Living Issues in China by Henry T. Hodgkin

Author:Henry T. Hodgkin [Hodgkin, Henry T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Human Geography, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781317422488
Google: wiU-CgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-07-24T02:48:08+00:00

IS THE MISSIONARY POWERLESS?

Enough has perhaps been said to bring this immensely complex situation into focus. Let us briefly note some of the questions which are inherent in it: How may the standard of living be raised for the masses? How may foreign capital be introduced without China’s economic freedom being infringed? Can the ancient values be saved in the new development? Can China avoid intense class war? Need she adopt the Western way of looking at the division between employer and employed?

In relation to such problems as these, has the Christian church anything to say? Chinese business in the past recognized the place of worship in guild life, even though it was a crude and self-interested type of worship, and in its own way medieval Europe did the same. May it be that we are moving toward chaos and need to be reminded that in this field, whether in China or in America, to leave out God is to leave out the most important factor, and that there are moral laws which can never be repealed. The missionary may well feel paralyzed before a problem so utterly beyond his power to solve. A fundamental approach to this complex of ideas and forces is suggested by these pregnant words of Mr. R. H. Tawney in his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism:

“Few who consider dispassionately the facts of social history will be disposed to deny that the exploitation of the weak by the powerful, organized for purposes of economic gain, buttressed by imposing systems of law and screened by decorous draperies of virtuous sentiment and resounding rhetoric, has been a permanent feature in the life of most communities that the world has yet seen. But the quality in modern societies which is most sharply opposed to the teaching ascribed to the Founder of the Christian faith, lies deeper than the exceptional failures and abnormal follies against which criticism is most commonly directed. It consists in the assumption, accepted by most reformers with hardly less naïveté than by the defenders of the established order, that the attainment of material riches is the supreme object of human endeavor and the final criterion of human success. Such a philosophy, plausible, militant, and not indisposed, when hard pressed, to silence criticism by persecution, may triumph or may decline. What is certain is that it is the negation of any system of thought or morals which can, except by a metaphor, be called Christian. Compromise is as impossible between the church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalistic societies, as it was between the church and the state idolatry of the Roman Empire.”

If the West is pushing China down a steep place into this denial not of Christian ethics alone but of her own great ethical systems, it is incumbent upon those who go out from the West for the purpose not of making profits but of giving a spiritual message, to make utterly clear where they stand on this issue “between the church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth.

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