war gave rise to a vast literature on politics, religion, and morality, including Bell’s Christianity and World Order, published by Penguin (296). And debates broke out, like the one between those who regarded Germans as possessing an essentially Nazi national character and thus collectively guilty, such as senior British diplomat Sir Robert Vansittart, and those who believed there were good Germans who could be cultivated and supported in the fight against Hitler, like Bell.

New relationships—particularly among laypeople—brought Protestants and Catholics closer together in a common cause, captured in historian Christopher Dawson’s call for “‘a return to Christian unity’ in the name of civilisation” (301). Similarly, the Council of Christians and Jews was established in 1942 “to co-operate in the struggle against religious and racial persecution” (310). When the British government was slow to distinguish the mass murder of Jews as a special crime in the fall of 1942, Archbishop Temple and Viscount Cecil (Free Churches) led a protest at Royal Albert Hall. That December, the Council of Christians and Jews took up a paper entitled, “Discussion of Present Extermination Policy of Nazi Government in Respect of European Jewry” (322). Various condemnatory statements were publicized by Christian leaders, but as they learned ever more about the annihilation of the Jews over the course of 1943, Temple and others expressed concern that the government’s response was far too timid. Repeated attempts to influence official policy were largely fruitless (343-349).

As the war progressed and Allied victory could be imagined, British Christians raised questions about the morality of war, the nature of a just peace, and the Christian principals that might inform a new postwar order. A Peace Aims group, spearheaded by the Presbyterian William Paton, worked to outline the Christian moral basis for peace and the political reconstruction of Europe. Striking the balance between justice and vengeance proved to be a key challenge. Any hopes that Christian leaders might shape the international settlement of the conflict were dashed by mid-1944. Much to their chagrin, retribution had emerged as the British aim with respect to Germany, and the fire-bombing of German cities illustrated the extent to which “total war” had taken hold (355-361).

After the defeat of Germany, even as the International Military Tribunal prepared to try representative German war criminals, British Christians like Bishop Bell and Wesleyan Methodist Henry Carter began the task of organizing humanitarian relief. A “Save Europe Now” campaign was launched. A new organization, Christian Reconstruction in Europe, was formed and was soon folded into the British Council of Churches as the Department of Interchurch Aid and Refugee Service. Additionally, Carter chaired the new World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Refugee Commission.  Meanwhile, Bishop Bell and Methodist Gordon Rupp met with other ecumenical representatives of the World Council of Churches in the Process of Formation in Stuttgart in October 1945, making contact with the emergence Evangelical Church in Germany. It was here that Martin Niemöller and Otto Dibelius drafted the famous Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. Despite its shortcomings, it opened the door for the German churches to re-enter the ecumenical realm. As for the Nuremberg Trials, Chandler details the controversial opposition of Bishop Bell, who sought to limit the extent of this judicial process (379-387).

A short “Endings and Legacies” chapter offers brief summaries of the postwar careers of some of the main characters in Chandler’s study, many of whom he regards—probably rightly—as underappreciated. In an interesting discussion of the place of German theology in postwar Britain, Chandler explains the rise of Christian writing about the German “Church Struggle,” German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the biographies of Confessing Church leaders. He also explains the rise of new points of contact between the Christian denominations and also between Christians and Jews. Finally, he demonstrates how leading British scholars of the history and theology of the German churches under Nazism had personal links to important British Christians of that era.

In sum, Andrew Chandler’s British Christians and the Third Reich: Church, State, and the Judgement of Nations is a thoroughly researched and fascinating exploration of the moral and political engagement of leading Anglican, Catholic, and Free Church figures in Nazism, the German “Church Struggle,” the persecution of the Jews, and the Second World War. It is rich with detail from primary sources, which nicely communicates both the spirit and depth of British Christian engagement in the moral questions of the era. In true transnational historical form, it enhances our understanding of both British and German church politics during the Nazi era, along with the surprising extent to which communications flowed between the two sets of political and ecclesiastical elites.

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Review of Wolfgang Huber, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Auf dem Weg zur Freiheit

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Review of Wolfgang Huber, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Auf dem Weg zur Freiheit (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2019). 336 pages + 25 illustrations. ISBN 978-3-406-73137-2.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

Wolfgang Huber is a distinguished voice in the German theological world, both academic and ecclesiastical, and a sustained treatment of the life and work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by such a figure at once demands attention. His book is in many ways an introductory survey which seeks to unite the ‘fragments’ of Bonhoeffer’s life and thought in a single coherent picture, for, as Huber remarks, at every turn in Bonhoeffer’s short life, ‘belief and life, theology and resistance closely interrelated’ (p. 9). The fertile phrases which Bonhoeffer cast upon the waters of the theological world are all here and considered in turn with authority and insight. Altogether, Huber views his primary material with poise and it may be said that every kind of source – theses and books, letters and poems –  is justly represented. As befits such a portrait the acknowledgement of other secondary studies is kept to a minimum: here they sharpen perspectives and come and go at important junctures without crowding the picture. Sometimes there is an acknowledgement of later debates which have come to define Bonhoeffer scholarship in the world at large, not least the guilt of the Christian Church, the campaign to claim Bonhoeffer as a ‘Righteous Gentile’, the two worlds of East and West Germany, and the controversies which emerged in the churches of South Africa under Apartheid. Huber clearly knows this broad ground very thoroughly indeed but here his attention is primarily claimed by Bonhoeffer himself and his voice is very much his own.

The structure of the book is not unduly distinctive, but it sets out clearly the overall argument and method. Huber’s Bonhoeffer is certainly a big and complex figure. He is also one full of contrasts and the author delights in framing and exploring them. An introductory section evokes the figure of Bonhoeffer as we might first encounter him in a variety of places, not least over the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey. There follows a section on Bonhoeffer’s background and early formation and then another three on his early work in the contexts of university and church life, the first situating him firmly in the landscapes of German thought, the second examining a theology of grace which was deeply rooted in the precepts of Lutheranism, and the third discussing the place of the Bible in a world of maturing historical criticism. Each of these sections present dualities which already defined so much in Bonhoeffer’s work (‘Individual spirituality or Society’; ‘The Church of the World or the Church of the Word’; ‘Acting justly and waiting for God’s own time’; ‘The Historical Jesus or the Jesus of Today’). The young Bonhoeffer is certainly very much at home in the intellectual landscapes of German Lutheranism but the emerging vision is an open one and there is no knowing where it will lead.

Huber acknowledges how extraordinary was Bonhoeffer’s achievement in maintaining sustained theological study under the many pressures and dangers to which his life exposed him. An extended discussion of the development and ‘actuality’ of Bonhoeffer’s pacifism precedes an examination of his place in the history of the German resistance against Hitler and his significance there as a ‘theologian of resistance’. Here Huber acknowledges frankly that to account for the motives which lay behind the actions of any figure of resistance, whether they became fundamental to events or peripheral, must be ‘difficult, even impossible’ (p. 172). At all events, with this decisive turning comes an intensification of the discussion of Bonhoeffer’s ethical writings and a deepening emphasis on the themes of guilt and responsibility. It is in these contexts of resistance that Huber is most of all struck by Bonhoeffer’s singular, even ‘astonishing’, new steps, and even if they only reach us as fragments the sense of a coherent picture remains. Indeed, it is in ‘the extreme loneliness of a prison cell’ that Bonhoeffer finds a ‘wonderful security’ in the achievement of a unity of faith, teaching and life (p. 34). A further section, stoutly entitled ‘No end to Religion’, again shows the importance of situating Bonhoeffer’s thought securely in the intellectual contexts with which he was familiar. A final, and rewarding, section on the ‘Polyphony of life’ maintains a fascination with dualities (‘Bach or Beethoven’; ‘Music or Theology’) and offers a particularly attractive discussion of Bonhoeffer and Gregorian plainsong (provoked by the famous remark to Eberhard Bethge). An epilogue reflects at length on ‘what remains’, searching through the subsequent publication of Bonhoeffer’s writings and the accumulating studies of his many interpreters, and observing, rather nicely, the creative achievement of a ‘polycentric internationalism’. A gentle parting note occurs with a reflection on Bonhoeffer’s late poem ‘The Powers of Good’, in which Huber finds a final place of rest in a vast, unsentimental and moving trust in God (p. 298).

It could be said that of the making of books about Dietrich Bonhoeffer there is no end. In such a field many new authors labour to produce some distinctive insight or bold (even tenuous) claim, perhaps to justify the writing of another book or to address a particular audience or time. Over the years particular aspects of Bonhoeffer’s thought have certainly been placed under many microscopes. It is natural at first to wonder if a new, introductory portrait by an established scholar might turn out to be something of an academic tour of duty. We may expect a good deal of craft and even a dose of wisdom. But Huber’s book is something better than this: the encounter of author and subject is duly rigorous but it is also fresh, alert and warmly responsive. Nothing here is taken for granted; often Huber acknowledges that he finds a particular idea, or development, ‘astonishing’ and one senses that he really does. Indeed, he serves his subject and his audience very well. Such a book would make an excellent place for German readers make a start. One might well hope for an English edition too.

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Review of Gerhard Ringshausen and Andrew Chandler, eds., The George Bell-Gerhard Leibholz Correspondence: In the Long Shadow of the Third Reich, 1938-1958

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1 (March 2020)

Review of Gerhard Ringshausen and Andrew Chandler, eds., The George Bell-Gerhard Leibholz Correspondence: In the Long Shadow of the Third Reich, 1938-1958 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). 476 pages. ISBN 978-1-4742-5766-4.

By Victoria J. Barnett, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Retired)

Gerhard Leibholz was a German attorney and professor of state law, married to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s twin sister Sabine. George Bell was a British Anglican priest, the bishop of Chichester and an active leader in the international Protestant ecumenical movement who became one of Bonhoeffer’s closest allies. These two very different figures would be brought together by the accidents of history, but this fascinating volume shows that they found common ground on a number of issues. Starting on the eve of the Second World War and extending into the 1950s, the Bell-Leibholz correspondence gives a vivid portrait of the challenges they faced as well as their reflections on the nature of democracy and totalitarianism, and on Christianity’s future in a transformed postwar political order.

A baptized Protestant, Leibholz came from a secular Jewish family and was categorized as a Volljude under the Nazi racial law. After the passage of the Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service in April 1933, Leibholz’s father lost his position, dying only five days later (there is speculation that his death was a suicide). One of his brothers, Peter, lost his position at the same time. A professor in Göttingen, Gerhard Leibholz managed to keep his position until early 1935. He and his family remained in Nazi Germany until spring 1938, when his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi warned them of the regime’s plans to require all those affected by the racial laws to have a “J” in their passport. Bonhoeffer and Eberhard Bethge drove the Leibholzes to the Swiss border; from there they made their way to England where they were joined later by their two daughters.

The volume opens with Bell’s September 1938 letter to Bonhoeffer assuring him of his willingness to help the Leibholzes. George Bell had been actively involved since 1933 in assisting refugees from Nazi Germany, including members of the Confessing Church who were affected by the Nazi laws. The early correspondence offers a detailed picture of the difficulties refugees faced even after they reached a safe country. They could not assume, of course, that they would remain in safety; Leibholz’s brother Hans and his wife managed to reach Holland, but committed suicide in 1940 after the German invasion. Added to this anxiety were financial concerns (Germany froze Leibholz’s assets when he fled, so they arrived in England with nothing), worries about the family they had left behind, existential concerns about employment and the future, and dealing with anti-German prejudice in England once the war began. In May 1940 Leibholz was interned as an “enemy alien” on the Isle of Man, along with a number of Confessing Church pastors and their wives. Bell managed to obtain his release in August 1940, after which the two men pursued the possibility that the Leibholzes might immigrate to the United States. With the assistance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s contacts in New York, Leibholz was offered and accepted an invitation to Union Theological Seminary in 1941, but by then the door had closed due to new U.S. restrictions on immigration.

