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

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.

Review of Gerhard Besier, ed., “Intimately Associated for Many Years”: George K. A. Bell’s and Willem A. Visser’t Hooft’s Common Life-Work in the Service of the Church Universal – Mirrored in Their Correspondence

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Review of Gerhard Besier, ed., “Intimately Associated for Many Years”: George K. A. Bell’s and Willem A. Visser’t Hooft’s Common Life-Work in the Service of the Church Universal – Mirrored in Their Correspondence, Parts 1 and 2 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015), ISBN: 978-1-4438-8006-0 and 978-1-4438-8011-4.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Bishop George Bell was the stalwart champion in the Church of England promoting ecumenical relations with the other churches of Europe and North America throughout the nearly thirty years of his episcopate from 1929-1958. He held leading positions in innumerable committees, councils and conferences, and in 1937, during the world meeting in Oxford of the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work, was a strong advocate for joining with Faith and Order, in order to found a World Council of Churches, which took place in 1938. At the same time it was agreed that this new Council (still in process of formation) should be established in Geneva, and that a young Dutch theologian W.A.Visser ‘t Hooft (Vim), who had served for several years in the Geneva scene as General Secretary of the World Student Christian Federation, should be appointed as General Secretary. Visser ‘t Hooft was far more of a General than a Secretary—I knew him personally—and brought unrivalled resourcefulness and a resolute determination to see his ideas realized, for the best part of thirty years. This was the beginning of a partnership between Bell and Visser ‘t Hooft, who early on struck up a strong and harmonious relationship. They are rightly described in the book’s title as being “intimately associated for many years”.

The exchanges by post or telegrams recorded in these volumes are largely drawn from the Geneva archives of the World Council of Churches or from the voluminous Bell papers, now deposited in the Lambeth Palace library in London. The first volume covers the period up to 1949, and the second the final years of Bell’s life up to 1958. The editing by Gerhard Besier is very helpful, since his footnotes give the biographical details of all persons mentioned, as well as bibliographical references to the many scholarly books relating to their endeavors. (There are, however, aggravating lapses in the proof-reading and printing of the English text.) Besier’s introduction is reproduced from the chapter he contributed to The Church and Humanity: The Life and Work of George Bell, 1883-1958 (p. 169-194), edited in 2012 by Andrew Chandler.

Many of these exchanges have to do with the plans for the various meetings of World Council bodies, and discussions about the membership, the place and date, as well as the content. These documents are however not too informative about the results. Obviously when the two men met at such meetings, they had intense verbal discussions and made significant decisions about the World Council’s operations. But these were not recorded in their correspondence at the time, and so are missing from these volumes. This is particularly noticeable with regard to such highly significant meetings as the First Constituent Assembly held in Amsterdam in 1948, when Bell became Chairman of the WCC’s Central Committee. While these documents discuss at length the preparations for this Assembly in August 1948 (p. 365-428), they provide no indication of the important deliberations and decisions taken on that occasion. The same is true for the Second Assembly, held in 1954 in Evanston, Illinois. Equally regrettable is the absence of documents relating to the important meeting in Stuttgart in October 1945, at which both Bell and Visser ‘t Hooft were present, and at which the famous Declaration of Guilt was issued (p. 287-94). Obviously both Bell and Vim played an active part and had extensive discussions with the German leaders, including Martin Niemöller, for whom they had been praying ever since his first incarceration in 1937. But they left no further record of their deliberations or their conclusions about this conference or its historic significance in their correspondence. An equally striking omission is the exchange between Bell and Vim about Bell’s journey to Sweden in May 1942, his meeting there with Bonhoeffer, and the information he gained about the German resistance, which the Bishop then passed on to the British Foreign Secretary, asking for some public gesture of support be given to the anti-Nazi forces in Germany. Eden’s refusal was conveyed to Visser ‘t Hooft in the notable telegram sent by Bell on July 23, 1942: “Interest undoubted, but deeply regret no reply possible”. (Bell’s message is discussed on p. 158 of W.A. Visser ‘t Hooft, Memoirs (London: SCM Press, 1973).) But this calamitous blow to Bell’s hopes for some gesture of support for the German resistance is not mentioned in Besier’s work. In fact, this first volume is silent for the whole period of November 1941 to August 1942.

