Features: May 2007

Pentecost Reflections by Former Moderators of the General Assembly

Do You Believe This? by Sarah Sanderson-Doughty

In Memoriam: Andre Bieler by Christian Iosso

Why I Believe in Being Connected by Helen Baily Cochrane

A Prayer for Our Children by Carolyn Winfrey Gillette

Past Issues

OGA Main Page

Items marked with are in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. For best results, right-click the link (or click and hold for Macintosh), select "save target as" and save the document to your desktop for viewing and printing.

Los archivos marcados con este icono pueden ser descargados en el formato publicable de Adobe Acrobat. Este archivo requiere obtener el programa Acrobat Reader que es gratis. Para mejores resultados haz clic sobre el enlace con el botón derecho del ratón (o haz clic y mantén el ratón para las Macintosh), selecciona "save target as" y guarda el documento en el tope de tu ordenador para poder verlo e imprimirlo.

In Memoriam: Swiss Calvin Scholar Andre Bieler, 1914–2006

Original notice written by Edouard Dommen in Gospel and Work Notices of the Protestant Church of Geneva (Message Evangile et Travail, Printemps 2007, #150, p. 5).

Translated with notes by Christian Iosso, Louisville, Ky., April 6, 2007

Andre Bieler, who died at Morges, Switzerland, on December 7, 2006, was a significant figure in the public Protestantism of his time. Unpretentious and known for scrupulous intellectual honesty, he was widely respected.

His masterwork, The Economic and Social Thought of Calvin (1959, new edition in preparation; recently translated into English), surprised the scholarly world with what Calvin himself actually said about economic justice, the dignity of labor, and the responsibilities of employers and investors.

Christians and Socialists Before Marx (1982) presented with care and objectivity the contradictory currents of thought among Catholics and Protestants during the early stages of industrial capitalism.

He concluded, “Those Christians termed ‘social’ … are the only representatives of Christianity who leave on political, economic, and social history the mark of a specific effort to apply the Gospel in a coherent way.”

He was well aware of “the ignorance in which clerics can … remain immobilized before the nature of problems facing the common life in their societies.” (He served as a pastor for more than ten years.)

Professor of theology, Andre Bieler also had a doctorate in economics. His faith, watered by his erudition, was the foundation of his concrete engagement in public affairs.

He did not claim ownership of even his most original ideas; he claimed to derive them from circles of friends, especially ecumenical and even larger groups.

He was at the origin of the Berne Declaration and an action group on Nestle, which became the current organization known as Actares. (In the first, along with two other Reformed theologians, he began the call for developed nations to contribute 3 percent of their gross national product to less developed nations; he later wrote a critique of development models predicated on unlimited growth. Thousands signed the Berne Declaration. In the second initiative, he was among the founders of the worldwide Nestle Boycott, aimed at preventing malnutrition through the widespread misuse of infant formula in less developed countries. He also provided a theological-ethical defense of corporate social responsibility, which was generally less known in Europe than in the United States of the mid-1970s).

Through the approach of Actares, he sought to call both managers and shareholders to take responsibility for their enterprises: “Christian capitalists … we are thus placed before stark choices that engage our faith” (note the insistence on the inclusive “we”).

This quotation was taken from “Letter to Christian Capitalists” (1976) where he defended the participation of workers in business decisions—an essential role, now unjustly abandoned before the unshared hegemony of financial interests.

Andre Bieler furnished a whole generation with inspiration and the tools for working “to remain a spiritual force to address the social challenges of our time.”

Translator’s note: This memorial note does not mention Bieler’s historical essays for the World Council of Churches, or several of his books, including Architecture in Worship (1965, with a supplement from Karl Barth), The Politics of Hope (1974, with a forward by Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Brazil), and the very handy The Social Humanism of John Calvin (1959, Eng. trans. 1964). Bieler was a master of both the overall vision and the particular detail. If his big book mapped the territory of Calvin’s social and economic thought, he then used that map to retrieve an ethos as well as examples and principles still in need of full application today.

Copyright Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). All Rights Reserved.