Hugh S. Pyper
Introduction
In 1920, the noted American New Testament scholar and Quaker Henry J. Cadbury wrote a letter to Adolf von Harnack, then the doyen of German theological and biblical studies.1 The letter accompanied a copy of Cadbury’s article ‘The Basis of Early Christian Antimilitarism’ which had appeared in the Journal of Biblical Literature in 1918.2 Cadbury wrote, ‘The fact that I published such an article at the time will in itself be sufficient indication that I came very far from sharing the hostility and hatred of many Americans’.3 Indeed, in 1918, Cadbury had been dismissed from Haverford College for his opposition to the war with Germany and to the anti-German sentiments being expressed in America.
He gave his reason for sending the article as the breakdown of normal scholarly communication resulting from the war. The article itself, as Harnack would have immediately recognized, is heavily dependent on Harnack’s own work, notably his study of the development of the metaphor of the Christian soldier in the first three centuries, in his small book Militia Christi (itself a development of the discussion of the topic in his monumental work, Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten).4
Cadbury’s correspondent is the same Adolf von Harnack whose signature on the well-known declaration of ninety-three German intellectuals (‘To the Cultured World’, published 1914), which supported the German cause and particularly the invasion of Belgium, so scandalized Karl Barth;5 the same Adolf von Harnack who, at the Kaiser’s invitation, drafted, in part, the Kaiser’s address to the Reichstag on 4 August 1914 which gave the moral case for Germany’s declaration of war; the same Adolf von Harnack who remained a staunch and vocal defender of Germany’s case throughout the war. How is it that a leading pacifist biblical scholar could find Harnack’s work such a source of inspiration for his formulation of a defence of Christian antimilitarism, while Harnack himself was led not only to comply with but to give a moral case for Germany’s military policy?
Cadbury was not the only apologist for Christian pacifism to build on Harnack’s work. In 1919, C. J. Cadoux, a leading Congregationalist scholar who spent the war years teaching at Mansfield College, Oxford, published The Early Christian Attitude to War: A Contribution to the History of Christian Ethics, a revised version of his doctoral thesis.6 In this, he too acknowledged his debt to Harnack’s Militia Christi. Unlike Harnack, however, Cadoux maintained a public commitment to Christian pacifism throughout the war. Despite the unpopularity of this stance, he was able to retain his teaching position at Mansfield College, a situation that would not have been possible in Germany at that time.
In this article, I want to explore how Cadoux and Harnack were led to such different positions in the interpretation of the early Christian evidence and the consequences of this for contemporary Christian attitudes to war. I shall argue that their scholarly conclusions are affected by their different cultural heritages and the different political assumptions on which they were able to draw. In essence, their disagreement comes down to the question not of what Jesus had to say on the subject of militarism but of what he could conceivably have meant by his statements. The range of interpretations that either could countenance was shaped by their particular political environments. To substantiate that claim, it will be necessary to give some background to these two figures and then compare how their scholarly attitudes reflect their different intellectual and social formations.
To begin with the lesser-known figure, Cecil John Cadoux (known as John, or Jack to his friends) was born in 1883 in Smyrna, Turkey, where his father was trading at the time; Cadoux was later to write a history of the city. The family was of Huguenot stock and, as his biographer Elaine Kaye put it, ‘Dissent, independence and a strong moral conscience ran strongly in the Cadoux veins, and Cecil John inherited his full share’.7 He was the ninth child of his parents, although three had died in infancy, and two more were to follow.
Shortly after his birth, the family returned to England, where his mother was to die only four years later. Cadoux was educated at St Dunstan’s College, where he showed an aptitude for languages and a passion for ancient history. The death of his father meant that he had to leave school too early to qualify for university entrance. He successfully sat the civil service examinations, working for nine years at the Admiralty. In his spare time, however, he studied avidly, eventually gaining a first-class bachelor’s degree as an external student from London University and then an MA. At the same time, he devoted himself to work with the Boys’ Brigade and Sunday Schools. He also became committed to the liberal theology epitomized by R. J. Campbell, whose The New Theology he studied closely.8
Two encounters were to set light to his unshakeable conviction that all war was counter to Jesus’s teaching and example. The first was a series of lectures that he attended in 1901 on the still-continuing Boer War. The impact of this war on the pacifist lobby in the UK was considerable. For those who had moral qualms about Christian militarism but accepted that a war in self-defence could be justified, the particular circumstances of this war posed a real problem. It was hard to argue that Britain needed to defend itself against some mortal threat posed by the Boers and the stories of atrocities committed against a white Christian population and what was basically a civilian militia shocked many who were supporters of the empire. In the years running up to the First World War, the fact that this was the most recent memory of conflict in British society was significant in gaining a hearing for the stance that moral questions could legitimately be raised when the government advocated war. Cadoux was much stirred by the argument that the Boer War was deeply anti-Christian.
