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The Historical Journal, page  of  © Cambridge University Press 

doi:./SX

HUMAN RIGHTS AS RADICAL


ANTHROPOLOGY: PROTESTANT
THEOLOGY AND ECUMENISM IN THE
TRANSWAR ERA*
TERENCE RENAUD
Yale University

A B S T R A C T . From the s through the s, European and Anglo-American Protestants per-
ceived a crisis of humanity. While trying to determine religion’s role in a secular age, church leaders
redefined the human being as a theological person in community with others and in partnership with
God. This new anthropology contributed to a personalist conception of human rights that rivalled
Catholic and secular conceptions. Alongside such innovations in post-liberal theology, ecumenical
Protestants organized a series of meetings to unite the world churches. Their conference at Oxford
in July  led to the creation of the World Council of Churches. Thus, Protestants of the transwar
era supplied the two main ingredients of any human rights regime: a universalist commitment to
defending individual human beings regardless of race, nationality, or class and a global institutional
framework for enacting that commitment. Through the story of Protestant thinkers and activists, this
article recasts the history of human rights as part of a larger history of critical reappraisals of human-
ity. Understanding why human rights came into prominence at various twentieth-century moments
may require abandoning ‘rights talk’ for human talk, or, a comparative history of radical anthropol-
ogies and their relationship to broader socio-economic, political, and cultural crises.

In the aftermath of the most devastating war in history, the United Nations’
Charter () and Universal declaration of human rights () 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

Yale University, Department of History,  York St, New Haven, CT , USA terence.renaud@
yale.edu
* This article has evolved from a working paper first composed in . Special thanks to
Margaret L. Anderson, John Connelly, Gene Zubovich, Tehila Sasson, Udi Greenberg,
Samuel Moyn, and the anonymous readers for their helpful commentary.

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 TERENCE RENAUD

covenant in  affirmed only a paternalistic responsibility for national minor-


ities and not for individual human beings as such.
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 reli-
gious 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. They redefined the
human being as a theological person in community with others and in partner-
ship 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 s 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 inter-
national bodies, but so far they have not explored the conception of humanity
that lay at the heart of the Protestant justification for human rights. And while
the historian Samuel Moyn and others have investigated the contemporary
Christian roots of human rights, they focus on the political contours of person-
alism at the expense of its theological foundation. Recent books on Protestant
internationalism such as Michael G. Thompson’s For God and globe () and
Mark T. Edwards’s The right of the Protestant Left () have foregrounded the-
ology, but they tend to overemphasize the role of Americans in reorienting
global Protestant thought in the s and s. In order to restore


‘Universal declaration of human rights’, in Ian Brownlie, ed., Basic documents on human
rights (nd edn, Oxford, ), pp. –. See Mark Mazower, ‘The strange triumph of
human rights, –’, Historical Journal,  (), pp. –; and Johannes Morsink,
The universal declaration of human rights: origins, drafting, and intent (Philadelphia, PA, ).

I borrow the term ‘transwar’ from the historian Philip Nord. See Nord, France’s new deal:
from the thirties to the postwar era (Princeton, NJ, ).

See especially Gene Zubovich, ‘The global gospel: Protestant internationalism and
American liberalism, –’ (Ph.D., UC Berkeley, ); and John Nurser, For all
peoples and all nations: the ecumenical church and human rights (Washington, DC, ).

See most recently Samuel Moyn, Christian human rights (Philadelphia, PA, ); and
Marco Duranti, ‘Conservatives and the European Convention on Human Rights’, in Norbert
Frei and Annette Weinke, eds., Toward a new moral world order? Menschenrechtspolitik und
Völkerrecht seit  (Göttingen, ), pp. –. Moyn’s work focuses on Catholic personal-
ism. He did try to account for Protestant personalism in an article on the German historian
Gerhard Ritter, ‘The first historian of human rights’, American Historical Review,  (),
pp. –, revised in Moyn, Christian human rights, pp. –. But Ritter was hardly represen-
tative of major trends in German much less continental or international Protestant thought.

Michael G. Thompson, For God and globe: Christian internationalism in the United States between
the Great War and the Cold War (Ithaca, NY, ); Mark T. Edwards, The right of the Protestant Left:
God’s totalitarianism (New York, NY, ). These books nevertheless correct some long-stand-
ing Eurocentric biases. Heather A. Warren also expressed concern about the ‘neglect of the
Americans’ significance’ in her book Theologians of a new world order: Reinhold Niebuhr and the
Christian realists, – (Oxford and New York, NY, ), p. .