Bell succeeded in cobbling together various stipends and opportunities by which Leibholz could support his family in England. A moving aspect of this book is Bell’s often heroic support and advocacy for the German refugees, particularly as popular British sentiment against them intensified.  The bishop also came under growing fire for his opposition to total war and his arguments on behalf of the “other Germany,” positions that probably cost him an appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury.

The book’s greatest significance, however, may be its documentation of the developing conversations between the two about Christianity, democracy, human rights, and their visions for the postwar European order. Their correspondence was part of a larger international conversation at the time that included diplomats, intellectuals, Catholics, Protestant ecumenists, and others. The detailed discussion of these issues in this volume could be an important resource for the scholarship today about the shaping of post-1945 Europe, particularly the differing conceptions of human rights that emerged after 1945.

Leibholz viewed these social and political questions from the standpoint of someone who had studied law; his doctorate had focused on issues of legitimacy in parliamentary law. (As an aside: in 2000 I interviewed Gerhard Riegner, who directed the World Jewish Congress during the war years. Riegner told me that he had studied law in Berlin during the 1920s with Leibholz and spoke of their early common commitment to human rights.) Leibholz shared Bell’s view that the major battle of their times was the defense of liberal democracy and its values against the threat of totalitarianism. Their understanding of those ideals was very much the product of the era, culture, and class from which they came. Leibholz, for example, viewed the “totalitarian” form of nationalism in National Socialism as something completely different from Prussian nationalism.

It is difficult to know how much previous Bonhoeffer family discussions had influenced Leibholz before he arrived in England, but the extent to which he began to focus in England on the centrality of Christian teaching and doctrine for Western ideals is striking. He was naturally interested in the German church struggle in which his brother-in-law was so engaged, and his first published article in Britain was a 1939 report about the situation confronting German churches. By 1940 he was already influenced by Bell’s book Christianity and World Order (Leibholz’s review of the book is included in an appendix to this volume). In 1942 Leibholz gave a series of lectures on “Christianity, Politics, and Power,” that was subsequently published in the widely read Christian News-Letter.

Leibholz intently followed British reports and commentary on the implications of the European situation. His letters to Bell are filled with analysis and commentary, particularly his sense of how Germans would react to British public policy and statements. Bell clearly valued Leibholz’s opinion and feedback. One of this volume’s many revelations is the extent to which Leibholz shaped Bell’s view of the German resistance. Bell sometimes sent Leibholz drafts of public statements in advance for his opinion, as in late 1942 with a question he planned to raise in the House of Lords: “I want to ask you whether the form in which the Question if put could and would be twisted by Goebbels so as to make it appear that I or the Church of England had turned Communist….” (115) Bell frequently shared Leibholz’s observations with other church and political officials, but with time Leibholz developed his own connections and sometimes wrote these figures directly. In a letter of 19 June 1942 to J. H. Oldham, for example, he commented on the Anglo-Russian treaty and the need for more discussion in Britain of what form of German government “the Anglo-Saxon countries would be prepared to accept after a collapse of ‘Hittlerite Germany’”(94). Another interesting development that was new to me was Leibholz’s growing belief that Catholic teachings on natural law were fundamental for modern liberal democracy, and his emphasis on the need for the “re-Christianization” of Germany after the defeat of National Socialism.

As the war progressed the personal strains on the Leibholzes intensified. They naturally focused on the German resistance and the fates of their family members. They learned of the April 1943 arrests of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi only four months later, in August. Two months after the failed coup attempt of July 1944, Leibholz compiled a list of people whom he believed had been executed and sent it to Bell with a comment about the loss this would mean for a postwar Germany. In the spring of 1945, they received conflicting information about the executions of Dietrich and Klaus Bonhoeffer (the Leibholzes initially believed that Dietrich Bonhoeffer had survived). They only received confirmation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s death on 31 May from Adolf Freudenberg in Geneva; confirmation of the deaths of Rüdiger Schleicher and Hans von Dohnanyi didn’t arrive until late July. Bell immediately began to write about the German resistance, and much of the correspondence during Leibholz’s remaining time in Britain concerned the reconstruction of what had happened to his brothers-in-law.

In 1947 the Leibholzes returned to Germany. Gerhard Leibholz became a federal judge in Karlsruhe in 1951 (he continued, however, to teach in Göttingen) and remained there until his retirement in 1971. After his return Leibholz sent letters reporting on denazification and the political reconstruction of Germany, but over time their exchanges grew infrequent. The friendship continued until Bell’s death in 1958. The final document in the volume is the Leibholzes’ condolence letter to Bell’s widow in October 1958, in which they wrote that they had “lost the most faithful and best friend we have had in the English speaking world.”

This book includes an excellent introduction by Ringshausen and Chandler giving the general historical context for the correspondence. The letters are grouped by year, with a short chronology for each year, and there are helpful footnotes throughout that identify the people mentioned and give more background for the issues being described. This volume will certainly be of interest to Bonhoeffer scholars and those interested in ecumenical and British church history. I hope that it will find a wider audience, because these extensive and often revealing conversations between a German refugee lawyer and a British Anglican bishop provide a close-up view of the larger historical conversations about war, democracy, human rights, and the construction of civil society at a critical juncture in twentieth-century history.

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Review of Ian M. Randall, A Christian Peace Experiment: The Bruderhof Community in Britain, 1933-1942

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Review of Ian M. Randall, A Christian Peace Experiment: The Bruderhof Community in Britain, 1933-1942 (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018), 241 pp., ISBN: 9781532639982.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

The ideals and experiences of the Bruderhof community have, perhaps inevitably, hovered in the background of histories of international religion in the early twentieth century. The inspired creation of the German internationalists, Eberhard and Emmy Arnold, much associated with the Hutterites and responsive to all forms of evangelical Protestantism, the Bruderhof offered a practical piety and a new vision of Christian authenticity. It sought to maintain firmly a principle of removal from the world and yet was constantly and perseveringly at large in that world, searching out new friendships, useful connections, and necessary alliances. Already in the 1920s, the community had become known to British Quakers working in Germany. It also found new friends and allies in the pacifist and internationalist circles which broke out after the First World War. It was a son of the Arnolds, Hardy, who provided the crucial link with Britain before 1933, preparing the way for the movement to set down new roots in foreign soil. The growing encroachments of the new National Socialist state – in particular, the compulsory conscription into military service – undermined the German Bruderhof by insistent degrees and in 1936 the two principal communities there were shut down, precipitating an exodus, through the Netherlands and across the English Channel, to a new home.

The suppression of the Bruderhof in Nazi Germany was not unobserved in Britain: there were protests and interventions by figures as diverse as the eminent Anglican laymen Sir Wyndham Deedes and the Baptist internationalist J.H. Rushbrooke. Friends of all kinds now proved effective, particularly in practicalities. By May 1936, the Bruderhof could be found in a farm near Ashton Keynes in the Cotswolds where a new community comprised sixteen Germans, fourteen British friends, and one Austrian. At the height of its quiet prosperity there, in October 1939, the community included as many as 119 Germans, 116 British members, 30 Swiss, 17 Austrians, and stray individuals from the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, France, Sweden, Italy, and Turkey. All came with their own stories and for their own reasons. All sought to be useful. A miner from the coalfields of Durham cycled three hundred miles to join them and was promptly set to work picking potatoes; another new arrival was a Lancashire poultry farmer who was also a Methodist lay preacher and admirer of the Indian Christian mystic Sundar Singh. In choosing the Cotswolds, a deeply rural area which possessed something of the character of an English arcadia, the community chose well. Birmingham, the second city of the country and a bastion of Quakerism and Free church life and worship, was not far away. Ashton Keynes also had a railway station. Visitors and longer-term guests could come and go as they chose – and they did.

This book is especially valuable for showing the extent to which the whole venture at Ashton Keynes depended upon the kindness of strangers: the supportive Assistant Secretary at work in the Aliens Department of the British Home Office, the sympathetic estate agent at nearby Cirencester, the manager of the local building society, the local architect and builder, the many private benefactors and well-wishers. It was not only Quakers who found in the Bruderhof something of real spiritual and moral significance: Leyton Richards, the leading Congregationalist and minister of Carr’s Lane church in Birmingham, had from the earliest days in Germany proven an admirer and a steadfast ally.

In sum, for a few years there followed a brief flourishing, a great many activities, initiatives and meetings, a good deal of dairy farming, Bible reading, dancing and ‘sharing’, a manufacturing of what the British could regard as ‘arts and crafts’ products, an association with the Peace Pledge Union and other Christian pacifist organizations, a successful new journal (The Plough) and, increasingly, an adoption of other refugees from Nazism (twenty by December 1938). Children were born there and began to grow up. Inevitably, not everything went well and not everybody was happy. Local opinion could be sullen and resentful of expansion and there were skirmishes in the newspapers. One antagonist, a nearby farmer, was particularly belligerent. But the founding ideals could still be found alive and well. The representative of a national Jewish youth organization visited the Bruderhof and rejoiced to think that it was very like a kibbutz.

It was the war which challenged and then extinguished all of this. Local criticism grew more hostile and more bizarre. Then came internment. For marrying a German, one of the leading lights in the community, Freda Bridgwater, now found herself classified as an ‘Alien’: eight days after her wedding she was removed peremptorily by the police to the Isle of Man. The situation faced by the little community turned up in questions in Parliament and became a part of a vigorous national debate on internment altogether. In the midst of such pressures, the Cotswold Bruderhof lost its confidence. Complicated negotiations to find sanctuary across the Atlantic were soon underway; by the end of 1940 the first members of the community were arriving in Paraguay and the last members joined them in the following April. Even as the members departed, new enquirers and seekers turned up at Ashton Keynes, only to find much of the settlement now in the hands of the London Police Court Mission.

Something of the vision evidently remained even after its adherents had gone. Indeed, as Ian Randall observes at the end of the book, today the Bruderhof has over 2,900 members living in twenty-three international communities, most of them across Europe and North America. The rich archive of the movement is to be found in Walden, New York. The time is surely ripe for a gathering of these strands and the telling of this story.

This is an intricate, meticulous and compassionate book about the haphazard fortunes of communities of renewal and revival across the first half of the twentieth century; communities which sought separation from the world but remained caught up in its turmoil; communities which sought a new simplicity of life only to commit hours of labour to the complexities of adjustment, assistance and survival in a threatening world of totalitarian politics, international war, and social intolerance. For all these reasons, it certainly deserves a wide audience and a place on many shelves, both institutional and personal.

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Review of Roger J. Newell, Keine Gewalt! No Violence! How the Church Gave Birth to Germany’s Only Peaceful Revolution

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Review of Roger J. Newell, Keine Gewalt! No Violence! How the Church Gave Birth to Germany’s Only Peaceful Revolution (Wipf & Stock, 2017), 212 pp. ISBN 978-1-5326-1282-4.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

The origins of Roger Newell’s book lie in a study tour to the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig some years after the tumultuous events of 1989. But the book also represents a sensitive discussion of the many strands of argument and interpretation which have emerged across the English-speaking world in response to the tides of German history across the twentieth century. In such a meeting of personal and academic dimensions does Keine Gewalt! offer something of a personal odyssey as well as an exploration of the continuing themes of Church and State, theology and society, conformity and revolution in modern Europe and beyond. The fundamental question is never far from view: how might a church that was so effectively marginalised by a dictatorial power after 1945 become a focal point, and a catalyst, for a great movement of peaceful change across the whole of the German Democratic Republic?

This sense of observing and interpreting like a guest whose eyes are being opened by degrees to something new and unexpected is certainly one of the strengths of the book. It makes Newell himself something of a tourist – in the best sense – and equally an attractive introducer to readers coming to the same questions afresh. The vital presence at the heart of the story is the pastor of the Nikolaikirche himself, Christian Führer, who in 1989 opened the doors of the church to all people – and, in particular, to many who were disaffected by the Communist state – so that they could meet together, light candles, share what was important to them all and find new ways to insist upon these things in a world of repression and intimidation.

