Tag Archives: ecumenical movement

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.

Review of Lucian N. Leustean, The Ecumenical Movement & the Making of the European Community

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Review of Lucian N. Leustean, The Ecumenical Movement & the Making of the European Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Pp. 286. ISBN 9780198714569.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Lucian Leustean, who teaches Political Science at Aston University, Birmingham, England, begins his study with the distinctly odd claim that two events are at the core of the relationship between the ecumenical movement and the European Community. He asserts, firstly, that a member of the German resistance movement, Adam von Trott, who was executed by the Nazis in August 1944 a month after the failure of the plot to assassinate Hitler, left a legacy indicating that not all prominent Germans backed the Nazi regime, that his Christian faith inspired churchmen to resist occupation, and that he had a vision of a federal post-war Europe with close relations between East and West. Very much the same role was played by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who is mentioned by Leustean only in passing. But in fact, Trott is now virtually forgotten whereas Bonhoeffer’s theology has steadily grown in influence. It is dubious, however, that either of them had much influence on the making of the European Community.

Leustean’s second claim is even more doubtful. He suggests that the creation of the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA), established in 1946, was of significance to the making of the European Community. This highly elitist body was led by an Englishman, Kenneth Grubb, and an American, Frederick Nolde, and was designed to draw the American churches into the debates about the post-war world, and subsequently about the Cold War. But Grubb was skeptical about Britain’s association with any European political reconstruction, since he saw Britain’s future in terms of its overseas possessions in the Commonwealth. And as Leustean admits, the CCIA failed to give any lead or engage in the process of European integration. It was thus years before the Protestant and Anglican churches adopted a coherent position towards the European Community, or even agreed what Europe was.

Leustean-Ecumenical To be sure the tasks of European reconstruction and reconciliation were formidable for politicians and churchmen alike. Priority had to be given to the immense task of caring for the vast millions of bombed-out, brutalized, and displaced populations. Most churches were still tied to their own national affairs and regarded plans for European integration as lying outside their spiritual domain. However a few of the survivors of the pre-war ecumenical bodies, led by the valiant and dynamic personality of the Dutch Calvinist, Visser ‘t Hooft, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, recognized the importance of seeking closer relations with those politicians involved in European reconstruction. The World Council, which achieved its long-delayed inauguration in 1948, almost immediately suffered a grievous, if not unexpected, blow by the rejection of its invitation to the Vatican to have Roman Catholics as full members. The initiative in European affairs was therefore left to the Anglicans, the Protestant leaders of northern Europe, and a handful of Orthodox churchmen in Eastern Europe. So too, those politicians who had expected that the legacy of unbridled nationalism under Hitler would lead to a willingness to cooperate more closely in pan-European revival were soon to be disappointed by the brusque refusal of the Soviet government to entertain any such measures for the areas of Eastern Europe under its military control. In both the political and religious fields, therefore, expectations had to be cut down, and prognoses for European integration modified, often drastically.

Leustean’s account examines the role of political and religious contacts with a direct impact on European institutions. He records how a number of Protestant churchmen saw their duty as Christians to go beyond furthering the local piety of their congregations. These men of vision believed that European cooperation was a mission for the wider Christian constituency. This witness became especially relevant in 1948, when the Berlin blockade made the threat of Soviet military power all too evident, and seemingly doomed the hopes for a peaceful cooperation throughout the continent. Leustean pays particular attention to the Ecumenical Commission on European Cooperation, founded in 1950, since some of its members went on to fulfill high administrative positions in the European Community’s structures. These included Gustav Heinemann, later President of the Federal Republic of (West) Germany, and Jean Rey, who became President of the European Commission. These men were not dreamy idealists, but practical executives, who believed that their project could and should deserve the moral guidance of the churches.

However, since most of the western European countries who founded the European Community had large Catholic populations, and since its founding leaders came from Catholic backgrounds, it was hardly surprising that relations with the Protestant ecumenists were at first marked by tensions. Later, however, after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, a new spirit of interdenominational cooperation was to be seen.

The European Community can be said to begin in 1950 with the plan put forward by the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schumann, for the amalgamation of industrial resources in the European Coal and Steel Community. But this initial success was overshadowed by the tensions resulting from the Cold War, by the proposals to rearm West Germans to play their part in defending their homeland, and by the reluctance of some idealists to encourage any step which would divide the nations of Western and Eastern Europe from each other. Many leading German churchmen campaigned for a unified and neutral Germany. Many British churchmen still adhered to their former attachment to the Commonwealth and were skeptical about any form of European cooperation. Many others adopted the traditional view that politics and religion should act in separate spheres. The cause of European unity therefore faced an uphill battle. The most that could be hoped for was “unity in diversity” which was finally acknowledged as the motto of the European Union in May 2000.