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RADICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 
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 relation-
ship 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 polit-
ical 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.
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 re-
ligious thinkers already in the s. At the same time, Protestants of the ecu-
menical movement organized a series of meetings to unite the world churches,
most notably at Oxford in July . 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 cler-
gymen, theologians, and laypeople came together to negotiate their under-
standing 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 s, 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 some-
thing 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 anthropolo-
gies. A broad anthropological revolution took place in European thought


Mark Philip Bradley, ‘American vernaculars: the United States and the global human
rights imagination’, Diplomatic History,  (), pp. – (at p. ).

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 TERENCE RENAUD

from the s through the s. During this tumultuous period, the human
being became an object of serious philosophical and political contestation: fas-
cists conceived of the ‘overman’ and experimented with novel forms of corpor-
atism; socialists prophesied the ‘new man’ that would emerge through classless
society; and existentialists in Germany and France rejected the human al-
together in what Stefanos Geroulanos has dubbed an anti-humanist ‘negative
anthropology’. The human person of the Universal declaration of human rights
should be juxtaposed with these and other radical anthropologies of the trans-
war era. The question why, after the s, human rights fell into relative ob-
scurity until the s or s 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.

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 judge-
ment whose results remained uncertain. Religious people viewed divine judge-
ment, 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 scrip-
tural authors and a non-dogmatic theology that embraced Enlightenment
reason. A theological liberal believed in rational truth and an immanent as


Stefanos Geroulanos, An atheism that is not humanist emerges in French thought (Stanford, CA,
). During the same era, the scientific discipline of anthropology developed a concept of
humanity that denied the existence of race. See Michelle Bratain, ‘Race, racism, and antira-
cism: UNESCO and the politics of presenting science to the postwar public’, American
Historical Review,  (), pp. –. On debates within the American
Anthropological Association over whether to endorse the Universal declaration, see Mark
Goodale, Surrendering to utopia: an anthropology of human rights (Stanford, CA, ).

For recent genealogies of human rights that focus on the s, see Samuel Moyn, The last
utopia: human rights in history (Cambridge, MA, ); and Barbara L. Keys, Reclaiming American
virtue: the human rights revolution of the s (Cambridge, MA, ). Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann
has refocused attention on the s as the real breakthrough of human rights into public dis-
course and international politics. See his forthcoming book Human rights: a short history and his
introduction ‘Genealogies of human rights’ to the edited volume Human rights in the twentieth
century (Cambridge, ), pp. –.

See Rüdiger Graf, ‘Either–or: the narrative of “crisis” in Weimar Germany and in histori-
ography’, Central European History,  (), pp. –.

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RADICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 
opposed to transcendent conception of God. The politics of these liberals
usually tended toward applied Christian ethics (e.g. the Social Gospel move-
ment), progressivism (e.g. Woodrow Wilson), and philanthropic humanitarian-
ism (e.g. Albert Schweitzer).
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. As German pastors grappled with the re-
ligious 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.
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 dia-
logue with the divine. In , 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 prema-
turely 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.’
In his early phase, Barth’s emphasis on divine transcendence minimized the


See Kenneth Scott Latourette, Christianity in a revolutionary age, II: The nineteenth century in
Europe: the Protestant and eastern churches [] (Grand Rapids, MI, ), pp. –; and
William R. Hutchison, The modernist impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, MA, ).

Karl-Wilhlem Dahm, Pfarrer und Politik. Soziale Position und politische Mentalität des deutschen
evangelischen Pfarrerstandes zwischen  und  (Cologne, ), pp. ff.

See Peter E. Gordon, ‘Weimar theology: from historicism to crisis’, in Gordon and John
P. McCormick, eds., Weimar thought: a contested legacy (Princeton, NJ, ), pp. –. In the
United States, the post-liberal turn came in the form of Christian realism. See Edwards, The right
of the Protestant Left; and Mark Hulsether, Building a Protestant Left: Christianity and Crisis magazine,
– (Knoxville, TN, ).

Emil Brunner (Obstalden) to Karl Barth,  Nov. , in Eberhard Busch, ed., Karl
Barth – Emil Brunner. Briefwechsel, – (Zurich, ), pp. –. All translations are
mine unless otherwise noted. Caught up in the revolutionary fervour of –, both
Barth and Brunner sympathized with the socialist cause.

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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 existen-
tial 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 pen-
chant 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’.
For a while, at least, Barth collaborated with Brunner and the Germans
Rudolf Bultmann and Friedrich Gogarten. During the s, they formed a
united theological front against modernity, progress, liberalism, and secularism.
But tensions within this continental milieu erupted in  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 theo-
logical point of departure, Barth reacted forcefully. He considered anthropol-
ogy 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 some-
thing 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.
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 s. One of the thorniest issues
was the relationship between fallen humanity and the original ‘image of God’
in which man was created (Gen. :). Sin and disbelief, Brunner contended,


Kenneth Scott Latourette, Christianity in a revolutionary age, IV: The twentieth century in
Europe: the Roman Catholic, Protestant and eastern churches [] (Grand Rapids, MI, ),
p. .

