Background
Rufus was born on January 25, 1863 on a farm in South China, Maine, United States, the second son and third child of Edwin Jones and Mary Gifford (Hoxie) Jones, who were both descended from Quaker families.
historian philosopher reformer scholars
Rufus was born on January 25, 1863 on a farm in South China, Maine, United States, the second son and third child of Edwin Jones and Mary Gifford (Hoxie) Jones, who were both descended from Quaker families.
Rufus attended the neighborhood school and helped his father on the farm until, at sixteen, he was enrolled in the Friends Boarding School (now Moses Brown School) in Providence; his first cousin, Augustine Jones, was headmaster. There he prepared to enter Haverford College, from which he received a B. A. in 1885 and an M. A. in 1886. The person who made the most profound impression upon him during his undergraduate years was Prof. Pliny Earle Chase. Chase launched him in his study of mysticism by suggesting the subject for his senior thesis, "Mysticism and Its Exponents. "
Later, Jones went to Europe for a year's study.
After a year's sabbatical at Harvard, he received his M. A. in philosophy in 1901.
Jones taught for a year in a Quaker school, Oakwood Seminary, Union Springs, New York. Because his uncle and aunt, Eli and Sybil Jones, were internationally known Quaker ministers, he carried letters of introduction that opened many doors for him among British Friends and on the Continent. After some months in Heidelberg, in 1887, where he attended lectures in philosophy, he returned to take a teaching post in the Friends' School in Providence.
In 1889 Jones was named principal of Oak Grove Seminary, Vassalboro, Maine, ten miles from his birthplace. That same year his first book, Eli and Sybil Jones, Their Life and Work, was published. In 1890 he was recognized as a minister by his local meeting and by the Vassalboro Quarterly Meeting. In 1893 Jones became the editor of the Friends' Review, published weekly in Philadelphia, and an instructor in philosophy at Haverford College. He enlarged his editorial work in 1894 by combining the Friends' Review with the Christian Worker (Chicago) to form the American Friend and continued his editorial work with this journal until 1912.
During a second trip abroad in 1897 he met John Wilhelm Rowntree of York, England; they planned a scholarly history of the Religious Society of Friends from its roots in the Reformation to the twentieth century. Although Rowntree died in 1905, Jones, assisted by the British Friend William Charles Braithwaite and others, carried the project to its conclusion in 1921. Jones wrote four of the seven volumes and part of another.
Jones took an important part in the founding of the Five Years Meeting of Friends, created in 1902, a conference that brought together a majority of the Quakers in the United States.
He was named to fill the new T. Wistar Brown chair in philosophy at Haverford. In 1898 he began a half century of service on the board of trustees of Bryn Mawr College (chairman, 1916 - 1936). Jones also published several books during the period, largely collections of lectures or articles previously printed in the American Friend.
Following another visit to England, he was invited to serve as director of studies at the new Quaker center for adult studies, called Woodbrooke, which opened in Birmingham. Although this offer tempted him, he remained at Haverford.
When the Swarthmore Lecture was introduced at London Yearly Meeting in 1908, Rufus Jones was invited to deliver the first address. In 1920 he was asked to speak again, the only person ever invited to deliver two Swarthmore Lectures. In 1904 his most important book to date, Social Law in the Spiritual World, was published; it was read widely outside the Society of Friends. Five years later his first volume in the Rowntree Series appeared, Studies in Mystical Religion (London, 1909), which gained him immediate recognition as a scholar of mysticism. He published two additional volumes in the Rowntree Series in the next five years, The Quakers in the American Colonies (London, 1911) and Spiritual Reformers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1914).
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, many Friends, although opposed to the war on principle, wished to serve in a civilian capacity. In April of 1917 the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) was formed in Philadelphia with Jones as the first chairman. A training program was started at Haverford College, and Jones negotiated with the War Department to gain approval to send conscientious objectors to France to work with English Friends. He continued to serve as chairman until 1928 and again from 1935 to 1944.
In 1947, after World War II, the AFSC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the Friends Service Council in London. Encouraged by Herbert Hoover, a fellow Quaker, he helped the AFSC to carry out child-feeding and relief programs in Germany and Russia in the postwar years.