It would have been helpful if the editor could have inserted short passages to fill such gaps. He could also have directed the reader to look at both of the biographies of Bell by Canon Jasper (George Bell, Bishop of Chichester (London: Oxford University Press,1967)) and Andrew Chandler (George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), also Visser ‘t Hooft’s Memoirs (1973), as well as such comprehensive histories as A History of the Ecumenical Movement 1517-1948 (London: SPCK, 1954), edited by Ruth Rouse and Stephen Neil, and its sequel The Ecumenical Advance: A History of the Ecumenical Movement, 1948-1968 (Geneva: WCC, 1986), edited by Harold Fey. Unless these more complete sources are available to be consulted, the usefulness of these two volumes alone will be limited. Libraries may well consider whether the expense is justified.

However, the value of these exchanges is that they fill in the details of the frequent consultations between these church leaders. In particular, they provide information about how the two men dealt with the three principal obstacles they faced in these years. The first was the fear expressed by many churchmen that this new World Council would evolve into a vast ecumenical enterprise which would swallow up the individual entities in some sort of super-church. The second fear, expressed by many more Orthodox leaders, was that this new World Council would produce a new doctrine of Christianity which would override the traditions and individual heritages of these Protestant or Orthodox churches. The third obstacle was the refusal of the largest Christian body, the Roman Catholic Church, to be associated in any way with this new venture. This refusal meant that the vision of a united Christendom, strongly urged by Bell, was thwarted, and still remains incomplete. Not until the Second Vatican Council, i.e. several years after Bell’s death, did the Roman Catholic authorities show a more tolerant and cooperative attitude. But the World Council has yet to overcome the barrier of Rome’s reluctance to belong to this wider ecumenical fraternity.

Nevertheless, it would be true to say that, during the period from 1938 to 1958, i.e. during the fruitful years of cooperation between Bell and Visser ‘t Hooft, the World Council moved from a tentative and provisional beginning to becoming the acknowledged chief instrument and channel of the ecumenical movement. The correspondence contained in the second volume spells out the contexts of these years from 1950 to 1958, including the preparations for the second Assembly meeting in the United States in 1954, at which point Bell resigned his position as Chairman of the Central Committee, and was promoted to Honorary President of the Council. But, as this correspondence shows, he continued to be very actively engaged in the affairs of the Council, even after his retirement in 1958 from the Chichester diocese. In fact he took part in a meeting of the Central Committee in Denmark, and preached a self-critical sermon there only two months before his untimely death in October 1958. The volume concludes with two moving tributes to Bell’s achievements written by Visser ‘t Hooft shortly after Bell’s funeral.

Conference Report: Intellectual Freedom and the Church: A Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History Symposium, November 19-21, 2010, George Bell House, Chichester Cathedral

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 16, No. 4, December 2010

Conference Report: Intellectual Freedom and the Church: A Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History Symposium, November 19-21, 2010, George Bell House, Chichester Cathedral.

By Andrew Chandler, George Bell Institute, University of Chichester

George Bell House was formally opened by the Archbishop of Canterbury in October 2008, on the fiftieth anniversary of Bell’s death. Set beside the cathedral, where Bell’s life and work is much commemorated, the house also stands outside the gate to the Bishop’s Palace, where visitors like Gandhi, Bonhoeffer, T.S. Eliot and Henry Moore came now and then across almost three decades. Today, George Bell House offers a valuable venue for small conferences. It certainly proved a very happy setting for this particular conference, held under the auspices of the journal Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte / Contemporary Church history. Speakers from a number of countries arrived on November 19 and throughout the following day they were joined by members of the University of Chichester, the cathedral, local people from Chichester itself and visitors from the breadth of the county.