After the signing of the Treaty of Rome, the European Common Market among the six western European nations was founded in 1960. However the attention of the ecumenical fraternity was more attuned to the project for a pan-European Conference of European Churches, which held its first meeting in 1959. But the obvious Soviet propaganda and control of the churches in Eastern Europe meant that the CEC was a rather dubious venture. On the other hand, in the early 1960s, the British Government had a change of heart and applied to join the Common Market. But when its application was rejected by De Gaulle in 1963, this paradoxically stirred up interest among the British churches, and eventually led to a more positive approach to western European cooperation. Yet, at the same time the same French government’s refusal to accept the proposal, put forward by the Vatican, to appoint a diplomatic envoy to the European Commission in Brussels, delayed the establishment of formal relations with Europe’s largest religious community until 1970.

In the 1970s the economic successes of the Common Market were notable. With the Soviet military threat contained behind the Iron Curtain, the western European economies flourished. Living standards rose rapidly. New integrative measures were started such as the European Parliament, the adoption of a single currency, and after the dissolution of the Soviet empire, the abolition of border controls and customs offices in many parts of Europe. These developments owed little to any church initiatives, nor even to representatives of the Ecumenical Movement. As one observer commented, this lack of ecumenical mobilization was in part due to the European Community being regarded as a purely economic and political project in which religious communities could not find a theological basis for participation. Also national churches, which saw themselves as the preservers of their country’s past, were unwilling to take up the cause of others with whom they had no common heritage or language.

In fact, the Ecumenical Movement concentrated more on the personal and pastoral witness amongst the ever growing number of international bureaucrats at the European Community’s offices in Brussels. The hopes of some leading Eurocrats that the churches would take a lead in calling the young and creative forces in Europe to unite behind a common vision were never realized. British churchmen, for instance, remained skeptical about the influence of supra-national technocrats, who were not directly responsible to any national government. The ideal of political integration between different parts of Western Europe therefore remained a nonstarter, since it threatened to curtail relations with Eastern Europe or the developing world outside Europe.. As a result, no common ‘European’ consciousness appeared, transcending national loyalties.

Leustean takes his account up to 1978, but in a concluding chapter is obliged to note the dramatic changes in later years, especially after the overthrow of the Soviet empire in 1989-90. Many churchmen have since sought to engage in dialogue in order to understand the role of religion in the new Europe. Over these years countless committees, councils, conferences, and gatherings have been established or re-established with a bewildering array of alphabetical abbreviations, for which there is fortunately an appended index. But essentially the complex scale and scope of what is now the European Union defies easy or synoptic description.. It was left up to a retiring President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, to call in 1990 for an attempt to give Europe a soul through a spiritual and intellectual debate in which the Churches should participate actively. It was a brave but mistaken view that the Churches, or other faith communities, could find enough common ground to overcome their mutual and historic differences, which are likely to remain prevailing in the foreseeable future.

Leustean’s conclusion is therefore that a fragmented, interrupted vision of Europe at both the political and religious levels, which had impacted the attempts to bring unity and integration to at least Western Europe, was the major factor why the dreams of idealists such as his hero von Trott were never realized.

Review of Keith Clements, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ecumenical Quest

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of Keith Clements, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ecumenical Quest (Geneva: World Council of Churches Publications, 2015), 326 Pp. ISBN 978-2-8254-1656-3.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Keith Clements is a British theological scholar who served for many years as General Secretary of the Conference of European Churches, thus becoming well aware of the churches’ modern ecumenical dimensions. He has previously written a number of shorter works about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but in this more substantial study concentrates on Bonhoeffer’s connections to and involvement with the ecumenical church bodies of the 1930s. Drawing largely on the Collected Works, now fortunately all translated into English, Clements seeks to show that this was the most continuous thread of his life and activity, but one which has been rather neglected in earlier biographies which have concentrated on Bonhoeffer’s theology or his role in the German Church Struggle.

Clements-Dietrich In fact, Bonhoeffer’s participation in ecumenical affairs started immediately after his return in September 1931 from his visit to the United States. He was sent as a German youth delegate to a meeting in Cambridge of the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches. This body had originally been established in 1914, but had to suspend its activities during the war, and had only been resuscitated in 1920. Its support came from influential lay and clerical leaders, particularly in the democratic countries of Western Europe and North America. They recognized the need for programs of reconciliation and peace activities in order to bind up the wounds caused by the destructive violence of the recent war. It was here that Bonhoeffer met with such leading figures as the Anglican Bishop George Bell of Chichester, with whom he was to collaborate for the next decade.In fact, Bonhoeffer made such an impact that he was forthwith appointed as an Honorary Youth Secretary and given responsibility for the World Alliance’s youth work in central Europe. This was a challenge he could hardly refuse, and one to which he brought his newly-minted skills in theological advocacy and his energetic support of the World Alliance’s aims.

