Continued: Rufus Jones and the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry: How a Quaker Helped to Shape Modern Ecumenical Christianity. By Stephen W. Angell
Jones agreed to write such a book. It would have no official connection with the Laymen’s Foreign Mission Inquiry, although it was definitely written with its agenda in mind.
31 Jones’s foreword explained the purpose of his book, entitled A Preface to Christian Faith in a New Age, as follows: "We cannot have an effective message or a dynamic gospel for China or for India unless we can discover some fresh power, some deeper interpretation of life that will transform our own civilization and inaugurate a new epoch of faith here in America." 32In effect, Jones wanted to level the playing field, i.e., to begin an era of "world missions" rather than "foreign missions," seeing the latter term as objectionable for its implication that somehow America was less in need of evangelization than the rest of the world.
A Preface to Christian Faith built carefully on the insights that Jones had laid out in his Jerusalem essay. The first chapter, "Obstacles and Hindrances to Christian Faith in a New Age," identified "secularism," "relativity," and the "reign of naturalism" among the threats that twentieth-century Christianity would have to overcome. Later chapters offered some positive responses to such hindrances. "The religion of the future, so far as it is creative, dynamic and transforming, will be at heart mystical, its evidence and authority will lie in an inward conviction of reality, in the discovery of a power to live by and in direct fortification for the tasks of life."
Jones emphasized that the religion of the future must include, but could not be limited to, a social gospel. "No gospel that is to touch and minister to the whole of life can ever cease from now on to be a social gospel. But the horizontal social gospel from man to man must never become a substitute for the soul’s personal upward relations with God as the source of inspiration and power."
Jones urged on his readers an enlightened Christianity, one that accorded well with the scientific and historical-critical advances in modern scholarship. Christians of the future should also realize the complementary relationship of their faith to other world religions such as Confucianism and Hinduism.
Every great religion, that is, every religion that has made a permanent contribution to human culture and civilization, has brought to light some unique aspect of the nature of God.... The supreme founders of religions have always brought a new spring of energy to the world through their ability to reveal some aspect of the nature of God which had until then been hidden.
A large part of the book was devoted to a plea for Christian ecumenism. While stating that there was a place for denominational distinctiveness, Jones clearly believed that Christian commonalities were far more important than the differences between Christian denominations. Hence, Christians should emphasize what they have at common – both in their home churches and on the mission field.
33Carrying the proofs (needing correction) of A Preface to Christian Faith, Jones, his wife Elizabeth and his daughter Mary boarded a steamship in January, 1932, for the trip across the Pacific Ocean to join his fourteen fellow commissioners for visits to missions in China and Japan.
34An extended account of Jones’s travels in China and Japan during 1932 will not be necessary for the purposes of this essay. It is clear, however, that in a time of great turmoil, including what was the beginning of Japan’s occupation of much of China that would persist throughout World War II, Jones and his fellow commissioners were able to have meaningful visits in China and Japan, and to make valuable contacts with deeply pious persons, both Christian and non-Christian.
One story well illustrates both Jones’s imperviousness to pressure and his single-minded determination to learn from all sincere spiritual seekers. While Jones was in Japan, the National Christian Council of Japan grew concerned about the Commission’s extensive contacts with practitioners of Buddhism and Shinto. When their protest was delivered to the Commission, Chairman Hocking consulted Jones about what they should do. A visit to a Zen monastery had been planned that same evening. Jones is reported to have quietly responded, "We’ll spend the evening with our Buddhist brethren." The result was "a rare and deeply moving opportunity."
35The commissioners did not insulate themselves from severe criticism of Protestant missions. An interesting case in point was a letter that Jones received from a Presbyterian missionary and also the latest star in the literary pantheon, Pearl Buck, who had published her novel The Good Earth to wide acclaim only one year previously.
Jones had written her, asking what would be required to build in China a vital religious fellowship that cut across denominational lines. Pessimistic that this kind of fellowship could be realized in China, she believed that it would take "almost totally new leadership and missionary personnel" to accomplish what Jones sought. Buck "technically" belonged to the church (an odd statement for a missionary), but she found that the churches in China had "too evil a savor." Nothing in the Christian churches there had been "of any help" to her. She still sought out those, like herself, "who are trying to find out what a Christian life really is in the circumstances in which we find ourselves... . The emphasis of the church has not been upon right living, that is, conduct, in China, at least, but upon a spoken profession of belief, and so members of the church have not been often enough Christians as well."
Buck’s profound appreciation of Chinese culture had left her significantly alienated from the aims and activities of most Western missionaries.
