What is the theological equivalent for the conundrum about the tree that falls in the woods without a hearer? What happens when a theological bomb is detonated but no one seems to notice? Is it still a bomb? Is it still destructive?
Re-Thinking Missions, a book published in 1932 just when it seemed the fundamentalist controversy was calming down, was just that’a bombshell dropped right in the middle of the U.S. Protestant world, and yet only those with the best hearing devices heard it go off. Ernest Hocking, a professor of philosophy at Harvard University, wrote the book on behalf of the Laymen's Foreign Missions Inquiry, an interdenominational study underwritten by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., commissioned to investigate the promise and perils of Protestant foreign missions in India, Burma, China, and Japan. Like so many reports of its kind, the Layman's Inquiry wound up revealing more about the laymen conducting the study than it did about Protestant developments in Asia. What it revealed was the triumph of the Social Gospel within the largest Protestant denominations in the United States at the expense of the church's confessional witness of Word and Sacrament. By the 1930s, a socially active and transformational faith had compromised the traditional means of teaching and ministry performed by pastors, evangelists, and missionaries.
The opening section of Re-Thinking Missions tipped the committee's prescriptive hand, even while the tone conveyed an objective description of the contemporary missions enterprise. For instance, Hocking, writing for the entire committee, conceded that all religions had a missionary motive’a debatable proposition since Christianity was responsible for transmitting its faith more than any other world religion aside from Islam. But because each religion’especially the Asian ones of Hinduism, Shinto, and Buddhism’shared with Christianity and Judaism "an ardent desire to communicate a spiritual value regarded as unique and of supreme importance," Hocking could attribute to every great world religion a passion for "saving" unbelievers, thus ironically portraying Eastern religions in remarkably Western (even Christian) terms. Another indication that the committee's minds were already made up was a remark about the limitations of the existing Protestant missionary personnel. Missionaries to Asia were "unduly weak," first, because they lacked coordination and were bogged down in redundancy and inefficiency. Second’and here Hocking revealed his prejudice’the contemporary missionaries were ineffective in "interpreting Christianity to the Orient." But this defect was premised on the committee's own defective understanding of the gospel.
That theological premise was patent in Hocking's description of theological changes that had undermined and essentially removed the old motivation for conducting foreign missions. Sweeping changes in intellectual life, both in the sciences and in philosophy, had yielded new insights in "our religious experience." As such, theology was not the study of God but an attempt to explain human experience. This meant that the "function of religion [is] to bring man into the presence of the everlasting and real." According to this scheme, the idea of heaven, hell, an afterlife, and divine judgment for sin was foreign no matter whether people believed the earth was six thousand or millions of years old. Science, in other words, had little to do with an existential encounter of reality. Be that as it may, Hocking went on to explain the effects of intellectual developments on foreign missions:
Of all the changes in the world, a theological change will bear most directly upon the missionary motive. If the conception of hell changes, if attention is drawn away from the fear of God's punitive justice in the everlasting torment of the unsaved, to happier conceptions of destiny, if there is a shift of concern from other-worldly issues to the problems of sin and suffering in the present life, these changes will immediately alter that view of the perils of the soul which gave to the original motive of Protestant missions much of its poignant urgency.
But Hocking was happy himself to report that Christianity had indeed changed. No longer a religion of fear, it had become one of "beneficence." This meant that the churches had passed through their "bitter" conflicts with science to a stage where free inquiry and full faith were necessary components of a "complete world-view." For some reason, Hocking did not notice that new understandings of human origins did not necessarily alter the problem of human sinfulness and the possibility of a righteous God. No matter, for him and the committee, modern Western Christianity lacked a "disposition to believe that sincere and aspiring seekers after God in other religions are to be damned." Instead, the churches had "become less concerned…to save men from eternal punishment than from the danger of losing the supreme good."
From this shift followed an approach to evangelism that paid less attention to word and more to deed, less to the message for individuals and more to the order of societies. Here Re-Thinking Missions echoed a declaration of missions leaders that had met only four years earlier in Jerusalem. The best and brightest of Western missions personnel affirmed that "man is a unity" and so the physical, mental, and social aspects of his needs could not be isolated. For this reason, "missionary work must be sufficiently comprehensive to serve the whole man." Ministry to the entire person, as well as society, elevated medicine and education to as high (if not higher) a rank as preaching. If medicine and education were subordinate to evangelism, then the assistance missionaries offered to Asians ceased to be disinterested and would be inferior, because such teaching and healing were not as valuable as salvation. The way around this dilemma was to see that ministering to the "secular needs of men in the spirit of Christ is evangelism." An added benefit of word and deed missions was that deeds were not as controversial as preaching. After all, doctrine could offend an unbelieving Asian, and separate Presbyterian from Methodist missionaries. But missionary enterprises that gave the right emphasis to social ministries ultimately showed the superiority of Christianity to religions of "illusion" or "pessimism." Christianity "regards the condition of the human being in human society as an express object of God's concern," Hocking wrote. Regarding social service as something more than a humanitarian act of relief but as "an act of union with God's will," then, was "in a special sense an expression of the kernel of the Christian faith."