What were the roots of such a ministry and the historical and theological context in which such a moment lay? In a remark to Newell, mediated through his wife, Monika, Führer himself replied that much could be comprehended in the three names of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller, and Karl Barth. It was here that German Protestantism found an accumulating tradition of theological understanding which was rich enough to bear fruit in a new context and age. Was the Nikolaikirche at last a realisation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s vision of a Church that existed for others? But, as Newell finds, this is no simple inheritance and there were others who played their part in this accumulating history of ideas and experiences, particularly Albrecht Schönherr, Helmut Thielicke, Heino Falcke and Barth’s protesting adversary, Emil Brunner. He views them squarely in turn, and often sympathetically, even where doubts are obvious. To be sure, there are few villains in this book and no grinding axes – and it is all the better for it. The eirenic tone never falters.

The structure of the book responds to this agenda, offering chapters first on Bonhoeffer and then Niemöller before concentrating much attention on Barth in successive phases of his life and thought. Barth, indeed, provides a cantus firmus for the whole study, moving restlessly through the foreground or background, first of National Socialism and the Barmen Declaration, then the post-war crisis and the Stuttgart Declaration and the Darmstadt conference of 1947, and then the deepening confrontations of the Cold War and the troubled (and troubling) search for a ‘third way’ between the worldly powers of Communism and Anti-Communism. It is the two final chapters which confront the peaceful revolution itself, an escalation of principled protest and public mobilization and a deterioration of political will culminating in the disastrously misfiring fortieth anniversary of the foundation of the GDR on 7 October 1989. If pastors like Führer had once brought the people from the street into the sanctuary, now they all took to the streets clasping their candles, returning violence with piety and securing an unexpected revolution which would transform a continent. ‘We were ready for everything except prayers and candles’, reflects a rueful President of the People’s Chamber, Horst Sindermann. The story still possesses the power to move, however much it may have been trimmed, qualified and modified by sober analysis and argument.

Newell’s discussion does much to show what long years of study by western historians and scholars have made possible for a creative Anglo-American minister reflecting on the place of theology in the world. The labours of John Conway, John Moses, Charles Maier, and Matthew Hockenos are particularly conspicuous. Other striking influences also show up in the words and ideas of Herbert Butterfield and of his own teacher, James Torrance. In a well-judged Epilogue, Newell challenges triumphalism and self-righteousness and observes what the world since 1989 has all too obviously become. Yet at the last he is not desolate, finding the figure of Karl Barth waiting for him with words of assurance, ‘When the great hope is present, small hopes must always arise for the immediate future.’

There are many fine qualities to admire in this book, but in its blending of undemonstrative curiosity, personal idealism and uncomplicated intellectual honesty it presents an admirable model of a kind.

 

 

 

 

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Review of Michael W. Brierley and Georgina A. Byrne, Life after Tragedy: Essays on Faith and the First World War evoked by Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Review of Michael W. Brierley and Georgina A. Byrne, Life after Tragedy: Essays on Faith and the First World War evoked by Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017). Pp. xxiv + 254. ISBN 978-1-5326-0226-9.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

The many centenary anniversaries of the First World War which have accumulated in Britain since 2014 have produced many significant contributions in many different forms. They have also given historians of religion an audience for their growing explorations of the diverse religious dimensions of the conflict. One of these dimensions has been the experiences of chaplains to the armed forces—a field which that fine historian, Michael Snape, has made his own. It is in this context that the striking figure of Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy emerges.

Studdert Kennedy, or ‘Woodbine Willie’, as he was affectionately known by soldiers, has long been the most well-known of the British wartime chaplains. He has attracted the attention of scholars of various kinds for his poetry (The Unutterable Beauty, published in 1927, remains much admired in some quarters), his trenchant criticisms of the status quo, his uncompromising socialism, his pungent scepticism of authority (one of his books was simply called Lies), and his determination that the ghastliness of war must surely and eventually yield a better world. But he was also the embodiment of courage and unselfconscious sacrifice (he won the Military Cross) and his early death, exhausted, at the age of 45, presented something of the quality of a martyrdom—not so much to the powers of the age but perhaps to the whole age in which he lived. Westminster Abbey notoriously turned down the idea of hosting his funeral. One suspects that Studdert Kennedy would have been delighted by the compliment.

This collection of anniversary essays is very much the work of two members of the clergy of the Church of England who have sought to claim for their cathedral something of a responsibility for public scholarship and critical reflection. This is admirable, and these days rare. Once I would have thought that an English cathedral could make a very good home to scholarship and that English priests at large might know how to value the reality of historical experience. I have long since lost that faith and find that even a book like this cannot quite revive it. Nonetheless, what we have here is solid fare and it expresses the commitments of ten priests, while the two laymen turn out to be lay canons of cathedrals. The effect is collegial: for the most part they share a common geography as well as denomination and one senses that they are happy to be found in company together.

Michael Snape inaugurates the volume with an efficient ‘reconsideration’ of British religion and the First World War, while Michael Brierley offers a brisk sketch of the life of Studdert Kennedy. John Inge presents a more personal and wide-ranging reflection on the war as it affected the sensibilities of ‘place’ and ‘home’, finding Studdert Kennedy at home only in the Christ of the Gospels and the worship of the Church. Peter Atkinson confronts Studdert Kennedy the poet and holds to account the imperious responses of later English literary critics, particularly I.A. Richards and Roy Fuller, before proceeding to a discussion of the poetry of Geoffrey Dearmer. Michael Brierley returns with a discussion of Studdert Kennedy and the ‘new vision’ of a suffering God—a vision which would resonate so profoundly, and be developed, in the later theology of the European twentieth century. Georgina Byrne examines different forms of preaching (‘Prophesy or Propaganda?’), locating Studdert Kennedy alongside the ‘intensely patriotic’ Bishop of London, Winnington Ingram (who has almost become a subject, or at least a controversy, in his own right) and the eloquent individualist and pacifist (of a kind), Maude Royden. A discursive Mark Dorsett places Studdert Kennedy in the company of the like-minded Edward Lee Hicks (a notable bishop of Lincoln and a leading Christian Socialist) and the influential thinker R.H. Tawney, while looking to further horizons. David Bryer provides a useful survey of the war and its impact on the development of humanitarianism while Alvyn Pettersen discusses images of glory in war memorials, examining those at Worcester itself and at Magdeburg Cathedral (by Ernst Barlach) before jumping, attractively but perhaps surprisingly, into a reflection on the life of the fourth-century monk, Antony of Egypt. By way of conclusion Mark Chapman is very much at home in a discussion of Anglican theology, not least in its stray connections with German theologians, during and immediately after the war. Finally, the two editors retrieve and reconfigure strands in a concluding reflection on ’integration, balance and fullness’. An Afterword by the bishop of the Evangelical Church in Central Germany, Ilse Junkermann, is only momentarily a response to the life of Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy and suggests a diocesan link at work. In no small measure is the integrity of the volume affirmed by a very good, robust bibliography.

In sum, there is enough here to satisfy the questions and perspectives of the conventionally-minded historian. Equally, theologians of society, war, literature ethics and aesthetics, will find much to intrigue them. Michael Brierley and Georgina Byrne have done particularly well to bring the whole feast before us and more than the figure of the marvellous Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy is honoured by it all.

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Review Article: The Quest for the Historical Schweitzers

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Review Article: The Quest for the Historical Schweitzers

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

James Carleton Paget and Michael J. Thate (eds.), Albert Schweitzer in Thought and Action: A Life in Parts (Syracuse University Press, 2016).

Patti M. Marxsen, Helene Schweitzer: A Life of Her Own (Syracuse University Press, 2015).

Albert Schweitzer is, perhaps, the most truly, and even magnificently, awkward of figures. He was a product of the nineteenth century and in unique ways embodied many of its intellectual and moral achievements and possibilities. Yet he left that age behind and sought to claim a new one, even when he struggled to understand what the twentieth century had brought. Schweitzer was an internationalist who evidently remained entirely confident of the superiority of the culture that had produced him even as he repudiated it. He was a thinker of enduring value, but he founded no school and his very range deprived him of a secure place in conventional academic categories. He was a figure of history but today historians, by and large, overlook him Continue reading →

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Review of Andrew Chandler, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Review of Andrew Chandler, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), Pp. xii + 212, ISBN: 9780802872272.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship, Andrew Chandler grapples with the ecumenical and political legacy of this influential bishop. Beginning with a description of the eclectic contents of one of Bell’s little blue notebooks, Chandler explains how it “captures a mind and a soul in perpetual motion in the world: attentive, enquiring, pursuing. It is a testament of Christian life in the middle twentieth century, wrought out of the turmoil of politics, war, persecution, calamity. It is a proof of one man’s decision to take his place in such a world, and to do so as a faithful Christian” (4).

George Bell was born in 1883 on the south coast of England, into a “secure, comfortable middle-class clerical home” (7). He attended Westminster School beginning in 1896, then Christ Church, Oxford, in 1901. Next he enrolled in theological college in Wells, in the West of England, where he was introduced to the student ecumenical movement and to Christian Socialism. Ordained as a deacon in Ripon Cathedral in 1907 and as a priest in Leeds in 1908, Bell returned to Oxford in 1910, where he combined a growing commitment to social justice with a vibrant personal faith. As he explained, “Christianity is a life before it is a system and to lay too much stress on the system destroys the life” (12).

After this overview of Bell’s formative years, Chandler breaks Bell’s ecclesiastical career into a series of chronological chapters which revolve around his positions and causes. Chandler begins with Bell’s time as domestic chaplain to Archbishop Randall Davidson of Canterbury (1914-1924), as dean of Canterbury (1924-1929), and as the newly appointed bishop of Chichester (1929-1932). From there the author examines Bell in his various roles as an interested observer and periodic participant in the German Church Struggle (1933-1937), as an ecumenical leader in a continent hurtling towards war (1937-1939), as a champion of peace in a time of war (1939-1942), as an active supporter of the German Resistance (1942-1945), as a leader in the postwar ecclesiastical reconstruction of Europe (1945-1948), as a key figure in the emergence World Council of Churches (1948-1954), and as an elderly bishop winding down his career (1954-1958).

Throughout these diverse phases of his career, the breadth and volume of Bell’s activities was formidable. Over a span of more than fifty years, he wrote, edited, and contributed to over two-dozen books, ranging from poetry and ecclesiastical biography to credal, incarnational, and pastoral theology, to Christian unity and the relationship between the church and modern politics. Along with his leadership in the Church of England, Bell was a force in numerous international ecumenical institutions, including the World Conference of Life and Work (particularly in Stockholm in 1925 and Oxford in 1937), other ecumenical meetings at Fanö in 1934 and Sigtuna in 1942, the postwar Treysa meeting with German church leaders, and the World Council of Churches, where Bell was elected moderator of the Central Committee at the first WCC assembly in Amsterdam, in 1948.

Bell’s activities were often centred on German affairs. Almost immediately after the rise of Hitler, Bell and his colleague A.S. Duncan-Jones, who was Dean of Chichester, monitored German politics and visited contacts in the German churches, in order to understand the nature of the German Church Struggle for themselves. Bell soon became a critic of the Nazi dictatorship, the pro-Nazi German Christian Faith Movement, and the policy of persecution against both non-Aryan Christians and Jews in general. Around this time, the young Dietrich Bonhoeffer was serving in a German congregation in London, and he and Bell began to develop a warm friendship.

Over the following years, Bell regularly spoke out against the Hitler regime and its supporters within the German churches. When the German delegation failed to appear at the 1937 Oxford Life and Work conference, Bell won support for a letter noting the absence of the German delegation and expressing concern over “the afflictions of many pastors and laymen who have stood firm from the first in the Confessional Church for the sovereignty of Christ, and for the freedom of the Church of Christ to preach His Gospel” (64). After Martin Niemöller’s incarceration in a concentration camp, Bell maintained close contact with the Niemöller family and wrote a stirring foreword for an anonymous biography of the Berlin pastor, in which Bell praised the faith of those standing for the Gospel in Germany. And when the Jewish refugee crisis began to grow acute in 1938, Bell spoke on behalf of refugees in his inaugural speech in the House of Lords, and also lectured publicly about the crisis, describing it as a “crisis of humanity” (69).

