In the aftermath of the most devastating war in history, the United Nations’ Charter (1945) and Universal declaration of human rights (1948) promised a new era of peace and international stability. The UN member states affirmed ‘their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women’. Several times over, the Universal declaration referred to the ‘full development of the human personality’ as a guiding principle for the conduct of all countries. It marked a clear departure from the programme of the League of Nations, whose covenant in 1919 affirmed only a paternalistic responsibility for national minorities and not for individual human beings as such.Footnote 1
Although co-opted later by a liberal narrative about the triumph of human rights, the language of the Universal declaration derived in large part from religious conservatives. In particular, European and Anglo-American Protestants of the ecumenical movement advanced the concept of personhood as a solution to the perceived crisis of humanity during the transwar era.Footnote 2 They redefined the human being as a theological person in community with others and in partnership with God. This Christian personalist idea of humanity set itself apart from liberal individualism and the various forms of totalitarian collectivism in fashion during the interwar years. Protestant redefinitions of humanity formed a crucial intellectual background for the inauguration of human rights in the 1940s and the revival of humanitarian activism over the decades that followed.
Scholars have demonstrated the institutional influence of ecumenical Protestants within the UN Commission on Human Rights and other international bodies, but so far they have not explored the conception of humanity that lay at the heart of the Protestant justification for human rights.Footnote 3 And while the historian Samuel Moyn and others have investigated the contemporary Christian roots of human rights, they focus on the political contours of personalism at the expense of its theological foundation.Footnote 4 Recent books on Protestant internationalism such as Michael G. Thompson's For God and globe (2015) and Mark T. Edwards's The right of the Protestant Left (2012) have foregrounded theology, but they tend to overemphasize the role of Americans in reorienting global Protestant thought in the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote 5 In order to restore balance to the trans-Atlantic project of renovating theology, ecumenism, and humanity for a secular age, European Protestant anthropology deserves greater attention.
Mid-century Protestant studies of humanity's place in the world and relationship to God – a branch of theology called ‘anthropology’ that bore no relation to the ethnographic science of the same name – prepared religious people across the Atlantic to accept and believe in universal human rights. As will be discussed below, adopting the language of human rights involved certain political stakes. Beyond politics, however, Protestant human rights enthusiasm was deeply religious. The historian Mark Philip Bradley has called for greater study of ‘the intangible structures of feeling that are one critical element of an emergent human rights consciousness’; this article uncovers the intangible structures of belief that first gave human rights meaning in the trans-Atlantic world.Footnote 6
Outlining innovations in post-liberal ‘crisis theology’, particularly the work of the Swiss Reformed theologians Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, the first part of this article shows how the human being had become newly problematic for religious thinkers already in the 1920s. At the same time, Protestants of the ecumenical movement organized a series of meetings to unite the world churches, most notably at Oxford in July 1937. The second and third parts of this article analyse the proceedings of the Oxford conference, whose significance for the history of modern Protestantism is hard to overstate. At that moment, when the fate of Europe and the world hung in the balance, hundreds of leading clergymen, theologians, and laypeople came together to negotiate their understanding of humanity's place in the world. Some differences of opinion would persist, but in general the conference yielded a remarkable consensus on personalism and the churches’ duty to defend human lives regardless of race, nationality, and class. The conference participants resolved to create a World Council of Churches to institutionalize their renewed sense of mission and promulgate a unique theological anthropology. Thus, Protestants of the transwar era supplied the two main ingredients of any human rights regime: a universalist commitment to defending individual human beings and a global institutional framework for enacting that commitment.
The actual term ‘human rights’ was absent from Protestant discourse until the 1940s, when many other camps also appropriated it for their needs. But in order to understand why human rights ever could have appealed to people of diverse nationalities and ideologies, one must abandon rights talk for something more like human talk. By way of the Protestant story, the final part of this article recasts the history of human rights as part of a larger history of critical reappraisals of humanity's place in the world – what I call radical anthropologies. A broad anthropological revolution took place in European thought from the 1920s through the 1940s. During this tumultuous period, the human being became an object of serious philosophical and political contestation: fascists conceived of the ‘overman’ and experimented with novel forms of corporatism; socialists prophesied the ‘new man’ that would emerge through classless society; and existentialists in Germany and France rejected the human altogether in what Stefanos Geroulanos has dubbed an anti-humanist ‘negative anthropology’.Footnote 7 The human person of the Universal declaration of human rights should be juxtaposed with these and other radical anthropologies of the transwar era. The question why, after the 1940s, human rights fell into relative obscurity until the 1970s or 1990s might then turn into a broader inquiry into why ‘human talk’ resumed at those historical conjunctures. Anthropological crises have almost always accompanied crises in the geopolitical, economic, and cultural spheres.Footnote 8
I
The idea of crisis resonated widely during the interwar years. Prior to the global economic depression and the rise of totalitarian regimes, however, crisis in the German-speaking world lacked catastrophic overtones. Staying close to its Ancient Greek roots, the word instead denoted a moment of decision or judgement whose results remained uncertain.Footnote 9 Religious people viewed divine judgement, for example, as the ultimate crisis faced by humanity. Swiss and German theologians such as Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Rudolf Bultmann also used crisis to describe the radical ‘separation’ [Krisis] between God and man. Religion for them was not possible within the limits of reason alone: it required divine revelation.
