D. Elton Trueblood: A Twentieth-Century Friend

Until now this series has kept us in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. George Fox traveling and preaching. Margaret Fell writing letters out of a prison cell. Early Friends working out, at considerable cost, what it meant to be a people gathered by Christ Himself. This article moves the clock forward.

I want to introduce you to a Friend who lectured on the radio, taught philosophy, served the Navy in wartime, and published more than forty books. The world knew him as D. Elton Trueblood, and after the Second World War he was very likely the best-known Quaker in the English-speaking world. If you have ever pulled a worn paperback of The Company of the Committed off a church library shelf, you have met him already.

From Pleasantville to Johns Hopkins

He was born on November 4, 1900, in Pleasantville, Iowa, into a Quaker family associated with what would later be called the Evangelical Friends tradition. Hold onto that last detail.

His schooling took him to William Penn College, then Earlham, then Johns Hopkins University, where he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy. Notice the shape of that training: philosophy, theology, and Christian ethics braided together rather than kept in separate rooms. No accident. Early on he settled on a purpose that would occupy his whole career, to demonstrate that Christianity is intellectually credible as well as spiritually transformative. Both, in the same breath.

Peter tells us to "be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear" (1 Peter 3:15). Trueblood read that as a job description.

The teacher at Earlham

Much of his working life was spent at Earlham College, one of the principal Quaker colleges in the United States, teaching philosophy and religion. His lectures were known for clarity and rigor, and drew students from well outside the Quaker fold.

What he asked of those students is a good ask. He pressed them to hold three things together: scholarship, Christian discipleship, and public service. Not piety in place of competence. All three, in one life.

He did not stay put. He lectured at universities across North America and Europe, and through radio broadcasts became a familiar voice to people who had never sat in a meetinghouse.

Wartime service and a public voice

During the Second World War, Trueblood served as Director of Religious Work for the United States Navy, helping strengthen the chaplaincy and see that men and women in uniform received real spiritual care. After the war he advised government leaders and educational institutions. When people wanted to know what a serious Christian thought about a public question, he was one of the men they asked.

The idea he called voluntary clergy

Of all his practical proposals, the one that traveled farthest was the notion of a "voluntary clergy." Gifted laypeople who keep their secular employment should serve congregations, so that the church does not lean entirely on paid ministry.

Trueblood believed this reflected the New Testament, and that it rested on a conviction as old as Quakerism itself: ministry rests on spiritual gifting rather than professional status. He was not inventing a novelty but handing an old Quaker instinct back to Friends who had begun to mislay it.

I confess a fondness for this one. When Paul came to Corinth he lodged with Aquila and Priscilla, "and because he was of the same craft, he abode with them, and wrought: for by their occupation they were tentmakers" (Acts 18:3). The man who wrote much of the New Testament had a trade.

What he actually believed

He set his convictions down plainly, so I will too. Trueblood held to the authority of Scripture, the deity of Christ, the bodily resurrection, personal conversion, and the inward guidance of the Holy Spirit. To that he added something not always found beside it: an unembarrassed intellectual engagement with modern culture. His central claim about Friends fits in a sentence. Quakerism is a movement within historic Christianity, not an alternative religion.

Which brings us to the Inner Light. Here he stood where Robert Barclay stood. The Light within is Christ Himself at work through the Holy Spirit, not an autonomous human faculty, not the better angels of our nature wearing Quaker clothes. It is the Lord. "That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world" (John 1:9). Trueblood read that verse as the first Friends read it, and would not let it be shrunk into anything smaller.

He appealed constantly to Fox, Barclay, William Penn, and John Woolman, contending that the early Friends were thoroughly biblical, Christ-centered, evangelical in the broad historic sense, and deeply experiential. He believed he was standing exactly where Quakerism had started.

A Friend at home in three houses

Now I must say something about the shape of the Society in Trueblood's lifetime, and I want to say it carefully. By the twentieth century it was no longer one body. Friends had divided into branches, Evangelical and Conservative and Liberal, each with its own history and convictions. How that came about belongs to another article in this series, and I will not settle it here. A man is better described by someone not busy taking sides while describing him.

His closest theological home was among Evangelical Friends, whose commitment to evangelism and world missions he shared. But he was not narrowly sectarian. He appreciated a great deal in classical Quaker spirituality, and urged Evangelical Friends to stay connected to those early writings. Do not cut yourself off from the root, he was saying, because you will need it in the drought. Some wished he had emphasized revivalism more strongly.

Many Conservative Friends respected him even where they differed, valuing his scholarship, his defense of waiting worship, and his emphasis on the living guidance of Christ. Some judged that his evangelical theology aligned him more with the Gurneyite tradition than with John Wilbur's interpretation of early Friends. He did not answer in kind. Whatever the temperature of the nineteenth-century disputes, he looked for common ground.

Liberal Friends held him in considerable respect as well, for his intellectual honesty, his commitment to peace, his concern for social justice, and his ecumenical spirit. He differed from many of them, plainly and without rancor, on the uniqueness of Christ, the historical resurrection, and the authority of Scripture, and some regarded his theology as too traditionally Christian and insufficiently open to religious pluralism. His argument was never that social witness mattered less, but that it drew its strength from exactly those foundations.

Too Christian for one house, not revivalist enough for another, too evangelical in his reading for a third, and respected in all three anyway. That was unusual then. It would be unusual now.

More than forty books

Not a boast about output, but a fact you must reckon with, because the books went where he could not go.

Start with The People Called Quakers (1966), his best-known introduction to Quaker history and theology, and the Company of the Committed you may already own. Then, if only for what the title tells you about the temperature of the man, The Humor of Christ.

Alongside Rufus Jones

For many historians he stands alongside Rufus Jones as one of the two most influential Quaker writers of the century. If Jones became the principal interpreter of Liberal Quakerism, Trueblood became the foremost interpreter of Christian Quakerism, and for a broad audience rather than a specialist one.

He died in 1994, having very nearly spanned the century.

A brother of a later century

His books are still read in evangelical, Quaker, and ecumenical settings alike. Here is why I commend him to you. Trueblood spent a lifetime insisting that you do not have to choose. Not between a mind that works and a heart that burns. Not between the Light within and the Scriptures without, because rightly understood they are the same Christ speaking. Not between honoring the founders and holding the faith once delivered to the saints, because the founders were preaching that very faith.

In earlier articles I commended George Fox to you as a brother worth knowing, and Margaret Fell Fox as a sister worth knowing. Let me now commend D. Elton Trueblood as a brother of a later century. A boy out of Pleasantville, Iowa, with a doctorate, a lectern, forty books, and the same Lord who met Margaret Fell at Swarthmoor Hall and never let her go. He took the Light he had received and held it out to anyone who would look. May the same be said of us.