Concluded: Rufus Jones and the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry: How a Quaker Helped to Shape Modern Ecumenical Christianity. By Stephen W. Angell
Jones was referred a question asking how the report’s conclusions could be justified in light of "the fact that in the last decade new and potent ideological currents have appeared which take direct issue with the characteristic thought tendencies from which the Commission has derived the particular philosophy of religion underlying its report." Jones evaded the question by stating that he was "quite certain I don’t know what the ‘potent ideological currents’ are that have appeared ... and until I have more light as to exactly what is wanted here, I cannot very well both give the dream and the interpretation thereof. (Laughter and applause)"
As often happened, Jones attempted to defuse an awkward question with some of his oft-noted humor. But Mackay found Jones’s response indicative of a "lack of sensitiveness on the part of the Appraisal Commission to the experiences, problems and answers of a generation which is taking the field."
53Both sides justified their positions by the appeal (or lack of appeal) to "youth," which seems to carry a double meaning: While the debate here focused in part on the position of real, flesh-and-blood young people, the concern over "youth" was also a metaphor for the future fate of foreign missions. In his letter to Carver, Jones commended the "striking and enthusiastic" response of young Christians toward the fresh perspectives contained within the report. Probably he had in mind those associated with the YMCA and YWCA – young people who were very aware of current world trends, and were quite sensitive to the positive implications and the insistence upon self-determination that was so evident in anticolonial and nationalist movements in Asia.
Howard Thurman, a seminary graduate who studied with Jones as a special student in 1929, exemplified this scrupulous attitude in a trip as part of an African-American Christian delegation to India in 1935. Thurman insisted that his trip, under the auspices of the YMCA, focus on interreligious dialogue, and that advocacy of conversion to Christianity not be a part of his delegation’s message.
On the other hand, Speer believed that the Christianity of Re-Thinking Missions was "not the view of Christianity which is to command the youth of the world. It has already turned from it." Speer and his allies had hoped for a reinvigoration of the push to convert non-Christian peoples and a rededication to the goal of "evangelization of the world in this generation" that had been enunciated so forcefully a generation earlier. The report, by emphasizing religious dialogue and encouraging mutual influence among all of the world’s religions, threatened the future of missions in the eyes of the staunchest supporters of a traditional missionary philosophy.
54Quakers joined in the criticism of the Laymen’s Report. Robert J. Davidson, an English Friend who had served for more than four decades as a missionary in China, found the Report to be "in many ways a serious criticism of the Friends’ Service Council.... One fails to find, on the surface at any rate, much, if anything, of the spirit which possessed Paul when he said, ‘Woe is me if I preach not the gospel.’ There seems to be a lack of the fire and passion of men who have found and possess a solution of and a remedy for world trouble and must make it known."
Nevertheless, Davidson’s approach toward non-Christian religions did not differ greatly from that of the Laymen’s Commission in his belief that all religions contained a measure of truth:
55All is part of one great whole. I therefore have approached these religions in order to find out what God has been teaching the people who follow them. I find they have, to my view, in many respects misinterpreted God, but have not both the Jewish and Christian Church done the same? But notwithstanding such errors, whenever men have recognised and obeyed a Being – a good Spirit greater than themselves upon whom they are dependent, have they not worshiped the Eternal? I try therefore not to emphasise this or that religion by giving them different names. Naturally as a Friend my approach has been by an appeal to ‘that of God in every man,’ an aspect of the subject hardly referred to in the Report.
Another Quaker, Gerald K. Hibbert, praised Re-Thinking Missions as an "epoch-making event in the history of Foreign Missionary Work." But he also criticized the way that the report represented Christianity. "There is something lacking in the presentation of Christianity here put forward. It seems a bit thin."
Echoing the Neo-Orthodox theologians like Karl Barth then newly popular in Europe, Hibbert observed that "too little emphasis is placed on the initiative and ‘otherness’ of God. The Divine immanence is over-stressed, and the transcendence of God is not sufficiently recognised.... The Gospel outlined is not big enough and deep enough to win the world."
