J. H. Oldham and George Bell

Ecumenical Pioneers

Keith W. Clements

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781506470009
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506470016
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Modern British History

This book introduces the life and thought of two British contemporaries who were decisive in shaping the modern ecumenical movement: the Scottish layman J. H. (Joe) Oldham (1874-1969) and the Anglican bishop G. K. A. (George) Bell (1883-1958). Their careers were rather different but closely related.

Oldham was a missionary statesman, the organizing secretary of the 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference, and a pioneering thinker and writer on race and social ethics who set the agenda for the crucial ecumenical conference on Church, Community, and State at Oxford in 1937. A quiet, skillful diplomat, he was the decisive mind behind the formation of the World Council of Churches (WCC).

Bell was the public, prophetic voice of the ecumenical fellowship from the 1930s onward, steadfastly leading the churches' support for the Christian opposition to Hitler in Germany, tirelessly working for refugees and all victims of oppression, and after the war pioneering the work of reconciliation. After the inauguration of the World Council of Churches in 1948, he served as the first chairman of its central committee. It was widely believed that he would have become Archbishop of Canterbury but for his courageous and outspoken opposition to the British and American policy of bombing civilian populations during the war.

The book outlines the life and main engagements of each figure in turn, and then provides a selection of their key writings to illustrate their thinking and their impact on ecumenism. A final chapter reflects on their pioneering significance and their relevance today.

Part I

J. H. Oldham

1

J. H. Oldham

The Wily Prophet

In the 1870s, the British Empire, that worldwide dominion on which, it was claimed, “the sun never set,” was approaching the peak of its power and reach. J. H. (Joe) Oldham was quite literally a child of that empire. He was born in 1874 in Bombay (today’s Mumbai), India, the oldest child of George Oldham, an officer in the British Indian Army, and his wife, Lillah. George and Lillah were devotedly evangelical parents, George being a founder of the Bombay Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) with aspirations to full-time evangelistic work once his military days were over. Devout and disciplined, the Oldham household was also warmly hospitable and, unusually for that time, as open to Indian as to European friends and visitors.

George Oldham retired from the army in 1881, and the family—including four children now—left India and settled at Crieff in Lillah’s homeland, Scotland. Joe was nurtured in a typically Scottish middle-class culture where education was taken with great seriousness, together with good taste in the arts and literature and a love of walking the hills, sport (Joe was an adept rugby player), and church. In the Oldhams’ case, church meant the (Presbyterian) Free Church of Scotland. George Oldham pursued his lay vocation as an evangelist to great appreciation by the churches and communities he visited. But tragedy struck with the death of Lillah Oldham, and in 1891, George, wishing now to devote his energies to his children’s welfare, moved the household to Edinburgh.

OXFORD EVANGELICALISM

Joe excelled at school and in 1892 entered Trinity College at Oxford University to study the subject known (still today) as litterae humaniores, or more popularly, “Greats”: the Greek and Latin classics and contemporary philosophy. It was the assumed route for those who aspired to government service or colonial administration, and the latter was evidently the aim of young Oldham. During his first weeks at Oxford, however, something happened to transform his life forever. While George Oldham’s evangelicalism was deeply serious, he had not forced it on his children, and Joe had not as yet expressed any marked religious inclination of his own—until one November evening, he was able to write to his father saying that he had given himself “definitely to Jesus Christ.” The famous American evangelist and YMCA leader Dwight L. Moody was in Oxford conducting a mission among the students, and Joe Oldham was among those who responded to his challenge to “break with sin.” For Oldham, this meant not only an inward change of heart but immersion in the tide of evangelical activity that was then surging through the student world: active membership in the university Christian Union with its earnest Bible study groups, early morning prayer meetings, outdoor gatherings for witness to other students, and attendance at the annual Keswick Convention in the Lake District and national student conferences. All these reinforced the call for total consecration to Christ, a commitment that its devotees saw supremely embodied in overseas missionary service. “The evangelization of the world in this generation” was the watchword of the Student Volunteer Union (SVU), founded in the United States in 1888, and its British version formed in 1891. At the start of his second year at Oxford, Oldham himself signed the SVU membership declaration: “It is my purpose if God permit, to become a foreign missionary.”1