Emil Brunner to Karl Barth,  June , in Busch, ed., Karl Barth – Emil Brunner,
pp. –. See John Webster, ‘Introducing Barth’, in John Webster, ed., The Cambridge com-
panion to Karl Barth (Cambridge, ), pp. –.

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RADICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 
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. 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 pos-
ition: ‘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 , the two broke off relations for
the next decade and a half.
Without the Barthian revolt in continental theology, it is unlikely that moder-
ates 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 , of his Church dogmatics
(), he placed the integral human person, the ‘real man’ who existed analo-
gously 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.


Emil Brunner (Zurich) to Karl Barth,  June , in Busch, ed., Karl Barth – Emil
Brunner, pp. –. See also Brunner’s books The mediator: a study of the central doctrine of the
Christian faith [], trans. Olive Wyon (Philadelphia, PA, ), and God and man: four
essays on the nature of personality [], trans. D. S. Cairns (London, ).

See the debate in Emil Brunner and Karl Barth, Natural theology: comprising ‘nature and
grace’, trans. Peter Fraenkel (London, ). See also Busch, ed., Karl Barth – Emil Brunner,
pp. xix–xx.

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This personalist anthropology stressed the interconnectedness of all humans in


a sort of ‘co-humanity’. 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 com-
munal rights and duties that lay at the core of Catholic personalism.
Ecumenical Protestant leaders of the transwar era expressed great anxiety
about communitarian social projects. They feared that the churches were be-
coming entangled in the politics of particular national communities, as with
the German churches under the Nazis. One report warned that ‘modern na-
tionalism 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 in-
dividual to manage his own life as he will is deliberately sacrificed to social co-
hesion.’ 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 , 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 ana-
lytic philosophers of mind about the nature of reality than they did to spiritual
believers about the existential human condition. Still, the language of


Wolf Krötke, ‘The humanity of the human person in Karl Barth’s anthropology’, trans.
P. G. Ziegler, in Webster, ed., The Cambridge companion to Karl Barth, pp. – (at pp. ,
). Krötke quotes from Barth’s Church dogmatics. On Barth’s mature personalism, see
Mark J. McInroy, ‘Karl Barth and personalist philosophy: a critical appropriation’, Scottish
Journal of Theology,  (), pp. –; and Stuart D. McLean, Humanity in the thought of
Karl Barth (Edinburgh, ). See also Gary J. Dorrien, ‘The Barthian revolt: Karl Barth,
Paul Tillich, and the legacy of liberal theology’, in Kantian reason and Hegelian spirit: the idealistic
logic of modern theology (Malden, MA, ), pp. –; and Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s
critically realistic dialectical theology: its genesis and development, – (Oxford and New York,
NY, ).

See Samuel Moyn’s discussion of Emmanuel Mounier, Jacques Maritain, and Pius XII in
‘Personalism, community, and the origins of human rights’, in Hoffmann, ed., Human rights in
the twentieth century, pp. –, revised in Moyn, Christian human rights, pp. –. For a more
celebratory account of Catholic personalism, see Thomas D. Williams, Who is my neighbor?
Personalism and the foundations of human rights (Washington, DC, ).

J. H. Oldham, ed., The churches survey their task: the report of the conference at Oxford, July ,
on church, community, and state (London, ), p. .

See Borden Parker Bowne, Personalism (Boston, MA, and New York, NY, ); Albert
C. Knudson, The philosophy of personalism: a study in the metaphysics of religion (New York, NY,

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RADICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 
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 under-
standing of humanity that underlay human rights discourse in the s.
Even if not an explicitly legal definition of human rights, Protestant person-
alists’ high valuation of individual human life in relationship to God and to uni-
versal 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 .

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. Although skewed

); Edgar S. Brightman, Personality and religion (New York, NY, ). In Brightman’s work
especially, personalism functioned as a ‘philosophy of religion’ rather than a theological
system. See also Sami Pihlström, ‘Pragmatism and American personalism: problems in perspec-
tival metaphysics’, Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly,  (), pp. –.

See Edwards, The right of the Protestant Left, pp. –. A book that helped introduce
European ideas into American discourse was the ecumenist Adolf Keller’s Karl Barth and
Christian unity: the influence of the Barthian movement upon the churches of the world [], trans.
Manfred Manrodt et al. (New York, NY, ). See also Heather A. Warren, ‘The shift from
character to personality in mainline Protestant thought, –’, Church History, 
(), pp. –; and Sydney E. Ahlstrom, ‘Continental influence on American Christian
thought since World War I’, Church History,  (), pp. –.

