The Complete Manuscript of the Autobiography of James Luther Adams

An Introduction to the Autobiography of James Luther Adams by George Kimmich Beach, President of the JLA Foundation

Adventure most unto itself

The Soul condemned to be

Attended by a single Hound

Its own identity.

                        --Emily Dickinson (Johnson listing 822)

            In his Autobiography James Luther Adams gathers up and reports in charming detail the memories of a life that almost spanned the twentieth century (1901-1994).  It was a life that affected countless others—students, ministerial and academic colleagues, friends and acquaintances.  He continues today to influence both those who knew him in person and others whose only acquaintance comes through his writings.  Adams’s close friend and Harvard colleague, George Huntston Williams, concludes his preface to the Autobiography with these words: “Adams is a scholar from whom students will learn for years to come, whom established scholars will have reason to emulate, and in whom many beyond his purview will find ongoing inspiration.”

            The Table of Contents for the Autobiography provides an outline of Adams’s life, from his numerous childhood labors and strict evangelical upbringing in Washington State; to adolescent rebellion and vocational self-discovery in college (University of Minnesota) and theological seminary (Harvard Divinity School); to further graduate school studies with  “intellectual lions” such as Alfred North Whitehead, George Lyman Kittredge, and Irving Babbitt at Harvard; to pastorates and burgeoning political activism in Unitarian parishes in Salem and Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts; to theological explorations in England, France, and especially Germany; to first hand encounters with Nazism in the 1930s and the feeble response of  the churches and universities; to teaching at Meadville Lombard seminary in Chicago, while immersed in the political life of the city; to professorship at Harvard Divinity School, where he and Margaret, “the beloved,” befriended countless students and he trained a generation social ethicists.  JLA (his favored moniker) was also a transformational leader within his adopted Unitarian community and an ecumenical bridge beyond it.  He was never sectarian but remained  rooted “in a particular plot of soil.” 

            Although well-known, admired, even beloved, Adams remains something of an enigma. The history of his publications reflects his engagement with the intellectual and moral currents of his times.  He wrote hundreds of essays, reviews, sermons, book introductions, and other published materials, but only two of these are books, a doctoral dissertation on the thought of Paul Tillich, and his Autobiography. His writings reveal a keen interest in questions of personal identity formation, education, and vocation.  Such interests are closely related to his ethical concept of “human vocation”—the sense of “calling” that, beyond career or profession, informs a person’s life as a whole.  The reader may fairly ask, does the Autobiography, by far the longest of Adams’s works, reveal how JLA came to understand and express his own sense of identity and calling?  His answer is indirect, seemingly hidden within the stories that comprise his life.  He occasionally refers to Emily Dickenson’s poem (“This consciousness that is aware"), leading us to ask: What “single Hound” of identity attended JLA through the “Adventure” of his life-time?  

            Exploration Press published the autobiography in 1995, but titled as a Memoir and with a text reduced by approximately half. After the lapse of thirty years, Adams’s full text is now available in electronic file from the Meadville Lombard Theological School library, affording ready access to the complete Autobiography.  The production has been a joint effort of two institutions closely linked to Adams’s life: Meadville Lombard and the Federated Theological Faculty of the University of Chicago, his first appointment as a professor of theology and social ethics, and the JLA Foundation, formed after his retirement from Harvard Divinity School to provide editorial assistance for his ongoing work.  The Foundation has sustained his intellectual legacy after his death through a website and the annual JLA Forum on Religion and Society.

            Adams’s literary legacy has its own puzzles. A great many of his essays, addresses, sermons, and book introductions are available in print, making his wide-ranging thought and lively rhetoric well-known to students, colleagues and the general reader.  Curiously, these were gathered and published not by himself but by his students and colleagues (listed in the notes following). Adams did not ask for help with these publications—not in my case nor probably the others’. These efforts were initiated because many students and friends wanted continuing, convenient access to his writings.  He invariably appreciated the assistance and fully cooperated in making selections. Why he didn’t initiate these collections himself is unclear. It seems his time was heavily occupied with  meetings and correspondence, with responding to countless invitations to speak for a special occasion, or to write a review of this or an introduction to that.  He had too many friends and admirers, it seems, to disappoint with a refusal—nor want to refuse them.  

