Howard Thurman and Quakers

By Stephen W. Angell

In 1955, the inaugural year of the Friends Journal, a special issue was published on the theme of the Wider Quaker Fellowship. One of the essays in that issue was excerpted from Deep River, a forthcoming book by Howard Thurman (1899-1981), eminent Christian African American mystical and social gospel theologian, preacher, and prolific author. The first sentence of the author’s identification read as follows: “Howard Thurman, dean of Marsh Chapel, Boston University, is a member of the Wider Quaker Fellowship.” (FJ, Nov. 1955, 297) For someone of the breadth of interests and audience that Thurman possessed, making this explicit an identification with Quakerism was remarkable.

The purpose of this essay is to probe the extent and depth of his allegiances, or alliances, to and with Quakers. This is not a topic that has altogether escaped scholarly notice. Gary Dorrien, author of a magisterial three-volume history of liberal Christian theology in the United States, notes the strong Quaker influence on Thurman, attributing that influence with considerable reason to Rufus Jones (1863-1948), the Quaker philosopher, theologian, and social activists whose range of interests strongly prefigured those of Thurman. Dorrien characterizes Jones as Thurman’s role model and “favorite religious thinker.” (Dorrien, 2003, 565).

Along similar lines, Leigh Schmidt, author of an insightful monograph on the history of mystical religion in the United States, highlights the “strong Quaker element of prayer, silence, meditation, and nonviolence in Thurman’s work.” (Schmidt, 2005, 268). But neither Schmidt nor Dorrien looks at Thurman’s interactions with any other Quakers than Jones, nor does either scholar consider possible areas of ambivalence or disagreement that Thurman might have had with Quakers.

Alongside of Jones, I will suggest three Quakers whose interaction with Thurman were important and deserve examination: Wilmer Cooper (1920-2008), Douglas Steere (1901-1995), and Louise Wilson (b. 1921). I will also argue with Dorrien and Schmidt that, despite a few possible areas of ambivalence or disagreement, Thurman had a durable and strong relationship with Quakerism.

This essay does not assert that Thurman had an attachment to Quakerism exclusive of attachments to other religious denominations. Quite the opposite was true; indeed, his most important religious affiliation, that which he had to the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, was based on the conviction that the soundest religious orientation would be built upon the transcendence of sects, denominations, races, and creeds. A Festschrift for Howard Thurman was published in 1983 by a Quaker press – Friends United Press in Richmond, Indiana – containing a most unusual “Publisher’s Preface” recounting many of Thurman’s connections with Quakers, but also including this vital disclaimer: “As quick as Quakers might have been to want to claim Howard Thurman, they knew that he belonged to everyone.” (Young, xii) My intention here, then, is to portray a relationship between Thurman and Quakers that was close and intimate, but not, in any sense, exclusive.

Thurman’s Early Life

Howard Thurman bought one of Rufus Jones’ books, Finding the Trail of Life, a childhood memoir, at a second-hand sale in 1927 when he was serving his first pastorate (in Oberlin, Ohio) and was 28 years old. Thurman immediately felt he had found a kindred spirit in Jones, and resolved to study with him if Jones were still alive. Thurman later recalled that Jones “had what I wanted, a combination of insight and social feeling.” (Jennness, 154) That led to Thurman becoming a special student of Jones at Haverford College in the winter and spring of 1929. (Thurman, 1979, 74) What follows is a brief account of his life before his studies with Jones.

Thurman was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, to Saul and Alice Thurman on November 18, 1899. Saul Thurman died of pneumonia when Howard was seven years old. (Jones, too, had lost a parent – his mother – during childhood, and had written movingly of the spiritual effects of her death on him in Finding the Trail of Life.) Thurman was a part of the Black Baptist church from birth, a connection that at the same time was wonderfully enriching because of his grandmother’s lively and nurturing spirituality, and occasionally very bleak when there were moments that, while possibly well meant, were devastating in their effects on him.

As an example of the latter, one can identify the tension following the death of his father, a good, gentle, unchurched man. His family pastor refused to preach Saul’s funeral sermon, and when a visiting minister was procured, he took the opportunity to preach a sermon (with Howard and the family present) that suggested that Saul Thurman was going to hell. After that sermon, Howard exclaimed that he would never to have anything to do with the church when he grew up – a vow which, in an important sense, he did not keep, yet at the same time his ministry was that of one who was always aware of how churches can be deeply hurtful. (Thurman, 1979, 4-6)

The hostile, white supremacist world of Daytona Beach environed the cocoon of black, poor Daytona neighborhoods, which fiercely protected their young. Thurman was very poor materially but also quite rich spiritually, in large part as a result of the love and careful discipline that he received from his mother, grandmother, and African American neighbors. The hostile white world had its greatest impact on young Thurman quite impersonally in its utter neglect of the education of black youth. There was, for example, no high school for African American youth in Daytona; the nearest high school that accepted African Americans was in Jacksonville, some ninety miles to the north. Nevertheless, through the determination of his mother, his grandmother, and himself, and some improbable, even miraculous, procurement of finances, Thurman was able to attend high school in Jacksonville, and then obtain an undergraduate degree from the elite African American institution, Morehouse College, in Atlanta. He consistently excelled in his studies, and was admitted (under a quota system, limiting African American admissions to two per year) at Colgate Seminary in Rochester. (Thurman, 1979, 21-46)

In western New York State of the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was as present as it had been in Daytona, and Thurman had uncomfortable personal confrontations with Klansmen there. In recounting his life experiences in a Rochester seminary and his ensuing pastorate in Oberlin, Ohio, Thurman described a series of difficult and challenging encounters, often, but not always, focused on racial issues. The overwhelming theme of his stories was a hard-won yet durable forgiveness, reconciliation, and peace which came from a forthright, loving, and stalwart facing up to the difficulties.

