“Watson Hayes and the North China Theological Seminary”

China’s Reforming Churches Conference

Wallace PCA, College Park, MD

Thursday, 2 January 2013, 11:30 a.m.

[Presenter’s introductory explanation for paper. This presentation is to correct three frequent misconceptions about NCTS: (1) that it was a “fundamentalist” school and as I go on to show it was classic Reformed theology, based on the president’s having been mentored by B B Warfield, and was no more fundamentalist than either Warfield or Machen; (2) that it was the result of divisive action by foreigners who split the Qilu theological faculty with their schismatic politicking. Nothing could be further from the case. The students, and with them the Shandong Presbyterian presbyteries took the initiative; (3) that NCTS had poor academic standards, accepted anyone, and was not intellectually reputable. On the contrary, it  added a further year for graduation,expanded the curriculum, and insisted on high academic standards for its graduates.]

            In the tumultuous thirty year period immediately prior to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949 the North China Theological Seminary was the centre for the propagation of the Reformed faith in the Middle Kingdom and provides an explanation for its vigorous and persistent influence there. And in this drama no one was more significant (and subsequently more neglected) than its founder and first President, the towering figure of Watson McMilIan Hayes, protégé of Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield.

The North China Theological Seminary started amid dissent and division. In late September 1919 eighteen Presbyterian theological students walked out of their classes at the union theological faculty of Shandong Christian (Qilu) University in Jinan. The school, a coming together initially of “Northern” Presbyterians and British Baptists, was in turmoil. The Baptist president, J Percy Bruce[2], had been asked to resign because of perceived high-handed cultural and theological insensitivity, particularly to the Chinese faculty. The price for Bruce’s departure was the demand that the deans of Qilu’s three faculties (arts, medicine and theology) must also leave. For Presbyterian theologs this meant losing a man regarded as “the best theological teacher in all of China,”[3] their beloved Watson McMillan Hayes (赫士), dean of Qilu’s theology faculty, a price they were unwilling to pay.

Watson Hayes[4] came to China in 1882 under appointment by the American (“Northern”) Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. He was assigned to learn and work with Calvin Mateer (狄考文)[5] at Tengchow and under Mateer’s tutelage quickly became proficient in Chinese language and culture, his model as a missionary. Hayes taught astronomy, geology, physics, and mathematics at the college there, the first in China, and became its president in 1895. Out of term time he did extensive itineration in the rural areas of Shandong.  Hayes was a polymath, editing the first newspaper in Shandong and establishing the first post office outside treaty ports.

In 1901 Yuan Shi-kai (袁世凱) as Governor of Shandong (later the first president of the new Republic of China) asked Hayes to set up Shandong Imperial University as its first president, because, he said, the recent Boxer Uprising could be attributed to a deficiency in education. Subsequently the whole Christian staff resigned over required veneration of the Emperor. From 1904 to 1917 he was involved in theological education in Tsingchowfu, and then became dean at Qilu University at its inception in 1916.

Born in the Presbyterian (and Scottish) heartland of Mercer County, western Pennsylvania, Watson Hayes[6] began studies at Western Seminary, Pittsburgh, in 1879, the same year that Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield was appointed a professor there. His three years with Warfield had a tremendous impact on him: he was steeped in the Westminster subordinate standards and was strongly Old School Presbyterian. In eschatology he was amillennial, and his view of Scripture, after Warfield, was as an inerrantist. He maintained a keen theological awareness to the end of his life: in 1930, at over seventy, he wrote “I have had the pleasure of reading a review of Barth” and refers critically to Barth’s “line of demarcation between subjective idealism and objective realism.”[7]

Criticizing liberal educational appointments by his Presbyterian Board Hayes stated that he was not opposed to secular education so long as it was provided by “a science teacher who reverences his Bible as the inerrant word of God and is a profound believer in the fact that all things consist by, through, and for Him.”[8] That world-and-life view did not extend to politics. In a 1929 letter to the North China Daily News he wrote that “the proper course for missionaries is to emulate the Apostles who, though living in times of great national peril, never mention political events in their epistles but confine themselves strictly to the Gospel message and the spiritual care of the churches.”[9] That approach may have been expedient at that time of upheaval in China but it also reflected his politics.

