An attempt at theological interpretation

by Bishop R. O. Hall

(posted here courtesy of Professor Philip Wickeri)

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Attached Note by Professor Charles Converse West, Professor of Ethics emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary. He was a Presbyterian missionary then in Hong Kong. Canon David M Paton gave them the article.

This is a meditation on the relation of western Christians to the forces of society today in the Far East, by Bishop R. O. Hall of Hong Kong Diocese, Episcopal Church. It was written for Anglicans, primarily to those outside the orbit of the new democracy. But it is offered to you because it contains food for thought and prayer for all Christians who are involved in the situation. The Bishop especially asks that it be thought of not as an essay or a declaration, but as a pastoral offering as part of the conversation of Christians in the Fellowship of the Spirit.

I. The Anglican Yardstick

In the paragraphs that follow I shall attempt to interpret what is happening in China in the Year of Our Lord 1950 in the light of the general position theological of Frederick Denison Maurice, for three reasons:

1) I believe his theology to be the correct analysis of the Act of God which we call Christianity.

2) I believe Maurice's theology to be 'correct' because he was conditioned by and understood the whole experience of God in Christ which comes to us through the Anglican liturgy and order.

3) I believe that a correct analysis of the happenings of our own days is more likely to be achieved by using the yardstick of Anglican or Orthodox experience, because our two Churches have traditionally refused sectarianism, and have accepted the way of identification with the community in which we live. Identification is a prerequisite of Redemption.

II. The Problem

The President of a Christian university in New China told me last month that he finds the real Communists with whom he has to deal, able, disciplined, and reasonable. Officials who are not Communist show all the petty tyranny of insecure officials the world over, aggravated by the fact that they wield power which it is hard to question.

The Commissioner of Education is a converted and practicing Communist. He has welcomed the fact that our theological college is attached to the University and that our ordinands are to take the full arts course at the university. "That will open their minds: they will be less superstitious."

A week after that conversation one of our ten ordinands came back heartbroken to Hong Kong. He cannot bear to continue to study the Marxist teaching in his history and sociology lectures because it is arrogant materialism. Brought up in a Christian home and a Christian middle school he finds the suggestion that his religious faith is superstitious more than he can bear.

I did not attempt to tell him of my own experience with my tutor in philosophy and how I had to fight to maintain my own position that once one knows that God has revealed the truth in Jesus Christ one can only approach all thought as well as all life from that conviction. I did not tell him of my distress to find that when I was a university student in England so many regarded my devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ as something rather unusual and a little extravagant, as if somehow the dignity of a great university suffered from meetings for prayer and for evangelism. I did not tell him these things because his problem is so much more extreme an example of my problem or of any Christian in the secular environment of the universities of the western democracies. But it is well to remember that Marxism is a lineal descendent of that secular and scientific mind.

And in China perhaps, Christians have been "spoiled." We have been for so long respected and looked up to as the leaders in moral standards that it is devastating to be faced by men and women living on a quarter of our income, with a devotion to Marxism both in thought and practice which makes our Christian living seem comfortable and tepid beside it.

III. Superstitious and Supernatural

In Hong Kong we have the use of a corner of an old rambling temple. In that corner every day some ninety boys and girls come in three groups of thirty for three busy and happy hours. Every one of them has been up before the magistrate for some kind of offence. Most have no parents: and even those with some semblance of a family sleep under staircases or archways. I confess that I am impatient that the vain and fantastic rites, for which the rest of the temple is used, are allowed to take up so much room and to waste so much money. I long to be able to take over the whole place for the sake of the hundreds more boys and girls whose needs are as great as our present ninety.

In China today the Communists regard our Christian Churches with the same impatience with which I regard decayed temples and their attendant monks. But it is more difficult for the Communist to be tolerant with what seems to him to be superstitious. To me, a temple is a witness to the supernatural. I can therefore, have some respect for it. But so far an attitude of toleration has been maintained. But we recognize that just as we look for the final elimination of all superstitious rites and practices in China, and the conversion of temples into churches and schools, into welfare centers and hospitals or clinics, so the Communists are determined to convert us from what they regard as our superstitious faith and practices. They look eagerly for the day when the churches will be turned into centers of culture and recreation for the community, and so be "useful."