It was during this time that whites first entered into Thurman’s “magnetic field of ethical awareness” (Thurman, 1979, 51), as they had not in the virtually all-black worlds he had inhabited at Daytona and Morehouse. He played a leading role in desegregating his seminary dormitory. He deepened his involvement with the YMCA, with which he had first become acquainted as a high school student, a powerful force for a progressive Christianity on race issues as well as other areas. (Jenness, 151)

Walter Fluker and Catherine Tumber make these obser-vations about his life immediately prior to his studies with Jones:

A regular on the ‘Y’ lecture circuit during the height of segregation, [Thurman] was the student movement’s most popular speaker before interracial audiences. . . . Thurman helped pioneer the introduction of theological education at black colleges and universities, and worked to wrest control of black seminary training from white leadership. In the late 1920s, he was appointed the first African-American board member of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). (Fluker and Tumber, 1998, 4)

Rufus Jones and Thurman

So, in early 1929, the twenty-nine-year-old Thurman traveled to Haverford College to study with the sixty-six-year-old Rufus Jones. Jones at that time was already a significant leader in the Quaker and ecumenical Christian world, a leading authority on mysticism, an activist who had played a large part in founding the American Friends Service Committee (and a lesser role in the establishment of the FOR), a professor on the verge of retirement after a thirty-six-year career at Haverford, and the prolific author of thirty-four books (more than twenty more would follow prior to his death in 1948). (Angell, 2000)

It was Jones’s experience of and scholarship on mysticism that especially attracted Thurman to him, although their commitment to a progressive Christianity that included pacifism was also a common bond. In 1961, when Thurman was invited to give a Rufus Jones Memorial Lecture under the sponsorship of Friends General Conference, Thurman began by acknowledging his debt to Jones in helping him to establish himself as a scholar of mysticism. Jones had given to Thurman “confidence in the insight that the religion of the inner life could deal with the empirical experience of man without retreating from the demands of such experience.” (Thurman, 1961, 3)

The mysticism that Thurman learned from Jones was skeptical of mere intellectual apprehensions of reality, and he was concerned to subordinate these to a more intuitive, putatively “inner-light”-centered way of submitting to the deepest possible reality. In a 1978 lecture to Unitarian Universalists in Berkeley, Thurman said of Jones, “He had a profound mistrust of the powers of the mind and an absolute devotion to the powers of the mind. He felt that always the role of the thinker was to put at the disposal of the motivations of his life, the best fruits of learning and the mastery of the external world. But this should be done best if the individuals who were seeking it would be inwardly motivated.” (Pollard, 1992, 163)

In his autobiography published in 1979, Thurman gave a more extended account of his relationship with Jones. He recounted how he had received wisdom imparted by Jones in several settings, including philosophy class lectures, a Philadelphia-area seminar on Meister Eckhart geared toward college and university teachers, and the messages that Jones delivered in mid-week meeting for worship at Haverford. Thurman took the occasion to write several essays on various aspects of mysticism, including “one on Spanish [and French] mystics, especially Madame Guyon, and another, a definitive study of the mysticism of St. Francis of Assisi.”

But best of all were their conversations, the occasions for heart-to-heart interchange. Jones’s manner was “utterly informal,” and his expressions “anecdotal, sometimes whimsically reflective,” but purposeful in showing Thurman possible directions for his work. Furthermore, observed Thurman, Jones “had the gift of intimacy, which allowed him to go to the heart of his personal experience without causing embarrassment to his listener or himself.” When Thurman showed skepticism at his elder’s habit of regular afternoon naps, Jones invited him to consider that there might come a time when the younger man would see the wisdom of that practice! (Thurman, 1979, 76-77)

A 1951 account stated that Thurman “acknowledges that Rufus Jones, the saintly philosopher of Haverford College, has had the greatest influence on him of any of his teachers. . . . Like the great Quaker, [Thurman] seeks the inner light of personal guidance and power. He does not strive nor cry, and a bruised reed he will not break.” (Christian Century, Sept. 12, 1951)

Thurman dealt with the issue of race gently in his retrospective observations of Jones. From the time that Thurman had the leading to study with Jones, he had an intuitive sense that Haverford College did not admit African Americans for study in 1929. In fact, it appears that Haverford admitted its first African American student in 1926, (Barbour and Frost, 266) but in the correspondence between Jones and Thurman prior to his coming in 1929, the issue was explicitly raised by Thurman, but not squarely addressed by Jones.

The latter’s correspondence was uniformly encouraging in terms of expressing pleasure at the thought of welcoming Thurman and praising his plan of study. Jones also stated that Thurman would not be charged for tuition. Thurman was able to get a grant from the National Council in Higher Education and appointment as a Fellow by the Council, and the grant was sufficient to meet his other costs. But Jones never addressed the issue of whether Thurman would be admitted to Haverford. (Thurman, 1979, 74-76) It is quite possible that inasmuch as Haverford was purely an undergraduate institution and Thurman already possessed both the B.A. and Bachelor of Divinity degrees, Jones thought it would not be possible to formally admit someone to what was essentially a post-graduate program.

