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Ducking the issues on the field of battle?
Alan Wilkinson asks how Methodist consciences coped in the World Wars
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| Conscience and Conflict: Methodism, peace and war in the 20th century Michael Hughes
Epworth Press £25 (978-0-7162-0617-0) Church Times Bookshop £22.50 THIS is a discerning study of how British Methodism has reacted to issues of war and peace, from the Anglo-Boer War to current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a Pro-fessor of Modern European History, Michael Hughes is well equipped to provide the historical setting of each crisis, and an illuminating com-mentary of Methodist responses. Methodists, with their optimistic liberal ideals, paid little attention to the just-war tradition, or to the Christian realism offered by Reinhold Niebuhr and their own Herbert Butterfield. By contrast, Hughes describes himself as a “high Anglican”, sympathetic to a “tragic-apophatic reading of the Christian story, sceptical about the extent to which we can ever know or speak about the will of God”. He holds “a somewhat bleak view that war and violence form an endemic part of the human condition”. He shows how conflicts between pacifist and non-pacifist in the 1930s were transmuted during the post-Second-World War period into a shared recognition of the evils of war, and a belief that poverty and injustice caused war. Recently, like other Christians, Methodists have been unwilling to grasp the fact that tolerance can provide comfort to those who are intolerant and exclusive, and that terrorism is not explicable as simply the result of poverty and exploitation. This book is an account and analysis of political attitudes. There is virtually nothing about what guidance and nourishment Methodism provided for individuals coping with the grief and complex memories of war. How did lads brought up in the chapels react to being ordered over the top, or being told to bomb cities? What about the significance of war memorials and attendant rituals? There is no reference to the controversies in the First World War about prayers for the dead, or the fate of unbelievers who had been cour-ageous in battle. Were they saved by their own sacrifice? Or was there an intermediate state that gave agnostics a second chance? Did such questions undermine Methodist preaching for conversion? When most Free Church people supported the national cause in both World Wars, what had happened to the Nonconformist conscience? Hughes thinks it was more evident during the Second World War in the utterances of William Temple and George Bell than in the Free Churches. Canon Wilkinson is an honorary priest at Portsmouth Cathedral, and a Fellow of the George Bell Institute. To order this book, email the details to Church Times Bookshop (please mention "Church Times Bookshop Price") |
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