This reconfiguration of the nature and purpose of missions, and even of the gospel itself, afforded Hocking and the committee space to reconfigure the church in relation to the kingdom of God. The interconnectedness of persons, society, and the whole cosmos pointed to an understanding of the kingdom of God that transcended the church and even religion. For Hocking, this kingdom stood for "the full development of individuals," the "maturing of social groups," and the "spiritual unity of all men and races." Such unity could not come through religion alone, but only from a global consensus on "the deeper principles of right and wrong." Also important was a "special concern in the values of existence," because whatever "heightens imagination, or intensifies affection and joy, enters directly into [the kingdom of God's] province." With such an expansive view of the kingdom, the task of planting churches increasingly took a backseat to constructing a spiritual organism that could "further the true ends of life." For this reason, planting churches and evangelism "in many cases defeated the central business of missionary enterprise."
This was a stunning rejection of Christian missions as they had been conducted for the better part of two centuries among Protestants, but the report caused barely a ripple in the world of mainline Protest-antism’except among the northern Presbyterians, who had just spent a decade disputing the essential articles of the faith and the limits of disagreement. One reason for the silence may be that few people cared about reports issued by denominational bureaucrats and even less about the findings of a Harvard University philosopher. But just as likely was the reality that most members of the largest Protestant denominations saw little problem with the church engaging in social forms of Christianity (also known as the Social Gospel). Since the era when mainline Protestantism had come into its own, that of the Second Great Awakening and the Benevolent Empire of social and moral reform agencies, Anglo-American Protestants had taken for granted the mutually reinforcing ministries of evangelism and social activism. The only question was the right proportions of social reform and evangelism for the evangelical Protestant recipe of realizing God's kingdom. By the 1920s, only the most liberal of Protestants were adjusting the ingredients, while the majority of the Protestants committed to evangelism had found parachurch agencies or nondenominational congregations to conduct the work of soul winning. In the middle were denominational agencies that tried to keep word and deed harmoniously together.
Among the northern Presbyterians, where a conservative remnant continued to look to the Reformed confessions for self-identity, debates about the relationship between social and declaratory Christianity could still generate speakers and audiences. Those audiences were especially large when the likes of a celebrated novelist and Presbyterian missionary was giving the speech. Pearl Buck, recently home on furlough from China and having written on the basis of her experience the highly acclaimed novel The Good Earth (1931), was beginning to sever her ties to the Presbyterian Church's Board of Foreign Missions, but she did give one talk in late 1932 to a crowd of Presbyterian women and board officials at the Astor Hotel in New York City in which she decided to heap praise on Hocking's report. She echoed the point about the mediocrity of personnel. Instead of attending to the needs of the Asian people, missionaries were overly burdened with gaining converts. What the churches needed to do was emphasize deed more than word. "I am weary unto death with this incessant preaching," she declared. "Let us cease our talk for a time and cut off our talkers and try to express our religion in terms of living service." Buck did not want missionaries to abandon the Word entirely, though what the Bible revealed to her was a far cry from the Confession of Faith. But if a missionary would simply throw himself in the "native work" of the people he was serving, "[p]reaching would be his last task." Buck concluded by endorsing Hocking's report: "If Christians take this book seriously at all, I foresee possibly the greatest missionary impetus we have known in centuries."
With a publication Presbyterians had formally cosponsored and with one of their missionaries publicly rejecting the task of evangelism, the head of the church's mission board, Robert E. Speer, had at least a public relations problem if not an actual snag in operations. So, on the one hand, Speer tried in his little book "Re-Thinking Missions" Examined (1933) to show support for a report his own office had helped prepare. He complimented Hocking for calling for higher standards among personnel, establishing indigenous churches, and applying Christianity to social problems. But, on the other hand, Speer was loath to recognize in Asian religions any value for the ultimate question of eternal life. Christ is still "the way," he wrote, "not a way, and there is no goal beyond Him or apart from Him, nor any search for truth that is to be found outside him."
The problem for confessional Presbyterians, as J. Gresham Machen's assessment revealed, was that Speer talked one way but acted in another. The general secretary's affirmation of Christ's uniqueness was reassuring to many evangelical church members. But did the missions board actually implement programs that adhered to that affirmation? The example of Pearl Buck, who resigned from the missions board’and whose resignation was accepted "with reluctance"’made this apparent hypocrisy all the more pressing. How many missionaries like Buck had the Presbyterian missions board sent to Asia and other parts of the world? How many on the staff of the missions board examined missionary candidates for their understanding of the gospel, their commitment to planting churches, and their view of the church's purpose?
