Dr. John H. Leith — Presbyterian minister, churchman, Calvin scholar, professor, and friend — established the Foundation for Reformed Theology to provide for the ongoing education of pastors in Reformed theology and, through them, for the renewal of congregations and the carrying on of the Reformed tradition.
A Pastor and a Scholar
John Haddon Leith (1919 to 2002) was born in Hodges, South Carolina, and grew up in nearby Due West. He took degrees at Erskine College, Columbia Theological Seminary, Vanderbilt University, and Yale University, where he completed his doctorate in historical theology in 1949. Ordained in the Presbyterian Church in the United States in 1943, he served congregations in Mobile and Auburn, Alabama, and Second Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee. From 1959 through 1990 he taught historical theology at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, where he was named Pemberton Professor of Theology and shaped successive generations of Presbyterian ministers.
Theology for the Church
Leith insisted, against the academic fashions of his day, that theology was the church's work — undertaken for the sake of preaching, teaching, worship, and pastoral care. He was a careful student of John Calvin and of the Reformed confessions, but he refused to read them as relics. He read them as living testimony to the faith the church needed to recover and to teach again. His writing was plainspoken, his arguments careful, and his concern always pastoral.
The recovery of the Reformed tradition is not a matter of nostalgia but of fidelity to the gospel entrusted to the church.
John H. Leith
Selected Works
Leith wrote at the intersection of historical theology and the working life of the church. The titles below remain in print and in regular use among ministers who study with the Foundation.
Introduction to the Reformed Tradition: A Way of Being the Christian Community (John Knox, 1977; revised 1981). Leith's fullest statement of the Reformed heritage and its abiding shape.
The Reformed Imperative: What the Church Has to Say That No One Else Can Say (Westminster, 1988). A pastoral case for the church's peculiar message in a noisy age.
Basic Christian Doctrine (Westminster John Knox, 1993). A working theology for ministers, written in clear prose for use in the parish.
His Vision for the Foundation
Late in his career, Leith began to see the next thirty years of Presbyterian ministry. He recognized that ministers who had studied a substantial Reformed theology in seminary would soon be serving alongside ministers who had not. He was concerned, too, that the working pastor would have fewer settings in which serious theological reading could be sustained. The Foundation was his answer: a quiet, unhurried place where ministers could read the great writers of the church together, year after year, in the company of colleagues, for the sake of better preaching, better teaching, and better pastoral care.
The Foundation continues that work today. Its bibliographies are largely Leith's legacy. Its seminar method is the one he and his earliest colleagues set in motion. Its purpose remains what he proposed at the start: the renewal of the church through the church's own theological inheritance.
A Life in Reformed Service
A condensed chronology of Dr. Leith's life, ministry, and major writings.