Hayes was chary of the premillennial dispensationalism then popular among many mission-minded evangelical Presbyterians. A younger colleague in Shandong was Reuben A Torrey Jr.[10] only son of the editor of the Scofield Bible and founder of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA)[11]. Torrey’s How to Study the Bible with Greatest Profit, translated into Chinese, became a set text for some Bible schools. William T Blackstone, grandson of another dispensational luminary[12], was a member of the same mission, appointed to Guangzhou in 1931. Blackstone’s father had administered the Lyman Stewart Fund[13] which bankrolled the 1909 publication of The Fundamentals and in the next three decades many missionary enterprises including BIOLA in Changsha, Hunan, as well as NCTS.

Watson Hayes was an intellectual and spiritual giant. In his lifetime he authored thirty-seven original works and translations[14]. At his fiftieth anniversary on the field it was stated that “It is rare that God vouchsafes to one of his missionary servants five decades of service, and especially such unusual service as Dr. Hayes has rendered, not only within the confines of his own mission, but to the Church of God throughout all China.”[15] As the tribute from the NCTS Board stated at its first post-war meeting: “For sixty-two years Dr. Hayes labored in China … Though he lived and labored in Shantung, his influence was felt throughout all China … [he] was an unusually fine Chinese scholar and an indefatigable worker up to the time of his death.”[16] As well as being revered, Watson Hayes also had a human side. A young missionary wrote of her impressions of him in his seventies: “rather unapproachable, always busy, a bit fierce at times, but dryly humorous too,” while his wife Margaret (n e Young) was “shy, perfect housekeeper and cook, droll, and very firm.”[17] They were a formidable couple.

The students who left their classes at Qilu that September 1919 were a unique group that had been spiritually energized by the revival[18] that came to Shandong from the tidal wave of the Korean Pentecost of 14 January 1907. Shandong was also a place where the principles of John Livingstone Nevius[19] had brought into being a vibrant Christian community guided by his principles of self-governance, self-propagation and self-support. Also timely and highly significant was the ministry of Ding Li-mei (鼎力美), an 1883 graduate of the Tengchow School who later went to study theology under Hayes in 1897.

Ding Li-mei was the spark that ignited the Shandong Union College in 1909 when a hundred young men were called to enter the Christian ministry. Similar results followed in Beijing and Tianjin. Subsequently Ding became Chinese secretary of the Student Volunteer Movement and travelled throughout China for twenty years[20]. He, as much as Watson Hayes, was the inspirational heart of the student revolt at Qilu in 1919 and he would be a founding member of the faculty of the new alternative theological seminary.

There were many irritants that drove the Presbyterian students out of Qilu to follow Hayes to Weixian. Hayes was particularly irked by a teacher who, in a chapel talk, held up the Old Testament to ridicule[21]. Another missionary wrote that “The virgin birth is scoffed at, the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ is explained away, and even the Deity of Christ is questioned by some of the foreigners in the faculty.” [22] The students had taken drastic action: as Harry Romig[23] recalled: “They were decidedly unwilling that [Hayes] should no longer have a seat on the faculty bench. When they were not appeased, and little consideration given to their complaint, all the students from the Presbyterian bodies walked out.”

In the Presbyterian Church of China there were four presbyteries in the Shandong synod. Determining[24] that “a crisis had been reached,” Shanxian presbytery meeting 27 October 1919 stated that the sixteen-year-old union arrangement for theological teaching “established originally to cultivate the doctrine and faith of our students for the ministry … does no marked advantage to us.”[25] As Charles Eames explained as he sent the resolutions on to A. J. Brown in New York in a covering letter “I attended every meeting of Presbytery and I can witness that in the actions above the Chinese were the leaders, in fact it was all the foreign members of Presbytery could do to keep the resolutions from being more radical than they are.” As Watson Hayes said to the Board secretaries when he met with them while on furlough six months later: “This is not missionary manipulated action, but the will of the Chinese, led and guided by their long smothered conviction.”[26]

That conviction was clearly stated two weeks later at a meeting of the Jinan Presbytery[27]. Their declaration of independence from Western liberal Protestantism marked the birth of both a distinctly Reformed commitment and a self-consciously Evangelical discernment on the part of the Chinese church. The document enumerated four points of principle: that internal university conflict did not promote the growth of “our students in Christian grace and spiritual knowledge”; that the present instruction failed to provide suitable preparation for ministry in our church; that students are not protected from erroneous teaching; and that this has been a longstanding concern “for our most reliable theological students as well as discerning Mission members” and church leaders leading to an “inevitable break.” There followed five statements about starting up a new “Bible honouring” school with Watson Hayes, Albert Dodd[28] and Yi Hsing-lin as teachers. Dodd was a 1902 Princeton Seminary graduate and had been principal of a boys’ school for fourteen years. He and Hayes became congenial partners.