Throughout the nineteenth century, liberal Christianity had constituted the main current of Protestant thought. This involved a historicist reading of scriptural authors and a non-dogmatic theology that embraced Enlightenment reason. A theological liberal believed in rational truth and an immanent as opposed to transcendent conception of God. The politics of these liberals usually tended toward applied Christian ethics (e.g. the Social Gospel movement), progressivism (e.g. Woodrow Wilson), and philanthropic humanitarianism (e.g. Albert Schweitzer).Footnote 10
But the tumult of the First World War shook liberal Protestantism's once solid foundations. What one scholar called the ‘crisis mentality’ of German clergy after the war could also apply to an emerging cadre of continental theologians, if for a more intellectualized reason.Footnote 11 As German pastors grappled with the religious disestablishment articles of the new Weimar Constitution and increasing anti-clerical pressure from the Left, the young Swiss theologians Barth and Brunner emerged as the two most prominent critics of theological liberalism. They reasserted a transcendent concept of God and the importance of revealed truth through the authority of scripture. In upholding divine otherworldliness, they defined man by his resolution of personal crisis through an act of faith – that is, man's overcoming of the separation (Krisis) between the human and the divine by saying ‘yes’ to the Word of God. Contemporaries referred to their post-liberal stance as neo-orthodoxy, dialectical theology, or crisis theology.Footnote 12
In wrestling with the problem of how to elevate God without debasing man, Barth and Brunner disagreed about the precise role of the human in this dialogue with the divine. In 1918, Brunner offered genuine praise for Barth's first major work, The epistle to the Romans, but noted that in its objective analysis of scriptural revelation, the book belittled the human side of the divine–human encounter. The ethical or moral dimension of human life (das Sittliche), he wrote to Barth that November, ‘has one component [that tends] toward the merely human, toward that culture of personality that you abhor, toward non-objectivity and bondage’. But it also has a component that tends ‘toward freedom and objective commitment’. He worried that Barth rejected prematurely the ‘entire domain of culture, of humanism’: ‘The state, socialism, Pestalozzi, Beethoven – all are for you mere “world” as much as cannibalism, and even much worse because they are conscious of this [worldly] suffering.’Footnote 13 In his early phase, Barth's emphasis on divine transcendence minimized the theological importance of man in the world. Brunner, in contrast, sought a middle way between secular humanism and absolute otherworldliness.
The categories of their argument were inspired by a revival of interest in the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who had described mankind's existential choice between three qualitatively different spheres of life: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Barth in particular sympathized with the either/or mentality of Kierkegaardian existentialism, conceiving of the church's mission as a leap of faith out of the ethical sphere (or, the realm of moral obligation) into the unconditional religious sphere. This theological approach mirrored his style of personal relations: Barth tended to think in absolutes and had a penchant for making dramatic breaks with people who disagreed with him. The scholar Kenneth Scott Latourette called him ‘a first-class mind, deeply religious, courageous, bold and uncompromising’.Footnote 14
For a while, at least, Barth collaborated with Brunner and the Germans Rudolf Bultmann and Friedrich Gogarten. During the 1920s, they formed a united theological front against modernity, progress, liberalism, and secularism. But tensions within this continental milieu erupted in 1929 when Gogarten unveiled his so-called ‘theological anthropology’. According to Barth, theology neither depended on human knowledge nor could ever speak directly about humanity, but only indirectly through the divine medium of Christ. This ‘Christological’ approach would form the basis of his thirteen-volume magnum opus Church dogmatics. So when Gogarten chose humanity as his theological point of departure, Barth reacted forcefully. He considered anthropology a regression into Scholastic natural theology, which had combined Christian belief and Greek philosophy to derive knowledge of God from the human and natural worlds – and not solely from scripture. Barth sensed something sinister in Gogarten's ideas, which the latter seemed to confirm a few years later by joining the Nazi-sponsored ‘German Christians’ movement. Ever the conciliator, Brunner suggested to Barth that there might be something worth salvaging even in natural theology and that, rather than Gogarten's all-too-secular version, one needed a truly ‘theocentric anthropology’. But Barth had had enough and stormily ended his collaboration with the German neo-orthodox theologians.Footnote 15
While he disagreed with his more conciliatory stance, Barth remained friends with his fellow Swiss Brunner – at least for a while. The two continued debating theological anthropology through the early 1930s. One of the thorniest issues was the relationship between fallen humanity and the original ‘image of God’ in which man was created (Gen. 1:27). Sin and disbelief, Brunner contended, did not completely efface the divine image. ‘Humanity and personality in the conventional sense’, he explained, are ‘always a dark remembrance of God and inevitable relatedness to God. In them lies the possibility of inquiring after God and furthermore the possibility of practicing theology meaningfully.’ For Brunner, the human must be understood dialectically as a theological person arising from the tension between God and fallen humanity. He insisted that sinners and non-believers also could hear the Word of God, albeit ‘wrongly’. Thus every human, regardless of whether he was Christian, Muslim, or atheistic, constituted a person insofar as he could potentially say ‘yes’ to the Word of God.Footnote 16 The ‘he’ that stood for the human in crisis theology would not have struck its adherents as problematic. Barth in particular held retrograde opinions of women, even by the standards of his time and milieu.
Brunner in any case identified a performative contradiction in Barth's position: ‘I find lacking in your dogmatics any determination of how theology, i.e. humanly rational understanding of the message of God, is possible…According to your anthropology, theology is impossible.’ By removing humanity from the theological equation, Barth failed to account for how humans could ever attain knowledge of God or understand the message of divine revelation. But Brunner's explanations did not satisfy Barth. After mounting accusations and a public airing of their dispute in 1934, the two broke off relations for the next decade and a half.Footnote 17
Without the Barthian revolt in continental theology, it is unlikely that moderates such as Brunner would have developed their new brand of personalism. It took years before Barth himself came around to this possibility of theological anthropology. At the centre of Volume iii, Part 2, of his Church dogmatics (1948), he placed the integral human person, the ‘real man’ who existed analogously to the figure of Jesus Christ: the tripartite combination of body, soul, and partnership with God. One interpreter has explained Barth's mature thought as follows:
in every human being we encounter God's honoured partner, one who is ‘always of value and interesting…because God is his Friend, Guarantor, and Brother.’…Hence, ‘human rights and human dignity’ are ‘not a chimera’…for the Christian understanding of the human, but rather a reality which is fundamental when the human person is seen in the light of Jesus Christ.