Chandler’s description of George Bell’s wartime activities illustrates both the breadth of Bell’s concern and the regularity with which his principled participation in continental political and ecclesiastical affairs pushed him out of step with his peers in the Church of England and British House of Lords. First of all, Bell argued that the church’s role in war was distinct from that of the state. The church was to be a universal body, “charged with a gospel of God’s redeeming love” and tasked with “creating a community founded on love” which would outcast the changes brought about by war (75). Whether in war or in peace, the church, declared Bell, should stand for principles like “the dignity of all men, respect for human life, the acknowledgment of the solidarity for good and evil of all nations and races of the earth, fidelity to the plighted word, and the appreciation of the fact that any power of any kind, political or economic, must be coextensive with responsibility” (75).

Second, Bell worked for peace, championing the vision of a federal union of European states and arguing for negotiation with the German state, even in the midst of the war, in hopes that the Germans would remove Hitler from power. His position was shared by few. Karl Barth felt Bell was “too much a British gentleman and thus unable to understand the phenomenon of Hitler,” while Archbishop Cosmo Lang wrote Bell: “You are an optimist and I am a realist” (81, 82).

In the same way, Chandler shows how Bell’s views on the morality of war were at odds with his contemporaries. When Bell opposed the internment of German and Austrian refugees as enemy aliens in the House of Lords, a fellow member wondered whether the bishop realized England and Germany were at war. When Bell tried to distinguish between Germans and Nazis, he was vigorously opposed in parliament and harangued by a Chichester parishioner. When he protested in the Convocation of Canterbury against the area bombing of German cities, he was shouted down. Worse still, at home in his diocese, he had become so unpopular that Duncan-Jones suggested he not attend a military service at the Chichester Cathedral.

Chandler does an admirable job of explaining the role for which Bell is often best known in German history circles—his activity as secret intermediary between the German Resistance and the British government. In late May 1942, in the city of Stockholm, Bell met with German Pastor Hans Schönfeld of the International Christian Social Institute in Geneva, whom he had known for over a decade. Schönfeld explained that there was a growing opposition movement within Germany, determined to topple Hitler from power and restore the German government to a Christian basis. A few days later, he provided Bell with a list of the names of important conspirators. Just after that, Bell met with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Sigtuna, Sweden. Bonhoeffer also outlined the nature of the German Resistance, urging Bell to ask the British government for assurances that the Allies would negotiate with the German opposition, if it could seize power. This Bell did, meeting with Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, but to no avail. Chandler explains not only the government’s skepticism about such “peace feelers,” but also the way in which Bell’s continued lobbying made him suspect and undermined his mission further (100).

After explaining Bell’s determined efforts towards postwar reconciliation and the establishment of the World Council of Churches, Chandler assesses Bell’s legacy in a concluding chapter. There he paints the image of Bell as a man of many interests, causes, and campaigns—indeed, as a man of paradoxes. A member of the Establishment who “did not quite belong to it,” Bell “so often refused to conform to categorical expectations” (166, 170). He was an Anglican with an ecumenical orientation, an Englishman who cared as much or more about international affairs as English matters, and a man of deep devotion who lived large parts of his life in the world of politics. Influenced by high-church incarnational theology, Bell worked to bring art and artists into the life of the church, even as he also exerted himself on behalf of social justice for the working classes and hospitality for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution (170-171). Most especially, perhaps, he stood for principled and often unpopular positions, such as ecumenical unity and international peace in a time of nationalism and war.

Sadly, no new biography of Bishop George Bell can avoid dealing with the October 2015 allegation that Bell “had committed sexual offenses against an individual who was at the time a young child” (170). Chandler laments the fact that almost everyone associated with this time has passed away, making it virtually impossible to consider the charges in a normal judicial process. He does not in any way deny that these offenses could have occurred, but does the only thing a historian can do, which is to attempt to place the allegations in their historical context. In an appendix devoted to the controversy, Chandler notes that Bell’s 368 volume archive contains his personal notebooks and pocket diaries from 1919 to 1957, in which he kept track of all his appointments and engagements. He notes Bell’s “conspicuously high view of the standards required by his office,” and adds that Bell was almost constantly observed, that he participated in many disciplinary processes for clergy, that he maintained what seemed like a happy marriage, and that he worked almost continually in the presence of his wife, secretary, domestic chaplain, or driver. Chandler interviewed the only member of Bell’s circle still alive, his domestic chaplain from the early 1950s. This man “is firm, indeed emphatic, that ‘no child or young teenager ever entered during my two years as Chaplain, except on the day in January chosen for the parish Christmas party which he and Mrs Bell laid on every year for the children of the clergy’” (198) Add to this that Bell tended to work with his door open and often held private conversations outdoors in the garden and it leads Chandler to describe the 2015 allegation as “anomalous” and seeming to exist “in its own world, evidently uncorroborated by any other independent source” (199).

Andrew Chandler has published widely on the life and ministry of Bishop George Bell, and is the current acknowledged expert on him. George Bell, Bishop of Chichester is a concise, accessible overview of Bell’s engagement in the world of ecumenism and international politics during the turbulent times in which he lived and worked. It deserves a wide readership, especially among those who only know Bell as Bonhoeffer’s friend and English contact on behalf of the German Resistance.

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These Church Historians of Our Time: Markus Huttner, Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier, Huamin Toshiko Mackman

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 4 (December 2015)

These Church Historians of Our Time: Markus Huttner, Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier, Huamin Toshiko Mackman *

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

In these days of professionalism and of stolid institutions of higher education we seldom think of the work of the scholar as possessing much of the quality of a vocation. If we live and work outside the academic sphere we tend to assume that all is well within it, or at least as well there as it is anywhere else. The difficulties of finding a steady place in a world of university departments might be obvious to those who haunt its corridors, but we do not glamourize them. If the young scholar who cherishes a vision comes and goes we might enjoy them while they are here but we do not worry about them unduly when they have gone. They may not go on to quite the career they would ideally have chosen, or written the books they would have wished to write. But doesn’t that go for us all?

The modern university, like any other institution, exists to give the theme of scholarship structure and form. But the truth is often that for younger scholars academic institutions exist as a kind of intricately structured instability, in which only the powers at the top, the elect, enjoy the confidence of position and all the solidity that comes with it, while at the bottom contracts are brief, and prospects are often bleak. In such an atmosphere of benign interest and effective indifference a great deal of vital new wisdom is lost to us, and because it never has time to ripen and reveal itself we hardly know what we miss. Although they might stand to benefit so much from such labour and such insight, churches rarely view this matter as one to concern them and while money is carefully set aside for the payment of the clergy it would hardly be considered appropriate to spend it on the ambitions of a young medievalist or a historian of religious faith in the modern age. Scholars of religious history often find that they are stranded between a university world which often proceeds on the assumption that religion does not matter very much, if at all, and churches which continue to feel that the enterprise of research and critical thought is really no responsibility of theirs.

The situation, of course, varies from one country to the next. In the world of the German university it is not only the structures that look distinctive but the degrees themselves. Not yet have they shed the lengthy progress from a first doctorate to a second Habilitationsschrift. Professors do possess power and patronage matters. It is dispensed in the context of collective research projects often funded by foundations outside the university itself. This has much in common with the working of science departments in British and North American universities, though money for the Arts and Humanities is thinner and the opportunities dimmer. In North America an aspiring academic must confront all the liabilities of the ‘tenure track’ and hope that security for the longer term will come, in its time. In such a context do many young historians spend much of their energy scrambling as best they can from one position or project to another, and in Europe it is the research project, not the institution itself, which often defines the narrative. All of this makes it exceedingly difficult to enjoy much freedom in what one writes, or indeed to build a career which possesses any clear sense of direction or cumulative character. A historian of one subject will need to become the historian of another, if that is where the money is to be had. A little like the ship-builders of the industrial age whose security lasted only so long as the present ship was emerging on the slipways of a dock, they must hope that there will come another ship-building contract when the present work is done.

The German historian Markus Huttner will have known such a landscape, its opportunities and frustrations, well enough. Born in Weilheim/Oberbayern in 1961 he graduated from Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn in 1990. He was already conspicuous as a student and he had taken a year abroad to study at Oxford, where he was a visiting student at Christ Church. In such places a commitment to the history of National Socialism, and its convergence with Christianity in particular, had yielded a deepening awareness of the significance of these themes in the context of wider European opinion. This would define his first doctorate and his first book. In 1995 Markus Huttner published Britische Presse und nationalsozialistische Kirchenkampf and gave to scholarship an intricate survey of the British newspapers and their interpretation of what went on in the Catholic churches of Germany in the years of the Church Struggle – one of those immense monographs which have been possible for German researchers but unthinkable almost everywhere else, and which have become the speciality of the Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh. The book shows conviction not only in the choice of subject but the disavowing of some of the theoretical and methodological approaches, by then conventional in much of German scholarship, which might well have defined it. The book established a firm claim both for its subject and its author.

Although he was soon immersed in the necessities of publishing a plethora of articles for academic journals, Markus Huttner already had his sights set on a second book, and one that might reach a wider public. In 1999 he published an innovative discussion of the great matter of religion and totalitarianism as it was argued out by Christians in both Germany and Britain during the National Socialist era. This was Totalitarismus und Säkulare Religionen. Blending theoretical and biographical approaches, Markus Huttner here developed the strengths of his earlier work and drew together a striking pantheon of critics and observers, churchmen like J.H. Oldham and George Bell, intellectuals like George Orwell and Christopher Dawson, international critics like Waldemar Gurian and influential journalists like the editor Wickham Steed, the German correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, Frank Voigt and the Times correspondent, Norman Ebbutt. At the time when the book appeared a growing number of historians were beginning to write again of totalitarianism (a word which had itself passed in and out of fashion) as a ‘political religion’, and in many ways this became the premise of the book.

In the German universities the place of this work was recognised. Established historians like Thomas Brockmann, Christian Kampmann, Antje Oschmann and Franz Bosbach had come to value the achievements and the promise of this new voice. Maintaining a fruitful relationship with Oxford and the British universities, Huttner’s work was equally known to Jonathan Wright, at Christ Church itself, and, at Leicester, by Richard Bonney, who met him at a conference in 2001 and found him eager to help his own work. But it was now a question of settling to work on a Habilitationsschrift. Working under Ulrich von Hehl at the University of Leipzig, Markus Huttner began to explore the history of the German universities across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new work which united the intellectual and the corporate and emphasized with a new profundity the development of professionalization and the organization of disciplines. The work prospered and much of value was accomplished. But now, suddenly, time was running out. It was in Leipzig in the spring of 2005 that Markus Huttner learnt that he was seriously ill. He was killed by a brain tumour, dying in hospital on 31 May 2006.

I never met him, but with characteristic generosity he once sent me his two books and I replied, saying that I was embarrassed that I had nothing of comparable worth with which to reciprocate. After his death, in 2007 a fine anthology of Markus Huttner’s shorter writings, Gesammelte Schriften zur Zeit- und Universitätsgeschichte, was edited by Thomas Brockmann, Christof Kampmann and Antje Oschmann. The collection does well to show the character and quality, and the range, that he had by then achieved and the promise that had become its own fulfilment. Today his contribution is barely known outside his own country. One is left to acknowledge the barrier of language and the difficulties of making scholarship truly an international adventure in which the riches that may be known in one place are equally known to another.