Machen believed that the report by Hocking itself constituted a "public attack against the very heart of the Christian religion," but the question was the degree to which Presbyterian officials were responsible for or sympathetic to it. Speer himself might affirm the finality of Jesus Christ, but would he sever ties between the denomination's board and the laymen's committee, or would he have his deputies weed out personnel or programs that harbored Hocking's view of Christianity? These denominational realities prompted Machen to bypass Re-Thinking Missions and scrutinize the board itself. For instance, he pointed out that the Presbyterian board had endorsed and given support to two liberal evangelicals, Sherwood Eddy, a leader in the Student Volunteer Movement and the YMCA, and Toyohiko Kagawa, a Japanese Christian reformer and labor activist. This guilt-by-association tactic was unconvincing to many, even if it did demonstrate that the Presbyterian board was hardly disciplined in its execution of responsibilities. As the Harvard historian William R. Hutchison noted, Machen's list of questionable missionaries or related workers was also "an honor roll of contemporary Christian leadership." In other words, Machen shot himself in the foot if his aim was to persuade Presbyterians in the middle.
But if the point of Machen's critique of Speer and his Presbyterian peers was to illustrate a point he had been making for a decade, then his argument was not so self-destructive since it proved the overwhelming chasm in his communion between liberals and conservatives. In his celebrated book Christianity and Liberalism, Machen had feared already that American missionaries were going to foreign lands not with a "message of salvation" but with a very different appeal, such as, "We are missionaries to Japan; Japan will be dominated by militarism unless the principles of Jesus have sway; send us out therefore to prevent the calamity of war." Such a basis for missions was contrary to the message to which the Presbyterian Church was legally bound through its constitution. As Machen reminded his readers, most of the Protestant churches in the United States were creedal churches, which in the case of the Presbyterian Church meant that officers subscribed the Westminster Standards. Liberals were, in his estimation, intellectually dishonest in taking those vows if they did not believe and teach the theology of the confession. But liberals were not the only ones who threatened the confessional character of the Presbyterian Church. Broadly evangelical leaders like Speer or liberal evangelicals like Eddy, who might mix different proportions of evangelism and social Christian, were also guilty of betraying the cause of Presbyterian missions if they did not hold to the Reformed creeds or make those affirmations the basis for planting churches around the world.
Of course, Machen lost the conflict with Pres-byterian leaders and was eventually found guilty for insubordination when he founded a new missions agency dedicated to sending out missionaries committed to the Reformed faith. But the points at issue in the Presbyterian controversy’the relationship between word and deed in the tasks of evangelism, missions, and church planting’has not gone away, even for evangelical Protestants who would sympathize with Machen's opposition to liberalism. The recent "Cape Town Commitment" published and affirmed at the 2010 Lausanne Congress shows the lingering confusion over the spiritual nature of Christian ministry and the general or common tasks of such activities as education and medicine. For instance, the "Commitment" calls for Christians to be people of truth, and the statement places, in numerical order, at least living the truth ahead of proclaiming it. It explains that "[s]poken proclamation of the truth of the gospel remains paramount in our mission." But such proclamation "cannot be separated from living out the truth" because word and deed "must go together." An indication of just how far the combination of works and words must go comes in a section of the declaration where delegates affirmed "Christ's Peace for His Suffering Creation":
We encourage Christians worldwide to:
A) Adopt lifestyles that renounce habits of consumption that are destructive or polluting;
B) Exert legitimate means to persuade governments to put moral imperatives above political expediency on issues of environmental destruction and potential climate change;
C) Recognize and encourage the missional calling both of (i) Christians who engage in the proper use of the earth's resources for human need and welfare through agriculture, industry and medicine, and (ii) Christians who engage in the protection and restoration of the earth's habitats and species through conservation and advocacy. Both share the same goal for both serve the same Creator, Provider and Redeemer.
A concern for creation is indeed a worthy reminder for all Christians, but is it the work of evangelism and missions? This was the same dilemma that confronted Protestants a century ago who were rethinking the task of foreign missions in light of the globalization of Western culture’through technology, medicine, education, and economics. By expanding the work of missions to include cultural and social activities, mainline Protestants lost the capacity to distinguish the spiritual and eternal responsibilities of the church from the mundane, temporal and, yes, worthwhile, duties of other governments, schools, banks, and farms. To be sure, the motivation was usually laudable, either to help less fortunate people or to bring glory to God across the wide range of human endeavors. But lost in these wholesome aims were two truths that Presbyterians confessed and that conservatives like Machen always kept in mind when contemplating the work of the church, whether in the United States or China: first, that the visible church is the kingdom of Christ (WCF 25.2); and second, that unto this visible church God gave "the ministry, oracles, and ordinances of God, for the gathering and perfecting of the saints, in this life, to the end of the world" (WCF 25.3).
Keeping those truths straight will not resolve a host of dilemmas that surround the work of evangelism and missions, but it will help in preserving the uniqueness and necessity of the church's ministry.
