Abstract
Frank Buchman (1878–1961), founder of the Oxford Group and Moral Re-Armament (more recently known as Initiatives of Change), was famous as an evangelist and reconciler. He was also controversial, in part because of his attempts to bring a Christian experience to Nazi leaders in the 1930s, and an interview he gave in 1936 in which he praised Hitler for his stance against communism. This book is by a man who was a young colleague of Buchman’s, and then later a research assistant for Garth Lean, author of the definitive biography of Buchman, Frank Buchman: A Life (London, 1985). It has been carefully edited by one of Spoerri’s colleagues, Peter Thwaites, and is accompanied by the online publication of forty-six documents (mainly letters) pertaining to the history of the Oxford Group in Germany.
A central issue for German churchmen in the 1930s was how to relate to national socialism and the state-backed German Christians. Was it incumbent on them to oppose Nazism directly, or was it possible to have some form of dialogue with the regime? As Thwaites notes, history has sided with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in supporting those who took an uncompromising stance. Bonhoeffer himself saw the Oxford Group’s attempts at Christian outreach in Germany in the mid-1930s as naïve. But for many it was not always clear what was the right thing to do. As Spoerri’s book demonstrates, Buchman was well-aware of the non-Christian nature of Nazism, but he took the view that anyone could change, and no person was beyond the reach of God’s grace.
What stand out here are the stories of Christians trying to get a sense of God’s leading in a complicated environment. An example brings this into focus. One of Buchman supporter’s, Anneliese von Cramon, got to know the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, quite well, to the point of talking openly with him about some of the fundamentals of the Christian faith. When Himmler offered her a job doing social work in the SS, she felt it right to accept; but she was then dismissed when she refused to take the oath of allegiance to the Nazi Party. Was she naïve, or courageous? It is not easy to answer that question, although the evidence here suggests more the latter than the former. Through von Cramon, Buchman himself had a number of meetings with Himmler, but after one of them declared that Germany had come under the influence of a ‘terrible, demoniac force’.
There was no formal Oxford Group perspective on the Nazi regime, even though its work was viewed with increasing suspicion by the Gestapo. Buchman wanted his German supporters to follow their own sense of God’s guidance. As the 1930s advanced and the atmosphere deteriorated, members of the Oxford Group found themselves pursuing four different strategies. Some sought to change the state from within, believing this would be preferable to a violent collapse provoked from the outside. A second group focussed on Christian renewal within the churches. A third were involved in active resistance to Hitler. And a fourth focussed on their own survival. Spoerri suggests that making judgments about the rights and wrongs of these different approaches would be wrong; ‘people react in different ways and also have different callings,’ he observes. He may be right, although one should be wary of taking that view to an extreme.
There is only one chapter here on the post-war era, when Moral Re-Armament invested a lot of resources in Franco-German reconciliation. In that sense, the book is not really a comprehensive overview of Buchman’s involvement with Germany. But the book raises some intriguing questions for those interested in spirituality under totalitarian regimes. It also has a contemporary relevance as well: after all, Christians in the West today wrestle with finding the right relationship to the state.