The academic world which Markus Huttner knew bore much in common with that of Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier. Born a decade later, in 1971, she grew up in Lyon and studied History at the Jean Moulin University there, graduating in 1993. Her next step was to the University of Heidelberg where she was increasingly drawn to the history of modern Catholicism in Germany, particularly between 1848 and 1933. Like Markus Huttner, she soon looked to study abroad and an opportunity to study German Catholicism in the Kaisserreich in Oxford in 1996 proved a striking influence, as did a short visit to Vancouver for a conference of German Studies organized by John Conway. The first time that I encountered her was in a conference of the Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte journal at Strasbourg. Very much in the background and barely making her presence felt, she maintained nonetheless a palpable intensity of interest in everything and everybody there. Her work had by now garnered plaudits and accolades, but not yet a solid foundation or way ahead. It is hard not to sense that the happiness of these stipendium and conferences, and the praise that she won there, must have given her a still more vivid sense of what she wanted but could not quite secure for herself. Lyon remained her home and it was there that she completed her doctorate on the Katholikentage in the Weimar Republic.

By now Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier had come to her view herself as a historian of religion, politics and society and a scholar of comparative histories. There was a profusion of articles in journals and collections of conference proceedings of various kinds. She was as much at home with the history of German Catholicism as she was with that of French Catholicism, but she was far more interested in the realm of lay activism than the manoeuvres of ecclesiastical powers. Her work showed that she had already become an accomplished surveyor of long chronologies and broad landscapes, but she was, if anything, more drawn to intricacies of personal and collective experience. A succession of short biographical studies was published bringing a succession of neglected figures, many of them women, into the foreground of historical appreciation. But Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier already perceived that her fortunes must be, at best, precarious in the national and secular worlds which defined the outlook of the French universities. In the European faculties of that time funding could be secured for what had come to be called ‘trans-national’ and ‘trans-cultural’ research and this offered some prospect of work on projects of various kinds. Looking to secure a post-doctoral position she turned towards the history of the international women’s movement. At a workshop in Hamburg in 2005 she met the historian, Angelika Schaser. It was an important connection. Together they were able to pursue an innovative seam of research into religious conversions in the border areas of France and Germany across the nineteenth century. But the search for a university position began to look increasingly desperate and it proved impossible to develop what had been begun. There was a brief stipendium at the University of Vechta in 2006 and then at the University of Mainz in the following year. At a meeting organized by the George Bell Institute in London she said very little in formal sessions but was rich in conversation, and here she found in the Polish historian, Dorota Schreiber-Kurpiers a new and vital friendship. This yielded another brief opportunity, this time a short lectureship, from 2007-9, at the University of Opole. Together Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier and Dorota Schreiber-Kurpiers now planned an innovative project exploring the relationship between military authorities and prostitution during the First World War, a matter never before touched by scholarship in that country. I remember well the quality of near-trepidation with which they outlined this to me, and how firmly they insisted that it was surely time that such a subject must be examined (though I should add that, for my part, I needed no convincing). For Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier the position at Opole was precious, but it also brought an immense burden of teaching. There was another flurry of applications – I remember writing many references for her, often more in hope than expectation – but to no avail. When Angelika Schaser met her again in 2009 she found her almost exhausted and dispirited, but still putting a brave face on it all. The University of Hamburg remained something of an academic home for her work.

I think I have never known a scholar who was so ardent in seeking to write and publish what she had discovered in her work; always she appeared to be hunting for a home for something just finished. No other avenue opened before her. She soon became convinced that there was no future for her, and for the research in which she had come to believe, in Europe. She had some contacts in North America and believed there might be something to favour her there. Her command of English was excellent. A modest breakthrough occurred: Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier moved to Quebec and to a position at Laval University. Now she wrote a short study of the French journalist, Louise Weiss (in French, and as yet unpublished) and another, of the German politician Helene Weber (the fruit of scholarship from the Hiledegardis Association in Bonn). An article, presenting something of her earlier research on conversions in French Catholicism, was completed for the journal Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte (but not published). It was in Hamburg, shortly before Christmas in 2011, that Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier, discovered that she had developed an inoperable brain tumour. The following January treatment began in Canada, but little could be done. Friends rallied as best they could and they found her resilient, even optimistic. Far from Lyon and from the many cities which she had known so briefly, she died in hospital on 4 October 2012.

Huamin Toshiko Mackman grew up in a quite different world from that known to Markus Huttner and Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier. She was born in 1961 in Japan, to a Chinese father and a Japanese mother. Already as a child she was familiar with international travel; because her father worked for an American airline company she frequently flew alone to the United States and to Taiwan, journeys which made her family wonder if she possessed a distinctively independent and adventurous character. At elementary school she discovered the English language, often studying it late into the night and, it was feared, harming her eyesight. Much of these young years was devoted to caring for an ill mother: there was no money for university fees, but Huamin won a scholarship and duly repaid what she owed with the first job that she secured upon graduation. For a time she was employed as an interpreter by a Chinese trading company, often flying to China on business, much to the satisfaction of her father. Her parents died within weeks of each other when she was 27.

It was soon after leaving the trading company that she began to work with foreign students in Japan. She also visited Korea and began to study its language. It was striking that in the midst of such a life she should encounter the Society of Friends and herself become a Quaker. During the early 1990s she worked for the Waseda Hoshin Christian Centre in Tokyo, developing a particular commitment to Japanese-Korean relations. It was in this context that she travelled to Britain in 1996, first to study for a brief period at the Selly Oak Colleges in Birmingham, then to return there, this time to live. These early Birmingham years found her researching for a doctorate and organizing a Centre for the Study of North East Asian Missiology with Werner Ustorf. Together they edited a collective volume, Identity and Marginality: Rethinking Christianity in North East Asia (Peter Lang, 2000). She married, settled and made the city her home.

In its heyday a renowned bastion of Christian internationalism, missionary training and education, Selly Oak was in many ways an ideal place for Huamin Toshiko Mackman to flourish. But that era had now all but passed. The financial basis of the establishment was fragile and was judged by its governors to have served its purpose in the world. Negotiations were soon rumbling in the background. When Selly Oak was effectively acquired by the University of Birmingham, salaried academic staff were adopted and given a new home in the Department of Theology while a still-peripheral figure like Huamin was stranded. Whatever the rights and wrongs of it, the end of the age of Selly Oak deprived her of an important context for her work, and one to which she could have made a sustained contribution.

At this time Huamin encountered the Birmingham Quaker and Director of the Barrow Cadbury Trust, Eric Adams. The Trust had only a few years before committed generous funds to the development of a new body, the George Bell Institute, which was run from an office at the Queen’s Foundation nearby. A modest power with modest funds, the institute promptly made her a Fellow, undertook to support her research costs and made a study available to her so that she could work, translate and write as she saw fit. Here, for two years, much was achieved. Huamin published two valuable articles in the journal of the institute, Humanitas, one a discussion of Japanese Christianity and missionary controversies in the 1930s and the other on the political dilemmas of the eminent Japanese evangelist, Toyohiko Kagawa. The library at Selly Oak housed archival treasures documenting vividly the activities of international corresponding members of the World Student Christian Federation across the first half of the twentieth century. These had barely seen the light of day for decades. This was the kind of work which would have suited Huamin almost perfectly and we often discussed what we would like to do. In these conversations the name of Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier often came up. Applications for some modest finance which might make possible some new research there simply ran into the ground. Shortly afterwards the Birmingham office of the Institute had to close altogether.

Very possibly Huamin Toshiko Mackman did not view herself primarily as a scholar, though her research was meticulous, her command of languages capable and her sense of a subject was acute, creative and persuasive. But her research spoke of a profound moral engagement with contemporary issues, many of which called upon persevering, practical qualities. She was deeply involved in various works of international reconciliation and later accomplished much for the Japanese community across the Midlands. Local hospitals called upon her when they needed assistance with Japanese or Chinese patients who spoke little English. She also committed a great deal of time to contemporary issues of justice. In particular, she monitored refugee issues as they arose in Japan itself, seeking to support those who campaigned for a more liberal policy there. At heart, she was a vigorous and assiduous Christian internationalist whose work constituted a consistent challenge to those old enemies, nationalism, militarism, imperialism and indifference in their many forms. In company she was immensely kind and wonderfully thoughtful. The impression that she made on people of very different backgrounds was striking. A quiet presence in any conclave, her conversation was given wholly to things that mattered. Huamin Toshiko Mackman learnt that she had lymphatic cancer soon after the final colloquium of the George Bell Institute, in Poland in 2012. For a time there were hopes that the disease could be controlled, but it was too strong. She died in a Birmingham hospice on 17 August 2014. She left behind her husband, Steve, and a young, adopted daughter, Rose, brought to Birmingham from a Chinese orphanage only a few years before.

These three brief lives will leave few traces. Many of those who have grown familiar with the conferences and seminars of university life hardly noticed when they were among us and barely knew that they had gone. What then of the institutions of the Christian faith, as we know them in their more solid ecclesiastical forms, their national and local hierarchies and synods, their ongoing pronouncements and resolutions? Here there will be almost no acknowledgement at all, no sense of what has been lost, no sense even of what might have been learnt. Yet all three of them were still, in their own way, Doctors of the Church

 

* My particular thanks to Franz Bosbach, Angelika Schaser and Eric Adams.

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Review of David Nash, Christian Ideals in British Culture: Stories of Belief in the Twentieth Century

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Review of David Nash, Christian Ideals in British Culture: Stories of Belief in the Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) ISBN 978-0-230-57265-2.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

Nash-ChristianThe cover announces the character of the theme: it is the image of a stained glass window in Worcester Cathedral showing three resolute figures looking up towards the sky, intent, devout, broadly sanguine. One is a nurse and the other two are men of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. The task that David Nash has set himself here is a striking one: in what kinds of narratives might the historian find the relationship between religious faith and active public life in the British twentieth century? How are we to locate the dimension of personal faith in the discussions and dramas of society at large? How are we to know when it is there – or when it is not?

Such a project, of course, requires some recasting of conventional understandings. This book is only to some extent a study of what is often now called ‘corporate’ religion. Nash knows the importance of chasing up other, less obvious paths in search of a new prospect. Above all, he looks purposefully at the sprawling realm of the Christian laity. His chapters enjoy titles like ‘Pilgrims, Seekers, Samaritans and Saviours’, and ‘Salvation, Old and New’. Two chapters explore ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ wars and ‘Loss’ and ‘Remembrance’. The material is lively and the argument vigorous and, in the best sense, provocative. Nash asks many questions which historians have often simply ignored: how did people read the Bible? What was it in their eyes to live and die ‘well’? What was it to doubt, or to be ‘saved’? There is a persistent emphasis on the Church of England which is justified at an early stage, but which still leaves some questions hanging in the air, for it is easy to claim too much for the Anglicans and expect too little of the others. There is also a fair amount of jumping about as far as dates are concerned and this might well unsettle those who look for chronological order. In one chapter the Abdication Crisis of 1938 finds itself in company with the prosecution of the Gay News for blasphemy in 1979 and the death of Princess Diana in 1997.

Yet chronology certainly does matter in this book. Nash regards the secularization debate as something tyrannous. Are so many diverse reconfigurations of faith and unfaith really amenable to one vast, unrolling trajectory of decline and extinction? ‘Secularization’ has tried to explain a great deal, no doubt, but has often only ended up distorting perspectives and getting in the way. An awareness of it has even affected the way a pessimistic Church of England, in particular, has come to understand itself. It is surely high time to claim a new freedom and to argue with quite different terms and possibilities. In short, Nash hands back the telescope that many other scholars have provided and instead picks up a kaleidoscope. The new view is fascinating, even if it is difficult quite to know what picture it presents and sort of trajectory might be at work.