His two-volume The Later Periods of Quakerism (London) appeared in 1921, completing the Rowntree Series, and in 1927 he published New Studies in Mystical Religion. He also published several other volumes; some were collections of lectures, and others, like The Church's Debt to Heretics (1924), were based on original research. Church groups, universities, and other groups besieged him with requests to lecture. In 1932 he shared in an interdenominational survey of missions in the Far East and contributed two chapters to the published report, Rethinking Missions (1932), edited by William Ernest Hocking of Harvard. This was his second visit to China, having gone to deliver a series of lectures to the YMCA there in 1926.
He retired from Haverford College after taking an active part in the centennial celebrations at the college the previous autumn, for which he wrote Haverford College, A History and an Interpretation (1933). The first semester of the following academic year was spent in Europe, where he gave many lectures, interspersed with additional study of the continental mystics. The Flowering of Mysticism (1939), about a small group of fourteenth-century mystics called the Friends of God, was the result of this research. In 1937 he presided at the second Friends World Conference, held at Swarthmore and Haverford colleges.
Early in 1938 he and his wife traveled to South Africa, where he lectured and met with Jan Smuts; they returned by way of China and Japan. In early December of the same year he visited Nazi Germany, accompanied by two younger Friends, in an attempt to intervene on behalf of the Jews. Although he was able to speak with a high official in the Gestapo and made some arrangements for alleviating the suffering of the Jews, little came of the mission.
During the final decade of his life, he lectured all over the United States and published a number of small volumes. He wrote the fourth and final of his autobiographical essays in 1941, A Small Town Boy. His last book, A Call to What is Vital, appeared shortly after his death in 1948.
On June 16 he died in his sleep during an afternoon nap.
Reacting strongly against the conservative, orthodox spirit and evangelical patterns dominant in nineteenth-century Quakerism, he, along with several British Friends, attempted to revitalize the Society of Friends and bring it into the mainstream of modern religious thought. Convinced that the first generation of Friends were mystics, he called upon his fellow religionists to accept a new mystical interpretation of Quakerism for the twentieth century - not the negative, withdrawn mysticism of the early church but an affirmative mysticism that would lead to involvement in the world. He asserted that early Friends were spiritually close to the pietists and continental mystics, and that they represented a reaction against Puritanism. Coupled with this was an overly optimistic view of the goodness of man and an emphasis upon the phrase adapted from the words of George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, "that of God in every man. "
In his effort to overcome the narrow, limiting theology of nineteenth-century Quakerism, Jones moved too far in the other direction. Optimism about man and society, accepted in the first part of the twentieth century, was struck a mortal blow by neo-orthodoxy and the excesses of the Nazis and others. Also his enthusiasm for mysticism led him to overstate his case regarding early Quakerism. Scholars also concentrated upon the mysticism of Rufus Jones, beginning with a thesis by William A. Alsobrook at Drew Theological Seminary in 1954.
Jones was tall and thin and somewhat awkward in his youth. Protruding teeth were an embarrassment to him until they were replaced by artificial ones later in life. He grew a moustache before his marriage in 1888, and never removed it. While his features were plain rather than handsome or powerful, as he matured and gained poise, he became a striking figure. His natural manner, sense of humor, personal warmth, and ability to respond to others drew people to him, young and old alike.
Quotes from others about the person
The British medievalist, Christopher J. Holdsworth, in a paper entitled "Mystics and Heretics in the Middle Ages: Rufus Jones Reconsidered", has pointed out that while Jones was a pioneer in his day, in the scholarly examination of mysticism, his work now needs to be reconsidered in the light of more recent scholarship. Like Father Caffrey, he stressed the enormous influence of Rufus Jones during his lifetime on the people who heard him and read his books.
On July 3, 1888, he married Sarah Hawkshurst Coutant, whom he met while teaching at Oakwood Seminary; they had one son, Lowell Coutant. His wife Sarah died from tuberculosis in 1899, and their son Lowell died of diphtheria four years later.
On March 11, 1902, he married Elizabeth Bartram Cadbury of Philadelphia. She was a highly intelligent and lovely young woman, who supported her husband in many ways and gave him valuable editorial assistance with his many publications. They had one daughter, Mary Hoxie, born in 1904. Elizabeth Jones, who was related to the English Cadburys, strengthened the transatlantic ties, and the couple spent several summers in England.