John Coleman Bennett

Nationality

Canada

Date of Birth

1903

Date of Death

1995

Political
Preference

John Coleman Bennett was born in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, as son of a Presbyterian minister. He graduated from Williams College in 1924 and received a BA and subsequent MA from Mansfield College, Oxford University in 1926. He attended Union Theological Seminary in New York from 1926 until 1929. In 1936 he joined the Pacific School of Religion. Ordained as a Congregationalist minister in California in 1939, Bennett was a leader in the ecumenical movement and an activist in social causes, such as anti-fascism, civil and women’s rights.

He returned to Union Theological as a professor in 1943 and was awarded 22 honorary doctorates over the years. Bennett has contributed significantly to Protestant thinking on international affairs, communism, Catholicism and church relations. In this, he enjoyed the mutual influence of his wife, Ann, a feminist and peace advocate who died in 1986.

During the 1930s, Bennett worked with the Oxford Life and Work Conference on Church, Community and State. He became deeply involved with both the National and World Councils of Churches with leadership positions in WCC Assemblies at Amsterdam (1948), Evanston (1954), and Uppsala (1968). During the Second World War, Bennett was secretary of the Federal Committee on the Relation of the Church to the War in the Light of the Christian Faith. He co-founded the magazine Christianity and Crisis with Reinhold Niebuhr and he was active in the American Commission for Just and Durable Peace, founded by John Foster Dulles, from 1942 until 1945. In 1946, he became a member of the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA) as an American expert on European matters.

His books include “Christian Ethics and Social Policy” (1946), “Christians and the State” (1948) and “Foreign Policy in Christian Perspective” (1966).