Even historians of missions agree on little else than that the issuance of this report was a watershed event. Stephen Neill described it favorably as "the most striking expression" of "a comprehensive change ... taking place in theological climates, in attitudes toward other religions, and in the understanding of the missionary task." On the other hand, James Alan Patterson has assessed it critically as "a fatal blow to the missions consensus" engendering a "greater polarization than had ever existed in the long history of American Protestant missions."¹

Jones served on the fifteen-member Commission of Appraisal that produced this report, and his role has largely escaped scrutiny so far. While Jones’s biographer Elizabeth Gray Vining devoted some attention to this important episode, most treatments of the Commission’s work focus entirely on the justly famous contributions and viewpoints of its chairman, William Ernest Hocking.² But this Commission was not a one-man show, and others, including Jones, its only Quaker member, made vital contributions to its work. The purpose of this essay is to set the historical record straight, by examining not only how Jones influenced the Commission but also how the Commission experience influenced Jones.

Jones grew up in South China, Maine, in an Orthodox (Gurneyite) Quaker community which was sympathetic toward foreign missions, a fact celebrated in his first book, a biography of Eli and Sybil Jones, his missionary uncle and aunt. They had been humble, sensitive, courageous souls, as well as eloquent speakers, who had pursued a remarkable, far-flung ministry in Liberia, Palestine, and throughout much of Europe and North America. There can be no doubt that his uncle and aunt helped greatly to shape Rufus Jones’s ideas about what missionaries should do.³

But it would appear that he had little personal involvement with any questions related with missions until he reached his mid-sixties. The American Friend Service Committee, which he helped to found in 1917, paved the way for a new breed of religious agency which gave a strict emphasis toward humanitarian service to people in need, in exclusion of religious evangelism.⁴ Vining does not record any involvement by Jones in foreign missions until an unexpected invitation from the Young Men’s Christian Association arrived for him to address missionaries in China in 1926.

The nationalist turmoil which had embroiled China during that year forced the evacuation of many foreign missionaries and had made it virtually impossible for the remaining missionaries, mostly Chinese citizens, to invite any foreign clergyman to address them. Thus an invitation was extended to the layman Jones. He refused, pleading a scheduling conflict, but YMCA representative Eugene Barnett pressed the issue. Timely encouragement by Haverford College President W. W. Comfort for Jones to proceed with the visit and to take a semester’s leave from his teaching eventually helped to convince Jones that he should accept.⁵

When his turn came, Jones worked diligently to convince his listeners of the compatibility of science and religion. "The missionaries have unfortunately too often presented a type of Christianity at sharp variance with modern science and when that is rejected, as it is by most students, there is no one to interpret the deeper and truer aspects of Christian faith." While in India, Jones’s appreciation for non-Christian religions was profoundly heightened by a visit to the Buddha’s birthplace and a conversation with Mahatma Gandhi at his ashram.⁶

Shortly after his return from this world tour, Jones was invited by John R. Mott, the pre-eminent leader of the American ecumenical Christian movement, to prepare a paper for the upcoming meeting of the International Missionary Council, to take place in Jerusalem in late March and early April of 1928. The Jerusalem Council was an important successor to the famed World Missionary Conference that met at Edinburgh in 1910. The Edinburgh conference had sought to spur Christians onward to increased missionary activity for the purpose of "the evangelization of the world in this generation" (the watchword that its chairman Mott popularized).⁷

We go [to Jerusalem] as those who find in the other religions which secularism attacks, as it attacks Christianity, witnesses of man’s need of God and allies in our quest of perfection. Gladly recognizing the good they contain, we bring to them the best that our religion has brought to us, that they may test it for themselves. We ask them to judge us not by what we have as yet made of our Christianity, but by that better and more perfect religion to which in the providence of God we believe our Master is leading us.⁸

Of all the points which Jones lifted up in his paper, it was this final point that excited the most discussion at Jerusalem. In 1934, Presbyterian mission executive Robert Speer, a participant in the Jerusalem conference, wrote of Jones’s conclusion that "Dr. Rufus Jones had chosen his words carefully, but it was obvious that they could be misunderstood."⁹ In retrospect, Speer wondered whether Jones had been stating that there were values found in non-Christian religions which Christianity needed for its supplementation and enrichment, a conclusion which Speer felt would be incompatible with a Christian’s need to insist upon "the finality of Christ."