The second major influence on Cadoux was reading Tolstoy, particularly his The Kingdom of God is Within You.9 The importance of Tolstoy’s radical interpretation of the gospel for the articulation of Christian pacifism in the last decades of the nineteenth century cannot be overestimated. Here was a respected voice advocating not only absolutist pacifism but also that the true Christian had no allegiance to the state, founded, as it was, on violence. Tolstoy’s extremism gave voice to a vision of Christian life as absolute self-sacrifice but also disturbed many whose instincts may have been pacific but who were alarmed by the anarchist implications of his thought.
After his encounter with Tolstoy, Cadoux never wavered from a commitment to non-violence and non-resistance as the demand of the gospel. His enthusiasm led to considerable friction with his family, as Cadoux was never one to let his own or other people’s feelings stand in the way of saying and acting on what he believed, although he was also unfailingly loyal and selfless. It further led him to increasing uneasiness that his professional role as a civil servant was contributing to the build-up of armaments in Britain.
In 1910, he became convinced that he was called to the Christian ministry and applied to Mansfield College in Oxford, becoming a student in 1911. Mansfield College offered training to Congregational and other nonconformist students. Its principal at the time was W. B. Selbie, and also on the staff was the noted Old Testament scholar and biblical translator James Moffatt, who had been responsible for the English translation of Harnack’s Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten.10
At the end of June 1914, Cadoux graduated with first-class honours and was immediately offered a five-year post at the college as Hebrew tutor. He embarked on study for a DD externally through the University of London. Initially, this was to be a study of the chronology of the Hebrew prophets, but not long after the outbreak of war, he changed this to a study of the history of Christian attitudes to pagan society and the state down to the age of Justinian.
Cadoux had maintained his pacifist convictions and preached in these terms on a number of occasions, often to the considerable anger and distress of the congregations he was visiting. He was also present at a conference in Cambridge called by a number of leading Christian pacifists from various denominations that marked the formation of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Cadoux became, over time, the leading figure in providing the intellectual formulation of the Fellowship’s aims and principles.
As an ordained minister of the Congregational Church, Cadoux himself was officially exempt from any requirement for military service. In April 1915, however, he took a term’s leave from Mansfield to join the Friends’ Ambulance Unit (set up by Philip Baker under Quaker auspices) on a tour of duty in Dunkirk and Flanders. Once back in Oxford, he married. Selbie, as college principal, did not share Cadoux’s increasingly unpopular views on pacifism, but was open to discussion. He drew the line, however, when Cadoux began to appear at tribunals to support conscientious objectors after the imposition of conscription in 1916 and the name of the college was brought into newspaper reports.
Nevertheless, once this issue was resolved, Selbie remained supportive of Cadoux’s academic and professional life. It was at this stage that Cadoux resumed his studies for a doctoral degree through the University of London; even in 1916, it was impossible for someone not in Anglican orders to be accepted to study for a higher degree in divinity at Oxford. It was this study that was to appear in 1919 as The Early Christian Attitude to War.
In the preface to the published version, Cadoux laments the lack of any concerted treatment of a topic which was clearly so relevant. In the course of a valuable survey of the significant works in the field to date, he calls the reader’s attention to what he describes as the ‘monumental’ work of Harnack in his Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten and also cites Harnack’s monograph Militia Christi.11 The latter, however, had not been translated at this stage, and in any case the conditions of war made it practically unobtainable.
His further verdict on it is a fine example of English understatement. After praising it as ‘without doubt the most thorough and scholarly work on the subject that has yet been produced’, he offers the following caveat:
Despite the author’s thoroughness, the extent of his learning, and his general saneness and impartiality of judgment, the arrangement of the material, and, in some case, the conclusions arrived at, leave something to be desired. . . . I venture to think that it is possible to present the material more proportionately and comprehensibly – and even, on a few points – more accurately than has been done by Harnack.12
Cadoux makes his own position clear: he was a convinced pacifist who saw all war as contrary to Jesus’s teaching. However, reviewers of the book, including those opposed to its argument, agreed that he presented the evidence with impartiality, while leaving little doubt as to where his own sympathies lay. Cadoux’s work shows that, difficult as it was, there was a place in Britain for a pacifist interpretation of Jesus’s teaching to be heard and published in the context of the First World War.