As Clements makes clear, however, Bonhoeffer soon saw that the whole ecumenical endeavour was sadly lacking an adequate theology. Passing high-minded resolutions at conferences or engaging in moralistic wishful thinking about the need for peace was not enough. With all the brashness of a twenty-eight-year-old—Clements calls it boldness—Bonhoeffer set out to remedy this deficiency. At the World Alliance’s next major conference held in Denmark in 1934, he advanced the argument that what was needed was for a great ecumenical council of churches to be convened which would commit all its members to non-violence and abjure all forms of militarism. The cause of peace demanded a universal approach and was not a matter just for individuals, or even for local or national churches. In the absence of any such body, the World Alliance meeting should dare to act as that council.

It was therefore especially necessary to attack those theological ideas about “the orders of creation” which German theologians were using to justify their nationalistic sentiments. Against this, Bonhoeffer argued for an order of preservation which would obey God’s commandment to witness to truth and justice, and prepare the way for the reception of the gospel of Christ. But in fact the ecumenical community was not yet ready for this precocious and prophetic vision of Christian witness. And Bonhoeffer himself became fully occupied with the onset of the Church Struggle within Germany, following Hitler’s take-over of power in 1933. He was now taken up with combatting the eager support given to the Nazi Party, particularly by his contemporaries amongst the younger pastors who so eagerly began to spread Nazi militaristic, nationalistic and antisemitic ideas in the fallacious belief that this would bring ordinary people back to the church.

Bonhoeffer’s move to England in October 1933 brought him into more frequent contact with Bishop Bell, who indeed came to rely on Bonhoeffer’s valuable guidance about the hectic developments in the German Evangelical Church. On the other hand, Bonhoeffer was unsuccessful in persuading any of these ecumenical bodies to sever their connections with the now nazified official church structures, and to regard the Confessing Church as the only true vehicle for Christian witness in Germany. The tensions this dispute caused led to the result that no one from the German Evangelical Church was allowed to attend the significant ecumenical conferences which took place in Britain in 1937, or to participate in the discussions in 1938 which resulted in the founding of the World Council of Churches.

By this time, however, Bonhoeffer had returned to Germany to lead the Confessing Church’s seminary at Finkenwalde in the remotest part of east Pomerania. This necessarily cut down on his opportunities to be in contact with his ecumenical partners. But, as Clements points out, Bonhoeffer was insistent that “The German Church Struggle is the second great stage in the history of the ecumenical movement and will be decisive for its future. It is not an ideal which has been set up but a commandment and a promise—it is not high-handed implementation of one’s own goals that is required but obedience. The question has been posed.” But in this idealistic vision Bonhoeffer was to be disappointed.

Clements does not elucidate how far this set-back induced Bonhoeffer to be drawn increasingly into the ranks of those who now sought to oppose Nazism and Hitler by some form of resistance or revolt. But as the war clouds increasingly gathered in the late 1930s, and as the Nazi ambitions became ever clearer, the hopes of the peace party were doomed to disillusionment and frustration. To be sure, it was largely due to his ecumenical friends in the United States, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Lehmann and Henry Leiper, that Bonhoeffer was offered an escape route from the risk of being conscripted for military service by accepting offers from New York to return to the United States in the summer of 1939. Yet, shortly after his arrival, Bonhoeffer realized he had made a mistake. As he explained in the well-known letter to Niebuhr, it was not the call of family, or of his church, but of his nation which led to his decision to return to Germany:

I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people…. Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization.

Clements rightly comments that in speaking of “Christian civilization” Bonhoeffer recognized the threat posed by the Nazis not just to Germany but to the wider Christian community. He saw himself engaged in the struggle for the widest goals of Christian witness which now required him to go back and face this ”terrible alternative”. It was all part of the costly discipleship to which he was committed.

