The New Christian Alignment
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THE most astonishing and epoch-marking revolutions have a way nowadays of coming upon us as by stealth. The eight well-printed and well-bound volumes containing the report of the Jerusalem Meeting of the International Missionary Council now published by the Oxford University Press, contain a living picture of as remarkable a transformation as contemporary history presents. Yet it is a change of which few even among those interested in the world 'expansion of Christianity are fully aware. Nor, indeed, has it fully taken place among all ranks of missionary thought and What a change, for instance, is revealed in the first volume, that on the " Christian Message." Here we find an examina- tion of Christianity in relation to Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Islam. It sets out, not to criticize, but to discover and state the characteristic excellencies of those faiths. The deliberate aim of these' documents, written as they were before the famouS Council Meeting was held at Jerusalem this last spring and revised in the light of the discussions, is to present sympathetically the real values of the non-Christian religions"; the elements in them by which men live. That surely will come to many as a startling eidence of .a new attitude on the part of missions.
It was in such a context of sympathetic thought toward other faiths that the Council sought to discover and state what is the unique value of Christianity itself. It is our de- liberate view that in the concentrated statement of the Christian Message adopted by the Council and forming the last sixteen pages of thiS first volume, we have a profounder, fresher presentation of the eternal verities of the Christian faith stated in terms more real to the new generation than has anywhere been produced since the beginning of the War.
The startling conviction, drove in with irresistible force upon the Council that, arter all, none of these great religions can be regarded as the final enemy of Christianity. The ulti- mate rival of the Christian way of life is materialism, as we...see it sweeping across the world to-day in the tidal forces of modern, scientific, secular civilization. The question at issue in that rivalry is whether the ultimate reality of the universe--and therefore our final scale of values,—is spiritual or material. The real battle is as to whether the material order is to speak the last word in the life of man or whether material things should be the' tool of spiritual aims.
As we move on, however, to the later volumes of the Report, we discover that a sharp distinction is rightly made between materialism and what we may call the secular well-being of man, in other words, his freedom from oppression, eco- nomic, intellectual, or governmental. This freedom is defi- nitely accepted henceforward by the world-wide missionary enterprise as a part of its Christian concern. For example, is there any more eloquent and cogent presentation of the responsibility of Christians for transforming in Asia and Africa as well as in the West the industrial order that is now corroding Oriental civilization and destroying tribal life in Africa than that presented by Mr. R. H. Tawney at Jerusalem and reprinted in these volumes ?
We have already seen, then, expressed in these volumes the revolutionary change now taking place in the attitude of Missions in regard, first, to other religions, then to Western civilization, and, thirdly, to the victims of industrial exploitation.
A fourthre' vohition is in the attitude of missions to education.
All over the world,l'itinee the War, Governm- ents have been and
are transforming and recreating education, often in the light of purely nationalistic conceptions. Now, however, up-to-date
thought everywhere shows an astonishing parallelism of pure education with the Christian purpose and, more startling still, with the - 'actual methods and, if we may say so, the very " technique " of Jesus' own teaching. The survey in the volume on Religious Education reveals a new conception of the place Christian education must play in the world's future as a whole, as well as the vast field of pOssible co-operation between Governments and missions in this area.
In this whole realm of Christian education, there is no field so immense as that of the peasant populations of the world, so often forgotten. Yet two out of every three living beings belong to what has been called " the green proletariat." This report gives as masterly a survey of this subject as has yet been assembled. Far from dealing simply in generalities, it gathers together the experiments actually being made by missionaries in co-operative banks, in marketing and buying, in rural sanitation, domestic hygiene, child-welfare, teacher- training, improvement of poultry and silk-worm rearing, cottage industries ; in a word, the development among boys and girls of real village citizenship. Imagine these subjects in a missionary report twenty years ago ! But it is now proved and accepted that the missionaries' task is to educate youth for life—and for life not only in the next world, but in this one Turning from this undramatic, but fundamental subject of rural life to the vehement and furious passions roused by inter-racial conflicts we take up the volume on Racial Problems. Here, again, we find, on the one hand, detailed analysis by experts of local areas of racial friction, and, on the other hand, a forward-looking, courageous group of " Findings " that have a real cutting edge.
We are thus brought back to the problem on which, surely, the future of the human race depends. The question at issue is this : Has secular civilization alone, apart from the spiritual power and standard realized through the Christian idea of the universe, the power to save man, not only individually, but also corporately from the racial wars that confront him and from the industrial and mechanistic tyrannies that menace him ? Man, by his triumph in the spheres of applied science, has achieved colossal triumphs in the aeroplane, in wireless, in chemistry, and so on. But is it not certain that with these tools—the aeroplane, poison gases, and the rest— he will destroy himself and his Civilization unless some higher spiritual values take control ?
Taken as a whole, these eight voltunes constitute a fearless, forceful, synthetic challenge —on the one hand, to the purely materialist view Of the universe--and on the other side, to all those who already hold the spiritual view of life to get together. In that task immense reinforcement is found in the last and in some ways the greatest revolution expressed in this report, i.e., in the advent of the -' wise men from the East," if we may so put it.
A quarter of the delegates at Jerusalem were picked repre- sentatives of the younger Christian communities of Asia and Africa. In personal calibre and in creative originality they more than held their own with their Western brethren. They stepped at Jerusalem (as any reader of these reports
will swiftly recognize) into full, equal, corporate leadership of the Christian forces in the world. That the special powers of such men and women from all the races of mankind are now to be concentrated upon and consecrated to the world task of Christianity conceived from the angle of this new alignment, opens up a vista ofadvance,-such as no generation has envisaged'
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