This personalist anthropology stressed the interconnectedness of all humans in a sort of ‘co-humanity’.Footnote 18 Humans exist publicly, and their relationship to God, while personal, can never be private.
Although Protestant personalism described humans as neighbours who shared in a common partnership with God, it said little about the sort of communal rights and duties that lay at the core of Catholic personalism.Footnote 19 Ecumenical Protestant leaders of the transwar era expressed great anxiety about communitarian social projects. They feared that the churches were becoming entangled in the politics of particular national communities, as with the German churches under the Nazis. One report warned that ‘modern nationalism aims at a reversion to a position in which men's rights and duties spring naturally out of their station in the community…The freedom of the individual to manage his own life as he will is deliberately sacrificed to social cohesion.’Footnote 20 But ecumenical Protestants did not respond with defiant individualism. Rather, they called for a universal community of faith that would recognize no distinctions based on nation, race, or class.
In addition to the European personalism evident in the work of Brunner, the mature Barth, and the Russian Orthodox philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, American strands of personalism also emerged during the interwar years. Already in 1908, the Boston University theologian Borden Parker Bowne had published a series of lectures on the theme of personalism. Other theologians such as Albert C. Knudson and Edgar S. Brightman would follow suit. But American personalism, with its emphasis on phenomenology, epistemology, and idealist metaphysics, lacked the scriptural rootedness and dialectical method of its continental cousin. American personalists had more to say to analytic philosophers of mind about the nature of reality than they did to spiritual believers about the existential human condition.Footnote 21 Still, the language of personality that appeared in the work of William Adams Brown and Eugene W. Lyman did make American ecumenists receptive to European personalism. An amalgam of European and American ideas would shape the Protestant understanding of humanity that underlay human rights discourse in the 1940s.Footnote 22
Even if not an explicitly legal definition of human rights, Protestant personalists’ high valuation of individual human life in relationship to God and to universal community represented one facet of the broad anthropological revolution during the transwar era. Critical humanisms and anti-humanisms of all sorts competed for legitimacy at this time of great social upheaval. Fascists, socialists, existentialists, and other camps invented new definitions of humanity to serve their various political and philosophical projects. For their part, ecumenical Protestants worried about the future of man and the church in an increasingly godless world. Theology during this age of extremes often turned militant. In addition to their intellectual work, the crisis theologians kept abreast of the exciting transnational movement toward church unity that culminated in the World Conference on Church, Community, and State held at Oxford in July 1937.
II
Delegates from over one hundred Protestant and Orthodox denominations around the world gathered for this perhaps most important conference of non-Catholic church leaders to date. After two weeks of exciting discussion, the participants collaborated on a heap of official literature that contained, among other things, a radical anthropology inspired in large part by European crisis theology. For the conference participants, only the individual person's act of faith could fulfil his general human potential. In saying ‘yes’ to the Word of God (or, the call of God to man through revelation), the person became God's servant and at the same time recognized his neighbours as fellow children of God. By conceptualizing ‘the existence of man as person as existence in community’, the churches interpreted the relationship between the individual and the collective as mutually constitutive.Footnote 23 Although skewed toward Western perspectives and the interests of the established Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed denominations, the Oxford conference produced a unified understanding of humanity that combined a theological reformulation of human nature with a refreshed social consciousness.
How the world Protestant churches came together at Oxford in July 1937 forms a key part of the history of the ecumenical movement.Footnote 24 As opposed to the official ecumenism of the Roman Catholic church and to older Protestant instances, the modern ecumenical movement started in the late nineteenth century as a product of imperial missionary work and serious attempts to federate the British churches at the Lambeth conferences. In 1910, the first World Missionary Conference convened at Edinburgh to lay the groundwork for an international federation of churches. Several Protestant organizations already existed on an international basis, such as the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) (founded in London in 1844 and 1855, respectively) as well as the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) (founded in Sweden in 1895). As general secretary of the WSCF and chair of the Edinburgh conference, John R. Mott made ecumenism his personal mission through constant world travel and speaking engagements. At Edinburgh, he and other likeminded Christians resolved to create organizations whose relevance transcended the somewhat narrow concerns of lay fraternal, sororal, and youth groups.Footnote 25
The First World War interrupted such ecumenical projects, but they resumed with vigour during the optimistic years following the Treaty of Versailles. The ecumenical movement formalized itself into three branches: the Life and Work Movement (L&W), the Faith and Order Movement (F&O), and the International Missionary Council (IMC). In the original division of ecumenical labour, L&W concentrated on the function of the church in modern society and the practical scope of ecumenical action in world affairs. F&O focused instead on the detailed negotiation of ecclesiastical practices through inter-communion agreements, mutual recognition of doctrinal peculiarities, and accommodation of different liturgies. The IMC handled global missionary affairs mostly in Africa and Asia.