Emil Brunner, ‘The Christian understanding of man’, in T. E. Jessop et al., The Christian
understanding of man (Chicago, IL, ), pp. – (at p. ).

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 TERENCE RENAUD

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 
forms a key part of the history of the ecumenical movement. 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 feder-
ate the British churches at the Lambeth conferences. In , 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  and , respectively) as well as the World
Student Christian Federation (WSCF) (founded in Sweden in ). 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.
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  for holding in Stockholm what it con-
sidered the world’s first truly ecumenical council. Its director, Nathan


For more recent histories of the Oxford conference, see Thompson, For God and globe,
pp. ff; Edwards, The right of the Protestant Left, pp. –; Graeme Smith, Oxford : the
Universal Christian Council for Life and Work Conference (Frankfurt/Main and New York, NY,
).

See John R. Mott, The evangelization of the world in this generation (New York, NY, ). See
also Andrew Preston, Sword of the spirit, shield of faith: religion in American war and diplomacy
(New York, NY, ), pp. –; and Kenneth Scott Latourette, ‘Ecumenical bearings of
the missionary movement and the International Missionary Council’, in Ruth Rouse and
Stephen C. Neill, eds., A history of the ecumenical movement, I (Philadelphia, PA, ),
pp. –.

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RADICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 
Söderblom, archbishop of Uppsala, won the Nobel Peace Prize in  largely
due to his efforts in organizing this event. After his death in , however,
many adherents to L&W voiced dissatisfaction with the Pollyannaish idealism
of the Stockholm conference and sought a more lasting and realistic church en-
gagement with the world. The Swedish theologian and ecumenist Nils
Ehrenström later summarized this sentiment: ‘whereas the holding of periodic-
al conferences is a useful part of ecumenical activity, concerns such as those of
Stockholm  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’. After another conference at Fænø, Denmark, in
, members of L&W started planning the much larger Oxford conference
for July . In co-ordination with L&W, Faith and Order planned its own
world conference at Edinburgh for the following month.
Leaders of L&W and F&O met prior to Oxford and combined resources. A
correspondent for the London Times paraphrased William Temple, the arch-
bishop 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 differ-
ent 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.

Temple’s statement reflected a growing belief among church leaders that their
mission required unified action. The ascendancy of L&W in the mid-s 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.
Joseph H. Oldham took charge of planning the conference. With some exag-
geration, his biographer Keith Clements described him as a missionary


Nils Ehrenström, ‘Movements for international friendship and life and work, –
’, in Rouse and Neill, eds., A history of the ecumenical movement, I, pp. – (at p. ).

On the trans-Atlantic planning of these conferences, see Thompson, For God and globe,
pp. –; Smith, Oxford , pp. –; and Warren, Theologians of a new world order,
pp. –. An early report by Edwin E. Aubrey emphasized the continuity between the
Stockholm and Oxford conferences. Edwin E. Aubrey, ‘The Oxford conference, ’,
Journal of Religion,  (), pp. –.

‘From Oxford to Germany: sympathy with the church: a new world council’, Times,  July
, p. .

L&W and F&O have survived as independent commissions of the World Council of
Churches. The IMC held its own world conference at Tambaram (Madras, India) in 
and reached many of the same conclusions as L&W at Oxford. Perhaps because of the
unique concerns of missionary work – and probably also reluctance to join an organization
dominated by members from (former) colonial powers – the IMC did not officially merge
with the World Council of Churches until the New Delhi Congress of .

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 TERENCE RENAUD

statesman, ecumenical prophet, and ‘one of the most creative people, in any
field, to have lived and worked in the th-century’. A leader of the
International Missionary Council and member of L&W, Oldham exemplified
a recognizable type of religious professional at work in the s and
s. 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 func-
tioned 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 profession-
al 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.
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. Henry P. Van
Dusen from the Union Theological Seminary in New York said that the confer-
ence ‘has stirred among the people of the United States a more widespread an-
ticipation than any Christian gathering in modern times’. 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 con-
ference represented most of the major churches of world Protestantism.
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 theolo-
gians Adolf Keller and Eduard Thurneysen and the French pastor Pierre Maury


Keith Clements, Faith on the frontier: a life of J. H. Oldham (Edinburgh, ), pp. , –.

John Kent used the term ‘religious professional’ in William Temple: church, state, and society
in Britain, – (Cambridge, ).

See Edwin H. Robertson, Unshakeable friend: George Bell and the German churches (London,
); and E. Gordon Rupp, ‘I seek my brethren’: Bishop George Bell and the German churches
(London, ).