His actual contact with Jones caused him to realize that for Jones, racial justice was not an ethical issue on the level of war and peace, but that did not affect the ease of their relationship. Thurman wrote, “During the entire time with Rufus, issues of racial conflict never arose, for the fact of racial differences was never dealt with at the conscious level. The ethical emphasis in his interpretations of mystical religion dealt primarily with war and peace, the poverty and hunger of whole populations, and the issues arising from the conflict between nations. Paradoxically, in his presence, the specific issues of race with which I had been confronted all my life as a black man in America seemed strangely irrelevant. I felt that somehow he transcended race; I did so, too, temporarily, and, in retrospect, this aspect of my time with him remains an enigma.” (Thurman, 1979, 77)

Thurman’s writing here is enigmatic as well. When, in 1926, a mentor at Colgate, George Cross, had suggested that Thurman’s life work should transcend race and be focused on “timeless issues of the human spirit,” Thurman had been inwardly critical of Cross’s statement. He had “wondered what kind of response I could make to this man who did not know that a man and his black skin must face the ‘timeless issues of the human spirit’ together.” (Thurman, 1979, 60) So race had been a problematic construct in Thurman’s conversations with Cross. In interactions with Jones, was transcending race really less problematic for him?

In an attempt to shed more light on these issues, I have examined the papers of Howard Thurman, housed at Boston University, and the papers of Rufus Jones, housed at Haverford College. I have unfortunately found little light to be shed by searching in archives. In Thurman’s papers at Boston University, there are letters that are filed under the name of Rufus Jones. These are dated in the early and mid 1930s immediately after his period of study at Haverford. Unfortunately, these letters were not written by Jones himself, but by a woman who was a secretary in the Department of Philosophy at Haverford. The letters were written on half sheets of paper, and they passed on personal news; there is nothing contained in them of philosophical or theological import, and they were written in a condescending tone.

Thurman did, however, keep in touch with Jones. In his papers, there is a letter informing Jones of Thurman’s departure for India in 1935, and promising to speak with Jones on his return. (Thurman to Jones, Sept. 3, 1935) In Jones’s papers at Haverford, there is nothing that I have been able to discover on Howard Thurman, and archivists at Haverford assured me that I had not missed anything. Before her death, I was able to speak briefly with Rufus Jones’s daughter, Mary Hoxie Jones, then in her nineties, and she categorically denied that Howard Thurman had ever studied with her father.

Contemporaneous witnesses to Thurman’s studies with Jones seem scarce, but one such testimony is provided by Jones’s Haverford colleague, fellow Quaker, and extensive writer on Christian Spirituality, Douglas Steere: “When I first knew [Thurman] at Haverford in 1928, [actually, 1929] he had come to be near Rufus Jones for a time, and we shared an exciting seminar in Meister Eckhart. Eckhart’s lesson that ‘you can only spend in good works what you have earned in contemplation’ must have lodged deeply in Howard’s mind and spirit for it has been a theme song of his ever since.” Steere was one person from this period of Thurman’s life who kept up his ties of friendship, visiting Thurman frequently during his subsequent thirteen-year tenure as professor and chaplain at Howard University, and then also visiting Thurman’s church during his pastorate in San Francisco. (Gandy, iii)

Rufus Jones and Thurman

There is not much anywhere in the voluminous published writings of Rufus Jones on matters of racial justice. In his youthful writings, there is occasionally to be found a racist comment, such as his assertion in 1895 (at age 32) that Cubans are “incompetent to conduct an efficient administration. They are negroes and mixed races, without general education or self-control.” (American Friend, “The Cuban War,” 8/22/1895, p. 804) The American Friends Service Committee, however, which Jones helped to found in 1917, had racial justice and reconciliation as one of its major foci from the 1920s onward, and Jones was intimately involved with the work of the AFSC for its first three decades, much of the time as Chairman of its Board. To what degree did Rufus Jones grow in his appreciation of the need for work on behalf of racial justice, and in his support for it?

Perhaps the closest connection after 1929 between Jones and Thurman came in the mid-1940s in a very intriguing series of conferences shortly before Jones’ death. Both were invited to take part in a twelve-man group sponsored by “the Fellowship,” also called the “prayer group movement,” a normally secretive association of evangelicals that was then in its infancy but has grown greatly in power since; its most notable event is the annual National Prayer Breakfast. The movement’s members are devoted “to the teachings of Jesus and a belief that peace and justice can come about through quiet efforts to change individuals, particularly those in positions of power.” (“Showing Faith in Discretion,” The Los Angeles Times, Sep 27, 2002)

[Ed. Note: This group, renamed “The Family,” became controversial in the summer of 2009. See, for example, The Family, by Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, Harper, 2008, and “Sex and power inside ‘the C Street House,’” Jeff Sharlet, Salon, July 21, 2009:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/07/21/c_street/]

The group that included Jones and Thurman began meeting in 1943 and after four annual gatherings the twelve men published a book of its findings entitled Together in 1946. Thurman, then in his mid-forties, was the youngest of the twelve, and almost certainly the only African American. The contri-butors’ list was heavy with veterans of the home and foreign missions movement, including former China missionaries John Magee and Congressman Walter Judd; E. Stanley Jones, miss-ionary to India; and Frank Laubach, missionary to the Philip-pines.