Life and Work made headlines in 1925 for holding in Stockholm what it considered the world's first truly ecumenical council. Its director, Nathan Söderblom, archbishop of Uppsala, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1930 largely due to his efforts in organizing this event. After his death in 1931, however, many adherents to L&W voiced dissatisfaction with the Pollyannaish idealism of the Stockholm conference and sought a more lasting and realistic church engagement with the world. The Swedish theologian and ecumenist Nils Ehrenström later summarized this sentiment: ‘whereas the holding of periodical conferences is a useful part of ecumenical activity, concerns such as those of Stockholm 1925 can be adequately dealt with only by a permanent body, officially recognized, through which the work of one conference can be linked to that of another’.Footnote 26 After another conference at Fænø, Denmark, in 1934, members of L&W started planning the much larger Oxford conference for July 1937. In co-ordination with L&W, Faith and Order planned its own world conference at Edinburgh for the following month.Footnote 27
Leaders of L&W and F&O met prior to Oxford and combined resources. A correspondent for the London Times paraphrased William Temple, the archbishop of York:
It was extremely difficult to interest the general Church public in the whole cause of united Christian witness so long as that public was called on to support several different movements of the kind. Further, the Life and Work Movement and the Faith and Order Movement in particular found themselves occupying one another's ground. They were suffering from the attempt to carry on in isolated compartments what were, after all, only distinct sections of a single enterprise.Footnote 28
Temple's statement reflected a growing belief among church leaders that their mission required unified action. The ascendancy of L&W in the mid-1930s and the excitement surrounding its conference at Oxford suggest a shift in priorities among church people in the face of changing historical circumstances. An ‘Oxford consensus’ on world affairs began to transcend the initial parochialism of the ecumenical movement.Footnote 29
Joseph H. Oldham took charge of planning the conference. With some exaggeration, his biographer Keith Clements described him as a missionary statesman, ecumenical prophet, and ‘one of the most creative people, in any field, to have lived and worked in the 20th-century’.Footnote 30 A leader of the International Missionary Council and member of L&W, Oldham exemplified a recognizable type of religious professional at work in the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote 31 In addition to their daily clerical or seminarian duties, these men (it was predominantly men) actively corresponded and collaborated with fellow Christians around the world in an effort to build inter-church unity. Some functioned best as ‘organization men’ who co-ordinated meetings, conferences, and day-to-day operations (e.g. Oldham), while others publicized the cause through speeches, letters, and journal articles. A good example of a religious professional with impressive international reach, George Bell earned a reputation as a ‘friend of the German churches’ and corresponded with a variety of anti-Nazi resisters inside Germany: this clearly lay beyond the scope of his episcopal duties in Chichester.Footnote 32
The conference took years to plan and expectations were high. Preparatory papers were solicited for the conference's five main sections on community, the state, the economy, education, and the universal church.Footnote 33 Henry P. Van Dusen from the Union Theological Seminary in New York said that the conference ‘has stirred among the people of the United States a more widespread anticipation than any Christian gathering in modern times’.Footnote 34 Anglo-American delegates played a prominent role in the proceedings, but they constituted only a narrow majority. A designated staff of stenographers and translators worked tirelessly to ensure that transcripts of speeches and papers circulated in English, French, and German. Despite some conspicuous absences, the conference represented most of the major churches of world Protestantism.Footnote 35
Barth did not attend the conference, but his influence was keenly felt. The Dutch theologian Willem A. Visser ’t Hooft, one of his devotees, chaired the sub-section on ‘The Christian Attitude Toward War’ and later would serve as the first general secretary of the World Council of Churches. The Swiss theologians Adolf Keller and Eduard Thurneysen and the French pastor Pierre Maury represented Barthian positions in other sections. For years, the conference organizer Oldham had been drawn ‘to the European continent…in his search for theological renewal’. But even those not convinced by the work of Barth, such as the American delegates, shared the Barthians’ scepticism of modernity, progress, and secular institutions.Footnote 36
The most influential conveyor of crisis theology in attendance was Emil Brunner. There were several reasons why Brunner would have attended this ecumenical gathering instead of Barth. In addition to his better command of the English language and more cosmopolitan bent – he had studied at the Union Theological Seminary in New York and later would hold guest professorships at the Princeton Theological Seminary and the International Christian University in Tokyo – Brunner also believed strongly in the theologian's duty to defend the Christian faith against rival ideologies of the contemporary world. Barth in contrast thought that this kind of apologetics or ‘eristics’ risked polluting theology with foreign concepts, much as the medieval Scholastics’ engagement with Greek philosophy had ostensibly distracted them from biblical revelation. Regretting that Barth had abandoned his previous engagement with the world, Brunner wrote him in the early 1930s that all theology is ‘a particular kind of evangelization, namely the struggle against our pagan thought’; each epoch creates new fronts in this struggle, and the church must respond to them. Barth's neo-orthodox theology might ‘protect Protestantism against Catholicism’, but Brunner more ambitiously sought to ‘protect Christianity against modernity’.Footnote 37
In advance of the Oxford conference Brunner circulated the paper ‘The Christian understanding of man’, a summary of his popular book of that year Man in revolt.Footnote 38 Like Barth, he argued that ‘man is a “theological being”; that is, his ground, his goal, his norm, and the possibility of understanding his own nature are all in God’. Yet, one cannot extract the human person from society. ‘The Christian answer, by unveiling the secret of human personality’, he wrote, ‘is able both to achieve the removal of the contradiction and the restoration of integral personality and union with persons.’ Both independent life and ‘a completely social life’ animate the human person: ‘the genuinely human element is freedom in union with God and my neighbor’.Footnote 39 Oldham had already highlighted this post-individualist definition of persons in a preliminary pamphlet for the conference, where he wrote somewhat awkwardly of those ‘who have been redeemed from the self-centered existence which is death into the objectivity and freedom of a life of personal response to the demands of persons’.Footnote 40 Pierre Maury's paper expressed similar sentiments, calling on the church to ‘take knowledge of the anthropology of its faith’, to see ‘in every man (and not only in its members) a creature in the image of God’, and to ‘defend in each and for each…not [primarily] the sacred rights of human personality, not any moral value, but “the brother for whom Christ died”’.Footnote 41 At Oxford, the human was robustly defined as a theological being, a person produced in the crisis of and dialectical tension between God and man.
