John H. Leith, theological lion at Union Seminary, dies

John H. Leith, theological lion at Union Seminary, dies

The Layman Online, August 13, 2002

Dr. John Haddon LeithDr. John Haddon Leith, 82, one of the nation’s theological lions during the three decades that he taught at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, died August 12 at Greenville Memorial Hospital in Easley, S.C.

The funeral will be held at 11 a.m. August 15 in Greenville Presbyterian Church on Highway 178, three miles south of Donalds, S.C. (An earlier story published the wrong date of the funeral.) Burial will be in the church cemetery. Former students will serve as the Escort of Honor.

Leith and his wife of 59 years, Ann Caroline White Leith, a native of Chester, S.C., decided to resettle in their beloved South Carolina when they fully retired in 1997 to reside in Foothills Presbyterian Home in Easley, S.C. Their children are Henry White Leith and Caroline Haddon Leith, both of Richmond. Dr. Leith is also survived by three grandsons.

Until the end, Leith was a prophetic voice in the Presbyterian Church (USA), a denomination that he loved and scolded. Following his seminary retirement, he served as theologian in residence at Grace Covenant Church in Richmond, Va., First Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, N.C., Peachtree Presbyterian Church in Atlanta and other prominent Presbyterian congregations.

Despite rapidly failing health, Leith added to his many books a final tract – The Best of Times and the Worst of Times for Religion, Especially Christian Faith – in 2001. It was a lament over the shrinking membership of the PCUSA and a final rejoinder that a denomination whose leaders renewed their commitment to Reformed faith could reverse its trend toward oblivion.

Leith was a theologian for the church. Eschewing the esoteric and pop theologies that captured much of postmodern academia, he insisted on sound teaching in Christian doctrine that is rooted in Scripture and tested in communities of faith.

Born in Hodges, S.C., in 1919, Leith graduated from Erskine College (B.A.), Columbia Theological Seminary (B.D.), Vanderbilt University (M.A.) and Yale University Graduate School (Ph.D.). His dissertation – John Calvin’s Doctrine of the Christian Life – was published in 1989 by Westminster/John Knox Press.

Wanting more than anything else to serve the church as a pastor, Leith wrapped his education around his pulpit work, beginning as a student supply minister in 1941 and continuing to serve congregations until 1959, when he was appointed to the faculty of Union. Leith believed that sound preaching and teaching results in growing churches. About 1,000 new members were received into the congregations he served.

In addition to his focus on church growth, Leith was a leader for civil rights long before the 1960s. One congregation he served, First Presbyterian Church in Auburn, Ala., stood openly for what the law and custom of the land would eventually adopt. He convinced the former president of Auburn University to host the Presbyterian Church’s racially integrated Quadrennial Youth Conventions in 1951, 1953 and 1954 when no other Southern school would agree to host the conferences.

In the 1950s, he began urging the denomination to ordain women and work toward reunion of the Southern and Northern denominations, with both eventually coming to pass.

Leith began teaching seminary students in 1957 as a visiting professor of theology at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. In 1959, he became Pemberton Professor of Theology at Union in Richmond, retiring in 1990. More than 400,000 copies of his 15 books are in print and his An Introduction to the Reformed Tradition includes Korean, Portuguese and British editions.

Leith was honored by Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. in March 2001. Pictured are, first row: John Leith, center, with William Morris, Morris Communications, Augusta, Ga; Tom Cousins, Cousins Properties, Atlanta, Ga.; back row: Sidney Anderson, former business manager, Davison Philips, former president, and Charles Raynal, director of advanced studies, Columbia Seminary.Simplicity – even in expressing profound theological concepts – marked his style. Professor Charles E. Raynal of Columbia Seminary says in his preface to a collection of Leith’s writings and sermons, “He understood John Calvin’s preference for simplicity and succinctness of expression as fruit of the morality of mind, which espouses directness of speech and honesty and rejects pomp and artificiality. In his writings, John Leith avoided the jargon, neologisms, and rhetoric flourish of many theologians.”

On occasion, he rejected their theology as well when it was not grounded in the Biblical and Reformed understanding of the Christian faith.

In Crisis in the Church: The Plight of Theological Education (1997), Leith defined the core problem in Presbyterian seminaries as “the loss of a passionate commitment to the Christian faith.” He publicly sparred with one of his colleagues at Union – Douglas Otatti, a theology professor who says Christians are not required to believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ. While advocating racial justice and women’s rights, Leith delivered withering attacks against pseudo, liberation theologies that were spawned by these movements. He called them “counterfeit gospels.”

Leith served the Presbyterian Church beyond the pulpit and the classroom. He was a member of four ad interim committees of the General Assembly, including the committee that wrote the “Brief Statement of Faith” that has become part of The Book of Confessions.

He served on numerous educational and denominational boards and was an editorial consultant for Bibliotheca Calviniana. Three Presbyterian colleges – Erskine, Davidson and Presbyterian – gave him honorary degrees.

At a retirement ceremony in Richmond, Va., theologian Albert C. Outler, who was Leith’s teacher and dissertation adviser at Yale, said, ” … John Leith has held his rudder steady and his course as constant as anyone I have known in his generation, learning himself and teaching teachers to learn, teaching preachers to preach, and preaching and teaching in his own right. He has been a diligent scholar. As a professor, he has lived with the Scriptures, the creeds, the confessions.”