World Crisis and the Making of Christian Radicalism, c.1938–1957

Abstract

This chapter locates the immediate origins of British Christian radicalism in the early 1940s. The Second World War was frequently interpreted by Christian commentators as evidence of a profound spiritual crisis in Western civilization. The resulting quest for a new Christianity was pursued, amongst others, by J.H. Oldham, Kathleen Bliss, Ronald Gregor Smith, Alec Vidler, and John Robinson. Many of these figures went on to become leading figures in the Christian radicalism of the 1960s. The perception that Western civilization was experiencing an unprecedented crisis encouraged readings of modern history influenced by Christian eschatology, which argued that the Church’s central mission was to help transform the world. In the 1950s, the memory of this crisis encouraged British theology’s engagement with American and German radical theologians, including Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, and Tillich. This tradition only required fresh imagined crises to regain its momentum in the 1960s.