In recent years there has been a quiet, but striking, revival of interest in the diverse circles of Christian intellectual life which emerged in mid-twentieth century Britain, stirred by the great confrontation with totalitarianism and international conflict. This scholarly current is occurring not in the heart of the academic establishment but on other, less predictable, terms. Of the three authors here, Alan Jacobs is not primarily an historian but a widely-published professor of the humanities at Baylor University, while the curriculum vitae of the two other writers show some international adventure: John Carter Wood is an American historian now lecturing in Mainz while Jonas Kurlberg has taught at Colombo Theological Seminary and currently holds a research fellowship at the University of Durham. The work of all three builds on the foundational contributions made by the ecumenical diplomat Keith Clements, first in his biography of J. H. Oldham (1999) and later in an edition of the papers produced by Oldham's most striking creation, a group known as the Moot (2009).
If there is a unifying element in these three books it is surely the purposefully integrating figure of J. H. Oldham. Oldham's prolific activities across the 1930s and 1940s found a place in a richly creative religious culture which rejoiced in generous, open perspectives and drew eagerly from experiences and visions which lay outside the conventional perimeters of church life. Like his ally George Bell, Oldham thought not so much of categories as of individuals. An avowed internationalist, he could search out a refugee who had something to say just as readily as a thinker quietly at home in a provincial British university. Not a priest or a minister but a layman, Oldham prospered in the heart of missionary and ecumenical organisations while enjoying the steady patronage and support of Archbishops Lang and Temple. None of this should be taken for granted: without it, his many enterprises could hardly have prospered. As it was, Oldham flourished and came to define a good deal in the age in which he lived.
Alan Jacobs's book presents an elegant reflection on the wider milieu of western Christian thought in a world in crisis, exploring a host of writers and their ideas in turn. They are an international lot, and even if they are not always deeply aware of each other there is still a good deal of transatlantic and inter-European traffic. Jacobs leans heavily towards British writers: T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis provide much substance while W. H. Auden receives most attention of all, crossing the Atlantic and sometimes wondering why he has done so. Reinhold Niebuhr offers a dose of Christian realism but does not stay long. Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler locate all these ideas in the institutional contexts of American academe. Beside this, the exiled French thinkers Jacques Maritain and Simone Weil receive almost as much attention: the social presence and influence of the former proves pervasive while the latter is inevitably found immersed in the world of the Free French movement and the tragedy of her own story. It is natural to wonder what Oldham, so often the bridging figure, would have made of her. Jacques Ellul is a welcome guest at the end. The overall effect of this book is warmly creative, rich in insight, generous and alert.
Jonas Kurlberg's book is defined by a quite different premise for he seeks to place the discussions of the Moot in the ‘heuristic framework’ of modernism. In this his study might bring new perspectives to historians who may be intuitively averse to the conceptual exercises of the theorists while introducing the Moot itself to political philosophers who have considered modernism an essentially secular enterprise and seldom much bothered with religious thinkers. Accordingly, the Moot becomes ‘a modernist experiment’; a ‘Christian manifestation of “Programmatic Modernism”’, apprehensive of crisis, straining to invoke past models (in this case, medieval Christian Europe), situated awkwardly in the landscapes of liberalism and totalitarianism and manifesting a restless search for ‘revitalisation’. It is hardly surprising that Kurlberg finds the more obviously ‘programmatic’ Karl Mannheim offering the weightiest food for thought while the very different Eliot provides a creative counterpoint. Their interaction becomes ‘one of the more intriguing subplots of the Moot discourse’ (p. 152). This emphasis is by no means exclusive: there is also much reflection on the ideas of Christopher Dawson, Michael Polanyi, John Middleton Murry, H. A. Hodges, Adolf Löwe, Walter Moberly, Alec Vidler, John Baillie and Oldham himself while Maritain appears as a significant influence. Perhaps the basis of the study is a little too beholden to the task of finding a place with reference to the approach of the political philosopher Roger Griffin to make an obvious appeal to some empirically-minded church historians, but Kurlberg carries it all off superbly well. Much of value is sharply defined and illuminated by this.
Of the three books, John Carter Wood's This is your hour presents the fullest overall assessment of the ‘amphibious’ worlds of Oldham and his busy confrères across twelve years and a picture of the various contexts through which they moved. Carter Wood provides a purposeful retrieval of Oldham as a man very much at large in the world while the origins, patterns and legacies of the Moot, the Christian Frontier Council and that innovation in publishing, the Christian News-Letter, are all set out with clarity and care. What is essentially at work in all of this is Oldham's determination to find not only an intellectual but an ecumenical voice, and one looking instinctively towards a middle way in a brutally polarising world. The successive chapters examine the relationship between faith and social order and faith and ‘the secular’, before confronting the problems of capitalism, Communism and ‘planning for freedom’; nationalism, universalism and Europe; freedom, democracy and liberalism. Finally (and perhaps most interesting) comes ‘the democratising of aristocracy’, a discussion of elitism and egalitarianism. His broader chronology allows Carter Wood to trace lines of development across time freely and fully. We also see that behind all of this lay the steadfast work of many other sympathetic spirits, not least Oldham's deputy and successor, Kathleen Bliss, his effective bursar, Eleanora Iredale, and the twelve German refugees who saw to the distribution of the Christian News-Letter. Altogether, this is a distinguished study; indeed, an important book and one which deserves to be influential.
The pioneering Oldham was fond of exploring the idea of a ‘frontier’ and seeing what people made of the view once they were perched upon it. That so much of significance and value was achieved under his auspices shows that there is every reason why his achievements should excite church historians. The Moot was, as Carter Wood observes, both immensely British and openly European. It was avowedly intellectual but also purposeful in pursuit of practical change. It acknowledged a gulf between the religious and the secular and between historical and contemporary experience and sought to achieve a new coherence and a new prospect. Perhaps above all here lay a profound belief in the fundamental important of intellectual life, an understanding that was arguably lost in the Western Churches in a later age in their determination to clericalise and centralise – for in this they lost the laity and the very people Oldham found so fascinating and so intensely important. The overall effect of these three fine studies should do much to liberate a figure like J. H. Oldham from a quiet annexe of religious history and to place these quietly conspicuous ventures in the foreground of British intellectual life at large. For this was a time when Christian thinkers looked openly to the ideas of a wider world, not least because they believed themselves to be a part of it.