His work depended heavily, and consciously, on the approach to biblical interpretation that Harnack had championed. Yet, despite the near agreement between Cadoux and Harnack as to the content of Jesus’s own teaching on the subject, they came to very different conclusions about the Christian response to the current crisis in relations between Germany and Britain.
Harnack’s involvement in this debate is crucial, not simply because of his acknowledged eminence as a scholar, but because of his active involvement in promoting the German cause once war broke out. This sat particularly ill with his English contemporaries in theological circles. Many of them had studied in Germany, often with Harnack himself, and he had been a prominent participant in a number of initiatives before the war that sought to promote cooperation between English and German churches.
In both England and Germany, there was a history of what Martin Ceadel calls ‘pacificism’ (as distinct from ‘pacifism’) at the turn of the nineteenth century.13 Pacificism is the position that mediation rather than war would be the way forward in international relations and that ultimately war would become redundant, although it may, in the short term, be necessary to defend militarily the liberties that would make that desired result possible. Harnack was closely involved with many of the leading pacificist groups in Germany.
As an example, in 1908, the Quaker MP J. Allen Baker formed a committee of English churchmen who invited more than a hundred leading German churchmen to visit England, Harnack among them. A return visit was made to Potsdam, greeted by the Kaiser and by Harnack, and in 1910, with the approval of the German government, a permanent organization was set up with the cumbersome title of ‘The Associated Councils of Churches in the British and German Empires for Fostering Friendly Relations between the Two Peoples’. Its British membership was over 11,000, and Harnack was one of the speakers when a German delegation visited England for its formal inauguration in 1911.14
There was distinctly less enthusiasm for this initiative among the German churches in general, however. Roger Chickering takes this as corroboration of his judgement that the German churches actively opposed the peace movement, ‘in many cases with a truculence unparalleled even in other sectors of German society’.15 Chickering sees the nature of the ties between the Evangelical Churches and the state, and the role of the clergy as public servants, as the main reason for this: ‘Protestant churchmen excoriated the pacifists for their ill-informed theological views and defended with passion the moral probity of war’.16 They were also deeply suspicious of any association with the non-Christian socialist and free-thinking supporters of the peace movement.
Harnack was thus seen by his British colleagues as an unusually supportive ally in this period. However, he became increasingly perturbed at the drift of English politics. Peace was not a matter of simply proclaiming ‘peace’ where it did not exist. It had to be struggled and worked for, and was, in the end, the gift of the Spirit. If that willingness to struggle was not in evidence, then no peace was possible.17 Chickering sums up Harnack’s views as follows:
However clearly Harnack’s conclusion seemed to vindicate the peace movement, they did not lead directly to an acceptable pacifist position, for no responsible theologian – particularly no Lutheran theologian – could advocate non-resistance as a policy for statesmen charged with guiding the nation’s destiny.18
That last point is significant given the extent of Harnack’s influence beyond the world of biblical and religious scholarship. He had a warm personal relationship with the Kaiser, which was cemented in 1911 when, in order to mark the centenary of the University of Berlin, the Kaiser announced the establishment of a new academy bearing his name (the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften) which would have oversight of all the research carried out in Germany. Harnack was chosen as its first president, a position of considerable authority and a sign of the esteem in which he was held.
Indeed, the Kaiser’s opinion of Harnack was so high that, when war was declared on the evening of 4 August 1914, Harnack accepted the Kaiser’s wish that he would write the text for the Kaiser’s appeal to the German nation. This was a fateful moment. As Martin Rumscheid puts it:
When he sat down to write the text, the ‘hostile’ nations were France and Russia, but before he had finished, word came to him that Great Britain had joined them. Harnack was stunned by the news; when eleven British theologians wrote him on August 27th 1914 an open letter containing an attack on German scholarship, he responded in indignation. The wound of that attack never healed completely.19
To his British colleagues, Harnack’s vocal support for Germany’s recourse to war seemed like a betrayal of what they had assumed to be shared values, all the more so because of his active involvement in the peace movement. In particular, many Britons who had previously deplored British involvement in the war were shocked into changing their minds by the German invasion of Belgium. Alan Wilkinson explains the importance of this particular incident as follows:
It seemed a flagrant violation of the principles of international law, the gradual building up of which Christians had been at pains to support as the best hope for future peace and international order. The Bible with its story of the small state of Israel always at the mercy of conquering world powers; the stories of Christ’s care for the downtrodden and weak, the stories of the early Christian communities persecuted by the might of the Roman empire; the public school ideal which encouraged the well-off to go to the aid of the less fortunate: all seemed to support the moral necessity of Britain’s intervention on behalf of Belgium. . . . Preachers compared the invasion of Belgium with Ahab’s seizure of Naboth’s vineyard (I Kings 21). Free Churchmen’s self-understanding was inextricably bound up with their own bitter experience of oppression by the power of the social and religious establishment. So they too were especially ready to identify with the cause of Belgium.20
Harnack’s endorsement of the invasion of Belgium confirmed to many Christians who had hoped otherwise that pacificism had failed; if Germany, as represented by one of its hitherto most respected figures, showed no regard for international law, that left no option but to fight.
