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David Paton: Christian Mission Encounters Communism in China

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David Paton: Christian Mission Encounters Communism in China CHAPTER NINE DAVID PATON: CHRISTIAN MISSION ENCOUNTERS COMMUNISM IN CHINA While serving as a visiting fellow of Cambridge University, England in the fall of 2005, I was asked to lead a discussion group with Master of Philosophy students on Christianity in China for the Divinity Faculty. Amongst the reading references, I found David Paton’s book, Christian Mission and the Judgment of God.1 David Paton had been a CMS mis- sionary in China for 10 years and was expelled from China in 1951. So he had experienced the end of the missionary era in China in the early 1950s. The book was first published in 1953 and was reprinted by Wm B. Eerdmans Co. in October 1996 (after Paton’s death in 1992), with the addition of an introduction by Rev. Bob Whyte and a foreword by Bishop K.H. Ting. They both endorsed Paton’s view from the experiences of Chinese Churches in the past forty years. Bob Whyte reported that many of Paton’s reflections remained of immedi- ate relevance today and the issues he had perceived as important in 1953 were still central to any reflections on the future of Christianity in China. Bishop Ting also confirmed that this book was a book of pro- phetic vision and Paton was a gift from God to the worldwide church. Dr. Gerald H. Anderson, the Emeritus Director of Overseas Ministries Study Center at New Haven (USA) added a remark on the cover- page, saying: “To have this classic available again is timely—even bet- ter with the new foreword by Bishop K.H. Ting.”2 So Paton’s work is still worth re-visiting and in this chapter, I shall review how he saw what was happening in the Christian Church in China when Chris- tian missions encountered Communism in 1949 and the early 1950s. Paton’s thesis was that God’s judgment was being executed upon His church by political movements which were anti-Christian, and by this he meant the Chinese Communist government. The arrival of the Communist rule in China in 1949 turned out to be a ‘debacle’ 1 See Paton, David. Christian Mission and the Judgment of God. Second Edition, (Cam- bridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1996). (First Edition in 1953). 2 Remarks on the front page. 180 chapter nine for Christian missions in China and Paton reckoned that “the end of the missionary era was the will (and the judgment) of God”.3 Paton’s book should have become very controversial in the 1950s and 1960s, even today. Unfortunately, it did not receive much attention in Eng- land as he was found too radically critical of the Christian missions of his times.4 There was another Anglican missionary, Roland Allen (1868–1947) who came to China earlier than Paton.5 They were both missionar- ies in China for some time and have been radically critical of the Christian missions of their times. Allen worked in North China and Paton was working with the YMCA in Fuzhou in South China.6 Their experiences in China, though forty years apart, had prompted them to radically re-assess the missionary methods of the Western churches. In short, Allen called for a return to New Testament principles and to the example of the Apostle Paul who entrusted the new churches into the hands of the Holy Spirit. He was saying that in order to develop native churches in China, the missionaries should leave their mission fields, the sooner the better; and Paton affirmed that the expulsion of missionaries from China in the early 1950s was the judgement from God since they had not done their job well, especially regarding the development of indigenous churches in China. In Paton’s own words, “God’s judgment is being executed upon His Church by political move- ments which are anti-Christian. Of this almost worldwide movement, 3 See ibid., 82. Paton spoke from his personal experiences in China and his charge against Christian missions was that Christian missions were part of the whole impe- rialist aggression of the West and this jeopardized the future of the missionary enter- prise. (64ff.) There were two sides of the charge. Firstly, Christian missions had been serving as the agents of the imperial West, as carriers and promoters of capitalistic, Western cultures. Secondly, “whatever may have been the formal aim of (Christian) missions, their actual policy was such that it was not to foster, but to preclude, the development of a genuinely dynamic, self-governing, self-supporting, and self-expanding church” (66). 4 Paton had edited another book on Roland Allen, Reform of the Ministry: A Study in the Work of Roland Allen in 1968 which came out again in a new edition in June 2003. See David Paton, ed. Reform of the Ministry: A Study in the Work of Roland Allen Second Edition. (London: Lutterworth Press, 2003). 5 See e.g. Roland Allen. Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? (London: Robert Scott, 1912). 6 Allen had witnessed the Boxer Movement in China in 1900 so he could under- stand more the charge that Christianity was a foreign religion, which Paton would shared fully. See Roland Allen. The Siege of the Peking Legations. (London: Smith Elder & co., 1901); and David Paton, ed. Reform of the Ministry: A Study in the Work of Roland Allen. (London: Lutterworth Press, 1968), 16f. .
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