The Quiet Revolutionary

Elton Trueblood enjoys telling his guests that he has been alive every day of the twentieth century. Those who know this 91-year-old Quaker Christian do not doubt it. His gait has slowed, his age shows in the sags and lines of his face, and his voice wavers, but he still stands tall and shakes hands with a firm grip. He somehow radiates a kind of boyish excitement as he talks about his life.

These days he lives in a retirement village near his sons in a semirural community just north of Philadelphia. His decades at Indiana’s Earlham College—teaching, writing, and directing the Yokefellow Institute—are behind him now, but not the memories. His replica of George Washington’s desk, moved from Earlham’s Teague Library, sits prominently in the living room of his one-bedroom apartment, one of the first of the furnishings a visitor notices. And the walls of the neatly kept room are hung with the memorabilia of a colorful lifetime. There are photos from his student days at William Penn College—with Trueblood as a football player, a member of the debating team, and with his future wife. In all of them, this product of a small college in Iowa seems already to have the self-assurance that enabled him to walk comfortably through the halls of the world’s most prestigious universities and be a friend to the likes of Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Trueblood went to William Penn in 1918 because it was a Quaker college, and he was Quaker to the core. What he would bring to the rest of Christendom would be derived from that tradition, and all who were touched by his ministry would taste something of this influence.

It was Quakerism that lay behind Trueblood’s bold admonition to “abolish the laity” (that is, do away with rigid distinctions between laity and clergy), but the phrase is original to Trueblood. It appeared in his first book, The Essence of Spiritual Religion, published in 1936 and based on sermons Trueblood gave in the summer of 1935 as acting dean of chapel at Harvard University. When he spoke of the “abolition of the laity” in the Sunday service at the chapel, he sensed an immediate reaction in his student listeners. “If it worked there,” he decided, “it would work anywhere.” It became central in his messages wherever he spoke over the next 50 years.

“The word laity does not appear in the Bible,” he says, emphasizing his point with an inveterate teacher’s measured diction. Everyone, he believes, is called into ministry; the task of spreading the Word of God and the responsibility for meeting the needs of a hurting world were never meant to be the assignments of an elite group of ordained church leaders. These “callings” belong to all Christians. His old, bespectacled eyes flash with youthful excitement when he argues, “Christianity withers when it’s a spectator sport. A layman in medicine is one who cannot practice. The same with law. But there is no place in the Christian faith for those who cannot or will not practice. There are no passengers on the ship of Christ. All are members of the crew.”

Trueblood’s campaign to “abolish the laity” was not the only fruit of his lecturing and sermonizing. He claims he has gauged the relevance of all his ideas by first speaking them and only then committing them to books and articles: “The conventional thing is to write a sermon and then speak it. I have always reversed that. I try it out face to face; I’m watching the people’s faces every minute, and I know what clicks and what doesn’t.” Most of Trueblood’s books grew out of such keen sensitivity. His living-room bookcase behind his desk is filled with copies of the 34 volumes he has penned, and he springs from his sofa seat to show his guests some of his favorite titles. The better-known include The Predicament of Modern Man (1944), The Company of the Committed (1961), The Incendiary Fellowship (1967), and While It Is Day: An Autobiography (1974).

One of the most tangible fruits of Trueblood’s emphasis on all Christians being ministers was the Yokefellows movement. Trueblood was convinced that if Christians were to live out their callings, they needed the help that comes through small-group experiences. He envisioned small gatherings of men and women meeting weekly all across the nation and around the world to support and encourage one another. Without telling anybody what he was really doing, he created thousands of small “Quaker Meetings” where Christians could be priests to one another, building them up for ministry. In these informal gatherings, Trueblood believed that Christians could find spiritual renewal and guidance for living out their calling of service in the world.

Talk of such “small-group ministry” now seems common enough, but in the late forties, when Trueblood began sowing the seeds for its later blossoming with his book Alternative to Futility (1948), the concept was revolutionary.

The idea came serendipitously. In 1949, reading the passage in Matthew where Jesus promises that following him would not be a burdensome yoke, Trueblood hit upon the name yokefellow. “Yokefellows” would agree to base their Christian life on four “pillars”: commitment to Christ, fellowship with others, ministry to the world, and discipline in daily living. The Yokefellow Institute began to flourish under Trueblood’s direction in the midfifties, reaching out with retreats and regular publications. (Since Trueblood’s retirement, his protege, James R. Newby, has carried on this work in quarters next door to Earlham College.) The Yokefellow Institute continues to promote the proposition “If you are a Christian, you are a minister.”