This sense of betrayal is well expressed by W. B. Selbie in a pamphlet entitled The War and Theology, published in 1915.21 As we have noted, as the principal of Mansfield College, Selbie was unfailingly supportive of Cadoux’s career but did not share his views. He began by acknowledging that the one certainty of the war is that things can never be quite the same. Given the debt that British theological and biblical studies owed to Germany, any rupture in their relationship was bound to have profound effects. Selbie was aware that some were already rejoicing in the new state of affairs, but he regarded this as a misguided and ignorant response.
The outbreak of war cannot and should not efface this past, he argued. Yet, in Selbie’s view, the attitude of many German theologians in supporting the war was a cause of real anguish to their British colleagues, demonstrating ‘how amazingly blind to facts even trained historical scholars can become’.22 In light of this, a reappraisal of the German heritage was inevitable. In particular, Selbie noted the separation between the work of the academy and the life of the German churches, with the latter showing a deadening orthodoxy. Selbie quoted approvingly the sentiment that ‘the theology of a country is made by its preachers rather than its professors’.23 British theologians had not shrunk from asserting the social consequences of religion and so were better placed than their German counterparts to address these questions.
Selbie quotes Harnack here: ‘In the last two generations religious considerations have more than once helped to determine the home and foreign politics of England. We can point to nothing which corresponds to this, and we might hesitate to imitate it, because German Protestantism is individualistic’.24 This Selbie saw as a danger that British theologians must avoid by always endeavouring to address the needs and problems of ordinary people. Selbie closes by calling for unceasing efforts to rebuild the bridges that the war has broken.
In contrast, from Harnack’s point of view, it was Britain that was guilty of betrayal. In an open letter to Americans in Germany, he began by praising the United States as the true heir of the trust given to the Germans, and formerly to the English, to uphold the three pillars of the religious and moral culture of Europe.25 These are: recognition of the value of every human soul and thus a respect for individuality; recognition of the duty to risk that soul for ‘God, freedom and Fatherland’; and recognition of the rule of law. These principles are threatened by what Harnack describes as the ‘Byzantine-Mongolian-Muscovite’ culture, which was fatally damaged by its failure to embrace the Enlightenment. What he calls ‘the mob of Asia’ is a threat: ‘Like the sands of the desert it would sweep down over our harvest fields’.26 England has betrayed this trust by siding with France and Russia, but the Germans’ much-mocked obedience is now seen to be the free choice of a people not afraid to face individual death in order to defeat the threatened death of culture itself.
This letter, in turn, provoked the response from eleven British nonconformist theologians, including Selbie, which was referred to earlier and which, according to Rumscheidt, seems to have wounded Harnack.27 The writers profess their respect for Harnack and for German scholarship and culture, but regret that he has been so ill-informed as to British motives. Britain is fighting to defend the sanctity of treaty obligations; this Germany flouted in its attack on Belgium and in a series of attacks on smaller nations. ‘It is not our country that has incurred the odium of being a traitor to civilization or to the conscience of humanity’, they assert.28
Harnack offered a rebuttal on 10 September 1914, in which he defended the German violation of Belgian neutrality.29 As France had decided to turn treacherously on Germany, forcing a battle on two fronts, self-preservation demanded that Germany should march through Belgium. Yes, neutrality was breached, but Britain would have done the same and certainly would have not raised a murmur if France had done so. At this point, Harnack, quite exceptionally for him, uses an explicit biblical analogy to show that there are times when moral necessities override formal obligations.
When David, in the extremity of his need, took the show-bread from the Table of the Lord, he was in every sense of the word justified, for the letter of the law ceased at that moment to exist. It is as well known to you as to me that there is a law of necessity which breaks iron asunder, to say nothing of treaties.30
Harnack advises his British correspondents to stop worrying about Belgium and Serbia, and to use their influence as Christians to oppose the folly of the British government so that the real threat, Russia, could be faced.
