January 1866—12 July 1931
Ecumenical Pioneer
Born in the country parish of Trönö, Sweden, Soderblöm, the son of a Lutheran pastor, was destined for a life in Christian ministry. Possessing a keen intellect, he attended the University of Uppsala and graduated in 1883 with honors in Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew. At the time, the academic fields of the History of Religion and the Origins of Christianity were viewed by many clergy as threats to the Christian faith. But Soderblöm believed otherwise, and as a graduate student learned Old Persian to explore whether the Old and New Testaments had been influenced by the religion of Iran. He earned his BD degree in 1892 and was ordained in March 1893.
That same year, Soderblöm experienced “a direct perception of the holiness of God
. . . , that God was far stricter than anyone could comprehend. God is a consuming fire. This apprehension was so powerful, so shattering, that [I] was unable to stay on [my] feet.” For the rest of his life, Soderblöm’s faith remained unshakable. He was “unable to doubt God in spite of everything.”
Over the next seven years, he served the Swedish Church in Paris, among the members of which were the philanthropist Alfred Nobel and the playwright August Strindberg. Soderblöm returned to Sweden in 1901 to assume a professorship in the University of Uppsala’s School of Theology. The author of several well-received books, Soderblöm was especially influential in making the field of comparative religion respectable in Christian circles. He remained at the university until his 1914 election as Primate and Archbishop of Sweden.
Soderblöm’s work as an academic and pastor led him to the conclusion that Christians “find no difficulty in freely interpreting Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount” but were much less likely “to take the master’s uncomfortable words completely seriously.” He believed the Church must engage with the world in order to bring about the gospel vision of justice that leads to peace.
During the final seventeen years of his life, Soderblöm worked toward that vision through his efforts to found a worldwide ecumenical movement. He sought the intercommunion of all Christian denominations, and in 1925 he worked tirelessly to bring together leaders from Anglican, Reformed, Orthodox, and Lutheran traditions in what came to be known as the Stockholm Conference. The ecumenical conference, motivated in part by the impotence of the divided churches to prevent World War I, advocated “a Christian internationalism equally opposed to a national bigotry and a weak cosmopolitanism” and “affirmed the universal character of the Church and its duty to preach and practice the love of the brethren.”
Soderblöm’s ecumenism earned him election to the Swedish Academy in 1925 and the Nobel Peace Prize the year before his death.
16 January
Ormond Burton
16 January 1893—7 January 1974
Christian Peace without Compromise
In 1923, four years after the end of the “war to end all wars,” Ormond Burton addressed a conference of the New Zealand Student Christian movement. He called his listeners to lives of radical discipleship. For Burton, such devotion required a commitment to the nonviolence preached and practiced by Christ, and he urged the students to put their faith into practice by refusing to join or serve in the military.
No stranger to combat, Burton served as a stretcher-bearer at Gallipoli, one of the bloodiest and most wasteful standoffs of World War I. When his best friend was killed in action, he volunteered to replace him. Commissioned a lieutenant in the infantry, Burton was decorated for gallantry several times. But the harsh Treaty of Versailles that the Allies forced upon a defeated Germany convinced him that genuine peace could never be won by military conflict. The victors, he concluded, would always demand concessions from the losers that inevitably stirred up resentments and kept old wounds fresh, thereby preparing the way for the next war. As he sadly noted at the end of World War I, “Victory had not brought a new world, and we saw in a flash of illumination that it never could. War is just waste and destruction, solving no problems and creating new and terrible ones.” By the time he spoke to the New Zealand Student Christian organization in 1923, he was a committed pacifist.
After the war, Burton was barred for a time from teaching because he refused to sign an oath to the Crown that would have obliged him to fight if war broke out again. He finally secured a job in a remote district of New Zealand. In the 1930s, he began training for ordination in the Methodist Church. Upon completion, he took a run-down church in one of Wellington’s worst slums and quickly revitalized it by dint of hard and dedicated work. He also cofounded the Christian Pacifist Society of New Zealand. When war erupted again in 1939, he spoke out against it and was promptly arrested, released, and arrested again. Sentenced to a year in prison, he spent his time behind bars writing an anti-war tract, Testament of Peace, for which the Methodist Church expelled him. He would not be reinstated or given another church until 1952.
Although Burton continued as a peace activist for the rest of his life, he steadfastly refused to cooperate with non-Christian peacemakers. When the Christian Pacifist Society he helped found voted to offer membership to non-Christians, he resigned in protest. He justified his position by arguing that without a strong commitment to the Prince of Peace, pacifism was merely an abstract philosophy. Of course he was mistaken. But he can be forgiven for the sake of his lifelong dedication to nonviolence.
17 January
William Stafford
17 January 1914—28 August 1993
Show Me a Good War
Some ten million men were conscripted into the U.S. military during World War II. Fifty thousand of them requested and received conscientious objector status. Some served as noncombatant medics. Others chose to go to prison. Twelve thousand opted to serve in labor camps scattered across the nation. The poet William Stafford was one of the latter.
Born in Kansas shortly before World War I erupted, Stafford grew up hearing elders—teachers, relatives, neighbors—talk about how horrible the conflict had been. So he arrived at his pacifist convictions while still quite young. When drafted in 1942 during World War II, it was only natural that he petitioned for conscientious objector status. For the next four years he performed hard manual labor in the camps—first in Arkansas, then in Illinois, and finally in California—for $2.50 a month. In Arkansas he was nearly lynched by a mob infuriated by his pacifism. After his release from the camps and his return home, a childhood friend threated to kill him for his “treasonous” opposition to the war. His first book, Down in My Heart, was a semi-autobiographical novel about life in the camps.
Stafford didn’t begin publishing poetry until nearly twenty years after the war ended. But his verse attests to his continuing opposition to it and to all wars. (Once asked whether he believed he could fight in a “good” war, he replied, “Show me a good war.”) In “These Mornings,” Stafford meditates on what happens when warplanes bomb cities. Both buildings and people are blown up into the sky or down into the earth, he writes, leaving nothing but hideous scars on the land. In “Ground Zero,” he reflects on the uncanny sidewalk photographs of victims created by the flash of the atomic blast at Hiroshima. Their shadows, he muses, are now ours. Our condoning of such an unimaginable mass killing leaves us spiritually anemic, shadow-like. And in “For the Unknown Soldier,” Stafford fleshes out the abstract word enemy by reminding readers that the “unknown enemy soldier” is a person who, just like us, marvels at a beautiful sky or carries a laughing baby to a park. He challenges the patriotic blindness that darkens our awareness of the “enemy’s” humanness.
Stafford’s lifelong opposition to war wasn’t strident. Although he understood and sympathized with the motives behind loud anti-war demonstrations, he neither approved of them nor participated in them. His style was quiet conversation, poetic evocation, and “living a life of witness by seeing the good in the enemy.” As he once said about his conscientious objection to World War II, “I can’t stop war, Jesus couldn’t stop war, Eisenhower couldn’t stop it. [But] I could decide there would be one person not in it.”
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