We, the
comrades of Unit 1012: The VFFDP, will honor Bishop George Bell every year on
his feast day on October 3. He is one of the Saints that inspire us, as he
supported the German Resistance against Nazism and he spoke out against killing
the innocent civilians. We will post information about him from Wikipedia and
other links.
If there are men in Germany also ready to wage war against the monstrous tyranny of the Nazis from within, is it right to discourage or ignore them? Can we afford to reject their aid in achieving our end?- Bishop George Bell’s word on the conspiracy against Adolf Hitler
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Bishop George Bell
(4 February 1883 to 3 October 1958)
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The Rt Revd
George Bell |
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Bishop of Chichester
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Province
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Canterbury
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Diocese
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Diocese
of Chichester
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Installed
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11 June
1929
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Term
ended
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3
October 1958
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Predecessor
|
Winfrid
Burrows
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Successor
|
Roger
Wilson
|
Other
posts
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Dean of
Canterbury
(1925-1929) Member, House of Lords (1937-1958) |
Orders
|
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Ordination
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1907
(deacon)
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Personal details
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Born
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4
February 1883
Hayling Island, Hampshire |
Died
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3
October 1958 (aged 75)
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Buried
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Christ
Church Cathedral, Oxford
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Nationality
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British
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Denomination
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Anglican
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Parents
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James
Allen Bell
Sarah Georgina Megaw |
Spouse
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Henrietta
Livingstone
(married 1918) |
Alma
mater
|
Christ
Church, Oxford
Wells Theological College |
George Kennedy Allen Bell (4 February 1883 – 3
October 1958) was an Anglican theologian, Dean of Canterbury, Bishop of
Chichester, member of the House of Lords and a pioneer of the Ecumenical
Movement.
Biography
Early
career
Born in Hayling Island, Hampshire as
the eldest child of Sarah Georgina Megaw and her husband James Allen Bell (the
vicar of the Island, and later a canon at Norwich Cathedral), Bell was elected
as a Queen's Scholar at Westminster School in 1896. From there Bell was elected
to a scholarship at Christ Church, Oxford, where he studied theology, followed
by Wells Theological College (first being influenced by ecumenism at the latter)
and was ordained deacon at Ripon Cathedral in 1907. He went on to work as a
curate for 3 years in the industrial slums of Leeds. His role there was the
Christian mission to industrial workers, a third of whom were Indians and
Africans from the British Empire, and during his time there he learned much
from the Methodists, whose connection between personal creed and social
engagement he saw as an example to the Church of England.
In 1910, Bell returned to Christ
Church, Oxford for almost four years as a student minister and academic tutor.
Here too he was socially engaged, as one of the founders of a cooperative for
students and university members and sitting on the board of settlements and
worker-development through the Workers' Educational Association (WEA).
Bell's early career was shaped by his
appointment in 1914 as chaplain to Archbishop Randall Davidson, one of the key
figures in twentieth century church history. Bell subsequently wrote the
standard biography of Davidson. Bell received a special commission for
international and inter-denominational relations. In this office he ensured in
1915 that the Lutheran Indians be allowed to continue the work of the Leipzig-
and the Goßner missions in Chota Nagpur in India, after the missions' German
missionaries had been interned. Until the end of the First World War, he also
worked for the Order of Saint John, a supra-confessional group working to help
those orphaned by the war and - together with the Swedish Lutheran Archbishop Nathan
Söderblom, one of his closest lifelong friends - for the exchange of prisoners
of war. In this work, he came to see internal Protestant divisions as more and
more insignificant.
Inter-war
years
After the war, Bell became an
initiator and promoter of the still-young ecumenical movement. In 1919, at the
first postwar meeting of the World Council of Churches in the Netherlands, he
successfully encouraged the establishment of a commission for religious and
national minorities. At the world churches conference in Stockholm in 1925, he
helped in the realization of the "ecumenical advice for practical
Christianity (Life and Work)".
From 1925 to 1929, Bell was Dean of
Canterbury. During this time, he initiated the Canterbury Festival of the arts,
with guest artists such as John Masefield, Gustav Holst, Dorothy L. Sayers and T.
S. Eliot (whose 1935 drama "Murder in the Cathedral" was commissioned
by Bell for the festival). Later Bell also received Mahatma Gandhi at
Canterbury.
