M. M. Thomas and the Theology of Revolution in Early Postwar Ecumenical Thought, 1945–51

This paper examines the origins of the “theology of revolution” in transnational ecumenical Christian thought in the mid-twentieth century. Rather than collapsing religious actors and categories into political contexts, it shows how leaders of the ecumenical movement – a network of Protestant and Orthodox church leaders from the North Atlantic and global South seeking world Christian unity and cooperation – came to understand anti-colonial political activism as a site of human encounter with the divine. I locate this conceptual innovation in a crisis besetting the movement during the Cold War. Seeking to surmount bitter divisions between Eastern European church leaders and Western anti-Communist, the leadership of the World Council of Churches and World Student Christian Federation turned to Third World theologians to elucidate a new basis for global Christian unity around solidarity with the struggles of “submerged nations, races, and classes.” To illuminate the origins of the movement’s pivot to the Third World I focus on M. M. Thomas, an Indian Marxist theologian, tracing his career and intellectual trajectory from southern India, where he organized youth Christian movements to collaborate with Communist Party actions against British rule, to Geneva, where he moved upon his appointment, in 1946, as a Secretary of the World Student Christian Federation. The triumph of Thomas’s theological defense of revolution in the movement reveals, I argue, an ambiguity in ecumenists’ postwar shift to the left. This shift was not the result, as many commentators have suggested, of long-standing progressive political impulses of ecumenical Christianity but rather of movement elites’ determination to re-entrench its claim to represent a “supra-political” Christian unity in an age of Cold War polarization.