Nathan Söderblom was born in 1866 at Trönö, a country parish in the province of Hälsingland, in the Kingdom of Sweden, today in the east-central part of the country. He was the son of a Lutheran pastor of strict pietist conviction, and the austere, devout parsonage of his childhood marked him for life. He studied theology at Uppsala, was ordained in 1893, and spent seven years as chaplain to the Swedish congregation in Paris, where one of those he buried was Alfred Nobel. Then came years of scholarship: he became one of the founders of the modern study of the history of religions, teaching at Uppsala and at Leipzig, a man who knew the faiths of the world from the inside and loved his own the more for it.

In 1914 he was made Archbishop of Uppsala, primate of the Church of Sweden, and within weeks the world went to war. It was an hour that exposed something terrible in Christendom: the churches of every nation blessed their own armies and prayed for the defeat of their enemies, as though the body of Christ stopped at the border. Söderblom would not accept it. He called on church leaders across the lines of battle to remember that they were one in Christ, to work for a just peace, and to care for prisoners and refugees on every side. His was a lonely voice while the guns spoke, but he never stopped, for he believed that peace was not mere quiet. "Peace can be reached only through fighting against the ancient Adam in ourselves and in others," he would say in his Nobel lecture, in the English of the Nobel record.

When the war ended he turned that conviction into an institution. In 1925 he gathered Protestant and Orthodox leaders from around the world at Stockholm, in the Conference on Life and Work, to take up together the churches' responsibility in the social and political life of nations. It was among the first great assemblies of separated Christians since the Reformation, and it fed directly into the World Council of Churches that followed a generation later. He held that the love commanded by Christ could not be confined: that "the commandment of love transcends all frontiers," as the Savior taught in the parable of the Good Samaritan.

In 1930 the Nobel Committee gave him its Peace Prize, the first ever given to a churchman, for the new attitude of mind he had labored to create among the nations. He died in office the next year, in 1931, worn out in the work. He had spent himself trying to make the one Church visible to a world that had seen it broken, and the movement he set going has never since let the churches forget that they belong, in the end, to one Lord.