Malvern (1941) as a pioneering venture in Christian Ecotheology

Abstract

The 1941 Malvern Conference included significant environmental statements, which have gradually been forgotten. In this article I point out their relevance and discuss their possible influence. I analyse the background of these environmental statements and suggest that British theology has probably played a stronger role in environmentalism than has previously been understood. I analyse the ecotheological positions of Malvern and William Temple in the context of a typology of ecotheological stances as developed by Willis Jenkins. While the exact influence of Malvern is difficult to assess, I refer to sources which show that its environmental content was noticed by certain prominent thinkers and contributed, for its part, to the development of ecumenical ecotheology.

Keywords:

• Environmental ethics
• ecological theology
• environmental history
• social ethics
• Anglican theology

Notes

1. Yet others include ‘religion and ecology’, ‘theology of nature’ and ‘theology of creation / creation theology’. For analysis of the terms, see Pihkala forthcoming, Chapter 1. I am using the term theology for Christian theology in this article, but in many instances what I am saying applies to the ways in which ‘theology’ functions in several other religions also, especially in monotheistic ones.

2. As is Finland, my own home country, where Lutheranism has been an enormously powerful cultural factor and it is often very difficult to separate Lutheran and other cultural influences from each other. I have found in my research that also Finnish Lutherans participated at a very early stage in nature conservation and environmental work, but this has remained unnoticed even by the representatives of the environmental work of the Lutheran church in the last decades. Cf. Pihkala forthcoming, Chapter 7.

3. This and the following section draw from Pihkala forthcoming, Chapter 4.

4. See also Cunningham’s (2004) reflections on Temple and the group: ‘William Temple was often an ally, but the Christendom Group placed greater emphasis on the need to derive Christian principles about society from Christian doctrine.’