Quaker Religious Thought
Volume 85 Article 2
1-1-1995
Thomas Kelly: Some New Insights
T Canby Jones
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Hermann Lotze thomas kelly
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THOMAS KELLY: SOME NEW
INSIGHTS
T. CANBY JONES
O God, thou art my God, early will I seek thee;
my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee
in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is,
To see thy power and thy glory, as I have seen thee
in the sanctuary.
Because thy lovingkindness is better than life,
my lips shall praise thee.
Thus will I bless thee while I live; I will lift up
my hands in thy name.
My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness,
and my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips,
When I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate
on thee in the night watches.
Because thou hast been my help, therefore, in the shadow
of thy wings will I rejoice. (Psalm 63:1-7 KJV)
I VIVIDLY REMEMBER HEARING THESE WORDS burst forth from the lips of
Thomas R. Kelly, both in meetings for worship and in the student
group that met in his home. In two recent gatherings we have sought
to recapture and understand more fully that thirst for God’s presence
which consumed Thomas Kelly both in his life and in his writings.
The first gathering was entitled “Renewing the Spirit of Community: Centennial Colloquium on the Life and Work of Thomas Kelly.”
This colloquium was held June 4-6, 1993, at the Thomas R. Kelly
Religious Center of Wilmington College, Wilmington, Ohio, on the
one-hundredth anniversary of Kelly’s birth. Ron Rembert, associate
6 • T. CANBY JONES
professor of religion and philosophy at Wilmington College, planned,
hosted, and found funding for this centennial event. Funding was
provided by the Ohio Humanities Council.
This issue of Quaker Religious Thought contains the four major
papers delivered at that gathering. E. Glenn Hinson, professor of spirituality, worship, and church history at Baptist Theological Seminary,
Richmond, Virginia, opened with the keynote address on “The Impact of Thomas Kelly on American Religious Life.” The following day
Elaine Prevallet, Roman Catholic sister of Loretto and director of Knobs
Haven Retreat Center, Nerinx, Kentucky, presented a paper on “A
Testament of Devotion: A Personal Response.” She was followed by
Howard R. Macy, professor of religion and biblical studies at George
Fox College, Newberg, Oregon, with a paper entitled “Thomas Kelly:
At Home in the Blessed Community.” The final paper included in this
issue is a study of Kelly’s religious background and development by his
son, Richard Macy Kelly, director of the AIDS program for the Baltimore (MD) City Health Department and author of Thomas Kelly, A
Biography. His paper is called “New Lights and Inner Light.” Thomas Kelly’s daughter, Lois Kelly Stabler, was also present and delighted
us with reminiscences of her father and her mother, Lael Macy Kelly.
The second gathering in which we gained new insights into Thomas Kelly and his message occurred at Quaker Hill Conference Center, Richmond, Indiana, April 15-16, 1994. It was a workshop called
to take a fresh look at Kelly’s life and commitment as revealed through
his sermons. Manuscripts of hese sermons, written between 1919 and
1934, were found by Ron Rembert in the Haverford College Quaker
Collection. The title of the workshop was “Love Held Him There,” a
phrase from the most striking of Kelly’s sermons. The sermon was
built around the quotation from Catherine of Siena, “For nails could
not have held the God-man to the Cross, had not love held him there.”
In what follows I will discuss things learned about Thomas Kelly’s
life, character, and thought, both from the 1993 Colloquium and the
1994 Workshop. I should mention that Josh Brown, pastor of West
Richmond (Indiana) Friends Meeting, with my help, is preparing a
series of twenty-five Kelly sermons for publication in the near future.
We turn now to consideration of the new insights about Thomas Kelly
gained from the two gatherings, with special emphasis upon those papers that appear in this issue of Quaker Religious Thought.
