Christian Engineering

What should a Christian think of a Brahmin? Have Christian foreign missions finished their work? Has their value in the Far East declined? Should they go on? Questions like these were interesting to laymen of seven U. S. Protestant denominations* whose 57,000-odd churches and ten million-odd members spent nearly $15,000,000 in 1931 on foreign missions.

Let us have a look, said they. They formed a Laymen's Foreign Missions Inquiry, backed largely by John Davison Rockefeller Jr. To head the inquiry two years ago they chose, an engineer --President Albert Lyon Scott of Lockwood Greene Engineers Inc. (industrial specialists), a Brown graduate (1900), minister's son, onetime Baptist deacon and Bible class teacher. Year ago Engineer Scott went to the Orient with an Appraisal Commission headed by Harvard Professor of Philosophy William Ernest Hocking. The Commission roved about, returned last July. Last week Engineer Scott began making public the report of the inquiry, which will be submitted to mission boards of the seven churches this winter. Gist of the first four of 20 installments of the report is as follows: Shall foreign missions be continued? Yes, but not in their present form. Missionaries should no longer preach routine hellfire to brown and yellow men. "Western Christianity ... is less a religion of fear and more a religion of beneficence." With the rise of a "basic world-culture," arises the question, "Why the missionary need leave his home to convey his message?" . . . Resurging nationalism is a danger to missionizing in the East. Christianity should not be identified with Western life but presented in its "universal capacity." Nor should Christianity attack the non-Christian systems of religion; it should understand them, associate itself with their "kindred elements." Christianity's chief argument is not with Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism but with "materialism, secularism, naturalism . . . the philosophies of Marx, Lenin, Russell. The case that must now be stated is the case for any religion at all."

*Baptist, Congregational, Dutch Reformed, Protestant Episcopal, Methodist Episcopal, Presbyterian, United Presbyterian.

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