As Hayes told Board secretaries when he met with them in New York City in May of 1920 while on furlough: “In a school controlled as the University school is, it is a foregone conclusion that the school must become one of the liberal (Union Seminary) type.” Hayes crossed out Union Seminary but his reference to that liberal Manhattan institution was clear. With the choice of faculty left to each of the cooperating sponsors “it is a practical impossibility to have any control of the character of the teaching whatever.” And then the plea: “It does not seem to be asking too much to ask that there should be a way found to have one conservative school of Theology here in China.”[29]

Thirteen students gathered for classes in Weixien on 19 September 1919. They were able to persuade Watson Hayes to join them as their instructor[30], and the first class graduated in January 1920. Meanwhile the first (“provisional”) meeting of the Board of Directors of the Shantung Theological Seminary was convened 4 and 5 December 1919.  A name was settled on. Two committees were appointed to set a constitution and raise money, the latter (true to Nevius) completely comprised of Chinese pastors. And it was “Resolved, that we invite Rev, W. M. Hayes, D.D., to become Principal of this school, and also to teach in the same.”  A follow-up meeting 12 March announced that that invitation had been duly made.

Significantly the base of the new school was being extended beyond the Shandong presbyteries now that it was known that Dr Hayes was involved and the school would be unique among Chinese theological institutions in its unreserved commitment to conservative theology. The Southern Presbyterian North Kiangsu Mission and the Chinese Christian Church (Independent) became partners in the new seminary. To facilitate the southern Presbyterian link, Tengxian[31] as closest to Kiangsu province, was suggested for the location of the new school in preference to Jinan (where an offer of property had been made by an elder) which would have put the new school in direct competition with Qilu University. Southern Presbyterians were already involved in Tengxian with the South Shantung Bible and Normal School (later Mateer Memorial Institute). Already familiar with Tengxian because of previous links with the Bible School, Craig Patterson[32] was seconded to the Seminary. (“I was sent as the S. Presbyterian teacher.”[33]) in 1923. Numismatist Patterson (“chivalrous, always busy but humorous and loving”[34]) was strongly anti-dispensataional and, as he proudly said, “Old School Presbyterian.”[35]

In the autumn of 1922 NCTS moved to Tengxian. One of the first things that the new school had insisted on was the extension of the course from three to four years so the initial graduating classes were quite small – in January 1924 there was but a single graduate, Han Chia-kang. But Hayes wrote enthusiastically of that second year in Tengxian: “The students manifested an unwonted zeal both in their studies and in the evangelistic work in the city and neighboring villages, so that, all in all, it was the most satisfactory term that the writer has known in twenty-three years.”[36] Chia Yu-ming[37] was now Vice-President. A new women’s Bible school was operating in tandem.[38] The statement of faith was unflinchingly and unapologetically conservative: an eight-point statement explicit in its commitment to Biblical inspiration[39], the Trinity, the atonement, the bodily resurrection, the Holy Spirit, a personal devil, and a strict ecclesiology.

With such a statement the Seminary, right up to 1927, achieved spectacular growth, quickly becoming the largest theological seminary in China, with a wide representation geographically and denominationally. In 1927, the high-water mark for missionaries to China, enrolment steadied at 103 men, and 34 women. The number of self-supporting students increased, “a matter to which all interested in the true development of the Chinese church should give serious attention.”[40] Watson Hayes had many well-heeled donors in the United States[41], like-minded committed conservatives, who gave generously and meant that the school could be independent of the mission board (nicknamed “156” from its address on Fifth Avenue, NYC). That same year Martin Hopkins[42] was appointed to teach Old Testament as a Southern Presbyterian replacement for George Stephens[43]. Hopkins had recently studied at Princeton under Robert Dick Wilson. The foreign faculty roster was almost complete.

Hayes returned home for a final six-month furlough in 1930. He had lost none of his fire, decrying to his supporters[44] at Swarthmore Church, Philadelphia, “Christ-belittling, Gospel-doubting men, who imagine their ideas are as good, if not superior to those of St. Paul.”[45] He was in an ebullient mood as he announced his intention to retire “so as to give myself unreservedly to teaching” and enclosed a picture of the graduating class of 1930, noting that there were twenty-nine provinces and ten missions represented. “We are not able to meet the demands for either men or women.” And then he concluded his first decade at NCTS stating that “I thank the Lord that he has enabled me to crown my labors by founding these two schools – they compensate in some measure for the many hard years preceding.”[46]

