COMPARISONS between 1930s Germany and developments in our own time should be made with caution. This does not mean that there are not observations that may be of interest or of use to scholars, politicians, or even church leaders in the present. Andrew Chandler has made an invaluable contribution to making the sources of the so-called German Church Struggle accessible to a readership outside the German-speaking world, and this has long included the British perspective, beginning, perhaps, with his 1997 Brethren in Adversity.
Especially outside of England, Bell is best known as a friend of the pastor, theologian, and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whom he had met through the emerging ecumenical movement. But, as we see in this remarkable collection of letters between Bell and the Swiss Reformed pastor, theologian, and ecumenist Alphons Koechlin, his networks were much wider, and his interest and involvement in the fate of Christians in Germany was that of an ecumenical leader deeply concerned and profoundly troubled by what he saw.
Both Bell and Koechlin are outsiders to the events, and yet they are both, in their own ways, deeply involved. Koechlin has the advantage of speaking German as well as being a competent communicator in English, having spent a year in Oxford. Bell, an elder statesman of ecumenism, comes to trust the much younger Koechlin, and their judgements on events in Germany converge: “If Bell was often led by Koechlin it would also be true to say that they had reached comparable views . . . in their own way. Both saw the crisis as one expressing the navigable consequence of a totalitarian state which sought to fashion everything in the image of its own power and ideology.”
The letters have been edited with great sensitivity, and an extensive apparatus of notes enables the reader to engage with them in a wider context. The correspondence covered in this volume of the series The Selected Letters and Papers of George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, spans two decades, though it is to some extent interrupted by the Second World War. Timelines at the beginning of each year help to locate what is being discussed in a wider historical framework.
These are historical documents, presented for the use of historians of the 20th century and the ecumenical movement in particular. But, at least for this reader, they show something of the ongoing challenge in ecumenical relationships between non-interference in domestic affairs and seeing where what is at stake is a profound betrayal of Christianity itself and thus affects the universal Church.
And here, avoiding direct comparisons, one could consider church leaders’ ecumenical responsibility for today’s “brethren in adversity”, perhaps, for example, in the Church in Russia under Patriarch Kirill.
Dr Natalie K. Watson is a theologian, writer and publisher and lay canon of Peterborough Cathedral.
The George Bell-Alphons Koechlin Correspondence: The German church struggle in an international perspective, 1933-54
Gerhard Ringshausen and Andrew Chandler, editors
Bloomsbury £28.99
(978-1-35045-516-0)
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