It was in 1894 that he had another decisive encounter at Oxford. John R. Mott, chairman of the student section of the YMCA in the United States and chairman of the SVU there, was visiting Oxford, and Oldham was deputed by other leaders of the Christian Union to meet him and show him around the colleges. Mott, a Methodist layman, was already the dynamic driving force of the international Christian student scene and its missionary orientation. He was a powerful and inspiring speaker and organizer, possessed of boundless energies in leadership and formidably persuasive in summoning recruits to the cause. His approach was caricatured as “Young man: God has work for you in Shanghai. Here is your ticket.” His purpose in visiting Britain was to further preparations for the meeting in Sweden in 1895 at which would be formed the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF), linking all national intercollegiate unions and dedicated to world evangelization, and he wanted to know what part Oxford could play in this. Oldham was greatly impressed, if somewhat intimidated, by this American who was nine years his senior. In turn, Mott made a mental note of his sharp-minded young Oxford guide, who was coming of age just as Mott’s plans were taking shape. Fifteen years later, the two men would be embarking on a close and lasting partnership of crucial importance for the ecumenical movement.

Viewed from today, when “evangelical” and “ecumenical” are often assumed to be divergent if not opposed commitments, it may be surprising that it was out of this international student evangelistic enterprise that so much of the later ecumenical movement sprang. Such surprise, however, manifests a reading back into the 1890–1910 polarizations and polemics largely unknown at that time. Moody, for one, envisaged the YMCA (and its sister, the Young Women’s Christian Association [YWCA]) bringing into fellowship young Christians of all traditions and denominations, as did Mott (who would venture even into Orthodox Russia on his recruiting drives). Student Christian unions were not yet self-dividing into “liberal” and “conservative” factions. All believed in winning the world for Christ. As for Oldham himself, his later growth into ecumenical life, leadership, and social thought did not signify a fall from evangelical grace, a forsaking of the evangelistic imperative. In 1942, fifty years after he made the SVU declaration his own and at the height of his engagement with the social order, he could still write, “To save society we have to begin by saving persons. Nothing can supersede, or take the place of, the evangelistic and pastoral ministries of the Church, reinforced by the insights that general and medical psychology can supply.”2 Over the years, no work of his would be more widely read and appreciated than his pocket-sized Devotional Diary (1925).3 He was ever a man of prayer.

THE MISSIONARY VOLUNTEER: INDIA

On graduating from Oxford in 1896, Oldham worked for a year in London as the full-time joint general secretary of the SVU and the Inter-Varsity Christian Union, and in 1897, he fulfilled his own missionary pledge by sailing to the land of his birth, having been appointed the Scottish YMCA secretary in Lahore in Punjab (in today’s Pakistan). Mott very likely had a hand in his appointment. From the start, Oldham’s work in Lahore was marked by tireless industry on behalf of the YMCA members in support of their own missionary task among their fellow Indians: organizing Bible studies, conferences, and a recreational center and reading room. But above all, it was Oldham’s capacity for friendship that was most appreciated. Upon arrival at Lahore station, he had been met by S. K. Datta, a student destined to become one of the leading Indian Christians of his time. It was the start of a close and long-lasting friendship. In fact, all Oldham’s close friendships in Lahore were with Indians, with one exception. He was presently joined by Mary Fraser, sister of his Oxford friend Alek Fraser and herself a student in modern languages at Oxford. Their wedding took place in Lahore Cathedral, and typically, Oldham’s best man was another of his close Indian friends, Surandra Nath Chandu Lal. The key to friendship, Oldham saw, lay in discarding the European sense of self-sufficiency that engendered an air of self-importance and allowing others to offer their own help and friendship. Mary no less than Joe was a child of empire, her father being in the Indian civil service and governor successively of Punjab and Bengal. Perhaps it was the very fact of their common background in imperial rule that made both Joe and Mary especially sensitive to the problems of the Western missions in India. While some YMCA colleagues were attributing the difficulties encountered by missions to Indian religious obstinacy or moral apathy, Oldham wrote very frankly to his fellow missionaries: “If the missionary finds it difficult to make contact and gain a hearing, then he must look to himself to find the reason. The missionary is a foreigner, separated from Indians by barriers of custom, modes of thought and language, by racial prejudice, and by belonging to a conquering race.”4 He studied Urdu. Again, in a paper on “Foreignness: A Hindrance to Evangelism,” he writes, “A missionary nods in a friendly way to an Indian Christian student. . . . ‘He was too proud to shake hands.’ The treatment of Indians by many of our countrymen is contemptuous and insulting.”5 Ten years later, at the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, the young Indian and future bishop V. S. Azariah shook many present by his impassioned plea that, notwithstanding all the heroism and sacrificial labors of Western missions, “[Indians] also ask for love. Give us FRIENDS.”6 He was in effect asking for more Oldhams. Oldham was already exemplifying what later became, in conscious debt to the personalist thought of Martin Buber, his famous motto, “Real living is meeting.” If being ecumenical involves venturing across boundaries and opening oneself to viewing the world and one’s own tradition and culture from the other side, then Oldham’s ecumenical education was beginning in Lahore.