In 1929 Bell was appointed Bishop of
Chichester. In this role he organised links between his diocese and of workers
affected by the Great Depression. He also took part in the meetings of the National
Union of Public Employees, where he was welcomed as "brother Bell".
Ally of the
Confessing Church
From 1932 to 1934 he was the president
of "Life and Work" at the ecumenical council in Geneva, at whose
Berlin conference at the start of February 1933 he witnessed the Nazi takeover
at first hand.
After 1933, Bell became the most
important international ally of the Confessing
Church in Germany. In April 1933 he publicly expressed the international
church's worries over the beginnings of the Nazis' antisemitic
campaign in Germany, and in September that year carried a resolution protesting
against the "Aryan paragraph" and its acceptance by parts of the German Evangelical Church (Deutsche
Evangelische Kirche, or DEK). In November 1933 he first met Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was in London for two years as representative of the
foreign churches - the two became close friends, and Bonhoeffer often informed
Bell of what was going on in Germany. Bell then made this information (and thus
what was really happening in Germany) known to the public of Europe and
America, for example through letters to The Times.
On 1 June 1934 he signed the Barmen Declaration, the foundational manifesto of the Confessing Church - it
proclaimed that Christian belief and National Socialism were incompatible, and
condemned pro-Nazi German Christianity as "false teaching", or heresy.
Bell reported on 6 June to a gathering of the bishops of the Church of England
and clarified the difference between confessing and rejecting, and the
separation between a lawful and an illegitimate calling on Jesus Christ. This
was the first reaction to the Declaration from the international church.
From 1934 Bell functioned as a
president of "Life and Work", when Bonhoeffer and Karl Koch as praeses
of the synod of the old-Prussian Ecclesiastical province of Westphalia were
invited as representatives of the Confessing Church to the world ecumenical
conference in Fanø. As a selected youth secretary, Bonhoeffer was responsible
for the related world youth conference. At one morning service, he addressed
world Christianity as an "ecumenical council" and called on it to
rise against the threatened war. On Bell's suggestion and against protests from
the representatives of the pro-Nazi DEK, the world conference expressed
solidarity with the Confessing Church and its struggle and again exposed the
Nazis' policies, including the concentration camps.
In 1936 Bell received the chair of the
International Christian Committee for German Refugees, and in that role
he especially supported Jewish Christians, who at that time were supported by
neither Jewish nor Christian organizations. In order to help them to emigrate,
he dispatched his sister-in-law Laura Livingstone to Berlin and Hamburg and
occasionally let exiles live in his own home. In the same year, he printed a
prayer in his diocesan newsletter for Jewish and "non-Aryan"
Christians:
Pray for the Jews in Stepney, and Whitechapel, and Bethnal Green [where exiles were often accommodated]; pray for the German Jews; for all who suffer pain, who suffer shame, on account of their race. Pray for those who have a Jewish parent or grandparent and are Christian by belief...
Bell used his authority as a leader in
the Ecumenical Movement and since 1938 as Lord Spiritual to influence public
opinion in Britain and the Nazi authorities in Berlin, and back those
persecuted by the Nazi regime. His public support is said to have contributed
to Pastor Martin Niemöller's survival by making his imprisonment in Sachsenhausen
in February 1938 (and later in Dachau) widely known in the British press and
branded as an example of the Nazi regime's persecution of the church. Thus
Hitler backed off from Niemöller's planned execution in 1938.
In winter 1938/39 he helped 90
persons, mainly pastors' families (e.g. Hans
Ehrenberg from the Christuskirche at Bochum), to emigrate from Germany to
Great Britain who were in danger from the regime and the 'official' church
because they had Jewish ancestors or were opponents of the Nazi regime.
World War
II
During the war, Bell was involved in
helping not only displaced persons and refugees who had fled the continent to
England, but also interned Germans and British conscientious objectors. In 1940
he met with ecumenical friends in the Netherlands to unite the churches ready
for a joint peace initiative after victory over Nazi Germany had been won.
Opponent of
area bombing
During World War II Bell repeatedly
condemned the Allied practice of area bombing. As a member of the House of
Lords, he was a consistent parliamentary critic of area bombing along with Richard
Stokes and Alfred Salter, Labour Party Members of Parliament in the House of
Commons.