III
Most rousing of all at the conference's first plenary session was the speech by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. His influence, especially in Great Britain and among Protestant youth groups, was nearly as great as Barth's. When William Temple met him for the first time at the conference, he greeted him by saying ‘[a]t last I have met the disturber of my peace’.Footnote 42 The failure of Christianity to respond to the challenges of the secular age, Niebuhr admonished the assembled delegates, had enabled the rise of pagan religions such as Nazism and communism. The churches’ impotence had also facilitated liberal humanism's ‘self-glorification’ and ‘self-deification’ of man. Both Catholics and Protestants shared the blame. Through the Parable of the Prodigal Son, Niebuhr demonstrated how modern culture, exemplified by ‘rationalistic humanism’, resembled the younger son in the first stages of emancipation from God, the father. As this prodigal son progressed through the world, he was corrupted by material wealth and irresponsible excess (e.g. fascism and communism). The church, however, risked turning into the self-righteous older brother who stayed loyal to the father but used that relationship to bolster a ‘sinful egotism’. This ‘profanization’ of Christianity involved a claim of exclusive access to truth through divine revelation that ignored the positive contributions of secular culture (here he might have had Barth in mind). The prodigal son thus had something to teach his older brother.Footnote 43
According to a correspondent for The New York Times,
Mr. Niebuhr, who threw aside his prepared manuscript and talked extemporaneously to deliver this appeal, drew rounds of applause when he challenged the church to meet modern thinkers on their own ground of reason. ‘Some of the most profound insights into religion’, he said, ‘have come when men no longer had a reason for believing in themselves’.Footnote 44
In other words, the churches must view their wavering self-confidence in the crisis-ridden 1930s as an opportunity for reform. Oldham struck the same chord when he described in his introductory speech ‘what was needed if the Church is to be rescued “from the reproach of multitudes: that it is an effete institution irrelevant to the real problems of life to-day and in the future”’.Footnote 45 The Oxford conference marked the collective realization by the churches that they faced extinction in a secular age.
If Barth and Brunner provided the post-liberal theological foundation for the Oxford understanding of humanity, then Niebuhr best articulated its post-liberal politics. He devoted the mid-1930s to the development of a new Christian social ethic based on a dichotomy between ‘moral man’ and ‘immoral society’. During the course of the American presidential election in 1932, he had become profoundly disillusioned by what he considered the political immaturity of the masses. Prior to that, he had supported the Socialist party and believed in its programme of social justice. Now he rejected the idealism and pacifism of the socialists along with the pragmatic optimism of liberals such as John Dewey.Footnote 46
This broad rejection stemmed from his evolving realist and rather cynical view of world affairs. ‘All social co-operation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group’, he wrote, ‘requires a measure of coercion.’Footnote 47 Force and violence were ineradicable elements of the social order. Among Protestants, Niebuhr argued against liberals who believed in the possibility of realizing the perfect Kingdom of God on earth. Such idealism, he claimed, ignored the basic immorality of society and underestimated the sinfulness of individual man. But he warned that one should not take the critique of liberalism too far. Alluding to what he considered Barth's revival of Luther-style orthodoxy in Germany, Niebuhr wrote that the ‘emphasis upon the difference between the holiness of God and the sinfulness of man is so absolute that man is convicted, not of any particular breaches against the life of the human community, but of being human and not divine’.Footnote 48
Niebuhr partially mischaracterized Barth's position. He ignored the latter's insistence on the constitutive relationship between the person and a universal community of faith. Moreover, Barth was hardly a Lutheran quietist in political affairs. He had joined the German Social Democratic party in 1931 in opposition to the increasingly authoritarian Weimar state and the growing popularity of National Socialism, and in 1934 he wrote the courageous Barmen Declaration on behalf of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church. Yet despite such misconstruals, Niebuhr's theological and political analyses were poignant and often packed a convincing rhetorical punch.Footnote 49
Although he did not share all his theological views, Niebuhr largely agreed with Barth's political stance. He too actively opposed Nazism, having collaborated with the New York progressive Left to aid refugees from Hitler.Footnote 50 The solidarity of ecumenical Protestants such as Niebuhr with those persecuted by the Nazis provided the immediate political backdrop of the Oxford conference. Conspicuously absent were any delegates from the official body of German Protestant churches, the German evangelical church (DEK). Constituted in July 1933 under the influence of the pro-Nazi church movement known as the ‘German Christians’, the DEK had federated all Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches in Germany for the purpose of creating a single Reich church, or Volk church, based on a racist-nationalist programme. In reaction to the DEK's adoption of the Aryan Paragraph legislation, which defrocked ministers of Jewish descent, a group of dissenting clergy led by the Berlin-Dahlem pastor Martin Niemöller created the Pastor's Emergency League to aid persecuted church people. This group formed the nucleus of a breakaway organization of churches known as the Confessing Church (BK). The rivals DEK and BK each claimed to be the true representative of German Protestantism.
The Confessing Church opposed what it considered the nazification of the German churches. In 1935–6, waves of arrests hit BK-aligned parishes and synods, and on 1 July 1937 – just eleven days before the start of the Oxford conference – the Gestapo arrested Martin Niemöller. The next day, the Council of Brethren of the BK-aligned evangelical churches of the Old Prussian Union proclaimed that ‘along with him, the entire Church of German evangelicals stands on trial’. Niemöller's actual trial was held in February 1938 and, after a poorly managed prosecution, he received a light sentence by a sympathetic judge (time served and a modest fine). But Hitler apparently felt so threatened by the man that he decided to make him his ‘personal prisoner’.Footnote 51 He would spend the next seven years in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps.