Unlike Davidson, Hibbert made a brief, quirky reference to Jones as one of the authors of the report. Hibbert stated that he could "well understand" Neo-Orthodox theologian Emil Brunner stating of Jones that "he is not a Christian, he is a neo-Platonist." Even among Quakers, then, Jones’s personal theological stance came into question during this controversy.
56 But the thoughtful, even restrained, evaluations of Hibbert and Davidson went largely, perhaps even entirely, unnoticed outside their small Quaker readership.Aggressive critics made the commissioners’ task of defending the report an awkward and uncomfortable one. Capitalizing on the report’s unpopularity, critics such as Speer and E. Stanley Jones called on the commissioners to revise their work and especially to rewrite the sections on missionary principles, a proposal that no commissioner was willing to entertain.
Speer, in the process of dissecting the report, sought to exploit private disagreements among its authors, disregarding the fact that in the end the report had been unanimously approved by all Commission members. Charles P. Emerson, a Commission member, wrote a frantic letter that was distributed to all other fourteen members. Emerson wanted to ensure that all of the Commission’s preliminary discussion of the report would be kept confidential. "Personally I feel that we should refuse to discuss any of our deliberations and that certainly none of us should emphasize any part which we may think we played to save our reputation as fundamentalists. The strength of the report was that it was unanimous. Why can’t we emphasize that?"
57There were those who refused to believe that Jones had played a significant role in shaping any of the controversial sections of Re-Thinking Missions. Mabel Ruth Newlin, a missionary in China, discerned (to her regret) that Jones did not write the first four chapters of Re-Thinking Missions describing the relationship of Christians to non-Christians. Those chapters "lack the warm and gripping challenge of the Master Himself, which calls out the best that’s in us, that was so clearly expressed" in Jones’s 1928 essay for the Jerusalem Council. Newlin had been pessimistic about the report ever since she met with members of the Appraisal Commission during their tour in China in 1932. She had then "wondered what kind of united statement could ever come from such a variance of religious experience and life."
58But in fact Newlin, for all of her astute assessment of the Commission members, was mistaken in dissociating Jones from the controversial parts of the report. Speer, the most knowledgeable critic of the Report, listed Jones and the Commission’s chairman, W. E. Hocking, as the two Commissioners most responsible for the language on Christians’ relations with non-Christians.
59 Speer, unlike Newlin, thought the language of the report to be quite similar to Jones’s Jerusalem essay.Perhaps because of the concern for solidarity raised by Emerson, Jones did not correct Newlin, but in retrospect it turns out that Speer, rather than Newlin, was more nearly correct. Early in the stages of the Commission’s report, Hocking wrote to Jones assigning him the primary responsibility for drafting chapters 4 through 6 ("The Scope of the Work of the Church," "The Mission and the Church," and "Education") but adding that "it is not easy to localize your contribution, for the simple reason that your contribution belongs everywhere." A later letter from Jones to Hocking, written while the report was being drafted, shows Jones also working quite hard on chapter 3 ("Christianity: Its Message for the Orient"). Jones, a quick worker, had completed his assigned chapters well before his deadline and apparently was assisting Hocking on chapter 3 as a favor.
60At the Hotel Roosevelt Conference which introduced the report to the world, Hocking was identified as "having special responsibility" for the first four chapters, although in a footnote in the published "Proceedings" Jones was identified as the co-author of chapter 4. At this meeting, Hocking defended the first four chapters, while Jones took on the subject matter of chapter 5, "The Mission and the Church."
61 On a provisional basis, one might be tempted to conclude that Hocking was the main author of chapters 1 and 2 ("The Mission in the World of Today," "Christianity, Other Religions, and Non-Religion"), that Hocking and Jones co-authored chapter 4 (and possibly chapter 3 also), and that Jones was the main author of chapter 5, and a significant contributor to chapter 7.62The report had fourteen chapters altogether. There is no evidence that either Jones or Hocking had primary responsibility for the other eight chapters, exclusively dealing with various social and practical aspects of missions; presumably, some of the other thirteen members of the Commission of Appraisal assumed leadership for those. The first four chapters, however, were clearly the most controversial.Jones would have been the first to state that any such conclusion, while almost surely accurate as far as it goes, would have been utterly misleading. In his letter to Carver, he wrote that he "did not write the early chapters, though every member of the Commission contributed something to every chapter."