See Thompson, For God and globe, pp. –; and Clements, Faith on the frontier, pp. –
.

Quoted by Charles W. Hurd, ‘Militant program urged for religion’, New York Times,  July
, p. .

Over  official delegates from  Protestant and Orthodox churches in  countries
gathered together with  laypeople and  representatives from various Christian youth
movements. Eric Fenn, That they go forward: an impression of the Oxford conference on church, com-
munity, and state (London, ), p. ; J. H. Oldham, Introduction to The churches survey
their task, pp. – (at pp. –).

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RADICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 
represented Barthian positions in other sections. For years, the conference or-
ganizer 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, pro-
gress, and secular institutions.
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 professor-
ships 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 previ-
ous engagement with the world, Brunner wrote him in the early s 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’.
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. Like Barth, he argued that ‘man is a “theological
being”; that is, his ground, his goal, his norm, and the possibility of under-
standing 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


Clements, Faith on the frontier, pp. –. Aubrey noted that the ‘Scandinavian Barthians’
wanted to begin the conference with preliminary theological definitions, while the American
and Eastern Orthodox delegates preferred pragmatic discussions of church unity. ‘The
Oxford conference, ’, p. . The claim by Warren (Theologians of a new world order,
pp. –) and Edwards (The right of the Protestant Left, pp. –) that American influence domi-
nated the conference, however, does not accord with the evidence.

Emil Brunner to Karl Barth,  Oct.  and  Dec. , in Busch, ed., Karl Barth –
Emil Brunner, pp. – and –.

Emil Brunner, Man in revolt: a Christian anthropology [Der Mensch im Widerspruch, ],
trans. Olive Wyon (Philadelphia, PA, ). For a detailed analysis of Brunner’s paper and
the Oxford reactions to it, see Thomas S. Derr, ‘The political thought of the ecumenical move-
ment, –’ (Ph.D., Columbia, ), pp. –.

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 TERENCE RENAUD

human person: ‘the genuinely human element is freedom in union with God
and my neighbor’. 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’. 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”’. 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’.
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 pro-
gressed through the world, he was corrupted by material wealth and irrespon-
sible 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 reve-
lation that ignored the positive contributions of secular culture (here he might


Brunner, ‘The Christian understanding of man’, pp. , , .

J. H. Oldham, Church, community and state: a world issue (London, ), pp. –. See
Smith, Oxford , pp. –. In his introduction to the main Oxford report, Oldham
noted the participants’ widespread engagement with personalism. The churches survey their
task, p. .

Pierre Maury, ‘The Christian doctrine of man’, in Jessop et al., The Christian understanding
of man, pp. – (at p. ). He quoted from the biblical verse  Cor. :.

Quoted by Richard W. Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: a biography (New York, NY, ), pp. –.

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RADICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 
have had Barth in mind). The prodigal son thus had something to teach his
older brother.
According to a correspondent for The New York Times,
Mr. Niebuhr, who threw aside his prepared manuscript and talked extemporaneous-
ly 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 be-
lieving in themselves’.

In other words, the churches must view their wavering self-confidence in the
crisis-ridden s 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”’.
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-s 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
, he had become profoundly disillusioned by what he considered the pol-
itical 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 ideal-
ism and pacifism of the socialists along with the pragmatic optimism of liberals
such as John Dewey.
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 in-
timate social group’, he wrote, ‘requires a measure of coercion.’ 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


Reinhold Niebuhr, ‘The Christian church in a secular age’ [], reprinted in
Christianity and power politics (New York, NY, ), pp. –. The parable appears in Luke
:–.

Hurd, ‘Militant program urged for religion’.

‘A way of life’, Times,  July .

See Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, pp. –.

Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral man and immoral society: a study in ethics and politics (Louisville, KY,
), p. .

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 TERENCE RENAUD

the holiness of God and the sinfulness of man is so absolute that man is con-
victed, not of any particular breaches against the life of the human community,
but of being human and not divine’.
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  in oppos-
ition to the increasingly authoritarian Weimar state and the growing popularity
of National Socialism, and in  he wrote the courageous Barmen
Declaration on behalf of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church. Yet despite such mis-
construals, Niebuhr’s theological and political analyses were poignant and often
packed a convincing rhetorical punch.
Although he did not share all his theological views, Niebuhr largely agreed
with Barth’s political stance. He too actively opposed Nazism, having collabo-
rated with the New York progressive Left to aid refugees from Hitler. The soli-
darity 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  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 min-
isters of Jewish descent, a group of dissenting clergy led by the Berlin-Dahlem
pastor Martin Niemöller created the Pastor’s Emergency League to aid perse-
cuted church people. This group formed the nucleus of a breakaway organiza-
tion 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 –, waves of arrests hit BK-aligned parishes and
synods, and on  July  – just eleven days before the start of the Oxford con-
ference – the Gestapo arrested Martin Niemöller. The next day, the Council of
Brethren of the BK-aligned evangelical churches of the Old Prussian Union pro-
claimed that ‘along with him, the entire Church of German evangelicals stands
on trial’. Niemöller’s actual trial was held in February  and, after a poorly


Ibid., p. . See also Reinhold Niebuhr, The nature and destiny of man: a Christian interpret-
ation, I (New York, NY, ), p. , and II (New York, NY, ), pp. –, , –.

