Hocking, William Ernest (1873-1966)

Philosopher of religion

Born in Cleveland, Ohio. Hocking received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard. From 1914 until his retirement in 1943, he was professor of philosophy at Harvard. His work focused on analyzing human experience, especially the experience of God. In The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), he advocated “widened empiricism” that located the ideal forms of transcendent reality within the bounds of pragmatic experience. His concern for Christian missions began in his teenage years with his conversion during a Methodist “experience meeting.” His mature philosophy of missions was summarized in The Coming World Civilization (1958), in which he foresees Christian faith as the “building ingredient” of a world culture. Prior to that he published three books dealing with mission themes: Human Nature and Its Remaking (1918), Re-thinking Missions (1932), and Living Religions and a World Faith (1940). The fame and controversy of Re-thinking Missions, in which he summarized a group report of the Laymen’s Foreign Mission Inquiry, overshadowed and somewhat distorted his other work. He later commented that there was much he personally believed that could not be included. Human Nature and Its Remaking, a study of the ethical need to reshape the human will-to-power in a creative direction, proposes the Christian world mission as the ultimate instrument of that creativity since it confers power on others rather than seeking to gain power over them. Living Religions and a World Faith argues that there is a fundamentally human “nuclear experience” of God that is best interpreted in Christian terms, an argument that has much in common with St. Augustine’s view that Christianity is the natural religion of humankind.

Hocking’s famous debate with Hendrik Kraemer began when Kraemer’s The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World (1938) stated that there was no word of authentic Christianity in Re-thinking Missions. Twenty-five years later, however, in the Hocking festschrift, Kraemer called Hocking a “shining example of truly Christian urbanity,” and Hocking had moved much closer to Kraemer’s neo-orthodox position.

Leroy S. Rouner, “Hocking, William Ernest,” in Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, ed. Gerald H. Anderson (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 1998), 295.

This article is reprinted from Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, Macmillan Reference USA, copyright © 1998 Gerald H. Anderson, by permission of Macmillan Reference USA, New York, NY. All rights reserved.