At the Hotel Roosevelt meeting, Jones was more specific. "We re-wrote nearly every chapter five times," he said. "We brought in our draft and read it to the group; they were very frank in what they said about it; we re-wrote and brought it in again, and re-read it, and had it re-criticized, and then re-wrote it, until we got very tired of the word re-."
In other words, each part of the Report was thoroughly a product of the entire committee.
63 Even though little in the report can be identified as coming solely from Jones’s pen, Hocking did not exaggerate in his characterization of Jones’s importance to the enterprise. Jones’s major influence on the project and his hearty agreement with its themes are quite evident.In this regard, one should note the strong philosophical similarities that tie the report to certain writings of Jones that preceded the drafting of the report (his 1928 Jerusalem essay and A Preface to Christian Faith), as well as to his essay on "The Background and Objectives of Protestant Foreign Missions" included in one of the supplementary volumes published alongside the report. Given the weight of the combined evidence, there should be no doubt that Jones’s contributions to both the philosophical and practical portions of Re-Thinking Missions were very substantial.
For Jones and the other Commissioners, their defense of the report, while valiantly attempted, quickly began to seem a losing battle. Rockefeller agreed to pay Jones’s expenses, if he should wish to travel anywhere to explain the report. In general, Jones appeared to be more in demand as a speaker than the Commission chairman, W. E. Hocking, or other members. A Presbyterian minister was reported as saying "that in a theological atmosphere as conservative as this, the greatest good we can do is to let the people understand that someone as deeply spiritual as Rufus Jones is behind this Report. Many people have been made to believe that the Report is a ‘raid’ by worldly modernists on some sacred Christian precincts. Hence we believe that an inspirational address by Dr. Jones will do us great good."
64Jones did undertake some travels to defend the Commission’s work, although not as many as requested. Jones wrote to Rockefeller apprising him of the encouraging results of a meeting in Minneapolis in the fall of 1933, and Rockefeller dictated an appreciative reply. "It is a great service which you members of the Commission are rendering in going about the country to interpret the report. I feel sure more is being accomplished than you can readily imagine. Please know of my personal appreciation of the important contribution which you are making and the growing satisfaction which I take in the results which have attended the labors of the Commission."
65Rockefeller, however, had privately soured on studies of church affairs as a result of the controversies precipitated by Re-Thinking Missions, and he withdrew his financial backing from the Laymen’s Inquiry parent body, the Institute for Social and Religious Research, leading to its demise. The Commission’s report did play a large part in influencing Rockefeller’s reducing his contributions toward the foreign missionary enterprises of Protestant denomination. By 1935, Rockefeller was convinced that the Northern Baptists would not take heed of the Commission’s recommendations, so he ceased to make contributions to their mission programs. He found Baptists missions to be objectionable because of their creedal and denominational foundation, which he termed "a divisive force in the progress of organized Christian work." He wished to stand with the younger generation "for the fundamentals of Christian unity, feeling confident that on such a foundation they will rear a Church far better adapted to the requirements of their day."
66As for John Mott, whose pleas were directly responsible for Jones’s involvement, he stayed silent in the wake of the attacks levied against the report by his good friend Speer, although "he doubtless held most of the forward-looking positions taken by the report."
67According to Jones’s biographer Elizabeth Gray Vining, Jones was "undismayed" by the controversy,
68 but the true picture seems more complicated than that. While he was encouraged by large sales of Re-Thinking Missions and its favorable reception among many youth, Jones was clearly disappointed by much of the reaction to the report. He was convinced that many of its critics had "profoundly misinterpreted" the report. Jones protested that "Robert Speer has persistently misunderstood its spirit and significance, and though thoroughly honest and sincere has been distinctly unfair."69However, the attacks were potentially endless, and engaging in unrelenting defense was an unsatisfying activity for any of the report’s proponents. Jones eventually sought to give himself some distance from the controversy. When Charles Ewald, who sought to serve the cause by organizing yet another organization – the Modern Missions Movement – in early 1934 to advocate for the recommendations of Re-Thinking Missions, implored Jones to give his backing to the project, the seventy-one-year-old Jones declined.