These exchanges may serve to illuminate the difference in attitude between Harnack and his nonconformist British correspondents. Rowan Williams entitled a fascinating lecture on Harnack’s role in the First World War, ‘The Deadly Simplicities of Adolf von Harnack’.31 In essence, his argument is that Harnack saw Christianity as a private matter of conscience. This does have consequences for the way in which the Christian lives in society but, crucially, cannot and does not lead to legislation. The individual ethic of the Christian cannot be used as a prescription for the behaviour of a state or a government.
Williams illustrates this by examining Harnack’s bestselling and widely translated work Das Wesen des Christentums, which arose out of a series of lectures he gave in Berlin in 1899.32 The fact that by 1902 the English translation of these lectures (under the title What is Christianity?) was already into its second edition confirms the international standing that Harnack enjoyed in this period.33 Williams points out that one of Harnack’s conversation partners in these lectures is, perhaps unexpectedly, Tolstoy. His radical pacifist and anarchist reading of the gospel was as significant for the development of pacifist thinking in Germany in the years before the war as it was in Britain.
Harnack himself recognized that there were surprising similarities between his work and Tolstoy’s. Much of Harnack’s work was devoted to stripping the gospel of what he saw as the distorting influence of Greek philosophy and the growth of dogma. Harnack proclaims in these lectures that what he seeks is ‘the Gospel in the Gospel’, that which has eternal, timeless value rather than that which is tied to the circumstances of the gospel writers.34 Harnack recognizes that Tolstoy is similarly concerned to get to the essence of the gospel but disagrees with his conclusions:
With a much deeper insight than Schopenhauer and with a strength of feeling and power of language that carry us away, Tolstoi [sic] has emphasised the ascetic and world-shunning features of the Gospel and erected them into a rule of observance. That the ascetic ideal which he derives from the Gospel is endowed with warmth and strength, and includes the service of one’s neighbour, is a fact which we cannot deny, but to him, too, the shunning of the world is the leading characteristic of Christianity. There are thousands of our ‘educated’ readers who find his stories suggestive and exciting, but who at the bottom of their hearts are pleased and relieved to know that Christianity means the denial of the world; for then they know very well that it does not concern them.35
For Harnack, Christianity means engagement with the world. In his understanding, that entails living with the power structures of the world and acknowledging their legitimacy. He argues that Jesus never denied the authority of the legal jurisdiction he was under. He goes on:
But Tolstoi refuses, in the name of the Gospel, to allow the law any rights at all. He maintains that the leading principle of the Gospel is that a man is never to insist upon his rights, and that not even constituted authority is to offer any external resistance to evil. Authority and law are simply to cease.36
Harnack is prepared to admit that it is a serious question as to whether Tolstoy is correct in this. However, he goes on to critique him as follows:
But, we are asked, are we in all cases to renounce the pursuit of our rights in the face of our enemies? Are we to use no weapons but those of gentleness? To speak with Tolstoi, are the magistrates not to inflict punishment and thereby to be effaced? Are nations not to fight for house and home when they are wantonly attacked? I venture to maintain that, when Jesus spoke the words which I have quoted [i.e. ‘resist not evil’], he was not thinking of such cases, and that to interpret them in this direction involves a clumsy and dangerous misconception of their meaning. Jesus never had anyone but the individual in mind, and the abiding disposition of the heart in love.37
Time and again, Harnack resorts to the technique of asserting that Jesus ‘could not have meant’ whatever contradicts his own position, with very little basis in argument. He goes on to quote Jesus’s declaration, ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ (John 18:36) and to conclude that these words ‘forbid all direct and formal interference of religion in worldly affairs’.38 The individual has to live as a citizen of God’s kingdom, but how that works out in terms of contemporary secular life is for the individual to decide for themselves in consultation with their conscience. Certainly there is no prospect of legislating the kingdom into existence; that would vitiate the conscientious struggle of the individual. Indeed, Harnack concludes:
There is only one relation and one idea which you must not violate, and in the face of which all others are only transient wrappings and vain show: to be a child of God and citizen of His kingdom and to exercise love. How you are to maintain yourself in this life on earth, and in what way you are to serve your neighbour, is left to you and your own liberty of action. . . . Then let us fight, let us struggle, let us get justice for the oppressed, let us order the circumstances of the world as we with a clear conscience can, and as we may think best for our neighbour; but do not let us expect the Gospel to afford us any direct help.39
Harnack and Cadoux
It is on this point that Cadoux parts company with Harnack. For him, Christians are obliged to live out their public lives as well as their private ones in obedience to their inner conviction as to the obligations that Jesus’s teachings place on them. The point is not to claim that Cadoux, unlike Harnack, rises above the intellectual and social culture in which he is embedded. On the contrary, Cadoux is the heir to a distinctive tradition in British civic life which has found a place for the political expression of radical Christian obedience, a tradition which, incidentally, was important both for the fostering of Tolstoy’s ideas and for their wider dissemination in Europe. This tradition was also important for the development of a particular approach to the theological interpretation of the Bible that placed authority not in the text, or even in the words of Jesus, but in the authority of the individual conscience directly illuminated by the universal word of God.