SOME NEW INSIGHTS • 7
Glenn Hinson stresses that after thirty years of teaching seminary
courses on spirituality and Christian devotion Kelly’s A Testament of
Devotion ranks among the best of the Christian classics. In fact, it has
done more to change lives among his students than any other. He
thinks that Kelly speaks to our condition so effectively because of his
simple and yet profound approach to a life of unreserved commitment
to the immediate presence of God in our midst. In spite of the “turmoil and fitfulness of our time-torn lives,” Kelly affirms, “God can be
found!” Elaine Prevallet agrees with Hinson, that Thomas Kelly reaches
our hearts because he speaks as an “authentic.” Not a person ready to
share “knowledge about religious phenomena and experience,” Kelly
communicates direct acquaintance with and the immediate experience
of practicing God’s presence. Howard Macy joins Prevallet and Hinson
in stressing the centrality of experiencing and living in “the Beloved,
or Blessed, Community” to the realization in us of “God-enthralled
lives.” Kelly expresses it: “We know that these souls are with us,
lifting their lives and ours continuously to God....It is as if…we were
within them and they were within us. Their strength, given to them
by God, becomes our strength, and our joy, given to us by God, becomes their joy. In confidence and love we live together in Him.”1
Prevallet highlights the integration of inward and the outward as a
very important characteristic of Kelly’s life and message. She stresses
the creative interplay between the depths of our lives, in which we live
in constant communion with God, and the external involvement with
human needs, which we find so exhausting. She emphasizes with Kelly
that it is at “the deep level of prayer and divine attendance…that the
real business of life is determined.” The implication is clear. Social
concerns, no matter how altruistic, will not “move mountains” unless
they originate in a life of continual prayer. Prevallet is also thankful for
Kelly’s wisdom in saying, “We cannot die on every cross, nor are we
expected to.” God shapes specific tasks, fitted to our capacities and
talents, for us to carry out. The rest we leave to others.
Howard Macy drives home Kelly’s Quaker use of the Scriptures.
Hungrily we read the Scriptures “to find new friends for the soul,”
Kelly says. We hunger to live in the same life and power in which the
prophets and apostles lived. They, through the medium of Scripture,
become our spiritual guides and mentors. Macy expresses it in an
unforgettable sentence. “So we read the Bible, then, to be joined to
part of the Blessed Community and feel our way back to the Source,
8 • T. CANBY JONES
so that the same ‘Living Spring’ may bubble up within us.” We find
the same kind of fellowship with the saints through the ages since
Scripture.
From Richard M. Kelly’s “New Lights and Inner Light” we learn
much of the religious background of Thomas R. Kelly and his forebears. Contrary to the conviction of Thomas Kelly’s mother, Madora
Kersey Kelly, that the Kelly ancestors were Scotch-Irish Quakers, Richard Kelly demonstrates that the Kelly family of the Schooley community near Londonderry, Ohio, were “New Light Presbyterians” or
“Christians” later known as “Disciples” or “Church of Christ.” They
were converted to Quakerism by the preaching of Quaker evangelists
in 1868. Richard Kelly thinks that the mainline Protestant element of
his father’s faith derives from that Presbyterian background and is a
major reason for the appeal of Kelly’s message to a wide spectrum of
people. A second important element of his father’s faith—and its appeal—was the evangelical holiness Quakerism in which he was reared.
A third element in that wide appeal was his deep acquaintance with the
mystical and inward prayer life of the Christian tradition, first introduced to Thomas Kelly by Rufus M. Jones at Haverford College.
A fourth element in Thomas Kelly’s wide appeal Richard Kelly traces
to his father’s two trips to Germany. Tom and Lael Kelly were sent
first to Berlin by the American Friends Service Committee, to found a
Friends Center there as a follow-up to a Quaker child-feeding in Germany during the years following the First World War. This writer believes that the German experience added a cosmic dimension to Thomas Kelly’s experience of Christ, and opened him to cosmic truths in
the world’s great religions and philosophies. In his second visit, to
Nazi Germany, in the summer of 1938, Thomas Kelly was so overwhelmed by the oppression and suffering of the German Jews, Quakers, and other Christians with whom he met that he felt “ploughed
into the furrows of the world’s sufferings.” He also learned from their
heroic courage what it means “to rise radiant in the sacrament of pain.”