The same report called on "the followers of non-Christian religions ... to discern that all of the good of which men have conceived is fulfilled and secured in Christ."¹⁰ Thus, evangelical Christians had begun to throw some bouquets, rather than a steady stream of brickbats, toward those who argued on behalf of non-Christian religions. This did not necessarily portend a lessening of missionary zeal; many argued that the qualified praise of non-Christian belief systems held more promise for conversions to Christianity than wholesale condemnation of non-Christians.¹¹

Chinese Communists and many of the Chinese Nationalists, or Kuomintang, accused the missionaries of being the "pawns of western imperialism." The Western military power that, over the course of more than a century, had been deployed to ensure the safety of the missionaries appeared to lend credence to this idea. The missionaries were divided on how to respond to these challenges. Some were disturbed by these charges and were willing to go to some lengths to refute them, by refusing military support or seeking citizenship in the countries in which they were residing, while others desperately sought to hold on to their privileges as foreigners in China. But it was also clear that it was very difficult for any missionary to resolve these challenges to the satisfaction of both themselves and the Chinese.¹²

The most powerful new current which is sweeping over the lives of almost every person in Oriental countries is the high tide of nationalism.... The dream of self-determination has become a widespread faith and hope. Foreign control, external domination, attitudes of superiority on the part of outsiders are oppressive weights not to be borne. Each country proposes to be master of its own fate. The missionaries of a hundred years ago would find themselves in another world if they could come back, and they would find themselves compelled to learn a new approach if they expected to have a creative influence upon anybody in the world today.¹³

most of the effort of modern missions is not only useless but more often than not harmful. At the root of missionary effort is also the assumption that one’s own belief is true not only for oneself but for all the world: whereas the truth is that God reaches us through millions of ways not understood by us. In missionary effort, therefore, there is a lack of real humility that instinctively recognizes human limitations and the limitless power of God.¹⁴

For Jones and many other like-minded Christians, these views coming from the person whom Jones was later to characterize as "the greatest living person on the planet"¹⁵ were impossible to dismiss, causing at the very least a profound reassessment of Christian missionary activity.

Gandhi’s views were not only disseminated through print, but also through the personal encounters that he granted to Western Christians such as Jones. In their meeting, Gandhi told Jones that he loved the Sermon on the Mount, but he also remarked that Hindu religious literature was full of stories with ennobling ideals.¹⁶

Jones was not the only Christian ecumenist to hear such ideas directly from Gandhi himself. Jones’ friend John Mott also visited Gandhi in 1929, the year following the Jerusalem conference. Mott reported his disappointment with the "superficiality or evasion" of Gandhi’s responses when Mott brought up the question of religious conversions.¹⁷

Both E. Stanley Jones and Kagawa were outspoken advocates of world peace; in fact, Kagawa’s pacifism would land him in prison in Japan during World War II.¹⁸ Many Protestant missionaries in the 1920s embraced a culturally sensitive approach toward missions work, an approach that had been pioneered by sixteenth-century Catholic missionaries such as the Jesuit Matteo Ricci but then renounced by later popes.¹⁹ Rufus Jones was certainly knowledgeable about, and supportive of, these progressive trends in Protestant missions.