The crucial difference in the environment of the two is that there was no equivalent in German society in 1914 to the position of the Religious Society of Friends (or Quakers) in Britain, as a politically engaged, publicly recognized group committed historically to Christian pacifism. There were Moravians and other Christian sects in Germany who renounced war on doctrinal grounds and were accorded some protection under the German constitution. In 1868, in the wake of the imposition of conscription in the North German Confederation, an exception was made for members of old Mennonite families, who could ask to be assigned to non-combatant duties. Their pacifism was connected to a repudiation of political power and a minimal engagement with the state, however, and their commitment to non-resistance was effectively eroded by 1914, as Peter Brock has shown.40 By the time of the Franco-Prussian War (1870/1871), most groups took a public stance that left the decision as to whether to seek non-combatant service to the individual, while leading Mennonites actively supported the right of Germany to self-defence.
In contrast to this Mennonite renunciation of political engagement, one of the early Quaker leaders, Sir William Penn, writing in 1682, summed up the characteristic Quaker view:
True godliness does not turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it, and excites their endeavours to mend it. . . . Christians should keep the helm and guide the vessel to its port; not meanly steal out at the stern of the world, and leave those that are in it, without a pilot, to be driven by the fury of evil times, upon the rock or sand of ruin.41
Here it is a Christian duty to engage with politics and to insist that the teachings of Christ are implemented in public life. Penn himself, of course, became governor of Pennsylvania, retaining the respect of the king even as he adopted the countercultural plainness of Quaker dress and speech.
Thus, there are political implications when another early Friend, Robert Barclay, in his Apology for the True Christian Divinity, set out the argument that a strict adherence to Jesus’s words entailed the renunciation of all outward weapons and fighting. Barclay’s arguments are not simply of historical interest. Tolstoy was somewhat amused by the earnestness with which British Quakers made a point of sending him copies of their literature on Christian pacifism, Barclay’s work among them. He was also surprised but pleased to discover that the essence of his arguments for Christian non-resistance had been made in a definitive form centuries before by Quaker writers.
Another element that gave the Quaker approach a contemporary relevance in this nineteenth-century debate was their attitude to biblical and ecclesial authority. Because it was fundamental to Quaker theology that every human being is open to the Light of Christ working on their conscience, even if they do not consciously acknowledge it, Quakers did not couch their arguments in explicitly Christian terms and base them on biblical authority, although they were clear that they were being faithful to the teaching of Christ. Indeed, the conclusions of Harnack and other liberal biblical scholars as to the development of the gospel texts and the importance of the ‘gospel within the gospel’ presented little problem to many British Quakers at the turn of the century.
So, in contrast to similar movements on the Continent, Quakers sought to be engaged in civic affairs and succeeded in overcoming numerous legal and other obstacles to maintain this position. It is telling, for instance, that there were several influential Quaker MPs in Asquith’s government at the beginning of the war. The provision for conscience objection in the 1916 Military Service Act owed much to their influence on the drafting process.
The story of the struggles of conscientious objectors in Britain in the First World War has often been told. Their arguments were often met with hostility and incomprehension. Despite this, the presence of Quaker MPs ensured that their views could be heard in the House of Commons and were taken into account in the framing of legislation. In Germany, there was no provision for any such objection in the various acts that called for conscription. A very small number of active refusals of conscription are recorded, mostly from Adventist groups. These resulted either in prison sentences or consignment to mental hospitals.