70 Jones’s reluctant and unobtrusive strategic leadership role in the ecumenical Protestant mission movement, which had seen such a promising beginning with his essay for the Jerusalem Council six years earlier, seemed to be waning as the Commission on which he served remained mired in controversy.How ought we to view the controversy over Re-Thinking Missions in retrospect? It would be tempting to view it as just another aspect of the conflict between fundamentalists and modernists. Commissioner Charles Emerson clearly had this conflict in mind when he cautioned his fellow commissioners, including Jones, against appearing to appease the fundamentalists in an attempt to gain a more positive reception for their report.
Yet that would be a very misleading way to look at this controversy. It is true that fundamentalists did oppose the report, although their tactics for doing so (outright repudiation) were generally rejected by the denominations of which they were a part. But, to the surprise and chagrin of the advocates of Re-Thinking Missions, the Commission’s main opponents were not fundamentalists. Robert Speer, in fact, led the hard-fought struggle against fundamentalism in the Northern Presbyterian Church. Speer’s main fundamentalist adversary, J. Gresham Machen, was expelled from the Northern Presbyterians not long after the Commission report appeared – and one of Machen’s chief complaints was the modernism evidenced by missionaries that Speer had sent abroad.
71Other outspoken opponents of the report, including Charles Raven, Toyohiko Kagawa, and E. Stanley Jones were moderate advocates of the social gospel and generally not classified with the fundamentalists at all. In addition, the controversy over Re-Thinking Missions caused no lasting splits within any of the American Protestant denominations.
A contemporary commentator, Archibald Baker, seemed to have a sounder perspective on the controversy than did Emerson when he discussed three parties to the controversy. Conservatives saw all non-Christian religions as "dead and false," hence God must come to the rescue through Christ. Moderates (or, as Baker writes, "the moderate conservatives or the moderate liberals, according to the term preferred") held a theistic view "modified by scientific methods and findings." This party holds that Christ constitutes the "essence or soul of the gospel, which in the Christian movement incarnates itself in historical forms by taking up those elements of human culture which are of such a nature that they may be ‘baptized into Christ.’"
While moderates tolerate cultural diversity in mission churches and are willing to see positive elements in other religions, Jesus alone is seen as "the unique, perfect, and final revelation of God." The "advanced liberals" constitute the third party, and Re-Thinking Missions represented their views. This view is both theistic and humanist.
Unlike the other two parties, this one downplays human sinfulness. "Human nature is endowed with the ability to discover all that there is to be known with reference to God and truth, by deciphering the revelation which God has made of himself everywhere. Therefore man does not need and never has received any miraculous revelation or redemption."
72Baker’s analysis applies only imperfectly to Jones, who, among other things, had strongly championed revelation, believed in the need for redemption, and experienced miracles. But, in general, this perspective on the controversy seems quite perceptive. In essence, then, the controversy over Re-Thinking Missions found moderates battling with liberals over their respective views, while the fundamentalists sniped at the moderates from the sidelines for the mildness of their critique of this unsound liberalism.
In this controversy, Jones had aligned himself more clearly with the liberals. His 1928 essay for the Jerusalem Council had been marvelously evocative, but indefinite enough that moderates could claim him for their cause of tolerant (yet triumphalist) missions. Five years later, however, moderate Christian leaders could ascertain clearly that Jones’s views were quite different from theirs. It was entirely fitting that the leading modernist of the period, Harry Emerson Fosdick (termed an "evangelical liberal" by Reinhold Niebuhr), should have desired to edit an influential anthology of Jones’s thought after Jones’s death in 1948.
73 There were many areas where Fosdick felt an affinity to Jones, also an evangelical liberal, but his theology of missions was clearly one such area of deep identification.One issue that always has been of great significance for Quaker theology is the significance of the Light (the "inner light" to some; "the Light of Christ" to others) that enlightens all human beings who come into the world (based, of course, on John 1:9.)
