William Ernest Hocking - Career

Career

Hocking began teaching as an instructor in comparative religion at Andover Theological Seminary. In 1906 he and his wife moved to the West Coast, where he joined the philosophy faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, under George Howson. In 1908 he was called to Yale, where he served as an assistant professor and published his first major work, The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912).

In 1914 Hocking returned to Harvard, where he eventually became Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity. During World War I, in 1917 he was among the first American civil engineers to reach the front in France. In 1918 he was appointed as an inspector of "war issues" courses in army training camps. His experience led him to write his second book, about morale. Returning to Harvard after the war, Hocking made the rest of his career there.

In 1930-1932, he led the Commission of Appraisal, which studied the foreign mission work of six Protestant Christian denominations in India, Burma, China, and Japan. Protestant missionaries had been doing evangelical work in Asia since the nineteenth century, but several groups noted falling donations and nationalistic resistance, suggesting that changes might be needed.

The Commission's report, entitled Re-Thinking Missions: A Laymen's Inquiry After One Hundred Years (1932) and known as the "Hocking report," reflected changing ideas about the role of western missionaries in other cultures, and generated fierce debate. Commission members traveled to Asian cities to meet missionaries and local people. While in China, Hocking consulted with Pearl S. Buck, who was developing a similar critique of missions and who later threw her support behind the Commission's report. The Commission recommended a greater emphasis on education and welfare, transfer of power to local groups, less reliance on evangelizing, with respectful appreciation for local religions. A recommended related goal was the transition of local leadership and institutions. The Commission also recommended reorganization in the US to coordinate and focus missionary efforts by creating a single organization for Protestant missions.

Influenced by his visit to China, Hocking published a characteristically open minded study of the twelfth-century Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi. He argued that Zhu Xi's thought was “scientific,” which not all European philosophers could claim, and therefore had something to teach westerners about democracy.

In 1936, Hocking was invited to give the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford and Cambridge universities in England. These reflected his thinking about the relation of Christianity to other world religions, as he had begun to support a universal religion. According to a review in TIME of the book containing his lectures, Hocking thought the important elements were

"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."