Niemöller's arrest and the conflict within the German churches – sometimes referred to as the ‘church struggle’ – weighed heavily on the consciences of the hundreds of church people preparing for the Oxford conference. George Bell wrote to the London Times on 2 July that
[t]he name of Dr. Martin Niemöller is famous throughout Christendom. The news of his arrest will be received with dismay here and among all the Churches abroad…It is a critical hour. The question is not only a question of the fate of a particular minister, but of the whole attitude of the German State to Christianity and Christian ethics.
Two weeks later, the bishops Bell and William Temple led the conference delegates in a public expression of solidarity with the German churches.Footnote 52 In the 1933 Protestant church election in Germany, the Gospel and Church party, a forerunner of the BK, had used the slogan ‘Kirche muß Kirche bleiben!’Footnote 53 Four years later, the official motto of the Oxford conference was essentially the same: ‘Let the Church be the Church.’ The German church struggle pertained not to a particular minister in a particular country, the conference participants believed, but to all churches everywhere.
For ecumenical Protestants, solidarity with imperilled Christian brethren – at least in Europe – involved subsuming distant human suffering under a general crisis of the secular world. The spirit of self-criticism at Oxford was so intense that even traditional religious activities such as providing humanitarian aid fell under scrutiny. Humanitarianism, which dwelled on human suffering in itself, represented for them yet another expression of the corrosive secularism of modern society. It exhibited ‘a tendency to glorify man and his works’, according to the Yale theologian and pacifist Robert L. Calhoun.Footnote 54 Humanitarian modernism was ‘unreflective’ insofar as it failed to incorporate a proper understanding of the human personality before God.
A reconsideration of the Christian missionary project had been underway long before Oxford.Footnote 55 But now that problem too reached a critical point. How could Christians conceptualize their action in the world as distinct from both secular humanitarianism and traditional ideas of mission? The immediacy of political action could provide a convenient pretext to gloss over troublesome theological issues. Niebuhr, like his friend and fellow theologian Paul Tillich, always put political practice ahead of theoretical purity. But significant theoretical labour always accompanied shifts in practice. In searching for a middle way between liberal optimism and orthodox withdrawal from the world, Niebuhr represented Oxford's general tendency toward a new Christian ethics based on human rights and political realism.
Not all of the Oxford delegates possessed Niebuhr's sense of moderation. Some experimented with a brand of anti-liberalism they called Christian totalitarianism. Nazism and communism – both defined by the delegates as ‘totalitarian’ – were indeed targets for critique at Oxford, but not the sort of pro-democratic critique that later characterized Cold War liberalism. Along with their general aversion to the anti-religious policies of the Nazi and Soviet regimes, the Oxford delegates agreed that these secular totalitarianisms had erred by committing the sin of idolatry: ‘the deification of nation, race, or class, or of political or cultural ideals, is idolatry, and can only lead to increasing division and disaster’.Footnote 56 The democratic states of the West had accordingly idolized man. Ecumenical Protestants did not condemn totalitarianism as such, but only manifestations of it that failed to consider God the absolute sovereign with a total claim on man. Oldham's secretary Eric Fenn explained that ‘there is nothing to choose between a dictatorship and democracy if both are godless. Each must in practice make a total claim upon the interest and activity of man.’Footnote 57 Only the divine claim on man was valid and total. Oldham soon developed these ideas into a revived concept of Christendom that differed from its medieval precedent only insofar as it embraced the challenges of modernity in order to build a just, ‘responsible society’.Footnote 58
But Oldham went further than that. The churches, he argued, could make good use of totalitarian methods. As a mode of organization, Christians should form ‘cells’ similar to those used by conspiratorial parties like the Bolsheviks. ‘There must be a multiplication of cells’, he wrote, ‘of small, living groups of men and women who come together to help one another in discovering and fulfilling their Christian responsibilities in the home, in the neighborhood, in civic life, in the professions and in industry, in social service and in the political arena.’Footnote 59 The ends of Christian totalitarianism differed of course from those of secular totalitarianisms. Eric Fenn claimed that this was precisely why the churches had found themselves in a defensive position:
We must face [the fact] that the Church itself has an ineradicable totalitarian principle within it, and that, therefore, wherever the Church is confronted by another totalitarian claim, there is bound to be conflict…[T]otalitarianism, though it may express itself in dictatorship, can and does exist in other forms and even in democratic countries. The enemy for the Christian is not Fascism, Nazism, or Communism as such, but the claims of a godless, pagan, or entirely secular society, whatever form it may take.Footnote 60
Less concerned about concrete political consequences, such ideas derived mainly from the theological conviction that religion exerts a total claim on man.
Oldham's decades-long search for a ‘new Christian conception of human existence which could engage with the threatening ideologies’ of the world had led him to this brand of Christian totalitarianism.Footnote 61 And it had lasting currency. Shortly after the Oxford conference, Oldham, Fenn, and William Paton among others founded a group called the Moot as one of those embedded ‘cells’ for the purpose of discussing Christian solutions to the modern crisis. They consciously joined the ‘battle over the nature and purpose of being human’. Several Moot discussions starting in 1938 floated the possibility of using a totalitarian model for reconstructing the West.Footnote 62
The Oxford delegates adhered to multiple and often conflicting political agendas, but their thoughts on theological anthropology tended toward unity. After surveying various secular anthropologies (the biological or Darwinian man, the bourgeois-liberal individual, and the socialist new man), Reinhold Niebuhr admitted already in 1934 that much could be learned from these developments in secular understanding. But one could hardly ignore the contradictions of liberal humanism: ‘the humanitarianism of the past 200 years stands in strange contrast to the inhumanities of industrialism’. While ‘bourgeois civilization’ had developed ‘a more completely independent and discrete individuality than any previous [type of] personality’, it had narrowly defined that individual according to an urban middle-class standard. In contrast, he wrote, the person as a theological being ‘faces the eternal mystery of life alone; and the very heart of that mystery is the reality of self-consciousness, seemingly dwarfed and yet not dwarfed by a world of physical immensity’. The reality of self-consciousness manifested itself through faith in God, and for ecumenical Protestants secular liberalism lacked precisely this fundamental Christian ethos.Footnote 63
For Protestants at Oxford, liberalism offered only a partial solution to the crisis of the secular age. The ‘full development of the human personality’ later demanded by the Universal declaration of human rights would require an appeal to a common moral consciousness. Ecumenical Protestants believed that such a consciousness could only be cultivated by a non-Roman Catholic ‘Una Sancta’, or universal church. For secular leaders, on the other hand, the answer lay with international rule of law. Some ecumenists such as John Foster Dulles and O. Frederick Nolde were able to bridge these two positions, developing a realistic Christian policy on international affairs. Post-war human rights would follow from both religious conservative and secular liberal discourses as the best possible means of protecting the human person through regulation of social inequalities, limitation of political persecution, and belief in the unconditional worth of individual human lives.
