11 - What Anglican Evangelicals in England Learned from the World, 1945–2000

Summary

In 2000 Graham Kings published an article on the theology of Max Warren, general secretary of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) from 1942 to 1963 and a leading Anglican evangelical. Kings’ starting point was to look at the major theological influences on Warren, and he identified four: three were CMS missionaries to the Middle East – Temple Gairdner, Constance Padwick and Kenneth Cragg – while the fourth was Warren’s son-in-law, Roger Hooker, who was a missionary in North India. Kings then commented that ‘these four influences were all English’, and raised the question of possible influences from overseas. He mentioned Walter Freytag, a German missiologist who shaped Warren’s thinking; the most significant non-Western scholar Kings came up with was the Indian Catholic priest and scholar of Hinduism, Raimundo Panikkar, who influenced the ageing Warren after he had stepped down as general secretary of CMS. One gets the sense that this was awkward for Kings. Surely this great missionary statesman, who was such a strong advocate of the handover of ecclesiastical power to African and Asian bishops, should have learned more from Christians from places like Nigeria and India. But apparently he did not.

This chapter explores what Anglican evangelicals in England learned from the rest of the world after the Second World War. It examines how they learned, how much they learned and from whom they learned it. There are reasons to think that evangelicals would be particularly open to this kind of contact. From its inception, evangelicalism was an international movement in which it was common to learn internationally. An early example was the way that Moravians from central Europe taught the Wesley brothers about assurance of salvation. In England in 1945, however, this kind of learning was difficult for Anglican evangelicals. From 1960, by contrast, the story is one of growing openness to outside influences. By the 1990s Anglican evangelicals were much happier to gain insight from people who came from overseas. This chapter examines these periods in turn.

Early reluctance: lessons from North America and East Africa, 1945–1960

By the immediate post-war years, Anglican evangelicalism in England already bore the imprint of foreign influence.