36 It is likely that Buck’s letter reinforced Jones’s pre-existing skepticism of the course undertaken by Christian missions in China. His journey of investigation in the spring of 1932 had only reinforced his doubts.After an intense period of writing and discussing numerous drafts, the unanimous fifteen-member report from the Commission of Appraisal was published in November, 1932, about five months after their return to the mainland United States. Virtually from its moment of publication, the report, entitled Re-Thinking Missions, created a sensation. The Book-of-the-Month club included the committee report among its offerings. Harper and Brothers observed that it was difficult to keep the book in stock. By April 1933, over 43,000 copies of the book had been sold.
Re-Thinking Missions was unveiled with a splash of publicity. Its grand unveiling at a conference at the Hotel Roosevelt in New York on November 18 and 19, 1932 (made a little less grand by piecemeal press releases during the preceding weeks for maximum publicity) covered all the major themes of the report.
In practical terms, the Commission urged more united and coordinated effort by Protestant denominations on behalf of Asian missions. A proliferation of small, underfunded, sectarian missions weakened the Protestant witness in Asia. They wanted missions to show the way toward Christian unity. Therefore, some missions and mission schools should be closed. Fewer, but higher quality, missionaries should be sent from America and Europe. New missionaries should be required to attend an orientation school, in which they would learn not only the language but also the culture of the people among whom they will serve.
The Commission also urged a devolution of control of missions from the outsiders to the citizens of the country where the mission was based. In essence, the commission was recommending churches originated by missionaries should become, as quickly as possible, indigenous and under local control.
37More controversial was the Commission’s statement of the principles (developed in the first four chapters of Re-Thinking Missions) on which Christian missions should be based. As a starting point, the Commission affirmed a general understanding among American and European Protestants circa 1930 that missionaries should seek primarily to understand, rather than to condemn, the culture of their hosts.
But then the Commission took this widely accepted point several steps further. Inasmuch as the Asian religions were part of the indigenous culture to which missionaries should relate in a positive manner, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism and Shinto should be seen as sister religions, allies in the struggle against the secularism and materialism that was so characteristic of the age.
That, of course, had been a major part of Jones’s message to the Jerusalem Conference in 1928. Moreover, Christians should seek out commonalities between Christianity and Asian religions. The Commission urged missionaries to engage in more frequent and heartfelt interreligious dialogue. Christians should seek to learn from practitioners of Asian religions. There might be aspects of Asian religions – the practice of meditation by Buddhists was singled out as one such aspect – from which Christians could benefit.
Increased religious unity between non-Christians and Christians was quite desirable. Missionaries should remember that "the inalienable religious intuition of the human soul" underlies all of the world’s religions. "The God of this intuition is the true God: to this extent universal religion has not to be established, it exists." Commission members urged that Christians allow truth, rather than tradition, to be their guide: "All fences and private properties in truth are futile: the final truth, whatever it may be, is the New Testament of every existing faith."
38While affirming that there should be a role for Christian missions, the role laid out for missionaries by the Commission was a much more humble, perhaps even a self-effacing one, than the pattern that had existed heretofore. The Commission endorsed Gandhi’s views condemning the linkage of medical or social services to evangelism as compromising the purity of intention relative to the services provided.
The missionary should strive primarily to set an outstanding example in his behavior and testimony. "It is clearly not the duty of the Christian missionary to attack the non-Christian systems of religion. Nor is it his primary duty to denounce the errors and abuses he may see in them: it is his primary duty to present in positive form his conception of the true way of life and let it speak for itself."
39When Jones spoke at that November meeting in the Hotel Roosevelt, he used his time primarily to amplify this last point. In order for the church to thrive, the faith of its leaders must be lively and convincing. This is particularly true if the church wishes to gain the adherence of the youth. "What is wanted is not a person who can talk about issues that carried conviction thirty years ago, but one, who at the present moment, can diffuse and transmit the life and the spirit of Jesus Christ in convincing and demonstrative fashion to the youth of today."
Missionaries should preach with their lives, not mainly with words:
If you can go into a rural neighborhood and teach the mothers how to care for their babies, teach the children, boys and girls, how to play, and be one with them in it, if you can transform the quality of agriculture, if you can lift the economic level of the whole village and make yourself a part of the life of the village while you are doing it, and all that time be revealing the dynamic and central message of Christianity, you will probably get more permanent results than if you will hold a revival meeting of the emotional type and get just a few stirred, and then go off and leave them!
A successful missionary "lives his way into the lives of those [people]. They know him as a friend.... He feels the beating of their heart and their human needs, and he tries to draw all of them into a unity of spirit, so that when out of that comes a church, it will be a church of the community and not a foreign imported thing standing apart altogether from the main stream of the life of the neighborhood."