The conference began with a paper on Ignaz von Döllinger, given by Dr. Charlotte Hansen, a Danish scholar now working with the George Bell Institute at the cathedral. The paper focussed attention on the confident character of Döllinger’s thought, his determination to rejuvenate Catholic theology and the response of the Vatican to what was increasingly viewed in those quarters as a challenge to its own theological authority. Yet Döllinger was a far from negligible figure: he won friends and admirers acrossEurope. Matters came to a head after the Vatican Council in 1870: from this point Döllinger’s fate was sealed. He was excommunicated, converged briefly with the Old Catholic Church, and soon retired from public life. Dr. Hansen concluded by drawing upon statements by Pope Benedict XVI and placing Döllinger’s ideas and experiences in a broader, unfolding context of Catholic theological life.

Professor Robert Ericksen of Pacific Lutheran University gave a paper on Emanuel Hirsch and “the turn towards Hitler.” Hirsch was a thinker who practiced and admired intellectual freedom in his own understanding of the Christian faith and message. However, he also saw intellectual freedom in the modern world leading almost inevitably toward what Kierkegaard called the “all-encompassing debate about everything.” He feared this turn toward radical scepticism, both in religion and in democratic politics; so he turned toward the discipline and control promised by Hitler, accepting Hitler’s claims to represent the traditional values of the German Volk. Only an authoritarian, völkisch, unified Germany could prevent the threat of nihilism and chaos he saw threatening in the modern world, and especially in Weimar. The way was open for an accommodation with the Deutsche Christen movement and National Socialism. Professor Ericksen suggested that questions about intellectual freedom remain relevant and difficult for us in our multicultural world. They cannot easily be resolved, but at least we can recognize how disastrous Hirsch’s turn toward Hitler proved to be.

Professor Gerhard Besier of the Technische Universität Dresden examined the careers of two more German thinkers, this time drawn from the post-war period. Hans Küng is, of course, a well-known name; in the Protestant Gerd Lüdemann there was something of a counterpart. Much of the paper examined the character of their thought and the reasons why they had become controversial within their own confessions. Both had very different church authorities with which to contend, but in both cases the story was one of confrontation, a good deal of manoeuvring over academic positions, a certain amount of avoidance, censure and repudiation. Küng earned many supporters within his own church and across Protestantism too. Lüdemann ended up with a Chair in the United States, from which he continues to write freely. This paper produced an extended discussion on the place of church authorities in the selection of theological faculties in universities, and also began to point towards the distinction to be found between the perceived responsibilities of teaching ordinands on the one hand and those of teaching students from all backgrounds.

In his contribution Professor Torleiv Austad of the Norwegian School of Theology looked at these themes from a Norwegian perspective, but also as one at various times involved in them as a senior church leader and a scholar. He began with the promise to the ordaining bishop with which an ordained minister begins their career and examined the story of Helge Hognestad, ordained in 1965. Hognestad was first influenced by Marxism, but soon became drawn to ‘New Age’ ideas and also became increasingly critical of the theological traditions of his church. In 1984 he resigned from office and five years later asked to be released from his ordination promise. In 1998 he sought to be readmitted, claiming that his thought was now compatible with Evangelical-Lutheran doctrine. This provoked a new debate and deliberations of the bishop, the Doctrinal Commission of the church and, in time, the state itself. Professor Austad concluded, “Intellectual freedom is important. But it cannot be used to undermine an ordained minister’s obligations and to break his or her promises.”

In the final paper, Professor Gerhard Ringshausen of the Leuphana Universität Lüneburg presented a paper which did much to complement this, but also enhanced the discussion of the meaning and reality of “freedom” in the context of Christian theology at large. He showed how the expression of freedom involves a wide range of meanings: first, the Christian understanding of freedom, which is founded in Jesus Christ, who makes his believers free of their sins and free to love to him; second, the sense that freedom is also a basic value of political and social life; third, the problem of differentiating and connecting both these understandings of freedom. Here, for example, it had to be asked if academic freedom in the Church and in theology could be understood as part of Christian freedom or as a consequence of it. The paper proceeded to explore these ideas in the theology of Luther, Troeltsch, Harnack and, most recently, Wolfgang Huber.

The conference concluded with the evensong service at the cathedral and a brief tribute at the spot where Bell’s ashes are interred. It was the eve of the festival of Christ the King. As we left, the cathedral organist could be heard practicing Bell’s own hymn, written for that festival while he was bishop here.