Terms like ‘the dignity of man’, ‘common humanity’, ‘integral personality’, and ‘personal community’ constituted a distinct lexicon that prompted later interpreters to refer to an ‘Oxford Doctrine of Man’.Footnote 64 The conference participants agreed that human beings possessed God-given rights to equal opportunity in worship, education, and labour. At the root of these particular rights lay the single right of personal self-fulfilment through acknowledgement of the Word of God. A holistic definition of the human that depended on a universal community of believers, this Protestant personalism maintained that economic and political inequalities deprived human beings of their right of self-fulfilment. The national and international legal systems alone lacked the moral foundations necessary to protect this personal human right. ‘All law, international as well as national’, declared the Oxford delegates, ‘must be based on a common ethos – that is, a common foundation of moral convictions.’Footnote 65 The common ethos that legitimized personalist rights was of course Christian faith. This was the Protestant answer to the problem of moral universalism that beleaguered human rights in the transwar era. While many ecumenical Protestants remained sceptical of abstract declarations of rights, they did believe in fostering a commitment among nations to protect the dignity of individual human persons. Protestants’ new understanding of man underpinned their confidence in the possibility of universalist conceptions of human rights, ones that would not succumb to secular temptations.
IV
The delegates at Oxford decided to formalize their commitment to building a global, Christian sphere of legitimization for the human person. They established a provisional World Council of Churches (or, WCC-in-formation) and elected the Barthian theologian Willem A. Visser ’t Hooft its general secretary. Based in Geneva, this organization oversaw a network of correspondence and personnel with subsidiary offices in London and New York. During the Second World War, the Geneva headquarters acted as a clearing house for ecumenical publications, aided refugees and anti-Nazi resistance groups, and facilitated co-operation between all manner of international Christian organizations such as the Red Cross, the YMCA, and the YWCA. The war gave ecumenical leaders the opportunity to practise the political realism they had preached at Oxford. In the struggle against fascism, they grew accustomed to speaking in an explicitly political language. George Bell, for example, still complained just as the war began that ‘[n]o amount of secular Declarations, no number of claims for human rights, without spiritual sanctions, will save us from destruction’. But after the war, he acknowledged ‘the importance of having Christian personalities in political life’ and argued that ‘the Church ought to be a champion of human rights’. One principle remained consistent between these two moments: his belief in ‘the sacredness of the human personality’.Footnote 66
In 1940, the American Federal Council of Churches created the Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace (CJDP) and chose as its director the Oxford participant and future secretary of state John Foster Dulles. Under his leadership, the CJDP published in 1943 its ‘Six Pillars of Peace’, which called on the international community to safeguard ‘the right of spiritual and intellectual liberty’ – a precursor to Article 18 of the Universal declaration. To complement the CJDP, the provisional WCC established in 1946 the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA). Visser ’t Hooft did not want the churches to become entangled in Cold War politics, so, in co-ordination with the CJDP, the CCIA lobbied the United Nations on behalf of a non-aligned third way: ‘a human rights, or personalist, order’.Footnote 67
Ecumenical Protestants’ new ‘rights talk’ corresponded to their increasing engagement with post-war politics. But their personalist anthropology never wavered. Writing in 1947, Emil Brunner insisted that
[w]herever human rights are declared, that declaration occurs with religious pathos. It cannot be otherwise, because the unwritten law which is independent of the state's positive law and often in opposition to it either hangs in the air or depends on an eternal, divine order. Human rights live completely from their basis in belief. Either they are jus divinum or – a phantom.
This sentiment matched the assertion at Oxford that any future world order would require a basic moral and spiritual consensus. Human rights and by extension all the stability mechanisms of the international community, Brunner concluded, ‘have only as much strength as the belief that sustains them’.Footnote 68
In the late summer of 1948, the World Council of Churches held its official founding assembly in Amsterdam, a gathering of Protestant leaders rivalled in scope only by the Oxford conference eleven years before. There, the theologians Brunner and Karl Barth finally reconciled after fourteen years of enmity. Brunner commented that the latest volume of Barth's Church dogmatics proved how close the two now were on the issue of theological anthropology.Footnote 69 Appropriately, the Amsterdam assembly had decided on the general theme of ‘Man's disorder and God's design’.Footnote 70 Later that winter, the United Nations published its Universal declaration of human rights which featured a personalist language echoing Protestants’ new understanding of humanity, an intellectual project begun in the 1920s by Barth, Brunner, and the crisis theologians.