The most eminent theologian in the branch of Quakerism from which Jones emerged, Joseph John Gurney, took a rather narrow view of this Light in terms of its operation in non-Christians. Gurney believed that the main purpose of this light of Christ was to show non-Christians the way to Christ. While he reluctantly admitted that "the outward knowledge of Christ is not absolutely indispensable to salvation," he carefully distinguished between the divine light and the human conscience, "a natural faculty" subject to perversion, thereby casting doubt on the ability of those who had not accepted Christ to do what is good.
74Jones took a very different and more expansive view of this question. There is no doubt that, for Jones, a close acquaintance with Christ (or "the Master of Galilee," as he often called him) could enhance one’s experience of the guidance of the Light within oneself. But Jones also clearly believed that non-Christians could have a perfectly adequate spiritual and ethical system without a formal identification with any Christian church. In other words, Jones sided with Gandhi rather than Gurney on this important theological issue.
It is clear that Jones would take this even further: he would have rejected any automatic assertion of the superiority of Christianity (in other words, what Speer called "the finality of Christ") over non-Christian forms of spirituality. If the kind of interreligious dialogue that he favored was really to take root, it was quite clear to Jones that all religious and spiritual seekers and experiencers must be willing to learn from one another. He eschewed the kind of equivocation, setting aside the superiority of Christ at some points but reasserting it at others, that had limited the attempts at interreligious dialogue by Mott and many other contemporary Protestant theologians and missionaries.
The theory that all of the current religions might all be grounded in a God who can be apprehended through a universal religious intuition, as the Commissioners maintained in their report, has never achieved widespread acceptance. Even many scholars of religion are reluctant to agree with that proposition, cognizant as they are of profound and real differences between religions.
It is to their credit, however, that Jones and the other Commissioners did not overreach in their attempt to describe this possible unity of the world’s religions. Their tentative assertions of the unity of the world’s religions were not based upon a delineation of any concepts or doctrines supposed to be at the base of that unity. Rather, for Jones, it is clear that his view of a universal religious intuition was grounded in his moving experiences of worship and spiritual sharing with Buddhists and other adherents to non-Christian religions during his two visits to Asia. The mutuality, reciprocity and humility of the Commissioners’ interaction with Asian non-Christians stands in stark contrast to Speer’s bald assertion of the divine provenance of Christianity towering above the manmade origins of all other religions.
There are many avenues that might lead a serious Christian of the modernist persuasion to the position adopted by the Commission. Ever since Harry Emerson Fosdick had challenged the fundamentalists, tolerance had been a cardinal virtue for modernists. Certainly the famous dictum of Quaker founder George Fox that "there is that of God in every one" could also lead to the kind of universalism that Jones championed.
For Jones, as was the case for Hodgkin and Buck, the simple experience of meeting practitioners of Eastern religions and engaging in meaningful sharing with them provided reason enough for the stance that the Commission took. Of course, for Speer, who placed great value on the historic creeds of Christianity, none of these arguments sufficed to budge him from his view that Christianity was the ultimate and final religion, in a class by itself.
As even Jones’s Quaker critics pointed out, to maintain these positions in a time when conservative Christian ideas were gaining ascendancy was extremely difficult. Karl Barth, the Continental theologian most in vogue, emphatically denied the immanence of God in favor of a renewed appreciation of God’s transcendence. If one favored Barth’s view, then it would seem inevitable that Quaker views of the Light would be one of those aspects of God’s immanence that would be severely questioned.
To Jones’s credit, however, he did not necessarily heed the theological fashion of his times. Like his aunt and uncle, Jones listened well, and his encounters with Asians, such as Gandhi and T. C. Chao, helped him to formulate his views on the question of Christian missions, views which with varying degrees of success he was able to communicate to his American Protestant contemporaries. And with his participation on the Commission which authored Re-Thinking Missions, his views received far greater exposure than they would have under any other imaginable set of circumstances.
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