For God and Globe: Christian Internationalism in the United States between the Great War and the Cold War (The United States in the World) by Michael G. Thompson

Author:Michael G. Thompson [Thompson, Michael G.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780801452727
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2015-11-16T16:00:00+00:00

As the church formed part of the answer, it could not be left behind in the rush to change the world. This position represented a conscious distancing from the “churchless” activism of some Christian internationalists.73

The question of actual plans for international order still remained, however. In addition to those floated in the preparatory papers, the daily deliberations of the section also saw other proposals for peace and world order surface. Once again, delegates collectively rejected some, while they took up others and incorporated them into the final report. One notable rejection was the American proposal that war could be “abolished” as a system—much in the same way slavery had been. Apparently the difficulties in meaningfully implementing the Kellogg-Briand Pact had done little to assuage the triumphalism of Outlawry advocates. In any case, their position stood so far outside the theological consensus forming at Oxford 1937 that the “abolition” position did not even appear as one possible Christian view of war among others in the final report.74

The particular scheme that did receive most serious attention in the section discussions was the League of Nations. In their treatment of the league, though, Oxford delegates—unlike those at Stockholm 1925—applied their dialectical, “No-Yes” framework. Not only did a false deification of the nation need to be countered, they argued, so too did a false deification of the League of Nations. The report stated emphatically that “no international order which has been devised by human effort may be equated with the Kingdom of God.”75 Despite the dangers, though, particular plans still had to be evaluated and, if appropriate, supported. “It is erroneous to hold that our hope in the Kingdom of God has no bearing upon the practical choices that men must make within the present order,” the report urged.

Dispersed through the deliberations on the league was a distinct note of self-consciousness about earlier moments in Christian internationalism—a coyness about the culture of sacred reverence that had once surrounded the league.76 As well as expressing dialectical theology, the warnings against idolizing the league grew from particular observations made by figures involved at Geneva over the previous decade and a half. In his preparatory paper, Alfred Zimmern complained that he had witnessed Wilsonian idealism become a “religion of internationalism.”77 Internationalists, he argued, had tended to elevate the league to “an object of aspiration, round which sentiments of a religious or quasi-religious character were allowed, and even encouraged, to gather.”78 In doing so, the league movement had only opened the way for reaction. “Wearied of stretching their aspirations beyond natural limits, men were open to the appeal of primitive and unthinking tribalism,” which for Zimmern was “equally false and idolatrous.”79 Others who had lived and worked in Geneva agreed with Zimmern. Some delegates told the section meeting that they could recall “hundreds of people of a certain type—nicknamed ‘the mystics’—who came to Geneva in the spirit of religious pilgrims, and who said: ‘I believe in the League’ with a kind of rapture as if they were saying: ‘I believe in the Holy Catholic Church.

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