Leonhard Ragaz
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Through Switzerland, Socialism and World War I
Biography
Born to a farmer family in Tamins, Grisons, on 28 July 1868, Ragaz studied theology in Basel, Jena, and Berlin. In 1890, he was elected as minister in Flerden, Heinzenberg. In 1893, he moved to Chur, working as a teacher of language and religion, and from 1895 to 1902 as municipal minister. In 1902, Ragaz was elected as minister at the Basel Minster.
In Basel, Ragaz came into contact with the labour movement. As construction workers went on strike in 1903, Ragaz delivered a sermon in the minster which came to be known as the "bricklayers' strike sermon" (Maurerstreikpredigt), in which he said that "if institutional Christendom were to be cold and incomprehending towards the becoming of a new world, which after all emerged from the heart of the gospel, then the salt of the earth would have become putrid".
In 1908, Ragaz was called to a professorship at the theological faculty of the University of Zurich. During the Swiss general strike of 1918, he took sides with the workers, and as the authorities sent troops to protect the university buildings from the strikers, he protested.
In 1921, he resigned as professor, stating that he could not continue to educate ministers for the bourgeois Swiss Reformed Church. He and his family moved to the proletarian Aussersihl district of Zürich. He remained involved with the labour movement, editing his journal Neue Wege, until his death in Zürich on 6 December 1945.
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Religious socialism and pacifism
For Ragaz, the Early Church was based on a spirit of cooperation and collectivity. As a consequence, the socialist ideal of self-administered cooperatives owned by the workers themselves was a postulate directly derived from the gospel and the promise of justice in God's kingdom.
Also as a consequence of his Christian belief in justice and peace, Ragaz staunchly opposed the First World War, from a stance of active pacifism: he called for all religious socialists to unite in protesting the war. He taught that if capitalism resorted to force and violence, that was a true reflection of its nature, but that if socialism did the same, it was a treason to its ideals.
Ragaz' main work is Die Bibel – eine Deutung ("The Bible - An Interpretation"), written during the Second World War and published in seven volumes in 1947–1950.