            What made the long labor of his Autobiography so important, both to him and to us?  When Adams came to the Harvard faculty in 1956, it was apparent that this was no longer a predominantly Unitarian institution.  University President Nathan Pusey had seen to that.  The Protestant theological world had turned sharply toward the Neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr, among others, while religious liberals remained largely unchanged in their humanistic optimism and individualism. Adams’s intellectual mentor, Paul Tillich—an Existential theologian and socialist who had self-exiled from Nazi Germany—came to Harvard in this period of theological contestation.  A new era was taking shape, with Adams himself a sharp critic of his adopted Unitarianism.  Its Christian and Humanist wings alike were caught, he said, in a “cultural lag.” It was not, by and large, a welcome judgment.  Others looked to Adams for a new theological vision, a systematic statement, a magnum opus.  The wish was naïve, perhaps rooted in nostalgia for a lost liberalism. Adams’s works reveal not the kind of summa we imagined, but rather a set of consistent themes and commitments, inviting our own creative synthesis; this is what I attempted in my study, Transforming Liberalism: The Theology of James Luther Adams (Boston: Skinner House, 2005).

            Whatever his intention, Adams treated his life itself as his magnum opus. The Autobiography, however incomplete or imperfect, would be the record of that life—a life engaged in the great moral and intellectual issues of his century, “not without dust and heat.”

            The labor of writing Not Without Dust and Heat consumed the last years of Adams’s life.  The process by which it was written, with the indispensable editorial assistance of Linda L. Barnes and Louise M. Des Marais, is noted by Professor Max Stackhouse in his “Introduction to a Memoir,” published under the title, Not Without Dust and Heat: A Memoir. The book incorporates approximately half of Adams’s text because the publisher insisted that the full text would be economically impractical. Stackhouse notes the Foundation’s acceptance of the publisher’s requirement for large cuts to the text and a major financial subvention. He explains the perhaps related decision to call the work a memoir rather than an autobiography in these terms: The book recounts memories of “distantly-related people” more than of his own immediate family, and as a whole is less than “fully ‘self-disclosing'.”  I read Adams differently.  Indeed this work is not introspective or confessional.  Rather it is an exploration of the way his life-experience shaped his world-view and sense of  human vocation.  His identity is reflected people and events he responded to.  He was something of a latter-day Puritan, one whose sense of personal calling was driven by a moral and intellectual “athleticism.” His life, as his title announces, was a race to be run and a triumph to be sought “not without dust and heat.”

            Some of us felt that truncating the text was the wrong decision from the start; letters to this effect are found in the records of the JLA Foundation, notably from George Williams, and Louise M. Des Marais, the chief editor of the text.  I was one of several students of Adams who were asked to suggest passages that could be cut; I found only a few sentences within my assigned chapters that seemed dispensable, and declined to continue with the assignment.  Apparently, concerns that seeking a larger subsidy or a different publisher would further delay an already protracted project led to proceeding with major cuts to the text, a process. Adams did not live to see the result; the Memoir appeared the year after his death, in 1995. 

            The Autobiography of James Luther Adams is more than the story of one man; it is a chronicle of the religious and political life in the twentieth century, seen through the eyes of a brilliant and engaged participant. A final word is in order on the title that Adams plucked with characteristic rhetorical flourish from John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), a tract championing free speech in an age of royal censorship—a dangerous, revolutionary age.  The title evokes the bruising life of intellectual and political activism that Adams chronicled in his own age, and in truth enjoyed.  JLA was an erudite academic and a loving husband and father of three daughters, but he did not idealize the “ivory tower” of academia nor the bourgeois virtues of work and family.  He loved what Hannah Arendt called “the public realm.” In fact his chosen title invokes an entire epistemology, namely the central liberal doctrine that truth is gained only through the free and open contest of ideas and moral commitments. Milton wrote:

            It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil as two twins cleaving together leaped forth into the world.  And perhaps this is the doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil. . . . I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbeathed, that never sallies forth and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat (emphasis added).

            This is what you get when a great poet writes a political tract.  And JLA’s Autobiography is what you get when a great theological ethicist recalls the story of his life, itself his magnum opus.