After the outbreak of war, and his recruitment as an agent of the Military Intelligence Service, Bonhoeffer found that the hostilities virtually paralyzed the activities of the ecumenical movement and forced its supporters to find new ways of upholding their sense of community and mutuality. Clements argues that in these circumstances Bonhoeffer’s commitment to ecumenism became still more pronounced even though carried out in a conspiratorial manner. Thanks to his connections he was able to travel abroad, twice to Switzerland, where he contacted both Karl Barth and Visser’t Hooft, now the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches (in process of formation), and told them about the discussions for post-war renewal going on in the resistance circles in Germany

Bonhoeffer’s most significant journey came in April 1942 to Sigtuna, Sweden, where he met once again with Bishop Bell. Bonhoeffer’s objective was to persuade Bell to urge the British Government to make a public declaration of support for the German Resistance in the hope that any such declaration would provide evidence that, when Germany was defeated, she would not have to suffer an even more vindictive settlement than in 1919. To this end, Bonhoeffer revealed to Bell the names of the leading members of the anti-Hitler conspiracy, and eagerly looked forward to his nation’s eventual defeat, since Germany deserved punishment and ought to express repentance for the crimes committed in the nation’s name. But, in fact, when Bell fulfilled his mission on his return to London, the result was a disappointing rejection. Clements clearly admires Bonhoeffer’s dangerous venture as an example of ecumenism in practice. But other historians are more skeptical, pointing out that this plan was more the product of these churchmen’s wishful thinking than any realistic awareness of the international political scene, or the realities of choices facing the British authorities at the time.

In April 1943 Bonhoeffer was arrested and taken to Tegel prison on the outskirts of Berlin. He was never to regain his freedom. But from the letters, essays and poems smuggled out by a friendly warder, we have the evidence that his dedication to the ecumenical cause remained as before. As Clements shows, he used the opportunity to explore the dimensions of Christian discipleship in the service of the world when the church takes upon itself the needs of the world before God. We have one final glimpse of his ecumenical commitment from the day before he was murdered in April 1945. Together with a group of other notable prisoners, including a British P.O.W., Captain Payne Best, whom Bonhoeffer had discovered was acquainted with Bishop Bell, they were spending the night in a Bavarian schoolhouse. It was the Sunday after Easter, and Bonhoeffer was persuaded to hold a short service for them all. He had hardly finished when two SS policemen entered, and called out “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, come with us”. He had just time to give a message for Best to pass on to Bishop Bell. “Tell him, Bonhoeffer said, that this is the end but for me the beginning of life. With him I believe in the principle of the Universal Christian brotherhood which rises above all national interests, and that our victory is certain”. Then he was led away, taken back to Flossenbürg concentration camp, placed in front of a summary court martial, condemned to die, and on the following morning, 9 April, executed in the prison yard.

Clements’ final chapter describes the post-war reception of Bonhoeffer’s fame and ideas, beginning with the heartfelt tribute paid by Bishop Bell at a memorial service held in a large London church in July 1945, which was broadcast by the BBC’s German service and heard by members of Bonhoeffer’s family. It was the first intimation they had that he was no longer alive. It was the beginning of the process which Victoria Barnett has rightly called “the making of an ecumenical saint”, and culminated in the placing of Bonhoeffer’s statue on the front portal of Westminster Abbey in London, together with other Christian martyrs of the twentieth century. He was seen as a suffering Christian witness and defender of the faith. The emphasis was on his unconquerable piety and his unyielding trust in God.

But in fact, there were also contrasting reactions which Clements does not mention. In post-war Germany, not a few of the more conservative members of the Evangelical Church, including those in the ranks of the Confessing Church, took a much more hostile view of Bonhoeffer’s past. To many of these men, Bonhoeffer was not a Christian martyr but a national traitor. It was inconceivable to them that a pastor should have been involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the head of state, should have openly refused to pray for Germany’s military victories, or should have welcomed the prospect of his nation’s downfall and defeat. It took some twenty years before Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer’s closest friend and biographer, was able to overcome these prejudices. Another and more favourable reception came in the 1950s in Britain and North America with the English translation of Letters and Papers from Prison and the revelations about Bonhoeffer’s political activism and participation in the anti-Nazi struggle. At the same time, these letters aroused a tremendous excitement, especially in the younger generation, because of the stimulating critique of existing church doctrines and the enigmatic assertions about the “world come of age”, the call for a “religion-less Christianity”, or the necessity of being “the church for others”. These were the themes which gave, and still give, Bonhoeffer an enormous appeal as a major source of inspiration and guidance.

Fortunately, in so praising Bonhoeffer’s legacy, Clements has avoided the distortions and omissions which have marked the recent American biographies by Metaxas and Marsh. Instead he points to Bonhoeffer’s posthumous appeal and influence, which have established his reputation far beyond his native German Lutheran home. Indeed, Clements can claim that in view of Bonhoeffer’s response to Nazism and the Holocaust, he has also become a significant figure for Christian-Jewish dialogue. In so doing, Bonhoeffer belongs internationally and irrevocably to the ecumenical scene. His witness to this cause remains his most lasting memorial and is one which still commands respect. We can therefore be grateful to Keith Clements for so fully and convincingly outlining Bonhoeffer’s contributions to the ecumenical world view to which he was so seriously committed and in which he believed so passionately.