According to Rufus Jones, these twelve men, each of whom wrote essays for the volume, had experienced in meeting together the “uniting, cementing, thrilling, joyous Spirit of Pentecost” and aimed to “become the pattern of a world organism of Christian forces.” They sought to nurture “just those things that are deeply grounded in love – agape – and just those movements initiated and supported by the inspiration and guidance of the divine Spirit” in the fast approaching post-World-War-II world. Another group member quoted Rufus Jones in 1944 as stating that “the next twelve months hold more portent for the future of mankind than any year since the birth of Christ” and Howard Thurman agreeing with the statement that “if we can get enough people praying this year, it may swing the destiny of mankind to the side of righteousness.” (Jones et al., 1946, 10, 11, 106)

Thurman’s succinct authored contribution, the final chapter of the book, was the only essay of the twelve to address domestic racial injustice: “Racial and class prejudice is directly a denial of the existence of God the Father. . . . A widespread racial exclusiveness appears in the Church and often among religious people generally. . . . This curious, malignant growth in Christianity stems basically from the notion that there is either more than one God, or there is a basic distinction between the God of life and the God of religion, or there is but one true God (mine) and other Gods are false. This is contrary to the message of the prophets of Israel and teachings of Jesus Christ.” (Jones et al., 1946, 118-120)

Scholars have found an especially rich lode to mine in making comparison between the writings of Thurman and Jones. There is much to confirm Dorrien’s assessment that Jones was Thurman’s “favorite religious thinker.” Thurman certainly read both widely and deeply in Jones’s extensive corpus of writings. James Massey pointed out several parallels between the two men’s thought. Their doctrines of God were similar, as well as their embrace of evolution, their optimistic anthropology, their “strong reverence for human personality,” and their insistence on the divisiveness of creeds. He also discussed several parallels in their phraseology, including their characterization of human existence as divided between an inner life and an outer one, although Massey adds that “such similarities in phrasing need not be the result of explicit borrowing.” (Massey 191-193)

Gary Dorrien provides a similar catalog of similarities, pointing especially to the ways that the two men’s scholarly interests concentrated on the places that mysticism converged with social activism and social change. “With Jones, Thurman held out for the religious and ethical primacy of the mystical vision of spiritual unity, the superiority of life-embracing, affirmative mysticism over life-denying, ascetical, negative mysticism, and the ethical practices of pacifist peacemaking and nonviolent resistance to injustice. Like Jones he insisted that all forms of violence, oppression, and prejudice offend against the divine good. Above all, he repeated that the best kind of prayer is prayed out of sheer love and enjoyment of God.

“Thurman and Jones were prophets of what Thurman called ‘the overflowing of the heart as an act of grace toward God.’” (Dorrien, 2003, 565) The preceding discussion ought to lead us to qualify these comments somewhat. In opposition to racial prejudice, for example, Thurman provided a clear and consistent protest, whereas Jones seemed not to address that issue. Nonetheless, Dorrien is very close to the heart of the matter here with his insight that both men advocated an affirmative mysticism that would make a very practical, positive difference in our world.

On a more focused matter, I explored an important parallel between the two men in an earlier essay. Seven years after studying with Jones, Thurman made a visit to India. His trip, under the auspices of the YMCA, was conceived as a Christian “mission” to India, but Thurman went only after he made it completely clear that the only kind of mission that he was comfortable with was one that rested entirely on the model of religious dialogue. This model of Christian missions had been spelled out clearly, sparking much controversy, in a Laymen’s Report on Christian Missions that had appeared in 1933, a report that Jones had been quite instrumental in drafting. Jones had previously visited India, and both Jones and Thurman met with Gandhi during their time in India. (Angell, 2000, 191)

Thurman’s Quaker Contacts After His Study with Rufus Jones

For most of the decade-and-a-half after his study with Jones, Thurman’s regular paychecks came from the historically African-American Howard University where he was Dean of the Rankin Chapel and Professor of Theology. But one of Thurman’s friends commented that teaching his classes was “the least thing” that he did. (Jenness, 157) In addition, Thurman was a readily available pastor, chaplain, and mentor for countless students, not only at Howard, but also throughout North America. He was a frequent speaker on other college campuses and at national conferences for young Christians sponsored by the YMCA and YWCA, and young Quakers, including Francis Hall, Dan Wilson, and Louise Wilson (not related), were among the thousands who initially became acquainted with Thurman in such settings.

These conferences were a nursery for a racially integrated vision of Christianity; a contributor to the NAACP’S magazine, The Crisis, asserted, in the context of explaining the importance of this setting for Thurman’s ministry, that the Y’s “were pioneers in bringing Negro and white young people together, in allowing them to live together, and in teaching whites not to be afraid of Negroes. Out of these conferences have come many of the leaders of the white North and South who, by word and deed, are working to extend American democracy to all Americans.” (Fleming, 253) Progress in racial justice work has always involved a healthy degree of generational change; generally, youth cannot stand to subject themselves to the same racial blinders that their elders have blithely worn.

Francis Hall, who became a perceptive Quaker theologian in the mid-twentieth century, later recalled his own call to Christ and “to the life of total harmony with God” that he received through Howard Thurman. In his account, he gave an especially vivid description of the quiet charismatic appeal of Thurman:

The call ‘follow me.’ These words of Jesus were spoken by Howard Thurman who was still young in his ministry at that time. . . . He had held me entranced each day by his deeply meditative style of speaking. You felt the creative spirit at work; indeed it was the Spirit of Christ that was speaking through him. I hung on every word as it was given birth and waited eagerly for the full sentence and the total message. Thurman did not speak from an obvious outline, in a systematic way, and in this next-to-the-last message of the conference he began to weave the call of Jesus in and out of his elaborations. I do not recall those elaborations but know that the call of Jesus was beginning to echo in my heart. Toward the end of his sharing he once more spoke the call, and suddenly the words were no longer transmitted by Howard Thurman. They were the living words of Christ and they sank deep into my being, where they exploded and infused me and gripped me. In that depth of my being was a glad response, ‘I come!’ Tears rose in my eyes; a tingling ran up and down my back; I seemed to be lifted out of myself. (Hall, 13)

Dan Wilson, who later became Director of Pendle Hill, recalled Thurman’s presence as a speaker at the Institutes of International Relations held at various locations throughout the United States under the auspices of the American Friends Service Committee from the 1930s through the 1950s. (AFSC website) According to Wilson, “We Quakers came to feel that he belonged to us and we to him.” (Young, xii)

