When I received a Th.M. in church history from Westminster Theological Seminary in 1982, I was a ministerial candidate of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and had been a member of the Tenth Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia for nearly five years. I had also served on the editorial staff of Eternity magazine. So I was what might be called a well-informed "evangelical Presbyterian." Yet in spite of my education and connections with northern conservative Presbyterianism, I had never heard of John Haddon Leith (1919-2002) of Union Theological Seminary in Richmond until nearly ten years later when, as a minister of the PCA, I picked up a copy of Leith's Introduction to the Reformed Tradition: A Way of Being the Christian Community (1977), considered today a classic, as well as The Reformed Imperative: What the Church Has to Say that No One Else Can Say (1988), perhaps Leith's finest book.
That I ended up discovering this preeminent John Calvin scholar and authority on the Westminster Assembly on my own may not have been all that surprising, given that John Leith was not on good terms with the founding fathers of the PCA. During the 1950s and 1960s, Leith was identified with the liberal wing of the southern Presbyterian Church because of his qualified neo-orthodoxy (what he called "critical orthodoxy") and especially his involvement in the civil rights movement. Nevertheless, Leith was no champion of the proposed reunion of the northern and southern Presbyterian churches nor did he support the ordination of women. In fact, after the creation of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in 1983, Leith appeared to become a conservative, following a journey in the religious sphere much like the noted neo-conservatives in the political sphere. To what degree he actually changed-or that his fellow mainliners were simply growing more liberal-is not clear, but his pointed critique of the theological crisis in the PC(USA) in The Reformed Imperative (1988), From Generation to Generation (1990), and Crisis in the Church (1997) surely established Leith not as an enemy of the PCA conservative breakoff, but as an enemy of the ringleaders of the liberal mother church. So marginalized from his own Union Seminary where he had taught for 31 years, only a handful from the school attended his memorial service September 2002 at Grace-Covenant Presbyterian Church in Richmond.
The difficulty in pigeonholing Leith, however, should not prevent conservative Presbyterians from appreciating his legacy, which is captured in Pilgrimage of a Presbyterian, his last book. This collection of his shorter (and mostly unpublished) writings compiled by Charles Raynal of Columbia Theological Seminary reveals Leith the pastor, the teacher, and the churchman. Containing more than 21 sermons, including his senior sermon as a student at Columbia in 1942, chapel messages during his tenure at Union, editorials from the Presbyterian Outlook, and various addresses, Pilgrimage contains gems of wisdom for those who seek faithfully to apply the Reformed tradition to the workings of congregations, presbyteries, and general assemblies.
Readers concerned about the state of seminaries will appreciate Leith's vision for the proper training of ministers, expressed in his 1960 inaugural address at Union, a working paper from 1976 that expounds the critical components of a theological education, and his 1984 syllabus for a course on the history of doctrine. Yet the book also offers those in the trenches of parish ministry a wealth of practical, pastoral advice. Included, for example, is a 1954 sermon Leith delivered on the occasion of the dedication of a new sanctuary in Auburn, Alabama, "The Pilgrim Church," exploring the seeming ironies of faith in the city without foundations and the sense of permanence that a building implies. Elsewhere, Leith clarifies the nature of the call to the ministry, seen in three aspects: the inward call, the outward call, and the appropriation of the people over time. He also speculates on the ideal time to confirm baptized children and admit them to the Lord's Table, suggesting that the current practice of the PC(USA) of inviting baptized but nonprofessing members to partake of the sacrament works against nurturing a meaningful church commitment on the part of adolescent covenant children. Another section offers a Reformed theology of the funeral service, which includes a model funeral sermon, itself worth the price of the book.
Together, these writings confirm what Charles Raynal says in the preface that "more than any other service, Leith wanted to be a pastor." As Leith reflected in Crisis in the Church, "If I were to choose eleven years to relive, it would probably be the eleven years I was in Auburn," when he was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church. The church, after all, was Leith's passion in a way that very few northern Presbyterians (whose passion is Evangelicalism) can claim or appreciate. Although a scholar par excellence, his passion was the visible church and the ministry of the Word, which he identified with Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, the written Word of God, far more than did Barth or Brunner. In addition, his advocacy for preaching that "is not moral advice or political rhetoric or personal therapy or entertainment" but as the means of grace puts to shame many liberal and evangelical Presbyterians. So even as conservatives may hesitate to claim this gifted theologian as one of their own, his Pilgrimage ought to make them reconsider his contribution to the recovery of the Reformed tradition in our time.
