A young John Foster Dulles in his uniform during World War I for the cover of my father’s book World Federation: The Ecumenical Agenda available to order both in English and in German.
The twentieth century has been the age of ever expanding technocracy, a feature which neither that century’s passing nor the shift from a modernist paradigm to postmodernity has diminished. Rather, the drift towards rule by technocrats, allegedly impartial souls, undriven by dogma and supposedly free of the partisan concerns that motivate the rest of us, has intensified. Neither has religious life, avowedly the realm of the spirit and private communion with God, been free of this propensity. Instead, the twentieth century witnessed the rise of the ecumenical movement, an attempt to unify the disparate churches on a global basis – a sort of ecclesiastical counterpart to the League of Nations and, later, the United Nations. Indeed, as this book shows, churchly pressure played a role in the birth of the U.N. itself.
Dr. Erdmann ably traces the story from 1919 to 1945. The results are illuminating. Scrutinising the documentary evidence in impressive detail, he demonstrates how key, highly placed individuals in both Britain and America attempted to harness the churches for a secular technocratic programme to build a new world order – and ultimately a world government – that would rest upon the minimalist theology of a vague Christian ethic.
The ironical conclusion was that the age that was in full retreat from Christian orthodoxy and supernaturalism witnessed a paradoxical confidence that the Kingdom of God – established, of course, by human management skills – was just around the corner.