In 1944, Thurman made a momentous career shift, resigning his position as chaplain and religion professor at Howard to become pastor of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco. Thurman found two compelling reasons for his new mission. First, he was “sensitive to the immorality and amorality of the Christian church in its ineffectiveness in the face of racial discrimination;” and second, he was “convinced that a way could be found to create a religious fellowship worthy of transcending racial, cultural, and social distinctions.” (Thurman, 1979, 142)

Thurman’s church became a locus for an intense mix of spiritual inspiration and social activism. Perhaps in and from his new position he could work on a more thorough combination of the inspiration for mysticism and social change, the intertwined visions that he had absorbed from his work with Jones, than he could in any other way. To become a part of this church, one was invited to subscribe to a statement of commitment:

I affirm my need for a growing understanding of all men as sons of God, and I seek after a vital experience of God as revealed in Jesus of Nazareth and other great religious spirits whose fellowship with God was the foundation of their fellowship with men. I desire to share in the spiritual growth and ethical awareness of men and women of varied national, cultural, racial, and creedal heritage united in a religious fellowship. I desire the strength of corporate worship through membership in The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, with the imperative of personal dedication to the working out of God’s purpose here and in all places. (Thurman, 1959, 52)

More than one Quaker became an active part of Thurman’s Church. One such Friend (Thurman did not supply a name) joined the Fellowship Church

because I wanted to worship God in a church that is open to all people without regard to race, creed, or culture. Having been born in the South of Quaker heritage, I had a conflict of emotions resulting from the racial prejudice that surrounded us, and from earliest childhood the unfairness, that was considered fair, practiced toward colored people, was of deep concern to me. When I found a church where people gathered with a dedication to seek God and know each other with spiritual concern first, I felt a sense of ‘home-coming’ unknown before and I joined forthwith. (Thurman, 1959, 112)

Dual membership (in the form of “associate membership”) was permitted by the Fellowship Church. Thurman was sensitive to the difficulty of divided loyalties, and the frequent tendency for those who held onto prior church affiliations to make either their previous affiliation, or the Fellowship Church, a “token membership.” Some Fellowship Church members were able to avoid this pitfall, however, as Thurman related in a story about a Quaker woman.

“She and her family became more and more involved in the life of Fellowship Church. In time she became a most active and influential member of the board. Periodically, however, she would absent herself from Fellowship Church, giving her attendance and time to the demands of her birthright religious faith.” (Thurman, 1959, 56)

In these two brief passages, Thurman managed to make some sense of the complexity of the relation of the Fellowship Church to other religious groups, including the Society of Friends. With its clear opposition to racial prejudice and its strong spiritual basis, the Fellowship Church was certainly attractive to those who felt that their churches of origin did not have the same strengths to the same degree. In the first example, the Friend in effect was stating that the Fellowship Church was better at living out the Testimony of Equality than Quakers had been.

Yet Thurman was hesitant to state that the Fellowship Church had transcended other denominations, including the Quakers. He allowed room for a person having vital relationships with more than one church, recognizing that each may meet complementary needs and that a person may find meaningful and responsible ways to relate to each. There may be, however, a whiff of irony in his apt use of the word “birthright;” he implied that the woman’s convincement was to the Fellowship Church, and hence that the latter was the livelier source for her religious faith.

During his time at the Fellowship Church, Thurman came into ever-wider renown. The first of 23 books that he authored was published in 1944, and others followed at one or two year intervals until the publication of his last book, his Autobiography, in 1979. In 1953, Life Magazine designated him as one of the twelve “greatest preachers of the twentieth century.” In that same year, he left San Francisco to assume the position of dean of chapel and Professor of Spiritual Disciplines and Resources at Boston University. (Thurman, 1979, 165-171) Thurman remained at B.U. until his retirement in 1965, engaging in much travel around the world, including Japan and Nigeria. For his retirement years, Thurman returned to San Francisco.

During this period of greatly increasing demands on Thurman’s time and attention, his relationships with Quakers were, if anything, growing closer. He presented the daily half-hour Bible study at Friends United Meeting Triennial sessions in 1963 and 1969. He delivered major addresses to Friends General Conference in 1964 and 1973. (Thurman papers; Thurman to Cooper, Nov. 20, 1964; Lenhart, 1973)

It should be underlined how unusual it is for any single person to play such a major role twice at either of these Quaker umbrella organizations, and Thurman served both of these organizations twice. That says much about the high mutual esteem in which Thurman and numerous influential Quakers held each other. During the winter term of 1966, he served as a Visiting Professor at the Earlham School of Religion, co-teaching a course on “Discipleship, Ministry, and the Church.” When his books, in their hard-cover versions, went out of print, he arranged for Friends United Press to re-issue many of his books in paperback, beginning in 1971. (Young, xi) Eleven of his original works, and a collection of his writings by his daughter Anne, a biography by Luther Smith, and a festschrift for Thurman have appeared from Friends United Press in the thirty-eight years since that time.

Two Friends whom Thurman became especially close to during the 1960s were Wilmer Cooper and Louise Wilson, both of whom he met at the sessions of Five Years Meeting (soon-to-be Friends United Meeting) in 1963. Cooper, the founding dean of the Earlham School of Religion and a critic of Rufus Jones for his optimistic theology and overly high view of humanity, carried on a considerable correspondence with Thurman that is preserved in the Thurman papers.