Oldham endeared himself to his Indian friends and colleagues, but in 1900, both he and Mary were struck down by typhoid. So serious was their debilitation that medical opinion insisted they return to Britain the following year, with no resumption in India for the foreseeable future. Though short, the Indian experience had provided Oldham with much to ponder on the problematic relations of missions to race, culture, and imperial power—issues that would accompany him for the rest of his life and inform his ecumenical perspective.

THEOLOGICAL STUDIES: MISSIONS EDUCATOR

Back in Scotland, the Oldhams made their home in Edinburgh, where Joe undertook a three-year theology degree course at New College, supplemented by a year’s study at the University of Halle in Germany. Aided by Mary’s tuition, he became accomplished in German and was able to benefit fully from the one who was, for him, the star attraction at Halle: Gustav Warneck (1834–1910), professor of theology of missions. Until Warneck, “missiology” was an almost unknown concept, and his chair at Halle was the first in missions anywhere, but he already had a following in Scotland, and Oldham was treading a not unfamiliar Scottish pilgrim path to Halle. Warneck understood missionary work as requiring three historical phases: the conversion of individuals and the gathering of small churches, the upbuilding of the churches and their leavening influence in the lives of the people, and the Christianizing of the masses involving not only religious but political and social movements.7 Each phase required study pertaining to the country in question, its social life, language(s), and culture. It was Warneck’s particular intellectual contribution, in viewing missions as an object of proper scientific study, to insist on seeing them as part of the wider human, historical scene rather than in pious isolation from secular forces. Particular aspects of Warneck’s analyses might be debatable, but the overall impact on Oldham was profound and lasting. It was soon after his return from Halle that Oldham wrote two articles for the Student Movement, raising the question of whether it might be the Asian countries that would make something “far grander” of Christianity than the European nations had succeeded in doing for nineteen centuries.8

For a time, Oldham considered entering the ministry of the Scottish Free Church, but no invitation from a congregation came, and he was content to remain a church elder and to stay active in the Student Movement, for which he wrote a number of aids to Bible study. In 1906, he was appointed full-time study secretary of the Mission Study Council of the United Free Church of Scotland, soon complemented by his appointment as missionary study secretary of the burgeoning Student Christian Movement (SCM) in Britain. Thus Oldham was brought into close collaboration with the very able secretary of the SCM, the Anglican priest Tissington Tatlow. Though on a relatively modest scale, at both the denominational level for the Free Church and the ecumenical level for the SCM, the work of providing guides for study groups on missionary work, organizing summer conferences for young people, and engaging in speaking and writing himself foreshadowed what was to be one of Oldham’s major contributions to the ecumenical movement: the establishment of study as a central necessity. This has perhaps become so familiar in ecumenical circles as to be taken for granted. Many others made important contributions, but Oldham was arguably the single most important figure in embedding study in the ecumenical movement at the international level, and even at this early stage, he was breaking new ground. Hitherto, reading material supplied by missionary organizations tended to be geared toward promoting the missions as they were and ensuring financial support by their constituencies, comprising hagiographical accounts of missionary heroism or success stories of evangelistic advance. After his encounter with Warneck, Oldham (assisted by George Robson, chairman of the Mission Study Council, who had translated Warneck’s History of Protestant Missions) was determined to provide genuine education about the factual history, contexts, and challenges of overseas mission. Thus the booklets for the SCM would, for example, focus on Africa one year, China the next, and so forth. The study emphasis continued. In following up the 1910 Edinburgh missionary conference and founding the International Review of Missions, in persistently bringing Africa to the attention of both governments and churches in the 1920s, in organizing the program of the 1937 Oxford Life and Work conference, and in helping shape the agenda of the infant World Council of Churches (WCC)—in all this, the presupposition was that pious enthusiasm was not enough; concerted study and evaluation of the meaning of the gospel and of what was happening in the world were essential. Here Oldham led by example. He was ever the student and voracious reader until the end of his days, keeping up not just with theology and biblical scholarship but with the sciences (natural, social, and political), philosophy and anthropology, economics, and educational theory, devouring everything from government reports to novels and poetry—and not forgetting newspapers.

THE WATERSHED: EDINBURGH 1910 AND AFTER

Oldham made his wider reputation by his crucial role as secretary of the 1910 World Missionary Conference. The conference was proposed in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Shapers of Ecumenical Theology Series
• Introduction
• Part I. J. H. Oldham
• Part II. George Bell
• Selected Bibliography
• Index