Even as early as 1939, he stated that
the church should not be allowed to become simply a spiritual help to the
state, but instead should be an advocate of peaceful international relations
and make a stand against expulsion, enslavement and the destruction of
morality. It should not be allowed to abandon these principles, ever ready to
criticise retaliatory attacks or the bombing of civil populations. He also
urged the European churches to remain critical of their own countries' ways of
waging war. In November 1939 he published an article stating that the Church in
wartime should not hesitate
"... to condemn the infliction of reprisals, or the bombing of civilian populations, by the military forces of its own nation. It should set itself against the propaganda of lies and hatred. It should be ready to encourage the resumption of friendly relations with the enemy nation. It should set its face against any war of extermination or enslavement, and any measures directly aimed to destroy the morale of a population."
In 1941 in
a letter to The Times, he called
the bombing of unarmed women and children "barbarian" which would
destroy the just cause for the war, thus openly criticising the Prime Minister's advocacy of such a bombing
strategy. On 14 February 1943 - two years ahead of the Dresden raids - he urged the
House of Lords to resist the War Cabinet's decision for area bombing, stating
that it called into question all the humane and democratic values for which
Britain had gone to war. In 1944, during debate, he again demanded the House of
Lords to stop British area bombing of German cities such as Hamburg and Berlin
as a disproportionate and illegal "policy of annihilation" and a
crime against humanity, asking:
"How can the War Cabinet fail to see that this progressive devastation of cities is threatening the roots of civilization?"
He did not
have the support of senior bishops. The Archbishop of York replied to him in
Parliament "it is a lesser evil to bomb the war-loving Germans than to
sacrifice the lives of our fellow countrymen...or to delay the delivery of many
now held in slavery".
Supporter of
the German Resistance
As a close
friend of the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer Bell knew precise details of
German plans to assassinate Adolf
Hitler. On 1 June 1942, Bell met Bonhoeffer in neutral Sweden, where
the latter was acting as a secret courier for information on the German resistance.
This information included the names of the participants from the armed forces
in the planned assassination attempt on Hitler and coup against the Nazi
regime. On his return, Bell passed this information on the German resistance movement on to Anthony Eden and tried to gain British government support for
them. Bell also asked Eden, at the conspirators' request
"to emphatically and publicly explain that the British government and its allies have no wish to enslave Germany, but only to remove Hitler, Himmler and their accessories"
- in other
words, to make a public declaration that the British would make a distinction
between the Nazi regime and German people, so as the conspirators would be able
to negotiate an armistice if they were successful. Yet after a month-long
silence, Bell received a rough rebuttal, for the allies had concluded at the Casablanca conference to wage war until
the unconditional surrender of Germany and to initiate area bombing.
Such moves
made Bell unpopular in some quarters (Noël Coward's 1943 song "Don't Let's
Be Beastly to the Germans", hostile to any distinction between the Germans
and the Nazis, commented "We might send [the Germans] out some Bishops as
a form of lease and
lend").
After the
failure of the first attempt on Hitler's life and the arrest of some of the
conspirators, Bell in vain tried to bring about a change in government
attitudes to the German resistance. When the final failure came on 20 July 1944,
Bell harshly criticised the British government as having made this failure a
foregone conclusion, and reproached Eden for not sending help to the plotters
in time despite having full knowledge of the plot.
Considered
for Archbishop?
In 1944 the Archbishop of Canterbury, William
Temple, died after only two years in that post. Bell was considered a leading
possibility to succeed him, but in fact it was Geoffrey Fisher, Bishop of
London, who was appointed. Bishops of the Church of England were chosen
ultimately by the Prime Minister, and it is known that Winston Churchill
strongly disapproved of Bell's speeches against bombing. It has often been
asserted that Bell would otherwise have been appointed, but this is debatable;
there is evidence that Temple had thought Fisher a likely successor anyway.
Bell's high posthumous reputation may have coloured later opinion (for example,
Archbishop Rowan Williams declared in 2008 that he thought Bell would have made
a better Archbishop of Canterbury than Fisher.)
Post-war
Champion of
defeated Germany
Visionary for
a reconciled Europe
Critic of
expulsions
Bell was also one of the first British
bishops to protest against the inhumane treatment of approximately 14 million Silesian,
Pomeranian, East Prussian and Sudeten Germans expelled from their homes in
Eastern Europe. Around 15 August 1945, he signed an open letter of protest in The
Spectator, and signed another protest to a London daily newspaper on 12
September that year alongside the British Jewish publisher Victor Gollancz,
Lord Bertrand Russell and others.