On Niebuhr’s generally negative opinion of Barth, see Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, p. . The
feeling was mutual. After the war, for example, Barth described Niebuhr as a ‘hopeless discus-
sion partner’ and asked never again to be paired with him at ecumenical conferences. Karl
Barth (Basel) to Willem A. Visser ’t Hooft,  June , in Thomas Herwig, ed., Karl
Barth – Willem Adolf Visser ’t Hooft. Briefwechsel, – (Zurich, ), pp. –.

Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr, p. .

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RADICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 
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’. 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  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 min-
ister, 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 dele-
gates in a public expression of solidarity with the German churches. In the
 Protestant church election in Germany, the Gospel and Church party, a
forerunner of the BK, had used the slogan ‘Kirche muß Kirche bleiben!’
Four years later, the official motto of the Oxford conference was essentially
the same: ‘Let the Church be the Church.’ The German church struggle per-
tained not to a particular minister in a particular country, the conference par-
ticipants 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’,


‘New Nazi blow at churches’, Times,  July , p. ; ‘Die erste Kanzelabkündigung zur
Verhaftung Martin Niemöllers’, in Wilhelm Niemöller, ed., Briefe aus der Gefangenschaft Moabit
(Frankfurt/Main, ), p. ; James Bentley, Martin Niemöller, – (New York, NY,
), p. .

George Cicestr, letter to the editor, ‘Arrest of Dr. Niemöller’, Times,  July , p. ;
‘Action of the conference in regard to the absence of the German evangelical church delega-
tion’, in Oldham, ed., The churches survey their task, pp. –. The German invitees represented
a wide spectrum of views within the German evangelical church, both pro- and anti-Nazi. They
were denied exit visas by the German government. Eugen Gerstenmaier gathered their input
into a pamphlet and mailed it to Oxford. It appeared in English as Church, Volk and state
(London, ). Two representatives from the German free churches did attend the confer-
ence: the Baptist leader Paul Schmidt and the Methodist bishop F. H. Otto Melle, both of
whom openly supported the Nazis. Observers knew very well that these individuals functioned
as Nazi propaganda tools. See ‘Reich takes issue’, New York Times,  July , p. .

Doris L. Bergen, Twisted cross: the German Christian movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill,
NC, ), p.  (plate).

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 TERENCE RENAUD

according to the Yale theologian and pacifist Robert L. Calhoun.


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. 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 theoret-
ical 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’. The democratic states of the West had accordingly ido-
lized 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.’ Only the divine claim on man was valid and total. Oldham soon


Robert L. Calhoun, ‘The dilemma of humanitarian modernism’, in Jessop et al., The
Christian understanding of man, pp. – (at p. ).

See for example Kenneth Scott Latourette, Missions tomorrow (New York, NY, ), and
the study by William R. Hutchison, Errand to the world: American Protestant thought and foreign mis-
sions (Chicago, IL, ). In his pioneer dissertation, Graeme Smith argued that Oxford was
primarily a ‘missionary conference’ with conversion as its ulterior goal. However, he underes-
timated both the change in missionary consciousness and the novelty of the Oxford doctrine of
man. Smith, Oxford , p.  and passim.

‘A message from the Oxford conference to the Christian churches’, in Oldham, ed., The
churches survey their task, pp. – (at p. ).

Fenn, That they go forward, p. . On Christian totalitarian ideas in the United States, see
Edwards, The right of the Protestant Left. In contrast, prominent Christian thinkers including
Waldemar Gurian also helped develop the theory and politics of anti-totalitarianism in the
s and s. See James Chappel, ‘The Catholic origins of totalitarianism theory in inter-
war Europe’, Modern Intellectual History,  (), pp. –.

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RADICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 
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’.
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 dis-
covering and fulfilling their Christian responsibilities in the home, in the neigh-
borhood, in civic life, in the professions and in industry, in social service and in
the political arena.’ 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 prin-
ciple 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 demo-
cratic 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.