This book is something better than an historical polemic and the overall effect is both alert and constructive. Perhaps best of all, it does not seek to lock the subject up inside some self-serving thesis. It frames some bold ideas and opens a variety of new doors. It invites. Does it persuade? That will depend on many things. It is surely right to suggest that later twentieth century religion came to reveal not simply a decline but a ‘diffusion of authority’ (p. 192) and to observe that this should not be seen automatically as a narrative of ‘dilution’. Scholars of secularization may well have been too ready to characterize the contemporary history of religion as a glum history of waning churches and chapels and declining weekly congregations. But secularization, however we understand it, remains difficult to repudiate because there is simply so much diverse evidence about to justify it. This is not to say that it hasn’t acquired an accumulation of questionable forms, or even become something of an ideology. Nash observes sharply that even the most adept secularization theses rather often end up preaching the end of religion and creating for themselves a kind of eschatology, a definitive ‘end time’ for religion altogether. This is plainly dubious. By contrast, Professor Nash is surely right to suggest that it is better to think cautiously and sensitively, not of cycles and grand trajectories but of patterns which might be difficult to identify with confidence. Nothing, after all, is predetermined. At the last this is both a subtle book and a hopeful one. It deserves to be read by an international audience.

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Catholicism, Dictatorship and the World at War: The Significance of Cardinal Hinsley, 1935-1943

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 1 (March 2013)

Catholicism, Dictatorship and the World at War: The Significance of Cardinal Hinsley, 1935-1943

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

This month brings the seventieth anniversary of the death of Cardinal Hinsley, Archbishop of Westminster. Hinsley’s time at the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England coincided with the appeasement of continental dictators, the final tumbling of all of Europe into war, the crisis of those critical months of 1940 when France fell and Britain faced catastrophe, the relentless expansion of the conflict across the face the world and then the turning of the tide against the Axis powers and the growing confidence of victory. It was the intensity with which Hinsley identified with the colossal dramas of his times that made him a national – and international – figure.

To any scholar of the relationship of religion and politics Hinsley presents an obvious interest. Yet this man who became archbishop of Westminster for eight tumultuous years has not attracted as much attention as he might have. Within a year of his death there was something like an ‘official’ biography by John Heenan, one of his students in Rome who would one day follow his master to that high office. This is very much a work of a particular kind and its judgments show the author to be working within the various confinements of his day and interest. There is a good drenching of piety, an emphasis on laudable qualities, and some firm avoidances. But Heenan knew the force of what his subject had established. In beginning with the weighty funeral which Church and State accorded to Hinsley in March 1943, he shows a Roman Catholic Church that had truly arrived as a dimension of national life. For this was a great occasion and a vast congregation. The Government, he exults, was not merely represented. It actually came, altogether. Even so, the wait for a second biography would be a long one. James Hagerty’s admirable 2008 study, Cardinal Hinsley: Priest and Patriot, provided a more dispassionate analysis, and often a more extensive one.

Hinsley has attracted only sporadic attention from scholars. Adrian Hastings paid a warm tribute in his lively History of English Christianity, 1920-1985 (London, 1986) while Thomas Moloney placed Hinsley firmly in the framework of solid diplomacy, in Westminster, Whitehall and the Vatican: The Role of Cardinal Hinsley 1935-1943 (in 1985). Moloney’s often elegant book leaves the historian of international politics much in his debt, for he clearly did a good deal of honest toil in the archives and, in so doing, widened and developed our picture. There is now a valuable overview by Michael Gaine in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. To extend the range of this will not be quite straightforward because, as Heenan found in 1944, there is not very much to go on. Hinsley was not a man who thought of filing papers and meeting the requirements of future historians. He did not bother to preserve his correspondence once a matter was settled. Heenan suspected that he would not even have expected a biography. He was private, modest and utterly given to the present moment. But he was observed sympathetically by a few who were prepared to commit something of the man to paper. The Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, recorded a significant tribute in the pages of Blackfriars in May 1943. This friendship of a Cardinal and an Anglican bishop is suggestive. Later that great insider, David Mathew, wrote wisely and sensitively of Hinsley in the later editions of his striking study, Catholicism in England: The Portrait of a Minority: its Culture and Tradition (third edition, 1955).

The verdict that the great weight of Hinsley’s long life came to rest in those late, crucial years, between 1935 and 1943, is irresistible, although in his biography of 2008 James Hagerty does well to retrieve the earlier years and readjust at least some of our perspectives. In fact, this was really rather an odd career, much of it committed to one modest institution, the Venerabile in Rome and then to a long, roving brief as Apostolic Delegate in Africa. There was not a great deal in all this to make any historian of great affairs sit up sharply and take note. But, crucially, Hinsley was enough of an insider in Rome to be in the way of something splendid if it happened to occur. In 1935, when he was 69 years old, it certainly did.

The leadership of the English Roman Catholic community had for over thirty years rested in the hands of capable Cardinal Bourne. But the impression left by those decades is something dour, brittle, dry and introverted. This was a Catholic community still not quite at home in national society; one often defined by a deeply regional character, a particular sociology (Irish, working class, aristocratic and rather little in between), a rather petulant striving for legitimation and a bristling grievance that the Establishment still refused to acknowledge its existence at State occasions. Nor was it was not a community always at peace with itself. The English bishops were notoriously querulous – and Rome knew about it. In 1935 many English Catholics may have been baffled by the appointment as Archbishop of Westminster of a man so little known in his home country. But Pius XI knew his man and would have no other. When Hinsley himself had recovered from the shock he quite simply took on a new lease of life. This sudden emergence from the background at such a doom-laden hour had something of the Churchillian epic about it.  Hinsley must have wondered if the whole of his life had been merely a preparation for this moment.

Hinsley looked like a safe pair of hands. He was devoted to the Papacy. He had done nothing disconcerting. He was amiable and had friends in high places. Moreover, he was theologically a conservative who had no time for Modernism. None of this indicated any bracing, liberalising attitudes or obvious liabilities. Yet there were quiet hints of something bolder. His sympathies were too deeply rooted in the conditions of the poor to accept too readily the blandishments of the Right. When a politician had visited the Venerabile and amiably told the ordinands that on their return to England it would be their duty to vote Conservative Hinsley brusquely ended the occasion. The Church was not his whole world: he was perfectly capable at ecclesiastical affairs but they did not excite him. He was stirred by the spectacle of oppression and he hated to see righteousness persecuted. Wherever the Church was threatened his ears pricked up and he was all attention and involvement. Yet we still know too little of what he made of Italian Fascism when he lived in Rome itself. Mathew thought he did not really understand Italians altogether. Heenan simply observed that when the Mussolini regime sought to redesign the centre of Rome and gobble up at least part of the Venerabile Hinsley did his best to thwart the plan. He would, not doubt, have done the same if a comparable civic engineering project had been dreamed up by any other power.

The personal traits of an archbishop are bound to be eulogized, but Hinsley’s characteristics were suggestive. Mathew thought that he simply lacked pride or vanity. He lived as simply as he could; he needed, and relished, the company of all sorts and conditions of people; as a friend he was found to be kindly, loyal, paternal. He listened well. It seems that Hinsley was quite at home with Chapel as well as Church people. Mathew thought Hinsley ‘never thought in denominational terms’. He did not much care for great churches – and Westminster Cathedral is something strenuous in these terms – but grumbled about mere ‘bricks and mortar’ and sought active apostolic work. Instead he was happiest in settings that were modest or quietly domestic. He sought never to waste time; some found him always in a hurry to use well what was left to him. He worked like a Trojan and prayed constantly. When George Bell stayed with him in his home in Hare Street he found ‘the next morning I felt a richer man, richer spiritually as well as richer in wisdom’. He could be stern but was more often found to be compassionate. He was uninterested in splendour and pageantry. When he left a note for his executors it was found to request no pomp at his funeral but only a low Mass, ‘no profusion of candles’, ‘the least expense possible’, a burial ‘wherever most convenient’. None of this, of course, he got.

Hinsley was devoted to the Papacy and this must have been at least one reason why Pius XI put him in Westminster. But he was not over-fascinated by church affairs and the perspectives that he brought to the job were generous ones. Hinsley disavowed purely clerical company and his view of the Roman Catholic Church was by conviction a laicizing one. He looked for things of substance, in whatever form they arose, not the mere presentation of clerical appearances. Hastings observed, ‘No archiepiscopate was effectively less ultramontane or clericalist.’ Hinsley was ardent in his support for Catholic Action. The Tablet had long ago been incarcerated by a defensive clerical caste; now he promptly turned it over to the laity and watched it prosper under Douglas Woodruff. He enjoyed G.K. Chesterton, looked up to Christopher Dawson and Arnold Toynbee and fostered the work of the young Barbara Ward. He would have liked Ronald Knox to be a bishop.

Above all, Hinsley brought something of the world to Westminster – but the world was just about to shout its demands at the politicians in Parliament and the diplomats in Whitehall anyway. He lost no time in pinning his colours to the shaky mast of the League of Nations but this brought no strong reassurance. His arrival had coincided with the hour of its most severe test. When Mussolini attacked Abyssinia in October 1935 Hinsley faced a fundamental challenge. What should he now say? If British opinion was indignant should he join the chorus and show the loyalty of the Church? If he stood firmly by the Pope he must know that the neutrality of the Vatican was incomprehensible to the critics of dictators and aggressors. The Archbishop of Canterbury was powerful against the invasion; a senior Anglican bishop like Henson of Durham was positively incandescent. To make matters worse for Hinsley he was caught up in a clumsy, botched attempt at intervention in Britain by the Vatican itself. For his part he had no illusions about Abyssinia, whatever his calculations. This was an act of aggression and, as Hagerty shows, he was ready to say so publicly. There was a letter to the Times. And then there was a sermon in Golders Green.

‘Indignation’, Hinsley declared at Golders Green, ‘knows no bounds when we see that Africa, that ill-used continent of practically unarmed people, is made the focus and playground of scientific slaughter.’ But what could the Pope actually do?

He is a helpless old man with a small police force to guard himself, to guard the priceless art and archaeological treasures of the Vatican, and to protect his diminutive state which ensures his due independence in the exercise of his universal right and duty to teach and guide his followers of all races. Can he denounce or coerce a neighbouring power – a power armed with absolute control of everything and with every modern instrument of force? He could excommunicate and place under interdict! Yes! And thus make war with his neighbour inevitable, besides upsetting the peace and consciences of the great mass of Italians with the result of a fierce anti-clerical outbreak. Spiritual penalties are for the correction of those who are knowingly guilty. And spiritual penalties for a world daily more godless are of little avail.

The Pope was not an arbitrator. He was explicitly excluded from any such role by the secret London pact of 1915. Only if both sides of a dispute invited him to judge them could he do so.

Parts of the British press made much of this characterisation of the Pope. Pius XI himself was not flattered. But what really caused the ecclesiastics in Rome to fidget nervously was Hinsley’s condemnation of the ideology which launched this invasion. Fascism, he had pronounced, deified Caesar, showed tyranny, made ‘the individual a pawn on the chessboard of absolutism’. This also alienated a significant number of English Catholics, bishops among them, who openly favoured the Duce. There was talk of bringing the Archbishop of Westminster to heel – and Hinsley did indeed fall silent, for a time. When he turned to Heenan for advice in writing speeches he was seen to be shaken by the controversy. But in retrospect the sermon at Golders Green sounds like the stray, opening shot in a far longer war.

Abyssinia was a cause of much heart-searching amongst British Catholics and Protestants alike. The Spanish Civil War presented dilemmas no less painful. Heenan the careful biographer buried this quietly; Moloney and Hagerty offer sustained reflections. Hinsley, they find, had to find a credible place between that position held by many English Catholics, who trembled at the growth of communism and cheered for Franco, and a vigorous left-leaning public opinion which deplored fascism and the forces of reaction. Above all, he was horrified by the onslaught against the Church in Spain and knew a good deal about it. He let it be known that he thought the Nationalist cause a crusade. But beyond this he was decidedly circumspect, maintaining a purposeful neutrality, refusing to indulge those who lauded Franco or accept the criticisms of those who deplored the Right and raged at any evidence of complicity. Meanwhile, he turned his attentions to the plight of refugee children. When Franco was victorious Hinsley received a signed photograph, a gift arranged by an English admirer. ‘I look upon you as the great defender of true Spain, the country of Catholic principles where social justice and charity will be applied for the common good under a firm peace-loving government.’ For all this, Moloney insists that Hinsley was ‘no third order Falangist’. In 1942 he would take up the cause of persecuted Spanish protestants too. It was often heard that to condemn Communists involved a support for Fascists. Although he had favoured Franco, Hinsley was determined not to accept that anti-communism revealed any shade of Fascism. He viewed both as enemies. His task now was to show that Catholicism voiced the cause of liberty and the maintenance of the common good.