A small example may serve to show how the existence of this radical tradition within British political as well as religious life meant that Harnack’s assumptions about the limits of Christian obedience did not reflect British experience. Referring to Matt 5:33–37 and the prohibition of oaths, Harnack writes:
Nor are we to understand the commandment against swearing as including an oath taken before a magistrate. No one with a grain of salt, as Wellhausen has rightly said, can miss the inner meaning of this commandment.42
Harnack offers no defence for what seems to him an unarguable position. Yet, Quakers were regularly fined and imprisoned for taking this commandment entirely seriously, to the extent that the so-called Quakers Act established the right of Quakers to affirm the truth of their statements without any recourse to an oath as early as 1695.43 As has been mentioned, there were a number of Quaker MPs in Asquith’s government; they were there because of a provision that was made in the early nineteenth century to enable MPs who, in conscience, could not swear the oath of allegiance to the queen to affirm their loyalty instead. What Harnack saw as plainly absurd was actually enshrined in British constitutional practice.
Cadoux was very influenced by Quaker thought and worked closely with many Quakers in peace organizations. He remained wedded, however, to Congregationalism with its stress on the authority of the congregation to discern the truth of the gospel and its more formal acknowledgement of biblical authority and theological scholarship than was to be found in Quaker practice. It was thus fitting that he took on the task of articulating this distinctive tradition in the idiom of contemporary theological and historical research.
This he did very effectively. His book was well received, especially in the growth of pacifism that occurred after the war, and was reprinted both in 1940, when the issue of conscientious objection resurfaced, and again in 1980. Few books of biblical scholarship boast so long a shelf life. Cadoux’s stance on the relationship between individual conscience and public policy was a complex one that recognized that different people may legitimately be led by their conscience to different actions. He had no doubt that his calling was to witness to Christ’s opposition to all war but acknowledged that others could be equally convinced that they were called to be ready to sacrifice their lives in defence of the values that made Cadoux’s position possible. He ended his book with a question, which he does not directly answer, but leaves as a challenge to his readers.
It is quite true that the Christian Church stands in a very different position from that in which she stood in the first three centuries of our era. But the question is, Is there anything in that difference, is there anything in our modern conditions, which really invalidates the testimony against war as the early Christians bore it, and as Origenes defended it?44
Harnack regarded the Constantinian settlement as a sign of the church’s growing maturity, as its members take on the inevitable tensions of living up to the obligations of citizenship within a Christian state while being faithful to the personal demands of the gospel. In contrast, in Cadoux’s view, the settlement is a sign of immaturity as the church, not having had to face these tensions, capitulates to the norms of the state without thinking through the priority of the demands of membership of Christ’s kingdom. We might say that for Cadoux, Jesus’s description of his kingdom as ‘not of this world’ does not enshrine an irreconcilable tension between the two kingdoms but issues a challenge to bring the worldly kingdom into conformity with Christ’s. The petition of the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done’, is not some eschatological hope but a statement of political intent.
The tradition within which Harnack worked meant that he could not conceive of such a relationship between the requirements of Christian ethics and the law of the state. This meant that he could not countenance a reading of the gospels that allowed for Jesus to give authoritative voice to the case for contemporary antimilitarism. Whatever Jesus may have said or meant, that could not be the interpretation. Cadoux was able both to argue for a coherent position of Christian pacifism and to retain a position within British society that was sufficiently respected for him to gain and retain a significant academic post in Oxford. The acceptance within British public life of the peculiar Quaker combination of a radical interpretation of biblical texts with a willingness to engage with and seek change in the structure of law itself was one of the conditions that made that possible.
1.Adolf Harnack was ennobled in March 1914 and thus entitled to use the style Adolf von Harnack from that time on. His earlier publications, however, reflect the shorter form of his name. Where referring to him by surname alone, this essay will, for consistency, simply use ‘Harnack’ throughout. Bibliographical references will reflect the name under which the work was published.
2.Henry J. Cadbury, ‘The Basis of Early Christian Antimilitarism’, JBL 37 (1918): 66–94.
3.See the facsimile of the letter which is appended to Wendy J. Cotter, ‘A Letter from Henry J. Cadbury to Adolf von Harnack’, HTR 78 (1985): 219–24 (223).
4.Adolf Harnack, Militia Christi: Die christliche Religion und der Soldatenstand in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1905); Adolf Harnack, Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1902).
5.For an exhaustive discussion of the origins and impact of this declaration, see Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg and Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg, Der Aufruf ‘An die Kulturwelt!’: Das Manifest der 93 und die Anfänge der Kriegspropaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013).
6.C. John Cadoux, The Early Christian Attitude to War: A Contribution to the History of Christian Ethics (London: Headley, 1919).
7.Elaine Kaye, C.J. Cadoux: Theologian, Scholar, Pacifist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), 2.
8.Reginald John Campbell, The New Theology (London: Chapman & Hall, 1907).
