Movers and shakers

The 20th century has produced outstanding theologians, including Karl Barth, Albert Schweizer, Rudolf Bultmann, Oscar Culmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, Emil Brunner, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Paul Tillich, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Karl Rahner, Hans Kung, Edward Schillebeeckx and Jurgen Moltmann, as well as the writers of Liberation Theology in Latin America, and indigenous theologians such as Kosuke Koyama in Japan and John Mbiti in Kenya.

But theology also received critical inputs from writers, artists and architects such as T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Evelyn Underhill, Graham Sutherland and Basil Spence. In many ways, Canon Paul Oestreicher is one man who embodies the Church of the 20th century and its struggles. Born into a Jewish family in Germany, he fled to New Zealand at the age of seven in 1938. As a schoolboy, he became a Christian and later he was ordained a priest in the Church of England.

A founding figure in Amnesty International, he also campaigned against the nuclear arms race and apartheid. He was an early pioneer of Christian-Marxist dialogue and was a keen supporter of the ordination of women. Committed to ecumenism, he became a Quaker with the permission of his bishop while still an Anglican priest.

Canon Oestreicher's perceived radical politics led to his election as a bishop in New Zealand being blocked. His final years in ministry before retirement were spent as a canon in Coventry Cathedral - perhaps the one building that has had the most influence on 20th-century church architecture and art, it also symbolised post-war reconciliation. There he was in charge of the cathedral's "Cross of Nails" ministry of reconciliation until his retirement two years ago. Last year, at the height of the Balkans war, he travelled to Belgrade.