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 ex-
istence which could engage with the threatening ideologies’ of the world had
led him to this brand of Christian totalitarianism. 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 con-
sciously joined the ‘battle over the nature and purpose of being human’.
Several Moot discussions starting in  floated the possibility of using a totali-
tarian model for reconstructing the West.
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


J. H. Oldham, The resurrection of Christendom (London, ).

Oldham, Introduction to The churches survey their task, pp. – (at p. ).

Fenn, That they go forward, p. .

Clements, Faith on the frontier, p. .

See ibid., pp. – and , and Keith Clements, ed., The Moot papers: faith, freedom and
society, – (London, ). On examples of religious totalitarianism in France, see
John Hellman, The communitarian third way: Alexandre Marc’s Ordre Nouveau, –
(Montreal and Ithaca, NY, ).

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 TERENCE RENAUD

Niebuhr admitted already in  that much could be learned from these
developments in secular understanding. But one could hardly ignore the con-
tradictions of liberal humanism: ‘the humanitarianism of the past  years
stands in strange contrast to the inhumanities of industrialism’. While ‘bour-
geois 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.
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’. The conference partici-
pants agreed that human beings possessed God-given rights to equal opportun-
ity 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.


Reinhold Niebuhr, Reflections on the end of an era (New York, NY, ), pp. –. Drawing
on European personalism, Niebuhr would develop his own theological anthropology in The
nature and destiny of man (–) and The self and the dramas of history (New York, NY, ).

See the subsequent books on Christian anthropology by Oxford conference attendees:
Robert L. Calhoun, What is man? (New York, NY, ); Edwin E. Aubrey, Man’s search for
himself (Nashville, TN, ); and Niebuhr, The nature and destiny of man. See also Smith,
Oxford , pp. –, and John Kimball Saville, ‘The relevance of the Oxford conference
doctrine of man to industrial reconstruction’ (B.Div., Church Divinity School of the Pacific,
Berkeley, CA, ).

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RADICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 
The national and international legal systems alone lacked the moral founda-
tions 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.’ 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 indi-
vidual 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 estab-
lished 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 ecu-
menical publications, aided refugees and anti-Nazi resistance groups, and facili-
tated 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 destruc-
tion’. But after the war, he acknowledged ‘the importance of having Christian
personalities in political life’ and argued that ‘the Church ought to be a cham-
pion of human rights’. One principle remained consistent between these two
moments: his belief in ‘the sacredness of the human personality’.


‘Report on the universal church and the world of nations’, in Oldham, ed., The churches
survey their task, pp. – (at pp. –). George Bell later echoed this sentiment in the
article ‘The church and the future of Europe’, Fortnightly Review, Mar. , reprinted in The
church and humanity (–) (London, ), pp. –. The argument about the
moral deficiency of international law had been developed by Max Huber in his essay ‘Some
observations upon the Christian understanding of international law’, in The universal church
and the world of nations (Chicago, IL, and New York, NY, ), pp. –.

George Bell, Christianity and world order (Harmondsworth, ), p. ; George Bell,
‘The church in relation to international affairs’, International Affairs,  (Oct. ),
pp. – (at pp. , ). See Moyn, Christian human rights, pp. –. The correspond-
ence between Barth and Visser ’t Hooft in – bears witness to Bell’s evolving stance

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 TERENCE RENAUD

In , 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  its ‘Six Pillars of Peace’, which called
on the international community to safeguard ‘the right of spiritual and intellec-
tual liberty’ – a precursor to Article  of the Universal declaration. To comple-
ment the CJDP, the provisional WCC established in  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’.
Ecumenical Protestants’ new ‘rights talk’ corresponded to their increasing
engagement with post-war politics. But their personalist anthropology never
wavered. Writing in , 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 ex-
tension all the stability mechanisms of the international community, Brunner
concluded, ‘have only as much strength as the belief that sustains them’.
In the late summer of , 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 theolo-
gians 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.
Appropriately, the Amsterdam assembly had decided on the general theme of

on the war. See Herwig, ed., Karl Barth – Willem Adolf Visser ’t Hooft, pp. –. On the provi-
sional WCC’s activities during and immediately after the war, see George Bell, The kingship of
Christ: the story of the World Council of Churches (Harmondsworth, ), pp. –; and
Willem A. Visser ’t Hooft, Memoirs (London and Philadelphia, PA, ), pp. –.

Thompson, For God and globe, pp. –; Nurser, For all peoples and all nations, pp. –.

Emil Brunner, ‘Das Menschenbild und die Menschenrechte’ [Part ], Universitas.
Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur,  (Mar. ), pp. – (at pp. –).
Part  of the essay appears in no.  (Apr. ), pp. –.