To be tolerant with Christians is, therefore, in one sense more difficult for Communists, than to be tolerant with temple worship is for Christians. But in another sense it is easier, for the Communists. For the Christian tree does produce good fruit.

A Communist Army medical officer who shared in the Christian festivities in our Leper settlement in Pakhoi, spoke in high praise of the love and compassion for the suffering shown by the Christians.

A leading Chinese Anglican layman who has great responsibilities in the management of our educational institutions, tells me that in Shanghai there is general recognition of the spirit and quality of Christian institutions.

Dr. T. C. Chao, reveling in his first reading of Tillich's The Protestant Era, writes from Peking, "The youth of China today regard us Christians as very superstitious. Those whom they consider sincere, they regard with pity and compassion. For they, of course, have Absolute Truth. How fortunate they are; I am less fortunate. And yet, perhaps, more fortunate, as being eternally unable to know Absolute Truth, but being eternally caught by It." He had written after Easter 1949 of the cost to him, who had for so long been the idol of the youth of his university (My description not his.) of preaching "Christ is Risen" to young men and women excited by the new secular adventure of Maudschungs Kingdom of heaven on earth. "But," he added, "I manage to do it."

We are challenged to prove by our lives that the supernatural is not just superstitious. We have no doubt of the issue. For God is: God reigns; God conquers.

IV. Anno Domini

The purpose of this paper is to ask readers to consider their theological appraisal of the task of Christ's Church in China: theological in the sense of reasonable estimation of what God is doing, so that we can use our understanding to the utmost in His service. Roman Catholic theologians on this issue are in the main "theologisers", like the Sophists of the day of Socrates. They tilt with ideas at ideas, in a combat of words.

But we live in a year of our Lord. Christ is Risen. We are transferred out of the power of darkness into the Kingdom of Christ. There has been almost unanimous approval of the Lambeth analysis of Communism as a judgment of God. Judgment is an essential function of secularism.

We know the great things about history and the God of history. One emphasizes that the year in which we live is a year of our Lord, and the other that the Lord whose year this is, is a Lord who exercises Lordship, a "Dominus", who exercises dominion, over His world in no ordinary manner. We know as the writer of Hebrews, that because we live in a year of Our Lord, we have received a kingdom which cannot be moved.

But the writer goes on, "Our God is a consuming fire". His dominion is not a dominion of peace and prosperity. Our Lord came to cast fire upon earth, to burn up evil in man's hearts. He came with a sword to disarm "the strong men armed" and take away from him "the armor wherein he trusted." He saw Satan like lightning fall from Heaven", but he promised us "tribulation" in this world.

In a greater period of Christian life and thought, the totalitarian and cruel rulers of mediaeval Europe were Christianed by theologians as "the secular arm" of an active God, creative and redemptive in history. It may be that world communism should be similarly analyzed as a secular arm of the God of history.

I have quoted after the verses from the Epistle to the Hebrews, the words of the Penitent Thief. Luke describes this supreme moment in human history in a symbolic and dramatic picture of man's relation to God. He tells us how as Jesus hung dying a malefactor's death, identified with human sin to its last end in cruel execution, one of the men with whom he was bound in the common ties of mortal pain, accepted the punishment of totalitarian cruelty, as something deserved. He also saw through the misery of those hours the reality of the Kingdom of Christ. Is it perhaps hypocrisy (play acting) to call Communism a judgment of God unless we were willing to accept that judgment with the complete acceptance of the Penitent Thief?

We should, perhaps, make no attempt to justify ourselves over against God's judgment. Could we also see the Kingdom of Christ through the eyes of the dying malefactor? We should recognize that our faith is not in a peaceful and orderly world, but in a heavenly kingdom of Christ, and that the relationship of this Kingdom at any one time to the secular order of peace and good government must be conditioned by the eternal purposes of the Kingdom itself; by the fire and sword of the judgment; by the redemption—and restoration—of sinful men and women into the inheritance of the sons of God.