The next decade would bring many challenges. Hayes had negotiated for a young graduate to come to teach, and after some delays, Alexander MacLeod (毛克禮)[47], with four earned degrees (two from Princeton Seminary), arrived in 1932, along with Kenneth Kepler[48]. Hayes wrote “I am glad to say that our two young missionaries, Messrs. Kepler and MacLeod, have a vivid sense of what they are here for, and I judge are of more than average missionary ability.”[49]

Three events profoundly affected NCTS in the early 1930’s. The Great Depression gutted giving to missionary causes. PCUSA missionary Pearl Buck’s 1931 The Good Earth and her speech a year later asking “Is There A Case For Foreign Missions?” (answer no), were particularly bitter blows in Tengxian as her parents, Absalom and Caroline Sydenstricker, had been Southern Presbyterian evangelists at Suqian since 1880 and were greatly loved. Hayes pointedly asked him: “The gingerly way in which Mrs. Buck was dealt with has evidently bred misgivings. Was there any definite basis for the puff regarding ‘the service she has rendered during this past sixteen years’?” Finally the publication in 1932 of Re-Thinking Missions: A Laymen’s Inquiry after One Hundred Years released a firestorm on the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions and on its leaders, particularly Robert A. Speer regarded as compromised.

Albert Dodd immediately joined the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, Machen’s alternative organization. Watson Hayes was placed in a difficult situation: he agreed basically with Dodd (and Machen) but could not see himself either bailing out or jeopardizing the position of the Seminary. Dodd said to the 1936 graduating class at Westminster Seminary while on furlough: “You are being called of God to the task of taking the message of salvation, in an age of intense crisis, to a world wherein countless millions have never heard, and to minister to a rapidly apostatizing church which is more and more inclined to reject that message and to hate and persecute that attitude. Words utterly fail one as he (sic) would express admiration for the courageous stand your school and you as individuals have taken.”[50] Hayes, temperamentally different from his colleague (and older), “Though under considerable provocation, I have refrained from making any public statements, because in my judgment it is better to do our washing at home.”[51]

The murders of China Inland Missionaries John and Betty Stam by the Red Army on 8 December 1934 came as a wakeup call to the Tengxian field. Betty’s father, Charles Ernest Scott, was deeply involved (and would continue to be) in NCTS and their wedding two years before in Jinan had been celebrated by the station. Eight years later, to that very day, the Japanese soldiers who had barracked themselves next door to the Seminary[52] (having taken the city in 1938 after a bloody battle) interrupted Seminary classes and led the faculty that still remained into house arrest, cancelling all classes for the next several months[53].

That final decade in Tengxian was in some ways regarded as the most productive for NCTS. The students were never more eager to learn, more spiritually alive, more committed to the Reformed faith. For those, such as my father who chose to stay on and as a result was to spend four and a half years as prisoners in a concentration camp, there was a rich reward of faithful and obedient service[54]. But my father was preparing his students for likely martyrdom and it set a new level of commitment for professor and student alike. The Reformed faith has always been a school for martyrs: John Calvin sent his emissaries into France knowing that likely death awaited them and so it has been throughout history as witness St Bartholomew’s massacre (1572) and Margaret Wilson, drowned in Solway Firth (1685) for refusing to abjure her faith.

One of those who would later be martyred was Chang Hsueh-kang[55] who attended Qilu from 1912 to 1916, and was one of the earliest graduates of NCTS. After serving a church in Weixian he joined the NCTS faculty in 1926 and was sent to Princeton Seminary for a year in 1931. He became Watson Hayes’ successor as president of NCTS in 1937 and subsequently was president of Taitung Seminary of the Christian Nationals Evangelism Commission. He refused to join the Three-self Patriotic Movement and died in prison on 5 March 1960.

Watson and Margaret Hayes were led out of their home in March 1943 and taken to Weixian by the Japanese who had turned the former American Presbyterian Mission compound into a concentration camp. He died there on 2 April 1944[56]. It was fortunate that his son, John David[57], stayed with his parents throughout the ordeal. At war’s end Margaret Hayes returned to America but died shortly thereafter. “From the time of the founding of the North China Theological Seminary in 1919 until the time of his death in 1944,” the memorial minute read, “Dr Hayes devoted all his great abilities and scholarship to the task of building up the Seminary, with the result that it became the largest and stongest theological seminary in China, and sent out into all China a great number of well-trained pastors, preachers, and Bible women, thoroughly grounded in the sound evangelical faith for which the Seminary ever stood.”[58]

毛大龍

A Donald MacLeod,

Research Professor of Church History,

Tyndale Theological Seminary, Toronto

adonaldmacleod@gmail.com;

website adonaldmacleod.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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