The credibility of the worldwide Christian message depended upon the willingness of Western leaders to promote policies, both domestically and internationally, that accorded with their Christian profession. He quoted an unnamed Indian statesman: "Your Jesus is hopelessly handicapped with his connection with the West."²⁰

On the other hand, fundamentalist leaders such as J. Gresham Machen and William Bell Riley were gravely concerned that some missionaries abroad actually held modernist views similar to that expressed by Fosdick. This division was especially profound among American Protestant missionaries in China. As early as 1921, W. H. Griffith Thomas, a fervent opponent of modernism, returned from a visit to China with a sharply worded complaint that modernist missionaries were succumbing to the allure of secularism, overemphasizing the provision of social services and downplaying evangelism. Missionaries should be on their guard against becoming "slack in contending for the faith."²¹

"When John R. Mott returned in 1929 from his trip around the world, he brought with him a number of impressions and observations which seemed to validate [Rockefeller’s] fears."²² This patron of progressive Protestantism convened at his house a group of laity from his own denomination, the Northern Baptists, to hear Mott’s report. The assemblage concluded that a study of mission work would be desirable in order to help Christian missions in Asia "make needed adjustments in objectives and programs to meet the rapidly changing situation abroad."²³

Jones turned Mott down, pleading that he was nearing retirement age and found his college teaching to be an exceptionally meaningful part of his life. "I have only two years more to teach at Haverford and my life is tremendously bound up with these men. Each year means more than the one before did and I have found through my work here an amazing open door into lives and thoughts of students everywhere and my interpretation of life and of God is ripening up in just the way I have wanted it to do."²⁴

Jones felt some regret turning down Rockefeller’s request. "Mr. Rockefeller has been so splendid and so kind that I greatly dislike disappointing him. I would not do it if I could see any way to avoid it."²⁵ Rockefeller may have seemed to Jones to be the model of a disinterested patron, but Rockefeller’s substantial and continuing financial contributions to foreign missions unavoidably gave him a significant stake in the outcome of the inquiry. It may perhaps seem ironic in retrospect that Rockefeller and Mott so earnestly sought to have a Quaker serve on their mission, when Quakers were not among the seven denominations sponsoring the commission, but it is doubtful that Jones was concerned at all about that matter, as he never raised the issue.

Mott referred to Jones’s paper that had been delivered at the Jerusalem Council as a reason that Jones should accept: "I have never been able to convey to you the position of leadership you won among the forces of the world-wide mission of Christianity through your paper for the Jerusalem meeting."²⁶ Jones wrote a revealing letter while he deliberated on Mott’s renewed request. The letter was addressed to his friend D. J. Fleming, a professor at Union Theological Seminary well-published in the theory of missions. He sought information on five matters:

1. How far the various American denominations are overlapping in their work... 2. How far the very fact of denominational missionary work complicates the whole undertaking... 3. How much of a difficulty is produced by the division between Fundamentalism and Modernism on the Mission Field.... 4. Whether the actual fruit of foreign mission work on the field indicates that our missions are a definite success and warrant the expenditure we are making.... 5. Do the persons themselves who come under the influence of missionary work show a changed life and indicate a transformed spirit? Do they fit in to the world where they are to have their life?²⁷

No reply by Fleming to Jones has been located. It is certain, however, that Fleming’s ideas influenced Jones as he formulated his thoughts on missions, just as they had influenced Fosdick. Fleming advocated an evangelism of service and personal example: "Not only the ethnic faiths, but Christianity itself, must stand or fall by their power to enlarge and enrich life.... In particular, the people of India, China, and Japan are not going to accept the Bible because of some statement as to its inspired origin.... The power of Christianity is to be proved by asking, not whether it can be authoritatively established, but what it accomplishes in the lives of men."²⁸

We do not know precisely what counsel Jones received from Hodgkin. It seems probable, however, that Jones’s own humility toward practitioners of other religions would have been reinforced by the wise testimony of a longtime friend who had devoted decades of his life to foreign missions.²⁹

In March, he was cheered by the news that his good friend, William Ernest Hocking, a professor of philosophy at Harvard University, had agreed to chair the commission. Hocking helped to keep Jones informed about the results of the Commission’s visits in the fall of 1931 to missions in India and Burma, which occurred while Jones remained at Haverford.³⁰ Rockefeller asked Jones to write a book that would "clearly define in present day language the function of foreign missions," promising to support financially this endeavor as well.