Several questioners pressed Jones about the allegedly corrosive effects of modernism on Asian missions, especially when it came to transmitting novel reinterpretations of the Bible. Jones refused to go along with their presuppositions: "If you are going to make the Bible a book that is dictated and to be taken literally and handled literally, and you are going to make people accept those statements on a literal basis, then ultimate failure is inevitable. But if instead we think of the Bible as a marvelous piece of inspired literature, the literature of the Spirit of God for the ages, and if we bring our students to feel its power and to see the insight there," then Jones was confident that the presentation of a missionary (or, for that matter, a college professor of philosophy) would be far more persuasive.
40Jones made similar observations about the challenges faced by missionaries in a background paper for the Laymen’s Commission:
41The new missionary, in the new age in which our tasks lie, goes out, or at least should go out to other lands, to share with other peoples all that Christ has come to mean to him. He sees, or at least should see, aspects of truth and reality in all religions that have come down out of the past and have held an important place in the lives of men and women and in the cultures of races of people through centuries of generations. It is one of the first duties of a "Christian quest" in a foreign field to enter in sympathetic rapport with those with whom he is visiting and that means that he must understand with genuine insight the ideal aspects and the lifting power of their native religions. If God is truly Father we can well believe, with St. Paul at Lystra, that He has not left any of His people without some witness of Himself.
...If he is truly "sensitive" in spirit, he will realize that the civilization from which he has come and which he represents has its own shortcomings and defects, and this consciousness will keep him humble and modest in attitude of mind rather than dominant and superior. One cannot be a genuine friend and sharer of life without both giving and taking. It cannot be a "one-way process." There must be a mutual and reciprocal correspondence.
Many of the initial reports were favorable. C. F. Andrews, a missionary in India and a mutual friend of both Jones and Gandhi, praised the report as "altogether refreshing and full of promise for the future."
42 Pearl Buck reported in the pages of Christian Century that she had read Re-Thinking Missions "with enthusiasm and delight.... I think that this is the only book I have ever read which seems to me literally true in its every observation and right in its every conclusion."If the report’s conclusions were heeded, Buck wrote, missionaries might be "sent to satisfy a special need of a community – not the artificial need of a mission station," and they would "let the spirit of Christ be manifested by mode of life rather than by preaching."
43 Buck’s views caused enormous controversy, especially after she repeated them in a speech at New York’s Astor Hotel. In April, 1933, she submitted her resignation as a missionary, and the Missions Board of the Northern Presbyterian Church accepted it "with regret."44Carl Heath with the Friends Service Committee in London wrote to Jones that he had heard much "alarmed talk of the Laymen’s Report and the excitement over it in America." From what he had heard, however, he himself was in agreement with its conclusions.
45Soon the storm hit in full force. One of the earliest critical reviews of Re-Thinking Missions was written by the formidable Robert Speer, a Presbyterian missionary executive and long-time ally of Jones and Mott in the ecumenical movement. He blasted the report as a "humanistic" document that had as its "theological basis old Protestant liberalism, already superseded in Europe by a deep evangelical wave."
Speer complained that the report slighted Christ: "This conception of Christ and His person, place and nature as a teacher and example and spirit with no avowed acceptance of Christ as God or as Redeemer or Saviour and with no witness to the meaning of His Death and the significance of His Resurrection are not possible for the Churches which hold still the great creeds."
In fact, he was uncomfortable with any suggestion that Christianity could be equated in any fashion with other religions: "Christianity is not a religion in the sense of the non-Christian religions. It is not a search of man for God. It is God’s offer of Himself to Man in Christ." Nor was Christ a founder of a religion like Buddha or Muhammad, but rather the fullness of the Godhead bodily.
Speer agreed with the Report’s authors that Christianity should be "proclaimed in a simple positive message," but contended that secularism or humanism was not any more of a threat to Christianity than non-Christian religions. "Humanism must be met in the same positive spirit as the non-Christian religions."
While Speer agreed with the report’s authors on some of their practical proposals, including devolution of the control of missions to citizens of the countries in which they were located, the overall impact of his early and critical review was very damaging to the report’s chances of acceptance in American Protestant churches.
46 Speer’s blockbuster assault on the report had a mammoth effect on Protestants worldwide and helped to bring forth many similarly critical evaluations. The famous Indian missionary, E. Stanley Jones, faulted the report for giving too much credence to non-Christian religions. "The soul of educated China is a great moral and spiritual vacuum," wrote Jones, a vacuum which Christianity was ideally positioned to fill.47The eminent Japanese Christian Kagawa wrote scathingly of Re-Thinking Missions as "Missions Without the Cross." He deplored the Commission’s "lack of militant spirit," as he charged the Commissioners as having "forgotten that the starting point of missions is a commission from God."