God, who has transferred us out of the power of darkness into this Kingdom of His beloved Son, is indeed a consuming fire. The wrath of the Lamb is more terrible than Buchenwald or Siberian labor camps, more terrible than the hateful horror of civil war, whether at Edgehill, Gettysburg, or in Formosa.

Enduring in his own person the judgment of God on sinning humanity, our Lord said to Pilate, "Thou couldst have no power over me unless it were given thee from above." Our faith in the existence and reality of God's kingdom necessitates our endurance of similar judgment. For what Our Lord endured and did at that one moment is a lifting of the curtain by which we can see what God is doing at every time and in all history.

V. God's Encirclement of Secularism

Our Lord's words to Pilate are vindicated by history. In 1950 all roads lead to Rome in thankfulness not for Caesar and his government, but for the Crucified and His government; in thankfulness for Him who rules time with the Sceptre of Eternity.

As a boy I was brought up within reach of the great Roman remains. I bicycled to visit them along the roads the Romans built with great cruelty by forced labor. Those remains bear witness still to the fact that unconverted Rome was a creature of the God of history the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Father Manu Chakravavarti of St. Andrews Brotherhood in Calcutta answered my youthful questions about Hinduism with these words: "Of course there is light in Hinduism, Hinduism is not all darkness, or how could I have recognized the True Light?" So the Roman genius for order and the rough justice of its colonial governments bear witness to the God who became incarnate in a province of that colonial empire to establish His own order in the heart of history. The conversion of Rome was an encircling movement; God at work in the heart of every Roman, as well as by the incarnation of his own Heart, in the Christian Church.

We must believe that the same encircling movement of God's love and power is ever at work to redeem all secular life into the Kingdom of His dear Son. So when we experience the astonishing integrity of the majority of the Communist officials in China, we see obedience to the God of Truth. When we experience the discipline of the soldiers, seemingly wrought by some miracle, for every Chinese in three thousand years has known that soldiers, like nails, are not made of good iron, when we experience this discipline we know it to be a miracle of the Son who was obedient unto death and we know that he who is "with us always, even to the end of the world," is with each communist soldier: unrecognized, and unknown, but there. When we learn that this discipline is based on self-criticism, and an intimate group organization, we are reminded of Gerald Heard's analysis of the early Christians as "Charatic Groups." We are back in the atmosphere of St. Paul's epistles, or of early Methodism, with a side glance at Moral Rearmament. When we read Mao Tze Dung in his New Democracy telling us that ideology must come out of experience we remember that Christian ideology came out of Pentecost, out of those Acts of the Holy Spirit which are called the Acts of the Apostles. And when we are told that there is no morality but that which serves the well-being of the State, we remember Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling (a document contemporary with the Communist Manifesto). We remember Kierkegaard describing as "teleological suspension of the ethical", Abraham's obedience to the Living God in his readiness to sacrifice Isaac should that be God's will. Nor do we forget the teleological suspension of the ethical, ends justifying the means, which we see in the electric chairs and gallows of our modern states, or in the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There remains the terrible danger of so much power over men's minds, and the basic demonic atheism of absolute power of any kind. We realize these things but take courage for two reasons:

VI. Identification

These then are some of the reasons which lead so many of my Chinese friends along the path of identification—knowing that they follow in the path of the Master Craftsman of Redemption, whose apprentices they are.

My ignorance of theology must be apparent by my ignoring of the immortal Thomas. I do so because I do not believe that truth is primarily intellectual, but an experience of life in God. I have been conditioned by the traditional liturgy and perennial order of the Church of England—the Anglican Communion. The theology of F. D. Maurice, Marx's other great theological contemporary, who had a similar Anglican conditioning, has suggested to me that what is happening in China in the year of Our Lord 1950, is confirmatory evidence that God reigns in His world, and the Kingdoms of this world must become not Communist or Democratic utopias, but Kingdoms of our God and His Christ. But I do not forget that the Great Rider on the white horse has a garment "baptized" in his own blood and on the throne of that Kingdom is the Lamb who hath been slain. And it was for Canterbury, and of Canterbury—the matrix of Anglicanism,-that Mr. T. S. Elliot, who also is Anglican conditioned, wrote "Murder in the Cathedral."

Hong Kong, St. Mark's Day, 1950