This is your hour

Christian intellectuals in Britain and the Crisis of Europe, 1937–49

John Carter Wood

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526132550
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Britische Geschichte der Neuzeit

In the 1930s and 1940s – amid the crises of totalitarianism, war and a perceived cultural collapse in the democratic West – a high-profile group of mostly Christian intellectuals met to map out 'middle ways' through the 'age of extremes'. Led by the missionary and ecumenist Joseph H. Oldham, the group included prominent writers, thinkers and activists such as T. S. Eliot, John Middleton Murry, Karl Mannheim, John Baillie, Alec Vidler, H. A. Hodges, Christopher Dawson, Kathleen Bliss and Michael Polanyi. The 'Oldham group' saw faith as a uniquely powerful resource for social and cultural renewal, and it represents a fascinating case study of efforts to renew freedom in a dramatic confrontation with totalitarianism. The group's story will appeal to those interested in the cultural history of the Second World War and the issue of applying faith to the 'modern' social order.

1

The ‘Oldham group’, 1937–49: people, organisations and aims

What I call the Oldham group grew out of J. H. Oldham’s efforts to advance the conclusions of the 1937 Oxford ecumenical conference on ‘Church, Community and State’, itself a summary of decades of Christian thought about the social order. Oldham set up the group’s official and unofficial bodies, selecting their members, guiding their discussions, synthesising their views and publicising their conclusions. But his efforts were assisted by others and enabled by the wider institutional infrastructure of British Christianity. He gained the backing of the Protestant churches, bringing resources, contacts and prestige; nevertheless, group members saw institutional religion as not only an ally but also an obstacle to their goals. While the group shared an intellectual consensus, it also experienced interpersonal tensions, political clashes, theological disputes and a chronic failure of resources to match ambitions. Introducing the group thus means describing Oldham himself, the people who joined him, the organisations they formed and the strategies they pursued.

Creating the Oldham group

Joseph Houldsworth Oldham (1874–1969), ‘Joe’ to his friends and colleagues, was born in India, where his father was an engineer for the East India Company.¹ When he was seven, the family returned to Scotland. Oldham attended Edinburgh Academy and then Trinity College, Oxford, where he not only read Greats between 1892 and 1896 but was also convinced by visiting American evangelists Dwight L. Moody and John Mott to become a missionary. He was the first full-time General Secretary of the Student Volunteer Missionary Union (SVMU), spending three years in India (where he wed) until a case of typhoid forced his return in 1901. He attended New College, Edinburgh, and studied with Gustav Warneck, professor of the theology of missions, in Halle, Germany in 1904 and 1905. (He received honorary doctorates in divinity from Edinburgh University in 1929 and Oxford in 1937.) Though never ordained, Oldham became a leader in the missionary and ecumenical movements, the latter emerging from the former after the 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference, which he co-organised. He was then secretary of the conference’s Continuation Committee. In 1912, he founded the International Review of Missions.

The ‘ecumenical movement’ referred to individuals in various countries, denominations and organisations working for Christian unity in theology and social action. Dominated by Europeans and North Americans, its reach extended to Africa, Asia and South America. Protestants led it, but Orthodox churches were represented; the Roman Catholic Church refused participation until the 1960s. Within the movement, there were various views on the meaning of ‘unity’ and the relationship between faith and society. A key fault line ran between Anglo-American social activism and the continental European Protestant – especially German – insistence on separating divine and secular categories.² The movement arose piecemeal through the coordination of conferences. Key organisations were the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches (founded in 1914), Faith and Order (1920) and the Universal Christian Council on Life and Work (1925).

Oldham became a key figure in inter-war ecumenism, particularly in Life and Work. Though raised a Presbyterian, he became an Anglican upon moving to London after the Great War.³ In 1921 he was appointed secretary of the International Missionary Council (IMC), where he remained until 1938. It allowed him to develop contacts with colonial administrators, contributing to his popular book Christianity and the Race Problem (1924). Without denying ‘racial’ differences (a question, as he saw it, for science), Oldham here set them in ‘a fundamental human unity’ and argued against racism and exploitation.⁴ One chapter, ‘The Christian View and Its Relation to Facts’, made assertions central to his later work: Christianity was less an ethical code than a claim about reality; Christians should engage with social issues; faith provided key beliefs about life’s meaning and purpose rather than ‘explicit direction’ for policy; and ‘secular’ knowledge could further Christian aims.⁵ He organised important ecumenical meetings and published his successful Devotional Diary (1923). He also became the first administrative director of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures.

Oldham’s focus shifted decisively to Europe in the 1930s. Russian Communism and Italian Fascism had long caused concern; however, the Great Depression, development of Stalinism, rise of the Nazis and apparent weakness of the democracies brought the issues of freedom, secularity and the social order to the top of his agenda. In 1934, he became chair of Life and Work’s ‘Research Committee’. Increasingly convinced of the need for Christian responses to what seemed a terminal western crisis, Oldham and William Temple (then Archbishop of York) organised the 1937 Life and Work Conference on ‘Church, Community and State’ in Oxford.⁶ Oldham was then in his early sixties (and nearly deaf), but the next decade saw him embark on a period of furious organisational activity.

The 1937 Oxford conference was the most significant inter-war meeting on Protestant and Orthodox social thought. It built upon and expanded existing strands of ecumenical thinking, such as those expressed at ‘COPEC’ (as the ‘Conference on Politics, Economics and Citizenship’ held in Birmingham in 1924 was widely known), and also reflected the specific political and theological atmosphere of the late 1930s. Over twelve days in July 1937, 425 delegates (and a similar number of visitors) from 120 churches in over 40 countries met in thematic committees to discuss pre-circulated draft resolutions.⁷ Oldham had issued a pre-conference pamphlet, and he co-wrote a summary of the conference’s main issues with Willem A. Visser ’t Hooft, The Church and Its Function in Society (1937).⁸ A series of reports were published on society, economics and international relations, the fruits of decades of Christian thought. Archbishop Temple saw inter-war ecumenism as defined by its critique of ‘acquisitive society’, assertion that social life must reflect true human ‘ends’, emphasis on ‘personal freedom’ and commitment to a fair deal for workers.⁹ However, the conference also exemplified Christians’ political divisions, particularly those related to the German ‘church struggle’ between the pro-Nazi Deutsche Christen (‘German Christians’) and the oppositional Bekennende Kirche (‘Confessing Church’). Agreement had been reached on joint participation by both sides, but at the last minute Hitler personally ordered that no German delegation attend.¹⁰ Nonetheless, the conference approved the creation of the WCC, a step matched by Faith and Order that year in Edinburgh: delayed by war, the WCC was inaugurated in 1948. After ‘Oxford 1937’, Oldham was at the centre of efforts by the British churches to continue the conference’s momentum, enabling what I call ‘the Oldham group’ to come together.

Oldham set up two church-funded organisations – the Council on the Christian Faith and the Common Life (CCFCL, 1938–42) and, later, the Christian Frontier Council (CFC, 1942–75) – as well as a discussion group called ‘the Moot’ (1938–47). With the outbreak of war, he founded a weekly (later biweekly) periodical, the Christian News-Letter (CNL, 1939–49), and a related book series. These projects formed an interlocking whole. The Moot was a private arena for discussing ideas. The two ‘Councils’ gave links to official Christianity, bringing prestige and material resources. The News-Letter was published under their auspices, with some of its content developed in the Moot and CFC. The Moot was the group’s main intellectual laboratory and the News-Letter its public face: it had a recognisable style and editorial line and proved to be popular. It was seen within the group as its most important joint production.

People

The members of the Moot

The crucial sites for developing the group’s thinki...