At home Hinsley the Archbishop appeared rudely caught between the campaigns of conflicting parties. Some parts of the Catholic press was likely to shout any embarrassment when it came to foreign affairs. Abroad, the troubled consistencies of Vatican policy had made life no easier for him. But when he looked at Germany Hinsley was far more the critic.  He was ready to follow the lead given by Mit brennender Sorge in March 1937. That September he published a protesting letter in the Times. Hinsley himself had been present when on Christmas Eve in 1937 Pope Pius XI said to a gathering of cardinals. ‘We know that there is in Germany a grievous persecution, and more, that there has rarely been a persecution more serious, so painful, and so disastrous in its widespread effects. This is a persecution in which neither the exercise of force, not the pressure of threats, not the subterfuges of cunning and artifice have been spared.’ By December 1938 he was taking to the platform at the Albert Hall to protest against the persecution of the Jews where he deplored that Nero was ‘a model of justice compared to the Führer of the German Reich’. He approved thoroughly of Chamberlain and applauded him as a peace-maker. But he did not want Hitler accommodated at the price of justice. In a private meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang (with whom he had much in common and in whom he found a growing friendship) he agreed that no colonies could be returned to a government which persecuted other races. But unlike Lang he could have nothing to do with the idea that to rein Hitler in a new diplomatic understanding with the Soviet Union might be deemed necessary. There were other public speeches, no less vigorous and confrontational. National opinion was thickening against appeasement and now the archbishop of Westminster was positively stirring the pot.

After the painful ambiguities and compromises of the age of appeasement, the coming of war brought some vital clarifications. Hinsley set to work with a will, making public speeches and BBC broadcasts which were unequivocal in their denunciations of the enemy and rich in their confidence in British justice. And Hinsley certainly was patriotic. He had grown up with patriotism; he must have taken on something of the patriotic yearning of the long-term ex-patriate;  he had admired British colonial administration in Africa; he viewed national institutions with great loyalty. Now a robust patriotism in high office in the circumstance of 1935-43 was a high virtue, indeed a basic necessity. Hinsley was realistic enough to know that it was patriotism which in no small measure stood between Hitler and Whitehall. ‘I’m glad we’re alone’, he remarked to Churchill after the fall of France. When Churchill asked ‘Why?’ Hinsley replied, ‘Englishmen fight best when they have got their backs to the wall.’ There is more than a sense of rejoicing at the coming of superbly heroic moment in all this. But if Hinsley’s patriotism is firmly acknowledged there is at least a danger that it confines him to a national landscape and merely exposes him to suspicions of another kind; that he was a prelate too close to the governing powers (even if they happened, on that occasion, to be right and just). But Hinsley does present a bigger argument than this and he does belong to a wider picture.

Heenan observed that Hinsley was a convinced democrat who preferred to live among the poor. The age of the dictators stirred deeply his affinity with the heroic and the just cause. Mathew found that Hinsley positively thirsted after justice and was ‘a great hater of oppression’. There remains something visceral in this palpable hatred of tyranny, a restless determination to stand against it, an abiding compassion for its victims. When an English edition was prepared of the reports documenting the German occupation of Poland sent by Cardinal Hlond to Rome it was Hinsley who contributed the foreword. In his last years Mathew thought that the new book which affected him most deeply was Professor Binchy’s Church and State in Fascist Italy. Mathew recognized that ‘the quality that most appealed to the Cardinal was reckless and self-sacrificing moral goodness, and it was this that led to his always deepening affection for the Bishop of Chichester’. Bell was convinced that the churches must sink their differences over doctrines and questions of order and unite urgently against against the new foe of totalitarianism. Hinsley promptly agreed. For a while, at least, there was the ecumenical excitement of the ‘Sword of the Spirit’ movement and a glimmer of authentic ecumenical progress in wartime. When, at a meeting of the movement in May 1941, Bell whispered to Hinsley that perhaps Protestants and Catholics might say together the Lord’s Prayer, Hinsley was ready to lead it – a quiet revolution, no doubt, but an authentic one, even so. His bishops disagreed with most of this and yet they never squabbled with him. It was enough, after 1943, to pretend that it had never happened. Without Hinsley the Sword of the Spirit had nowhere to go and it was soon only the pious memory of a few stranded progressives.

Hinsley in wartime took his place in a national consensus against Nazism and Fascism. In no way did he see himself as an individualist or a prophet. He was equally adamant that his views found their place within the body of Catholic thought, as history and international life revealed it, not on the margin. In a broadcast of 10 December 1939 Hinsley justified his own conviction that Britain’s cause was just by asserting, ‘I have before my mind the lessons of history and also the great traditional body of doctrine which sets forth for the moral guidance of mankind principles which are above both national and racial interests. These principles are clearly stated in the great pastoral letters of the Popes from Leo XIII to the present pontiff ….’ It was Benedict XV who had issued the ‘peace note’ of 1917, affirming the ‘supremacy of right over might, and also for a real and agreed peace between combatants whether victors or vanquished.’

Bell found Hinsley eager for the regeneration of Europe. What had made Europe great in civilization? It was Christianity. And it was Christianity which had formed a reverence for the individual, a belief in the family and, out of this, the very nation which had created Europe. In March 1940 he found much of significance in the anniversary of St Gregory the Great, a Pope who inherited a civilization in chaos and ruins and yet claimed a vision of Christendom. Now in the Soviet Union ‘the individual and his conscience, and therefore God and His supreme rights, are to be “liquidated,”’ not even with a nod to any theory at all, whereas in Nazi Germany the same effect was sought in the name of Race, ‘of the physical blood which courses pure, according to the Myth, in the veins of Aryans alone, and, among Aryans, of Germans only.’ If a society rejected God this was the kind of thing that might be expected. ‘Rome only has been the source of full civilization, that is, the perfect harmonious relating of individual to Society, of State with Church, of time with eternity.’

This was what Moscow and Berlin sought to destroy, in Poland and in Finland. With such powers as these there could be no compromise. He viewed the ‘martyrdom’ of Poland with ‘deep indignation’: it was his duty to ‘protest aloud’ against such persecution of Catholic and Orthodox Christians as he had against such persecution in Germany itself. ‘Liberty must be our goal, liberty which is not now possible in Russia and in Germany. The thirty-seven million Catholics living under the Government of the Reich are constantly in my thoughts. They, and the members of the Evangelical Confessional Church, have been among the principal victims of the Nazi regime.’

Hinsley insisted that in all of this he stood by the Popes, not against them. First there was Mit brennender Sorge in 1937, then the encyclical Divini Redemptoris. Both of these were the work of Pius XI. To them Pius XII had added Summi Pontificatus and the Five Peace Points of Christmas 1939. When it was asserted that other Catholics spoken in contradiction of his views he simply denied it. He could turn to Mit brennender Sorge again. He could look at the letter issued by the German bishops at Fulda in August 1938. ‘I am’, he maintained, ‘in good company when I denounce the principles and methods of Nazism in its tramp through Europe.’ What Hinsley took from Summi Pontificatus was the defence of the ‘sacred rights’ of the family against ‘the aggression of the State and against the doctrines of immoral propaganda’. He was clear that it was the place of the Catholic Church to stand firmly against this fundamental enemy and he knew that he occupied a significant place within an international argument, one that concerned the credibility of the whole Church. When he heard that Nazi propaganda in Germany and in the Netherlands had complained that he had merely converted the words of two popes to the service of the cause of Britain he was more than ready to confute them.

Hinsley had been as much a denouncer of the Soviet Union as Nazi Germany. As James Hagerty acknowledges, the new alignment of powers after Barbarossa ‘seriously compromised’ him and he made no easy accommodation. Indeed, he would not conform to the new official line if he could possibly help it. He sought to distinguish between the Russian people and their state, insisting that all expressions of support were for the former and not the latter. On this he came to rely rather heavily. How he would have managed if he had lived to see the end of the war is difficult to judge. Heenan found that Hinsley ‘loved the Jewish race’. When he heard that he was scored by Nazi propaganda as a ‘friend of the Jewish people’ he was evidently proud of the title. He was ready to join the new Council of Christians and Jews with Archbishop Temple and the Chief Rabbi, J.H. Hertz. His final public statement was produced when he was dying, on 1 March 1943, not for a British audience but for the World Jewish Congress in New York: ‘In unison with the voice of indignant protest that cries aloud from all human hearts and in accord with the declarations of the Church, I denounce with utmost vigour the persecution of the Jews by the Nazi oppressors … Words are weak and cold; deeds and speedy deeds are needed to put a stop to this brutal campaign for the extermination of a whole race ….’

The historian may turn again to Hinsley with many questions. What remains clear is that Hinsley played a vivid part in the international encounter between Catholicism and totalitarianism, that he sought to show the two as implacable enemies and that he sought to claim an alignment between the Church and democracy and liberty. Within this he struggled as much as most to find a lasting consistency, not least in juggling his responsibilities to Vatican policy, national diplomacy and domestic opinion. Arguably, he would have wished to be remembered as an archbishop who stood resolutely against tyranny and persecution, for it was in this landscape in which he truly found himself. He did much to deserve this. Those who seek to condemn the Church at large for its acquiescence in the evils of dictatorship during the Second World War still have something in him to reckon with. Insofar as he drew justification from the words and interventions of the Papacy he might, too, shed at least some light on the value of that much disputed record.

 

 

 

 

 

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Review of Andrew Chandler, ed., The Church and Humanity: The Life and Work of George Bell, 1883-1958

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 18, Number 4 (December 2012)

Review of Andrew Chandler, ed., The Church and Humanity: The Life and Work of George Bell, 1883-1958. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2012), Pp. xvi + 227, ISBN 978-14094-25564.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

George Bell, Bishop of Chichester on England’s south coast from 1929 to 1958, has long enjoyed recognition as one of the outstanding figures in the Church of England during the first half of the last century. He championed consistently and relentlessly two major aspects of church life, namely the cause of church unity and the search for international peace and justice. Bell’s achievement was to advocate these ideals with effectiveness and tenacity even against the vocal opposition of many of his episcopal colleagues, his laity, and the wider conservative public. The result was that in many cases he appeared a lonely contender for failed causes. But this corresponded with his style of leadership. He was not a team player, had no oratorical gifts, and was an ineffective chairman of committees. His strength was seen best in one-to-one conversations, and his persuasiveness in such encounters was enhanced by his genuine interest and humanity, as is well recorded in his extensive correspondence, fortunately now preserved in Lambeth Palace library. Above all, he set the sights for Christian witness at the highest level, and tirelessly sought to challenge any lesser, more parochial views for both the church and the nation.

It is for these qualities that Bell will be remembered. To help this task, a memorial conference was held in 2008, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death. The result is this collection of essays in his honour, elegantly edited and introduced by Andrew, Chandler, the Director of the George Bell Institute in Chichester. Among the distinguished contributors is the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, whose penetrating tribute closes the volume. Also included are essays about various aspects of Bell’s ministry.
Gerhard Besier of Dresden gives us an informative piece about Bell’s efforts to promote the cause of church unity on the international level, in collaboration with Visser ‘t Hooft, the first General Secretary of the World Council of Churches. In the inter-war years, this mainly Protestant ecumenical movement owed much to Bell’s careful but enthusiastic involvement, which pulled together the separate strands of Life and Work, along with Faith and Order. When the World Council was finally established in 1948, it was fitting that Bell should be Chairman of its Executive and later one of its Presidents.

