JONES, Rufus Matthew

Jones was a Quaker theologian who also lectured on philosophy and psychology. He was one of the leading Quaker scholars of the early twentieth century and is credited with helping to revitalise the Quaker movement in America. He also helped to organise war relief work in Europe during and after the First World War. 

Jones was born in South China, Maine on 25 January 1863, the son of a farmer. His parents were Quakers, and several of his aunts and uncles were Quaker ministers. He was educated at the Friends School in Providence, Rhode Island and then at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where he graduated BA in 1885. Jones then taught for a year at a Quaker school in Union Springs, New York before undertaking further study in Germany. Here he encountered the works of the great German mystics Jakob Böhme and Meister Eckhart, leading to his own lifelong interest in mysticism. 

In 1887 Jones returned to America, where he taught for two years at the Friends School in Providence. He married Sally Coutant in 1888. Together, they served as principals of the Friends Oak Grove School in Maine until 1893. Jones then took up a post as lecturer in philosophy at Haverford College, where he worked and taught until his retirement in 1934. 

Following the death of his first wife in 1899, in 1902 Jones remarried to Elizabeth Cadbury, sister of a fellow scholar at Haverford. She and Jones collaborated on many of his writings over the next three decades. 

Following America’s entry into the First World War, Jones organised a training programme for Quaker conscientious objectors, teaching them to do war relief work. With his brother-in-law Henry Cadbury, Jones founded the American Friends Service Committee which organised war relief efforts in Europe during and after the war. Following the war, Jones estimated that the AFSC had fed and care for more than a million children in Germany alone. The AFSC also operated in Poland and Russia. Originally intended as a temporary expedient, the AFSC found there was a continued demand for its services, and it worked with other agencies such as the Red Cross to organise relief following disasters and civil disorders both at home and abroad. In 1947, the AFSC and the British Friends were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Though based at Haverford, Jones travelled and lectured widely. In the USA he gave lectures at many universities including Harvard, Yale and Columbia. He visited England seventeen times, and was closely connected to the British Quakers and had many friends among them. In 1923, the year of his Rowntree lecture, Jones spent a period of time studying in Oxford.  

Jones also visited China, Japan and India, where he met Mahatma Gandhi. As a result of his Asian travels, Jones turned against the conventional notion of missionary work. Missionaries, he said, should seek to spread knowledge and help those in need, but they should respect other religions and stop trying to convert people of other faiths. His last overseas journey was in 1938, when he went to Berlin in an attempt to persuade Heinrich Himmler to stop persecuting the Jews and allow them to leave Germany. Jones died in Haverford in 16 June 1948. 

Jones wrote prolifically, 57 books and more than 500 articles, all on aspects of philosophy and faith. He wrote several autobiographical works, beginning with Finding the Trail of My Life in 1926. He was deeply interested in the history of mysticism and wrote a number of well-researched and erudite works on the subject. As well as the German mystics, he studied the English dissenting movements of the seventeenth century, and had a particular interest in George Fox, the Puritan mystic who founded the Society of Friends. 

Jones borrowed Fox’s phrase, ‘there is God is every man’, and repeated it often in his own work. He believed there was good inherent in everyone, and that if people wish to find God, they need only to look within themselves. From Meister Eckhart in particular he borrowed the idea of ‘the light within’, using light as a metaphor for the awakened soul. But Jones was also an eclectic, and he quoted freely from poets such as Browning and Emerson, and from the psychologist William James. His view was ultimately that everything good in the world – beauty, truth, justice, honesty – was merely a reflection of what was good in ourselves. To create good in the world, we need first to awake the good in our own souls. 

Jones was noted for his clarity of expression and ability to make mysticism understandable to a wide audience. Matthew Hedstrom (2004) refers to him as ‘the seminal figure in making mysticism middlebrow in the interwar period’. He was a powerful influence on later Quaker writers such as Harry Fosdick, who were responsible for the mid-twentieth-century Quaker revival in America. But his influence extended to other faith groups as well. Jones’s work was admired by the African-American preacher Howard Thurman, who himself influenced Martin Luther King. 

In his Rowntree lecture, Jones discusses the concept of progress. Like many mystics before and sense, he questions whether material progress and spiritual progress go hand in hand, or whether the former impedes the latter. Jones does not denigrate material progress; he has no complaint about modern technology, he merely wonders why we put so much stress on material things, and pay so little heed to matters of the spirit. He concludes that perhaps materialism has distracted us away from the spirit. It is time, therefore, to set material things aside and look within ourselves: 

To-day we must build the new world in our own bosoms by rebuilding a great faith. You know as well as I do that we cannot rebuild the world merely by improved theories of society, or by improved theories of economics and politics, though those are tremendously important… We need to find new springs of interest. We need to discover new founts of inspiration and enthusiasm. We need fresh visions of faith and hope. 

‘We all know deep down in our souls that it is not progress in the quality of life itself’, says Jones, ‘it is not what really makes life. We must look elsewhere, and find other energies, that will build the kind of world we want.’ 

But what do I mean when I talk about a spiritual outlook? I mean simply the realisation that man is not merely physical man, and not merely economic man. He is built and dowered for beauty and love and truth and God, and if he has not found those realities he has not begun to live, he has not found himself. There are great hungers in us that must be satisfied. 

Jones calls for us to remember the notion of service; we are here to serve society, not vice versa. This was particularly pointed advice to a room full of business leaders and managers. He ends his lecture rather in the style of a revival meeting: ‘And it is through us that the light is to dawn’, he says, ‘through us that the service is to come.’  

There is no doubt that the lecture expresses Jones’s very sincerely held views and beliefs. Unlike other theologians and clergy who addressed the conferences, however, he made little effort to make his beliefs relevant to his audience; nor did he say anything about waste, which had been the theme of the April 1923 conference. He spoke, clearly and at times quite emotionally, from the heart. What his audience made of it, we do not know. 

Major works 

Practical Christianity, 1899. 

Social Law in the Spiritual World: Studies in Human and Divine Inter-Relationship, 1905. 

The Abundant Life, 1908. 

The Quakers in the American Colonies, 1911. 

Spiritual Energies in Daily Life, 1922. 

The Church’s Debt to the Heretics, 1924. 

Finding the Trail of Life, 1926. 

New Studies in Mystical Religion, 1927. 

Pathways to the Reality of God, 1931. 

Mysticism and Democracy in the English Commonwealth, 1932. 

The Eternal Gospel, 1938. 

The Flowering of Mysticism, 1939. 

Barbour, H., ‘Jones, Rufus Matthew’, in American National Biography, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999 

Fosdick, H.E., Rufus Jones Speaks to Our Time, New York: Macmillan, 1951. 

Hedstrom, M.S., ‘Rufus Jones Speaks to the Masses’, Cross Currents 54 (2), Summer 2004, http://www.crosscurrents.org/Hedstrom0204.htm  

Vining, E.G., Friend of Life, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1958.