William Ernest Hocking is a ruddy-faced Harvard professor of philosophy who stalks religion with a cool philosopher's eye. In 1931-32 Dr. Hocking, a Congregationalist, chairmaned the Appraisal Commission of the Laymen's Foreign Missions Inquiry. The Commission produced the controversial Re-Thinking Missions (TIME, Nov. 28, 1932), which proposed far-reaching changes in missionary work, scandalized conservatives by insisting that Christians, instead of attacking non-Christian religions, should seek to understand them and cooperate with them. Mission boards gave the report short shrift, but Philosopher Hocking re-pondered it long & hard. Last week he published the result of his cogitations—Living Religions and a World Faith (Macmillan; $2.50)—and declared more firmly than ever that the world's religions must be replaced by one religion.
Much concerned is Philosopher Hocking by "the scandal of plurality"—the fact that religion, by its nature universal and one, is everywhere local, partisan, sectarian. He feels that missions cannot achieve world religion. "The mission," says he, "tries to make a particular religion universal. The new interest is to escape particularity and localism, finding in religions what is already universal."
Unlike many a fellow philosopher, Dr. Hocking thinks that the time is propitious for an emphasis on religion: "Its very disorder sharpens the point of the search for agreed principle, and its loss of anchorage facilitates because it requires new course-making." But traditionalists will sight few landmarks on Dr. Hocking's course. The world-faith-to-be he defines in appropriately vague philosophical terms as "a belief in obligation, in a source of things which is good, in some kind of permanence for what is real in selfhood, and in the human aspect of deity." He pins his hope more on the common people throughout the world than on the theologians, finds in them a "universal sense of the presence of God, and the intuition of the direction in which the will of God lies."
Dr. Hocking believes that "we shall see in the Orient the rise of a Christianity far outpassing that which we of the West have conceived, simply because it can recover there so many lost fragments of what is its own." The fusion of spiritual beliefs which he envisages for the world faith of the future will be God-centred rather than Christ-centred: "God is in His world, but Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed are in their little private closets, and we shall thank them, but never return to them."