Much of the correspondence had to do with Cooper’s successful wooing of Thurman as a visiting professor at ESR. But several revealing bits do emerge in a reading of the letters, including Thurman’s great appreciation for the innovative quality of education at ESR, then in its first decade of existence (Thurman called ESR “an extraordinarily creative undertaking,” Thurman to Cooper, Nov. 24, 1966), and his great appreciation for Cooper’s theological perspectives, especially as worked out in the 1966 Isaac and Lida Johnson lecture, “A New People to Be Gathered in the Power of the Lord,” delivered to Friends United Meeting in its triennial sessions.

In that lecture, Cooper developed in depth a Christian Quaker vision centered around both religious and social testimonies. He called for a reversal of a 75-year trend of Quakers “expending ourselves to the point of depleting ourselves at the local meeting level.” What was needed was a three-fold vision to build up Friends meetings, especially at the local level, as “a worshipping fellowship in expectant waiting upon the Lord,” “a redemptive fellowship of loving concern and care of the members for one another,” and “a witnessing fellowship for the purpose of mission and service in the world.” (Cooper, 1966, 2,5)

Thurman commented to Cooper that he read his lecture “with real enthusiasm. It is a definitive statement concerning American Quakerism which I am very glad to have. It throws a great deal of light on the fundamental points that the School of Religion is making.” (Thurman to Cooper, Aug. 19, 1966)

After her meeting with Thurman at the Five Year’s Meeting in 1963, Louise Wilson, a member of the Virginia Beach Meeting, a new Quaker meeting that affiliated with the North Carolina Yearly Meeting (Conservative), became a close personal friend of Thurman’s, and their friendship lasted until his death in 1981. Their connection was on a deep spiritual level, with Thurman often appearing to take a spiritual director’s role.

What emerges in Wilson’s recounting is Thurman’s extraordinary love, generosity, and careful, creative discernment. She wrote of herself in 1963, “I was a young woman, carried by God’s love; a woman who often got ahead of God in her eagerness to serve. Howard Thurman put a ‘stop’ on me. Something in him made me want to wait, to ponder, to listen, and to discover. . . . I knew God had touched both of our lives.”(Wilson, 1996, 51)

A copy of Wilson’s pamphlet “Giving Thanks” was carefully preserved in Thurman’s papers. There, she wrote:

Have you ever been with a person, whose consciousness was so high, that you felt complete? All the questions of life seemed answerable to just rest in the presence of this person. Perhaps, at first, you did not realize, that it was The Presence, in which you rested. When you were no longer together – what then? Was the next person you met less real or more real? Was the next touch you felt more gentle or less gentle? Was the next voice more beautiful or less beautiful? How long could you carry an awareness of The Presence, which you had experienced in another? Perhaps only for a short while, perhaps – never to be the same. (Wilson, n.d., in Thurman, Papers.)

Truth Arises in Worship

Thurman did not often write about Quakers, but when he did, his writings demonstrated both a great appreciation for and an intimate knowledge of Friends from the inside out. Here, for example, is a careful, discerning, and illuminating account of one of his experiences in a Quaker Meeting for Worship, probably somewhere in the Philadelphia area and possibly datable to the early 1930s when he lived in Atlanta. It is offered in the context of advice to his reader as to how to use silence to center down:

I was invited to speak at a Friends First Day Meeting in Pennsylvania. I decided to put aside my usual procedures of preparation for an address and expose myself completely and utterly to the time of ‘centering down’ in the Quaker meeting. I felt that if I were able to share profoundly in that clarifying, centering process the word to be spoken would be clear and sure. I was accustomed to quiet and silence in private but not as part of a collective experience, and I entered into it with some trepidation. After a while all the outer edges of my mind and spirit began to move towards the center. As a matter of fact, the movement seemed to me to be actually fluid and flowing. After some time, I am not sure precisely when, the sense of the movement of my spirit disappeared and a great living stillness engulfed me. And then a strange thing happened. There came into my mind, as if on a screen, first a single word and then more words, until there was in my mind’s eye an entire sentence from the Sermon on the Mount. The curious thing was that, familiar as I was with the passage, one part of my mind waited for each word to appear as the sentence built, while another part knew what the sentence was going to say. When it was all there, with avidity my mind seized upon it. I began thinking about it as the text of what I would say. When I was ready to speak, I placed my hands on the railing in front of me and was about to stand, when from behind came the voice of a lady quoting that passage. When she finished, all through the meeting individuals spoke to this theme, and I began to wonder whether I would have a chance to say anything, knowing I had traveled nine hundred miles to do it. At length I had my opportunity to speak. (Thurman, 1977 [1963], 97)

Thurman demonstrated several things in this remarkable passage: first, knowledge of the way that Quakers customarily conducted themselves during worship (“centering down”) and an eagerness to submit to that discipline; second, an acknowledgment of precisely how this was different from his usual practice; third, a willingness to become utterly vulnerable through providing a careful description of precisely what his experience in this worship setting was; fourth, a clear finding that the process worked in helping him to get past the ego to something he recognized as a “great living stillness,” which he surely experienced as divine; fifth, empirical confirmation of the mystical unity that has been such an important part of Quaker spirituality, in that, independently of each other, he and another person had both been drawn to the same aspect of Jesus’ witness and were faithful to share what had been imparted to them; and lastly, a sense of satisfaction that he was able to share with the meeting what the Light had discovered to him, even if it came through a process during which, unlike his usual speaking invitations, people had not waited for him to speak first.

