Ecumenical Commemoration
Archbishop of Uppsala, Ecumenist, & Renewer of the Church
July 12 · d. 1931
also known as Nathan Söderblom
Nathan Söderblom was the Swedish Lutheran Archbishop of Uppsala who, in the wreckage of the First World War, called the divided churches of Europe to work together for peace. A distinguished scholar of the history of religions before he was a bishop, he gathered Protestant and Orthodox leaders at Stockholm in 1925 in the movement that became one of the streams of modern ecumenism, and in 1930 he became the first churchman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
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.
How we know Söderblom is from his own large body of writing, from the records of the movement he led, and from the Nobel archive. He was a scholar before he was a primate, and his books in the history of religions and in theology, above all his Gifford Lectures, published after his death as The Living God, set out his mind in his own words. The acts of the 1925 Stockholm Conference document the work for which he is chiefly remembered, and the Nobel Foundation preserves the citation and the lecture of 1930. The standard life is Bengt Sundkler's biography of 1968. Because he is a modern figure, the original Swedish and the events are a matter of public record, but the English translations of his words, including the Nobel lecture, are later renderings and should be quoted as such.
Söderblom is commemorated on July 12, the day of his death, in the calendar of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and among the ecumenical commemorations kept in the Episcopal Church and other Anglican provinces. He is remembered as the founder of the Life and Work movement, one of the tributaries that joined in 1948 to form the World Council of Churches, and as the great modern example of the scholar-bishop, a historian of the world's religions who gave his life to the unity and peace of his own Church. The Nobel Peace Prize he received in 1930 was the first ever awarded to a Christian minister.
Further reading. Söderblom's own mind is best met in his Gifford Lectures, The Living God: Basal Forms of Personal Religion, published in 1933 after his death. The standard biography is Bengt Sundkler, Nathan Söderblom: His Life and Work (1968), reissued in 2023. His 1930 Nobel lecture, The Role of the Church in Promoting Peace, is the most accessible short statement of his peace theology.
Online resources. The Nobel lecture and the citation of 1930 are freely available at the Nobel Prize website.
Almighty God, we give you thanks for the ministry of Nathan Söderblom, who labored that the Church of Jesus Christ might be one: Grant that we, instructed by his teaching and example, and knit together in unity by your Spirit, may ever stand firm upon the one foundation, which is Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Söderblom /ˈsɜːdərblɒm/
Readings for an Ecumenist
Ezekiel 34:11–16Psalm 133Ephesians 3:14–21John 17:10–26