Nuclear
disarmament and the Cold War
In the 1950s Bell opposed the atomic
arms race and supported many Christian initiatives of the time opposed to the Cold
War. In last years of his life, he became acquainted with Giovanni Montini in
Milan through his ecumenical contacts, who in 1963 became Pope Paul VI and
brought the Second Vatican Council to its conclusion.
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The Grave of Bishop
George Bell
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Veneration
Bell is honored with a feast day in
the Church of England and the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA)
on 3 October.
Fiction
- He appears as an off-stage character in Bomber Harris.
- He also appears as a character in Susan Howatch's novel Ultimate Prizes (1989).
- A fictionalised Bell 'Francis Wood, Bishop of Cirencester', appears in episode 17 of Anthony Horrowitz's TV serial Foyle's War, Plan of Attack.
- He appears as a character in Alison McLeod's novel "Unexploded"
Works
Primary works
- "A Brief Sketch of the Church of England", 1929
- "Life of Archbishop Randall Davidson." Biography, 1952 (3rd Edition) London OUP
- "Christianity and World Order", 1940
- "The Background of the Hitler Plot", in: Contemporary Review 10, London 1945
- "The Church and Humanity", 1946 (contains: "The Church's Function in Wartime." November 1939)
- "The Task of the Churches in Germany", 1947
- "Christian Unity: The Anglican Position", 1948
- "The Kingship of Christ: The Story of the World Council of Churches", 1954
- "Die Kirche und die Widerstandsbewegung (Politisch-historische Vorlesungsreihe der Universität Göttingen)", in: Evangelische Theologie (Zeitschrift) 7, 1957.
- "The Significance of the Barmen Declaration for the Oecumenical Church", London 1943.
Secondary works
- Franz Hildebrandt (Ed.), 'And other Pastors of thy Flock': a German tribute to the Bishop of Chichester, Cambridge, 1942
- Ronald C. D. Jasper: "George Bell, Bishop of Chichester." Oxford University Press, 1967.
- Kenneth Slack: "George Bell". SCM Book Club 204, 1971
- Eberhard Bethge: "Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Eine Biographie." Christian Kaiser Verlag München, 1978, ISBN 3-459-01182-3
- Jaakko Rusama: "Unity and Compassion. Moral issues in the life and thought of George K.A. Bell." Helsinki 1986. ISBN 951-95207-6-7.
- Annegret Winkler-Nehls / Andreas Nehls: "They find themselves between the upper and the nether millstones". Bischof Bells Nachlass zum Problem nichtarischer Flüchtlinge, 1933-1939. Eine Dokumentation. Beiträge zur Diakoniewissenschaft 152, Heidelberg 1991.
- Edwin Robertson: "Unshakeable Friend. George Bell and the German Churches". London: CCBI 1995. ISBN 0-85169-234-6.
- Andrew Chandler: "Brethren in Adversity. Bishop George Bell, The Church of England and the Crisis of German Protestants, 1933-1939". Woodbridge 1997.
- Stephen A. Garrett: "Ethics and Airpower in World War II. The British Bombing of German Cities." New York 1997
- Paul Foster (Ed.): "Bell of Chichester: A Prophetic Bishop." Otter Memorial Paper No. 17, February 2004, ISBN 0-948765-84-4
- Jeremy Haselock: "George Kennedy Allen Bell, Bishop of Chichester and Pastoral Liturgist." Studia Liturgica Vol 35, 2005.
- Peter Raina: "George Bell: The greatest churchman - a portrait in letters." London: Churches Together in Britain and Ireland 2006. ISBN 0-85169-332-6 & ISBN 0-85169-334-2.
- “George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, on the Morality of War.” Anglican and Episcopal History 58 (1989): 498–509.
- Peter Webster, 'George Bell, John Masefield and "The Coming of Christ": context and significance', Humanitas. The Journal of the George Bell Institute, 10;2 (2009). Available online in SAS-Space
- http://www.spartacus-educational.com/GERbellG.htm
- http://www.joric.com/Conspiracy/Bell.htm
- George Bell in the Dictionary of National Biography (subscription required)
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