One of Thurman’s favorite bits of verse to cite – he did so, for example, in his 1973 address to the Friends General Conference Gathering in Richmond, Indiana – was the stanza of John G. Whittier’s poem on “The Brewing of the Soma” that often appears in Christian hymnals as the fourth verse of “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind:”

Drop thy still dews of quietness
Till all our strivings cease,
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of thy peace. (Whittier, 1904, 552)

Part of what made Thurman seem so Quaker was the depth of his investment in the Quaker process of approaching the divine. Usually he made the case without appeal to anything that could be labeled peculiarly Quaker, in order that he could be more widely understood. (The above story is an exception in this regard.) Instead, as he went on to discuss in his Richmond address to Friends in 1973, his overarching theme was exploring “the givenness of God,” or “the extension of God into the conscious life of his creatures,” which can be found within and uniting all human beings. (Friends could be pardoned for thinking of the “Light of Christ” or the “inner light” as equivalent to “the givenness of God.”) Sincere searchers after the divine will be able, heart to heart, soul to soul, to recognize what is true and given by God, because it will carry the “sound of the genuine.” At our best, we wait and listen for that “sound of the genuine” in others. “To know [the givenness of God] vitally is to rob death of terror and life of its fear.” (Lenhart, Friends Journal, 1973)

Thurman was keenly aware of the difficulties in gaining access to this divine core of life. In the first place, we human beings are needy creatures, and sometimes it seems that our needs might overwhelm us. Thus Thurman could pray,

O Lord, make clean our hearts within us. We have no new words by which to lay before Thee the story of our brittle lives and our present needs, the thirst of our hearts, the sorrow, pain and tragedy of certain of our experiences, the joys and the illuminations by which our steps are made secure. . . . Be patient with us, O Lord, be patient, that we may learn how to walk in the light which has been made so luminous by many who have gone before us in our journey.” (Thurman, 1980, 118)

Indeed, Thurman was not even certain that words could always be available to say what needed to be said to God: “We have tried, our Father, to make articulate the stirring of the mind and heart that is just out of reach. We make as an offering to Thee even our failure.” (Thurman, 1980, 123) But the crying need for this kind of deep communication with God – this “integrity of prayer,” to use one of Thurman’s phrases – could not be gainsaid, and Thurman was confident that the centering process that could be experienced in meetings for worship were an excellent way to enter that world of integrity-filled prayer. (Thurman, 1980, 11)

Jesus for Thurman and Quakers

The various branches of American Quakers had developed different interpretations of Jesus by the 1960s and the 1970s, (Fager, 1996, 30-31,38) and Thurman seems to have been quite sensitive to the nuances of these differences. His talk at the Friends General Conference in Indiana in 1973, for example, made little or no reference to Jesus. An 11-point outline he prepared for a workshop on the “Leadings of the Light” at that 1973 FGC managed to treat the subject of the light without explicit reference to Jesus.

His Bible Study sessions at Friends United Meeting, however, had been entirely concerned with “the Temptations of Jesus.” Explicit talk about Jesus would surely be expected in a Bible Study program and optional in a workshop, but it is doubtful that Thurman would have needed such a clue in order for him to provide the appropriate message to each group of Friends. His writings show a sufficiently deep acquaintance with Friends that he would have known beforehand about the nuances attendant to the theology of each branch of Quakers.

One can find an intriguing clue already in his November 1955, article in Friends Journal. The article on the slaves’ spiri-tuals that he published there was substantially the same, but not identical, with Chapter two of his book Deep River. In the Friends Journal article, Thurman says this about slave religion:

Again, the slave was cut off from his religion, whatever kind it was. It is quite beside the point to say that he was given Christianity, an infinitely “better” religion than anything he had known before. When the master gave his God to the slave, for a long time it meant that it was difficult to disentangle religious experience from a slavery sanction.

And here is how Thurman rendered that same passage in the second edition of Deep River:

Again, the slave was cut off from his religion, whatever kind it was. It is quite beside the point to say that he was given Christianity, an infinitely better religion than anything he had known before. When the master gave his (the master’s) God to the slave, for a long time it meant that it was difficult to disentangle religious experience from a slavery sanction.

I frankly am not sure whether the Friends Journal article preceded the copy for the second edition of his book, or succeeded it. But what especially interests me is Thurman’s highlighting of the word “better”, by sticking it inside quotation marks, only in the Journal article. At the very least, he trusted Quakers of the liberal and modernist varieties, even in the 1950s, to understand that Christianity could only be “better” than the Africans’ ancestral religions in some highly relative, culturally biased sense. That degree of distancing from Christianity, on the other hand, was not something he was willing to convey to his book readers.

In other passages in this book and others, Thurman was quite explicit about his own distancing from important aspects of Christianity. He was attracted to the religion of Jesus, but not to the religion of Paul, who Thurman saw as compromising with Roman culture to an unacceptable extent. (Thurman, 1976, 31-35) Thurman’s first teacher on religion was his grandmother, Nancy Ambrose, a former slave, and she had greatly affected Thurman by her memory of how white Christian preachers used certain writings of Paul to justify the slaves’ oppression. (Thurman, 1976, 30-31; Thurman, 1975, 22) Thurman seems to have made no use of the high Christology prominently featured in Paul’s letters.

Alonzo Johnson, who has carefully examined Thurman’s Christology, has concluded that Thurman was an “adoptionist,” a form of low Christology that places heavy emphasis on Jesus’ humanity over and against his divinity (it posits that Jesus can be considered divine only from the standpoint that God has adopted Jesus as his son). Johnson explained that the Gospel of Mark was Thurman’s favorite gospel; Mark, oldest of the gospels, is often interpreted as having been written from an adoptionist perspective. (Johnson, 1997, 42, 76)

Quakers whose faith is centered on the revelations found in the New Testament are often referred to as “Christ-centered,” but this term would be somewhat problematic if it were to be applied to Thurman, to the degree to which the term “Christ” directs our gaze away from Jesus’ humanity toward Jesus’ divinity. It would be better to designate Thurman’s theology as “Jesus-centered,” if we wish to be true to his awe and admiration of the radical power of Jesus’ humanity.