48As the criticisms multiplied, even the Commission’s sponsors began backing away from it. Only two of the seven denominational sponsors issued something approaching an endorsement of the entire report. The Methodists were the most forthcoming in this respect. The General and Women’s Boards of the Methodist Church issued a statement that said in part that "the search for reality and the courageous facing of the issues so characteristic of this Inquiry are in full accord with the temper of the youth today and will give new meaning and effect to the Christian Message as it is presented to this disturbed and distracted modern world."
Only the Congregationalists, among the other six, seemed ready to endorse the report without any major reservations. But the Northern Presbyterians, United Presbyterians, Protestant Episcopal Church, Reformed Church of America and Northern Baptists all criticized the philosophical underpinnings of the report, while finding merit in some of its practical suggestions.
The Presbyterians wrote that "the supreme and controlling aim of Foreign Missions is to make the Lord Jesus Christ known to all men as their Divine Saviour and to persuade them to become His disciples [and] to gather these disciples into Christian Churches," and faulted the Commission for its failure to affirm the unique supremacy of Jesus Christ as the Son of God and only Savior of mankind.
The Northern Baptists, the denomination to which John D. Rockefeller, Jr., belonged, could not endorse the report but recognized that a report with such a prominent sponsor could be criticized only with the greatest sensitivity. Thus the Baptists found "the first section devoted to the philosophic and religious basis of missions ... unacceptable and inadequate" for its failure to present Christ as pre-eminent, but they also emphasized that they found themselves "in hearty accord with many of the recommendations in the report." Conservatives among the Northern Baptists attempted to force their Mission Board to prove their orthodoxy by entirely repudiating Re-Thinking Missions, but their attempt to strengthen the condemnation of the Commissioners failed.
49Some churches sought desperately to seek a private exemption from the sweeping conclusions of the Laymen’s Report. John W. Wood, a representative of the Episcopal Church, wrote to Jones, asking to what extent statements praising Episcopal missions that Jones had allegedly made during the Commission’s private deliberations were accurate. Of course, Jones could not respond to such a query.
50Roderick Scott, a philosopher sympathetic to Re-Thinking Missions, wrote to Jones from Fukien Christian University in China, querying, "Is it really true that these multitudinous conservatives are really in the seven missions investigated? I thought they were mostly outside in the ‘lesser breeds.’" Scott called the widespread criticism of the report among mainline Protestants "a good deal of a blow."
51 Surely he spoke for Jones and many others with that statement.The debate also raged among Protestant denominations which had not been sponsors of the Laymen’s Inquiry. One such debate with definite repercussions for Rufus Jones was that which occurred among the Southern Baptists. Jones addressed the Virginia Baptists, then as now among the most moderate of the Southern Baptists, early in 1933, and was pleased by the support that he received from them. In February 1933, Jones received an anguished letter from W. O. Carver, President of the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Jones had been scheduled to deliver the prestigious Norton Lectures at the Seminary in April, only two months hence. Carver informed Jones that the faculty had decided to cancel the lectures, because of their disagreement with Re-Thinking Missions and their disinclination to hear lectures from somebody so closely associated with that work.
Jones responded in a calm and kindly manner, stating that he understood Carver’s dilemma entirely. In a low-key way, however, he gently pushed Carver on the subject of Re-Thinking Missions. Jones brought up his positive reception among Virginia Baptists, and Carver was forced to acknowledge divisions among the Southern Baptists by observing that Virginia Baptists did not speak for all Southern Baptists. Jones rebutted Carver’s statement that Re-Thinking Missions constituted a humanist assault on Christianity as follows:
52Every member of the Commission was not only not a humanist, but positively an anti-humanist. Take such a statement as this: "Christianity believes in the real presence of God in personal life and teaches that the highest privilege of religion is a direct experience of companionship with God and union with his will." There is no way to turn that into humanism. There are more passages as positive as that. In fact, the Report is profoundly theistic throughout.
Jones never came close to losing his temper in his exchanges on Re-Thinking Missions, but he was clearly nettled by attacks upon the report that explicitly or implicitly impugned the theological orthodoxy of its authors. Nor did he necessarily convince his critics with his theological defenses of it. John Mackay, analyzing the report’s theology, highlighted what he saw as a "significant, not to say pathetic, incident" from the Hotel Roosevelt Conference.
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