chaplains in the fire

The starting point for my friend Tim Larsen’s new book The Fires of Moloch is another book, one published in 1917 and often reprinted over the next few years. The Church in the Furnace is a collection of essays by Anglican clergymen who served in the Great War as military chaplains. The chaplains were sometimes thought to be of a modernizing or liberalizing tendency because they were so straightforward about the horrors of the war — and what they believed to be the church’s unpreparedness to minister to people who had been through such horrors, or even those who merely observed them from a distance. It a collective cry for the Church of England to take steps, however dramatic, to prepare itself to minister to a world very different than that which their Victorian ancestors had known.

The brilliant idea that Tim had was to look at the stories of each of the seventeen contributors to The Church in the Furnace. Throughout his career Tim has written books that provide brief biographies of a series of related figures and then show how these figures are related to one another, whether personally, intellectually, or culturally. For instance, his book The Slain God concerns a series of anthropologists and their encounters with Christianity. When imagining Tim’s books, think Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, with a good deal of the humor but without the cynicism and the camp. This group of chaplains is particularly well suited for this kind of treatment, because if you look at their experiences you’ll see that they were uniformly appalled by the war into which they were thrown, and agreed that the Church of England was not prepared to meet the challenges of the war — but they had very different senses of what the key problems were.

It seems to be believed in some circles that these were Anglo-Catholic clergymen, but as Tim points out at the beginning of his account, only some of them were. They really covered the whole spectrum of the Church of England — high church, low church, and broad church — and while some embraced modernist revisions to traditional Christian theology, others were conventionally creedal in their thinking. They also had widely varying ideas about what the primary emphasis of the church should be as it strove to meet the challenges of a bloody twentieth century.

Tim does an exceptional job of contextualizing The Church in the Furnace, first by showing who these chaplains were when they entered the war: what they brought to their work as chaplains, what experiences, what history, what theological formation, what pastoral philosophies. You can see the wide variety of ways in which they were not (as indeed they could not have been) prepared for what they had to face. But then, having shown that, Tim goes on to show how deeply and permanently they were, without exception, marked by their experience as military chaplains. For the rest of their lives — and in some cases those lives were quite long — they continued to think of Christianity and Christian ministry in ways that shaped by their experience in war. For instance, almost all of them became inclined at one time or another to conceive of the Christian life in military terms. This imagery, of course, is is present in the New Testament, though present among many other metaphors; but it becomes central for most of these chaplains. Some of them speak of Christ as “our great captain” who has recruited us into his army, has made us his soldiers. This image becomes the default model of the Christian life for several of these clergymen, and a significant part of the rhetorical and theological equipment for all of them.

Finally, one other noteworthy theme emerges. There’s a general sense that war has the effect of alienating people from their religion. But in fact, what was seen in the Great War was a dramatic increase in prayer, both individual and public. One of the most consistent messages of these clergymen was that they found that, other than the Lord’s Prayer, which most of the soldiers knew, they really didn’t have any idea how to pray, never having been instructed in prayer. And if there was one thing that all of these clergymen agreed on, it was that the church desperately needed to to teach people how to pray. And I suspect that is a message that is as relevant now as it was then, if not more so.