However, none of these terms (adoptionism, Christ-centeredness, Jesus-centeredness) would have entered explicitly into any of Thurman’s presentations to Friends. Instead, in a narrative fashion he attempted to penetrate to the depths of Jesus’ experience, so that Quakers, too, could better live up to their name and be better friends of Jesus.

Let us examine Thurman’s Bible Study presentations to the 1969 triennial of Friends United Meeting on the theme of “The Temptations of Jesus.” Thurman had seven years previously published a book on this theme. (Thurman, 1978) Yet from my acquaintance with Thurman’s papers, I conclude that he always reworked his material, often from scratch, every time that he approached a familiar theme. I have not yet discovered an occasion where he simply read from one of his books or utilized a set of his notes prepared some years previously.

Thus, he gave a fresh interpretation of the temptations to Friends United Meeting in 1969. His outline references his 1961 book, The Inward Journey, a poem by convinced Quaker Clive Sansom on “Mary of Bethany,” as well as his Temptations of Jesus. The Sansom poem is used to introduce Satan’s temptation to Jesus to turn stones into bread. Here are the first and fourth verses of that poem:

Master! They have taken me who have taken you;
No life is life by in your will,
It is I who stand charged in the judgment hall,
Mine is the road to Caesar’s hill. . . .
My sister moves in her appointed way
Through constant task to common need:
To her such sacraments are real – to me
A ritual meaningless as the gentile’s creed.
Sansom, 1965, 46

In reference to Jesus’ statement that we “do not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God,” Thurman did not deny “the importance of bread,” as human beings are “nourished from the earth,” but then he moved to an examination, as also essential to our lives, of words issuing from God’s mouth, including “the needs of the mind,” such as “ideas, thoughts, beauty, and poetry,” as well as “the needs of the spirit,” which would encompass the need “to love, to be loved, the need to be needed, to give one’s self.” (Outline for July 21, 1969, Box 181, Thurman Papers) Mary of Bethany had been one who was called to give the needs of mind and spirit top priority, and Thurman implicitly caused his audience to wonder whether these needs were being sufficiently met in their lives.

In his 1962 book version, he did remind his reader that “the loaded energy of your life must always be on the side of those things that are addressed to the deepest and most searching hungers of your mind and spirit.” (Thurman, 1978, 20) Judging from his outline, however, he likely gave this particular temptation greater prominence in his 1969 FUM Bible Study.

Thurman’s treatment of Jesus was often quite contemporary in nature. The Bible Study took place at the same time as Neil Armstrong’s pioneering walk on the moon, and Thurman illustrated his take on Satan’s offering Jesus the kingdoms of the world with his disapproval of the decision to plant the U.S. flag on the moon. He decried its primitiveness, seeing that action as establishing “territorial imperative after the manner of an ancient tribal rite.” The proper thing to do, in his judgment, would have been to plant the flag of the United Nations. (Outline for July 23, 1969, Thurman Papers)

The concluding chapter of Thurman’s Temptations of Jesus imagined Jesus’ dilemma in the Garden of Gethsemane, but Thurman’s FUM Bible Study on the “Temptations of Jesus” ended with a meditation on “Jesus and the Experience of the Enemy.” Thurman began this session with a brief story from South African writer Olive Schreiner about the power of forgiveness. He examined all of the negative consequences of hate, concluding with the statement that “love of enemy be-comes the only basis for the survival of personality in conflict.” (Outline for July 24, 1969) This must have been a wonderful way to strengthen the Quakers present in their embrace of the pacifism, which probably had been one of the deep matters of the Spirit that had brought Thurman and Quakers together in the first place.

Jesus, in Thurman’s account of him, was an extra-ordinarily powerful teacher – Thurman certainly thought of him as the most powerful teacher that ever lived. The Quakers who flocked to hear Thurman would have seen the latter as emulating Jesus quite strongly. His genuineness opened the gates to a deeper searching within themselves. Lucille Thomas, an ESR faculty spouse, wrote to Thurman that his presence at ESR in 1966 had “reinforced me in being true to my deepest self, to trust and have confidence in the truths that come to me, to search more deeply and trustingly into the openings which come to me.” (Lucille and Charles Thomas to Thurman, Mar. 4, 1966, Thurman Papers) In other words, Thurman had helped her to be a better Quaker.

In conclusion, this essay has demonstrated powerful synchronicities of thought and spirit between Thurman and two branches of Friends. There are many eloquent testimonies to the great importance that Thurman has had in the lives of many key Friends of the mid- to late twentieth century. Given the existence of a Wider Quaker Fellowship, Thurman may well have had first claim to be in it. He was a true friend to Friends.

That said, Thurman’s relationship with Friends over the course of more than half a century appears not to have been always a smooth one. While Thurman may have been reluctant to openly criticize Quakers’ racial policies, it appears that at least some of his actions, such as his role in forming the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, were aimed at holding up a higher standard in regard to the Testimony of Equality than many Quakers were adhering to at the time. While Thurman found much to admire about Friends, he played a prophetic role with Friends as well as with other American religious groups. In his quiet way, he called Quakers and many others to Jesus, and to their better selves.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my Earlham School of Religion colleague Stephanie Ford for her comments on an earlier form of this essay, “Howard Thurman and Quakers.”

Bibliography

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By Stephen W. Angell

Thurman’s Early Life

Rufus Jones and Thurman

Rufus Jones and Thurman

Thurman’s Quaker Contacts After His Study with Rufus Jones

Truth Arises in Worship

Jesus for Thurman and Quakers

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

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