Trueblood also brought the theology of Quaker founder George Fox to the wider church through an emphasis on the “primacy of persons.” True to Quakerism, Trueblood taught that there is a sacred presence or “inner light” in everyone, a conviction that seems to take tangible expression in the way Trueblood draws out guests and friends in conversation, frequently turning to them to ask for their opinions.

According to Trueblood, one need not be a Christian to be endowed with this holy presence. “Socrates was a Christian before Christ,” he argues after the fashion of some early church fathers. And this “gift” can be found in every man and woman; we become Christians by yielding to Christ’s indwelling presence and acknowledging Jesus as Lord.

Trueblood also, however, emphasizes the primacy of Christ; with George Fox he affirms that “there is one, even Jesus Christ, that can speak to thy condition.” And for Trueblood, a Christian is one who wholeheartedly receives Christ’s forgiveness and makes a commitment to follow Christ in his or her vocation and everyday life. His theology of persons is simply an affirmation of his Quaker belief that there is a sacred “Thou” in every person waiting to be known and acknowledged.

This conviction has given Trueblood his unmistakable egalitarian disposition toward each person he meets. Everyone has a sacred quality of being, he believes. He has found it in people as famous as President Herbert Hoover, who requested before his death that Trueblood conduct his memorial service, or in persons as lowly as the man who trimmed Trueblood’s grass. He recognized it in the scholar, statesman, and one-time president of India, Radhakrishnan, as well as in Bible scholar J. B. Phillips, both of whom became his friends. Trueblood believes he can respect all men and women because all are made in the image of God and all possess something of the “inner light.”

Trueblood is not best known as a Quaker, however, but as a thinker and communicator. While American book jackets love to name the latest scholar/writer the “new C. S. Lewis,” and dozens of writers have aspired to be the heir to the Oxford don’s following, the comparison can be defensibly made in Trueblood’s case.

Trueblood himself is delighted with the suggestion. “Actually, I set out to be [the American C. S. Lewis]. I said to myself, There’s nobody in America doing what Lewis is doing in Britain. Why shouldn’t I try?”

Like Lewis, Trueblood has held teaching positions in some of the most academically prestigious universities in the world. While teaching at Stanford and Harvard, he made Christianity seem more than viable. His many books, from popular theological treatises to college philosophy textbooks, have gained respect both inside and outside the academic community. He has managed to popularize many of the great truths of Christianity.

There is another way in which the comparison sticks. Like Lewis, Trueblood would not pass through every evangelicals’ doctrinal fine-toothed comb. His view of Scripture, for instance, would not satisfy more conservative formulations. Trueblood himself prefers terms like “rational evangelical,” or “new evangelical,” to describe his place on the theological spectrum: somewhere between old-fashioned fundamentalism and old-fashioned liberalism. “When someone asks me what I am,” he reflects, “I often say four words, the beginning letters of which spell care: catholic, because I’m not sectarian, apostolic because I try to go back to the roots, reformed because I want to improve myself any time I can, and evangelical because I’m Christ-centered.”

Trueblood is not likely to talk for long, in fact, without mentioning what is probably his favorite phrase, what he calls the “holy conjunction”: There always has to be a “conjunction between clear thinking and tender hearts,” he argues. “Christian fellowships that rightly understand their identity know Scripture thoroughly and follow the Spirit where he leads. They are evangelistic and socially involved. They pray and serve. One of the most important words that Jesus ever used was the word and.”

Trueblood looks at his watch and announces that the interview will have to end. He had scheduled an hour for the interview and, for all his 91 years, was alert and quick with answers. But now he feels his age and remembers that he has scheduled himself to take a nap. It is easy to imagine that this is the way his life has always been lived—according to a disciplined schedule. There is each day a time to pray and a time to think, he would argue. There is a time to read the Bible and a time to read the philosophers. There is a time to remember and a time to dream of what might be in days to come. But now it is time for him to say, in his quiet but direct way, “Good-bye.”

Tony Campolo is professor of sociology at Eastern College in St. Davids, Pennsylvania, and author of Who Switched the Price Tags? and The Kingdom of God Is a Party (both from Word).

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