George Bell (bishop)

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.

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 he was elected to a scholarship at Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained a First in Classical Moderations in 1903 and a Second in Literae Humaniores ('Greats') in 1905.^[1] He won the Newdigate Prize for English verse in 1904 for his poem, 'Delphi'.^[2] After Oxford he attended 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 three 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. 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, as a student minister and as lecturer in Classics and English, 1910–14; he was a Student (Fellow), 1911-14.^[3] 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

Memorial, Chichester Cathedral

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 realisation of the "ecumenical advice for practical Christianity (Life and Work)".

External images

[4] George Bell as Dean of Canterbury Cathedral.

[5] George Bell as Bishop of Chichester.

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:

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

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:

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".^[8]

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", which expressed hostility 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 as Archbishop of Canterbury

In 1944 the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, died after only two years in the post. Bell was considered a leading possibility to succeed him, but it was Geoffrey Fisher, Bishop of London, who was appointed. Bishops of the Church of England are chosen, ultimately, by the British 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^[9][10] may have coloured later opinion (for example, Archbishop Rowan Williams said in 2008 that he thought Bell would have made a better Archbishop of Canterbury than Fisher^[11]).

Post-war

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, 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 the 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.

Child abuse allegations

In 1995, 37 years after Bell's death, a complaint was made to the then Bishop of Chichester, Eric Kemp, alleging that Bell had abused a child during the 1940s and 1950s.^[12] The complaint was not passed on to police until a second complaint was made to the office of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 2013, eighteen years after the first complaint had been made and fifty-five years after Bell's death. An investigation by the police concluded that there was sufficient evidence to have arrested Bell had he still been alive. The diocese paid compensation in September 2015 and Martin Warner, the Bishop of Chichester, issued a formal apology to the alleged victim the following month. A pre-litigation process which had included the commissioning of expert independent reports had preceded the financial claim, with no reason having been found to doubt the veracity of the claim.^[13][14] In February 2016 the female alleged victim spoke publicly for the first time, in an interview with the Brighton Argus about being sexually abused from the age of five until her family moved away when she was nine.^[15]

There were also criticisms of the way in which the Church of England handled the case. These included an article in The Spectator by Peter Hitchens, who described Bell as a "fair, just, brave man" who deserved the "presumption of innocence".^[16] An editorial in the Church of England Newspaper similarly wrote that Bell was "being tried and convicted by the Church of England with little thought for proper justice and due process".^[17] On 13 November 2015, Alan Pardoe, a judge and Queen's Counsel, criticised the handling of the allegations against Bell as "slipshod and muddled" in a letter to the Church Times.^[18] There were further criticisms of the handling of the case in the Church Times of 20 November 2015 by a group of theologians and historians headed by Jeremy Morris, Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge.^[19] An accompanying letter from Brian Hanson said there had been unhappiness expressed at the Chichester diocesan synod over the national church's handling of the issue. In the Daily Telegraph of 2 January 2016, Charles Moore severely criticised the Church's treatment of Bishop Bell.^[20] On 7 January 2016, The Daily Telegraph published a letter by Bishop Warner stating that the church was mindful of the widely felt hurt about its decision, especially because of the bishop’s great reputation. However the church was seeking, "to move on from a culture in which manipulation of power meant that victims were too afraid to make allegations, or allegations were easily dismissed." In future, "we must provide safeguards of truth and justice for all, victim and accused alike." The bishop welcomed the Goddard Inquiry, "as a more balanced forum than the media might be for a judicial and forensic assessment of our handling of child-abuse cases" .^[21]

In the weeks following the settlement with the alleged victim there were suggestions that Bishop Bell School in Eastbourne may change its name;^[22] similar suggestions were made for the house named after Bell at Bishop Luffa School in Chichester and the building named after him at Chichester Cathedral.^[23]

On 20 March 2016 the George Bell Group, containing several leading churchmen and women, lawyers, and members of both Houses of Parliament, published a review in which they challenged the Church's evidence against Bishop Bell and attacked it for failing to find or interview a key witness or examine Bell's own extensive personal archive.^[24][25]

On 30 June 2016 the case formed a large part of a debate in the House of Lords on historical child sex abuse.^[26]

On 28 June 2016 the Church of England announced that it would hold an independent review of the procedure used. On 22 November 2016 it announced that the QC Lord Carlile would be the reviewer.^[27][28]

Veneration

Bell is honoured with a feast day in the Church of England on 3 October. The liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) has suspended this commemoration until that calendar can be updated.

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.

Edited (together with J. O. Cobham):

• "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
• Chandler, Andrew (2016). George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. ISBN 9780802872272. LCCN 2015038505. 
• http://www.spartacus-educational.com/GERbellG.htm
• http://www.joric.com/Conspiracy/Bell.htm
• George Bell in the Dictionary of National Biography (subscription required)

See also

George Bell corresponded regularly with his colleagues in other countries, some of whom were close and trusted friends of leaders of the time, including Rabindranath Tagore, M K Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. This was instrumental in making suitable arrangements for Dietrich Bonhoeffer to spend a year with M K Gandhi in 1934, to study the way of civil disobedience. The prevailing situation in Nazi Germany made it difficult if not impossible for Dietrich Bonhoeffer to spend a year at Gandhi's Ashram in India.

References

External links

• Bell's papers are held at Lambeth Palace Library