From Lois Kelly Stabler, Thomas Kelly’s daughter, as well as from
his son Richard, we learned many foibles of Kelly’s character, some
positive and some negative. For example, his condescension toward
the restrictive evangelicalism, provincialism, and low scholarly standards of the midwestern United States where he had been reared, was
very pronounced. Also, as his son insists, Thomas Kelly was an intellectual elitist at that time. Richard Kelly also reports that his mother,
Lael Kelly, with some amusement worried whether there would be
SOME NEW INSIGHTS • 9
“enough Ph.D.’s” in their Brightwater, Maine, vacation community
to satisfy her husband! On a more positive note, as Douglas Steere
makes clear in his biographical memoir prefacing A Testament of Devotion, throughout all of Thomas Kelly’s adult life, with the exception
of the last three years, Kelly had a driving ambition to become a recognized philosopher in the academic world. On the really positive side,
laughter and joy in living were outstanding characteristics of Kelly.
This included the freedom to laugh at himself. This same happy atmosphere prevailed in the Kelly home and family. Lael Kelly, a person of
great warmth and strength in her own right, contributed much to that
happy atmosphere.
Lois Stabler pointed out the two best things that happened to her
father. The first was his marriage to her mother, Lael Macy Kelly. The
second “best” thing to happen was his blanking out at his Ph.D. oral
exam at Harvard in 1937. This scholarly disaster suddenly and gloriously freed Thomas Kelly to become the totally spiritual person he had
in the depths of his being longed to become. Thereafter new spiritual
power and authenticity flowed from his words and reached new depths
in the hearts of eager audiences.
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At my suggestion following the Colloquium, Ron Rembert made a study of both Kelly doctoral theses.
The first one, at Hartford Seminary in 1924, was entitled
“The Place of Value-Judgments in the Philosophy of Hermann Lotze.”
The second one, at Harvard in 1937, was entitled
“Explanation and Reality in the Philosophy of Emile Meyerson.”
At the Quaker Hill Workshop in 1994 Ron Rembert
reported that the Harvard thesis on Meyerson was exceedingly technical and did not reflect the fresh cosmic vision and concern we associate with Kelly.
By contrast the 1924 thesis on Lotze does so, he said.
Rembert selected for emphasis the most striking quotation he found
from the Lotze thesis.
“It is a fundamental thought in Lotze’s mind
that reconciliations are more nearly the truth about reality than conflicts. He is deeply convinced at the start that a harmonious relation
does exist, and so seeks to vindicate his faith.”
We spent considerable
time at the workshop thinking out the implications of this statement.2
An important facet of Thomas Kelly’s concern which deserves further study, and which we did not focus on in our 1993 colloquium or
our 1994 workshop, is Kelly’s deep interest in East Asian and South
Asian philosophy and religion.
He took advantage of his time of teaching in Hawaii to steep himself in Chinese and Indian philosophy and as
a result developed a course in each of these fields to teach at Haverford
College.
Several of Thomas Kelly’s sermons before the trip to Hawaii
also reflect this concern.
To Thomas Kelly the cosmic Light of Christ, which so fully suffused his life and thought, knows no cultural limits. Beyond its Middle
Eastern origins and West European cultural expressions this Light is
found shining in some form in the lives of all persons in all cultures.
Perhaps the most important outcome of both gatherings, the
Colloquium and the Workshop, in the opinion of this writer, was the
characterization of Thomas Kelly as an “evangelical mystic.”
This writer
has never heard of anyone so characterized before. In his paper, Richard Kelly clearly demonstrates that his father never lost the evangelical
fervor of his youth, even though it came to be expressed in more cosmic terms. In our Quaker Hill Workshop we became convinced that
the sermons of Thomas Kelly (1919-34), which we were studying,
never lost that call to complete commitment to God we associate with
A Testament of Devotion. The fact that his most moving sermon is
based on a text from a medieval saint and mystic, Catherine, only confirms this judgment. Furthermore, Glenn Hinson sees Thomas Kelly
as having recaptured mainstream Quaker spirituality, and he considers
that present day Quakers neglect him at their peril.
Is “evangelical mystics” what Thomas Kelly is challenging all of us
to become? Savor the following essays and decide for yourself.