Ecumenical Protestants had a direct influence on the institutionalization of human rights. O. Frederick Nolde, a Philadelphia-based seminarian and later director of the WCC Commission on International Affairs, lobbied the United Nations’ Commission on Human Rights to use the churches’ language and understanding of humanity in the Universal declaration. While acknowledging the importance of more well-known figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Charles Malik, and René Cassin, the scholar John S. Nurser has assigned Nolde the role of catalyst whenever national delegations wavered on the question of mandating human rights. In addition to Nolde, several individuals in key positions during the San Francisco conference and subsequent UN assemblies (e.g. John Foster Dulles) stayed in close contact with Christian activists and consciously attempted to mould the UN programme according to what later became known as Judeo-Christian principles.Footnote 71
For the leaders of the WCC, most of whom had matured in the interwar ecumenical movement, the chief human right was religious liberty. At its meeting in Chichester in July 1949, the WCC Central Committee denounced Soviet totalitarianism and declared in a general statement to world leaders that
a peaceful and stable order can only be built upon foundations of righteousness, of right relations between man and God and between man and man. Only the recognition that man has ends and loyalties beyond the State will ensure true justice to the human person. Religious freedom is the condition and guardian of all true freedom.Footnote 72
Nolde and the CCIA had indeed devoted most of their energy to Article 18 of the Universal declaration, which guaranteed ‘freedom of thought, conscience and religion’. Visser ’t Hooft greeted ‘the happy result that we now have an official international statement on religious liberty which can render very real service in the struggle against religious discrimination’.Footnote 73
Some other members of the WCC regarded such a narrow concern for religious liberty with scepticism. Chandran Devanesen, an Indian Christian leader, had critiqued the CCIA's policy toward the UN Commission on Human Rights as ‘too much like putting theological butter on political bread’. That is, the churches merely adapted to international law rather than tackling social problems with true Christian ecumenicity. Moreover, an exclusive focus on religious liberty subordinated real problems of racism and poverty and thus seemed to Devanesen like ‘a form of pious nihilism full of sentimental aspirations that are not taken seriously’.Footnote 74
The WCC leaders tried to sober expectations for the new human rights regime. A meeting of the Central Committee in Bossey, Switzerland, in April 1950, resulted in a general report on the churches and international affairs. While acknowledging the basic compatibility of the Universal declaration with Christ's Golden Rule, the report warned that ‘the Church must be on the watch, and if necessary seek to intervene, lest a legal fiction be created when the far-reaching requirements of the Declaration are confronted with the actual reality’. The church must furthermore ‘ensure that human rights are stated for the benefit of man as a person and not for that of the vested interests of particular groups’.Footnote 75 Protestant ecumenists’ political realism and personalist understanding of humanity prompted them to hold human rights to a higher standard than even most secular lawyers thought necessary.
For a while the Oxford consensus on man and world affairs provided the chief point of orientation for ecumenical Protestantism and exerted an influence far beyond religious circles. The concept of ‘responsible society’ popularized by the Amsterdam conference guided most ecumenical solutions to social problems.Footnote 76 By the 1960s, however, the majority of theologians and church leaders who had risen to prominence as religious professionals during the transwar era had either died or retired. Generational change combined with the intensification of Cold War geopolitics to dissipate the Oxford consensus.Footnote 77 The WCC's support for the UN's mission in Korea had already prompted the Chinese Christian leader T. C. Chao to resign from the organization in 1951. Although Visser ’t Hooft pursued an official policy of neutrality, collaborating with the UN and adopting the internationally sanctioned language of human rights – even if only to ensure religious liberty – aligned the WCC with the West. Decolonization created additional tensions between churches in developed versus underdeveloped countries.Footnote 78 The Protestant turn from liberal humanitarianism to personalist human rights had succeeded, but the degree and character of future church involvement in human rights activism came into doubt. Indeed, as Samuel Moyn has argued, only the global crises of the mid-1970s occasioned the general and more enduring retreat into the ‘last utopia’ of human rights.Footnote 79
Another way to approach the history of human rights in the twentieth century, however, might involve abandoning preoccupation with the actual term ‘human rights’. A recent book by the critic and scholar Mark Greif points the way toward a broader history of anthropological crises. In The age of the crisis of man, he describes how ‘[m]an became at midcentury the figure everyone insisted must be addressed, recognized, helped, rescued, made the center, the measure, the “root”’.Footnote 80 This indeed was a period in American and European intellectual life marked by radical anthropology – ‘radical’ in the original sense of pertaining to the roots of a problem, something deep and far-reaching. Greif concludes his literary history in the 1960s, when French philosophy and the countercultural provocations of the New Left supposedly negated the transwar definition of ‘man’. Whether or not his chronology is correct, one might use his framework to answer the question why human rights came back into prominence in the 1970s and again in the 1990s. Might those moments also have involved anthropological crises that prompted specific intellectual, cultural, and political responses?
Ecumenical Protestants offered one response to the mid-century crisis of man: a theological anthropology that linked individual human persons together in community with each other and with a transcendent universal principle, God. Fascists and communists had other responses, and the secular liberal response – muted at first in the 1940s but dominant after the 1970s – converged with a conservative Christian language to create post-war human rights. The Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain once described this convergence as ‘the clash of incomplete philosophies’. Such a human rights mélange could only be sustained by the Western anti-totalitarian atmosphere that condensed in the transwar era and conditioned Cold War ideology. ‘We are dealing with the tonality, the specific key,’ wrote Maritain about the Universal declaration, ‘by virtue of which different music is played on this same keyboard’.Footnote 81 But human rights too might now be seen as just one style of music played by transwar thinkers on the same keyboard of radical anthropology. A future history of modern crises of humanity must transcribe other anthropological melodies alongside human rights and listen for their strange harmonies. Only then might scholars grasp contemporary issues of ‘posthumanism’, from animal rights to artificial intelligence, by their roots.