9.Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You: Christianity Not as a Mystic Religion But as a New Theory of Life, trans. Constance Garnett (London: Heinemann, 1894).
10.Moffatt translated the 1906 revision of Harnack’s work as The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, 2nd ed. (London/New York: Williams and Norgate/Putnam, 1908). He taught at Mansfield College from 1911 to 1915.
11.Cadoux, The Early Christian Attitude, 10.
12.Cadoux, The Early Christian Attitude, 11, 13–14.
13.See on this point, Martin Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 7. Ceadel acknowledges A. J. P. Taylor as the coiner of the term.
14.On these movements, see Alan Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War, 2nd ed. (London: SCM Press, 1996; repr. Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2014), 22–23; Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, Adolf von Harnack (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1951), 296.
15.Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and a World Without War: The Peace Movement and German Society, 1892–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 196.
16.Chickering, Imperial Germany, 201.
17.On this, see von Zahn-Harnack, Adolf von Harnack, 301–3.
18.Chickering, Imperial Germany, 208.
19.Martin Rumscheidt, ed., Adolf von Harnack: Liberal Theology at its Height (London: Collins, 1989), 24.
20.Wilkinson, The Church of England, 30.
21.W. B. Selbie, The War and Theology, Oxford Pamphlets, 1914–1915 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1915).
22.Selbie, The War and Theology, 8.
23.Selbie, The War and Theology, 8.
24.Harnack, quoted in Selbie, The War and Theology, 13.
25.Adolf von Harnack, ‘To Americans in Germany’, in From the Beginning to March 1915, vol. 1.1 of New York Times Current History: The European War (New York: The New York Times, 1915), 198–200. This publication collects together in English translation many of the open letters and other communications that passed between German intellectuals and their opponents.
26.Von Harnack, ‘To Americans in Germany’, 200.
27.P. J. Forsyth et al., ‘A Reply to Prof. Harnack’, in From the Beginning to March 1915, vol. 1.1 of New York Times Current History: The European War (New York: The New York Times, 1915), 201–2.
28.Forsyth et al., ‘A Reply to Prof. Harnack’, 202.
29.Adolf von Harnack, ‘Prof. Harnack in Rebuttal’, in From the Beginning to March 1915, vol. 1.1 of New York Times Current History: The European War (New York: The New York Times, 1915), 203–5.
30.Von Harnack, ‘Prof. Harnack in Rebuttal’, 204.
31.Rowan Williams, ‘The Deadly Simplicities of Adolf von Harnack: Liberal Theology in Germany on the Eve of the Great War’ (lecture delivered as part of the ‘Salon Series’ of the Legatum Institute, 8 January 2014). A transcript is available at https://lif.blob.core.windows.net/lif/docs/default-source/default-library/rowan-williams---the-deadly-simplicities-of-adolf-von-harnack---january-2014---lecture-transcript-pdf.pdf.
32.Adolf Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums: Sechzehn Vorlesungen vor Studierenden aller Facultäten im Wintersemester 1899/1900 an den Universität Berlin gehalten (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1902).
33.Adolf Harnack, What is Christianity? Lectures Delivered in the University of Berlin during the Winter-Term, 1899–1900, 2nd ed., trans. Thomas Bailey Summers (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1902).
34.Harnack, What is Christianity?, 15.
35.Harnack, What is Christianity?, 86.
36.Harnack, What is Christianity?, 116.
37.Harnack, What is Christianity?, 120.
38.Harnack, What is Christianity?, 124.
39.Harnack, What is Christianity?, 125.
40.Peter Brock, Pacifism in Europe to 1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 431.
41.William Penn, No Cross, No Crown: A Discourse Shewing the Nature and Discipline of the Holy Cross of Christ; and that the Denial of Self, and Daily Bearing of Christ’s Cross, is the Alone Way to the Rest and Kingdom of God; to which are added, The Living and Dying Testimonies of Many Persons of Fame and Learning, Both of Ancient and Modern Times, in Favour of this Treatise: in Two Parts (1682; repr Philadelphia: Meeting for Sufferings of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, 1853), 61–62.
42.Harnack, What is Christianity?, 113.
43.William III, ‘An Act that the Solemne Affirmation & Declaration of the People called Quakers shall be accepted instead of an Oath in the usual Forme (1695/96)’, in The Statutes of the Realm, vol. 7, ed. John Raithby (Great Britain Record Commission, 1820), 152. [Also available online: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/statutes-realm/vol7/p152.]
44.Cadoux, The Early Christian Attitude, 263.