These rise of Nazism to power in Germany and the attempts by one section of the German Protestant churches to oppose its ideological goals aroused Bell’s close interest, and his efforts to support the Confessing Church’s resistance to Nazism are touched on in several of these essays . Chandler himself contributes a chapter entitled “The Patronage of Resistance,” outlining Bell’s unwavering encouragement of “the other Germany” by drawing a clear distinction between the Nazi regime and the German people. To many people in Britain, especially during war-time, this seemed a perverse or at least naive view. Bell persevered, however, and was determined to create conditions after the war in which this “better” Germany could rise again. After his well-known meeting with Bonhoeffer in Sweden in 1942, Bell sought to get the British government’s approval of some gesture of assistance to the German Resistance. This only earned him the scorn of the politicians who saw him as a “turbulent priest,” out of touch with mainstream British opinion.

Even more controversial were Bell’s outspoken protests in the House of Lords against the Royal Air Force’s bombing of German cities and civilians. As some have supposed, this principled stance against his own government’s policies led to his being passed over when the Archbishopric of Canterbury fell vacant in 1944. Less well known, but equally a part of Bell’s humanitarian concerns, were his efforts on behalf of the German refugees in war-time Britain, as described by Charmian Brinson. In 1940 the British government ordered whole-scale internment of such refugees, even though many of them were Jews expelled by the Nazis who had sought refuge across the Channel. Nonetheless, many of them were deported to Canada and Australia on the flimsiest of pretexts. Bell spent much time in attempts to mitigate their position through his dedicated engagement, especially for the group of 37 “non-aryan” pastors from Germany whom he had personally sponsored to come to England in 1938-9. This was a noble if unpopular task, but Bell did not flinch from doing what he believed was his duty.

After Nazism was overthrown, Bell turned his energies to the reconstruction, reconciliation and hoped-for re-Christianization of Europe. Predictably, as Philip Coupland describes, he showed empathy for the German people, and resolved to do what he could to assist the churches there in rebuilding their devastated church life. He strenuously avoided any talk of collective guilt and was openly critical of aspects of the war crimes trials and the ‘de-nazification’ process. But in the view of Tom Lawson, in the only essay in the book critical of Bell’s tactics, this was a moral blunder, since Bell became associated with the perpetrators of the most reprehensible crimes, for whom he pleaded leniency, allegedly in the interests of healing the war’s wounds.

Certainly Bell was fully persuaded that Christian values would be vital in fashioning the new Europe. Hence he was all the more alarmed by the growing threat of Soviet Bolshevism. His remedy was for a federal United States of Europe, but the onset of the Cold War doomed such a prospect. The political division of Germany between the victors was a bitter blow. So too was the British Government’s reluctance to seek a closer unity even in western Europe. On the other hand, as Dianne Kirby makes clear in her contribution on George Bell and the Cold War, Bell was a welcome ally for the British Foreign Office’s propaganda campaigns. He exercised a moral influence through many circles of the establishment and kept at bay those who still believed in the good-heartedness of the Soviet Union. Seeking to combat Communism by the teaching of a better religion and a truer philosophy, Bell alerted people to the Communist threat and reinforced with religious arguments the level of popular anti-Communism. At the same time, though, Bell was appalled by the development of nuclear weapons, the use of which he considered incompatible with Christian international morality . The inherent contradictions in such views remained unresolved. So too the Cold War split rather than united Europe’s churches. Bell’s pastoral and political legacy is therefore a mixed one. Yet he remained a striking voice calling on the Church to rise above temporary loyalties or immediate interests, and instead to place the needs of suffering humanity in the forefront of Christian responsibility and obligation.

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Review of S. J. D. Green, The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change, c. 1920-1960

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 1, March 2012

Review of S. J. D. Green, The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change, c. 1920-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 333 Pp., ISBN 978-0-521-83977-8.

By Andrew Chandler, George Bell Institute, University of Chichester

Very possibly what has brought many historians to consider seriously twentieth century religion is not its significance in politics, intellectual and cultural life or social existence, but the idea of its decline and even extinction. At all events, secularisation has by now become an academic realm in its own right, with its prophetic presences, its own points of reference, its particular questions (and answers) and its earnest debates about conceptual approaches and forms of analysis. Every scholar of contemporary society knows that in a western European country the statistics of adherence have crumbled, values and attitudes have altered and church buildings have emptied, shut and disappeared. Something vast has occurred—and we remain caught up in it. Whatever it may be, the term ‘secularisation’ still does very adequately in framing it.

S. J. D.Dixonis based at that most privileged of Oxbridge bastions, All Soul’s College. Certainly he works with a very well-stocked library on his doorstep: his references are copious at every turn and, although there is little archival research going on here, there is a committed and valuable exploration of published primary material. The book represents not so much a coherent argument as a succession of specific explorations of the waning of a Protestant inheritance, most of it effectively Victorian. It is a gathered contribution, a garnering of past articles published by earlier collections. But it professes an overall argument, too.

Green is cagey with his terms at the outset—he refuses to define ‘religious phenomena’, and accepts that his book is, ‘unashamedly’, a study of the specifics of denominational practice and popular belief (3). His chronological frame is chosen with a purpose and to effect: for some time scholars of secularisation have insisted that what happened after 1960 marked the crucial sea-change in the fortunes of public religion. He is firmly conscious of the difficulties in persisting in the idea of something distinctively ‘English’, but resolute in keeping out the Scots and the Welsh. Part I presents an ‘outline of the problem’ combining dense historiography with a bash at narrative; Part II picks up some case studies, inspecting the world of Dean Inge, the ‘strange death of puritan England’ and the ‘discovery of a “post-Protestant” people’ by Seebohm Rowntree; Part III adopts the pleasantly alliterative form of ‘Resistance, revival and resignation’, examining the church-state debates over the 1944 Education Act, asking if there really was much of a religious revival in the 1950s and then ‘slouching towards a secular society’ in the early 1960s. All of this is characterised by tremendous confidence, subtlety and fluency in the mobilization of terms and interpretive frameworks. Does the whole odyssey cohere? Just about, probably. Every reader will have their own questions. Is there too little sense of the deliberately constructed denominationalism on which so many Christians placed their hopes in this period? Very possibly. (Incidentally, principled Baptists might not much enjoy finding themselves a part of some conglomerate called here, a little casually, ‘theBaptistChurch’.) Might far more be said about the fate of all kinds of Christian social and educational institutions in these years? Surely. Does Dean Inge really deserve so much house space? Could there have been more about someone like Ernest Barker who wrote so thoughtfully and extensively about comparable themes? It is too easy to regret what has been left to one side—and, perhaps, irrelevant, because much of the value of the book lies in its capacity to provoke the mind to think of other avenues.

A plaudit on the cover observes the author’s pessimism while a second congratulates him for being so very ‘sensible’. Green would surely know how to value both attributes. Almost at the last gasp he writes, ‘Religion will not disappear, not even inEngland. But the social significance of religion will go on declining.’ (316) How we grasp quite what that leaves behind would make an interesting chapter in itself. At all events, it would take a rash scholar indeed to deny the force of such a judgement today.

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Letter from the Editors: December 2011

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Letter from the Editors: December 2011

St. Martin’s Cathedral, the thousand-year-old seat of the Archbishop of Mainz.

It was exactly seventy years ago that the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, took the striking step of writing a Christmas message to be broadcast by the BBC to his friends in the churches of Germany. For Bell, the message affirmed the unity of all Christians, however they may be divided by national borders and all the extremities of war. Naturally, such a message was acceptable to his own government: it offered its own, unequivocal condemnation of the evils of Nazism and marked a clear line between the ideology of the Hitler regime and the faith of Christians everywhere. Bell addressed some of his words directly to Martin Niemoeller.

In this December issue of the ACCH Quarterly, the broadcast of 24 December 1941 might also remind us that the issues which arose in Germany between 1933 and 1945 were at once the concern of observers, friends and allies abroad. They, too, became participants in the tragic history that unfolded in these years. And we might continue to reflect on the importance of pursuing our own international friendships in a world where creative intellectuals and men and women of faith still seek to make their voice heard in countries governed by dictatorship, repression and alienation.

On behalf of the editors,

Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

 

Bishop George Bell of Chichester, BBC Christmas Message to Germany, 1941:

I AM talking to all Christians in Germany; for all Christians in Germany are oppressed. Many of you are my friends, and it is impossible to forget you now. I am a poor hand still at speaking German, and so I have asked a German pastor who is your friend and my friend, Pastor Hildebrandt of the Confessional Church, to read what I want to say.

This Christmas Eve I want to give you my heart-felt greetings as a fellow Christian. In the years before the war many of us worked together in closest fellowship on the tasks of the Church. My mind goes back to the meetings at the Wartburg of German and British scholars, with Archbishop Soderblom in the midst; and to another memorable conference at Eisenach a year or two later. Some of you have been my guests at the Palace in Chichester. Do you remember that walk, Doctor, in a rather muddy field one spring after­noon, with the Cathedral spire behind us, when we talked of the German Evangelical Church and its organisation? I thank God for the strong stand you have been taking ever since 1933 against those who are trying to destroy Christianity within the German nation. I think of some of you in your homes in Marburg, Hanover and Berlin, where you made me so welcome. I can picture you now, watching the Christmas tree, and thinking of the absent sons and daughters. Do you remember, old friend in Berlin, an evening party of Confessional Church leaders in your house four years ago, when we discussed the latest news of the German Church conflict? I can see your wife and daughter now, so courteously helping us all at the table. How vivid the talk was, and how friendly! Do you remember the young pastor saying, with such prophetic truth, that once a revolution had started like the Nazi revolution, its very logic compelled it to go where the extreme men drove it?

Well, the Nazi revolution has gone where the extreme men drove it, with a vengeance. The Nazi leaders have dealt sharper and sharper blows at the Christian Church. They have attacked everything for which Christianity stands in Germany. And the logic of their attack is compelling them now to try to destroy everything for which Christianity stands all over the earth.

Christmas means Christ and His rule of love. It brings good tidings of great joy, and speaks of peace and goodwill. Could anything be in greater contrast to the injustice and violence with which those who persecute the Evangelical Church and the Catholic Church would enslave all nations? It is good to remind one another on Christmas Eve that you and I have a bond as fellow Christians which all the anti­-Christian forces in the world are powerless to destroy.

I remember the sermon Pastor Niemöller preached on New Year’s Day, 1937, in Dahlem, only a few months before his imprisonment. He was very frank about the fight the Nazis were waging against faith in Jesus Christ. But he was full of encouragement. Christians, he said, are not to imagine that they are alone, a forlorn little group, facing certain ruin. ‘In the world nothing counts but what men can see.       But­ God’s Word decrees otherwise. God’s Word speaks plainly enough, even concerning very high personages. … It is truly not worth our while to hang our heads and to be afraid because the wicked spring as grass and the evildoers flourish as though their power were eternal. They spring as grass – yes, but, says God’s Word, only as grass, and they flourish-yes, says God’s Word, but only until they be ‘destroyed for ever.’

Ah, Martin Niemöller, my friend, I rejoice to hear your brave voice. I rejoice to hear your voice too, Bishop Wurm in Stuttgart, and yours, Bishop von Galen in Münster; and all the other voices, soft or loud, which swell the chorus of those who speak up for Christ and His Church in these days when wicked­ness walks the earth, and destroys freedom, and takes its ghastly toll of human life.

Believe me, fellow Christians in Germany, we under­stand you. You are not alone. Keep up your faith. Help to save your country’s soul by resisting the evil spirit by which it is now possessed. Your fellow Christians everywhere are by your side. Your struggle is our struggle. The days are dark, but Christmas brings salvation. Light will break through. Hold fast, never yield. Trust in the Power of God, and the Love of Christ.

24 December 1941

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