Emil Brunner (Zurich) to Karl Barth,  Oct. , in Busch, ed., Karl Barth – Emil
Brunner, pp. –. See also Emil Brunner, ‘The new Barth: observations on Karl Barth’s
Doctrine of Man’, trans. John C. Campbell, Scottish Journal of Theology,  (), pp. –.
According to a letter from Barth to Visser ’t Hooft of  June , however, Barth still
thought Brunner’s interpretation was ‘entirely outrageous’. Herwig, ed., Karl Barth – Willem
Adolf Visser ’t Hooft, pp. –.

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RADICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 
‘Man’s disorder and God’s design’. Later that winter, the United Nations pub-
lished its Universal declaration of human rights which featured a personalist lan-
guage echoing Protestants’ new understanding of humanity, an intellectual
project begun in the s 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 ques-
tion of mandating human rights. In addition to Nolde, several individuals in
key positions during the San Francisco conference and subsequent UN assem-
blies (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.
For the leaders of the WCC, most of whom had matured in the interwar ecu-
menical movement, the chief human right was religious liberty. At its meeting in
Chichester in July , the WCC Central Committee denounced Soviet totali-
tarianism 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 recog-
nition 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.

Nolde and the CCIA had indeed devoted most of their energy to Article  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’.
Some other members of the WCC regarded such a narrow concern for reli-
gious 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


See the five-volume conference report edited by Visser ’t Hooft, Man’s disorder and God’s
design (London, ), and Visser ’t Hooft’s own reminiscences about the conference in his
Memoirs, pp. –.

Nurser, For all peoples and all nations. See also O. Frederick Nolde, Free and equal: human
rights in ecumenical perspective (Geneva, ).

Bell, The kingship of Christ, pp. , –. See also Visser ’t Hooft, Memoirs, p. .

Willem A. Visser ’t Hooft, ‘Report of the general secretary’, Ecumenical Review,  (),
pp. – (at p. ). The WCC published a brief discussion of this issue by Charles Malik,
‘Human rights and religious liberty’, Ecumenical Review,  (), pp. –.

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 TERENCE RENAUD

bread’. That is, the churches merely adapted to international law rather than
tackling social problems with true Christian ecumenicity. Moreover, an exclu-
sive focus on religious liberty subordinated real problems of racism and
poverty and thus seemed to Devanesen like ‘a form of pious nihilism full of sen-
timental aspirations that are not taken seriously’.
The WCC leaders tried to sober expectations for the new human rights
regime. A meeting of the Central Committee in Bossey, Switzerland, in
April , resulted in a general report on the churches and international
affairs. While acknowledging the basic compatibility of the Universal declar-
ation 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 con-
fronted 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’. Protestant ecumenists’ pol-
itical 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.
By the s, 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. 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 .
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


Chandran Devanesen, ‘Post-Amsterdam thoughts from a younger church’, Ecumenical
Review,  (), pp. –. In , George Bell nevertheless claimed that ‘[a]mong all
the questions confronting the world at the present time the race question is pre-eminent’.
Bell, The kingship of Christ, pp. –; Visser ’t Hooft, Memoirs, pp. –.

‘The church and international law’, Ecumenical Review,  (), pp. – (at p. ).

Edwards, The right of the Protestant Left, pp. ff. Oldham had introduced the concept in
his pre-war writings.

On tensions within the international ecumenical movement, see Hulsether, Building a
Protestant Left, and A. J. van der Bent, From generation to generation: the story of youth in the World
Council of Churches (Geneva, ). Visser ’t Hooft noted the generational change in his
Memoirs, pp. –. On the general decline of European religiosity in that decade, see Hugh
McLeod, The religious crisis of the s (Oxford, ).

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RADICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 
developed versus underdeveloped countries. 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-s occasioned the general and more enduring retreat into the ‘last
utopia’ of human rights.
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”’. 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 s, 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 s and again in the s.
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 s but dominant after the s – 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’. But


Bell, The kingship of Christ, pp. –, –, –; Visser ’t Hooft, Memoirs, pp. –,
–. On the human rights activism of the WCC during the s and s, see Christian
Albers, ‘Der ÖRK und die Menschenrechte im Kontext von Kaltem Krieg und
Dekolonisierung’, in Katharina Kunter and Annegreth Schilling, eds., Globalisierung der
Kirchen. Der Ökumenische Rat der Kirchen und die Entdeckung der Dritten Welt in den er und
er Jahren (Göttingen, ), pp. –.

Moyn, The last utopia.

Mark Greif, The age of the crisis of man: thought and fiction in America, – (Princeton,
NJ, ), p. .

Jacques Maritain, Man and the state (Chicago, IL, ), p. .

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 TERENCE RENAUD

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.

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