Addison Leitch

“Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour.”

— Ecclesiastes 4:9, KJV

A Theologian from Pittsburgh

Addison Hardie Leitch was born in 1908 in Ben Avon, Pennsylvania, a small town on the Ohio River just below Pittsburgh, and he grew up in that part of the state. As a young man he went out to Egypt under the foreign mission board of the United Presbyterian Church of North America and taught science for a year or so at Assiut College, on the Nile. He came home to study for the ministry at Pittsburgh-Xenia Theological Seminary, and in 1936 he married Margaret Heslip. He then went on to Cambridge, where he took a doctorate in 1938. He and Margaret had four daughters.

His career was spent in the colleges and seminaries of American Presbyterianism. In the early 1940s he was dean of men and college pastor at Grove City College in western Pennsylvania. From 1946 he taught at his old seminary in Pittsburgh, and for some years in the later 1950s he was its president. In 1961 he moved to Tarkio College, a small Presbyterian college in north-western Missouri, as professor of philosophy and religion. He was also a well-known writer for the evangelical press and a regular contributor to Christianity Today. Those who knew him remembered a big personality: a lively, funny, well-read man, a gifted teacher, at ease in argument and at home in the pulpit.

A Second Marriage

He and Elisabeth Elliot met in the later 1960s; most accounts connect their meeting with one of her speaking engagements, and some date it to 1967. By the accounts of those who knew them, she was quickly drawn to him. Here, for the first time since 1956, was a man who was her equal in mind and in conviction, who had read what she had read, and who was not overawed by her fame. Margaret Leitch was by then seriously ill, and she died in 1968. The friendship between Addison and Elisabeth moved quickly after Margaret’s death, and before the year was out they were engaged. The speed of it surprised some of their friends and troubled a few. The sources do not suggest anything improper, and this book does not speculate beyond them; it records only that both of them had known long loneliness and that neither saw any reason to wait.

They were married on New Year’s Day, 1 January 1969. Elisabeth was forty-two; Addison was sixty. She had been a widow for thirteen years.

The marriage brought her east again, though not back to New Hampshire. That same year Addison joined the faculty of the newly formed Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, in Hamilton, on the North Shore of Massachusetts, to teach theology. Elisabeth left Franconia, and she and Valerie, now a teenager, moved with him to Hamilton. The North Shore was to be her home for the rest of her life.

The seminary itself was new. It had been formed in 1969 by the merger of Gordon Divinity School, in Wenham, and the Conwell School of Theology, in Philadelphia, with the encouragement of Billy Graham and the support of a number of evangelical leaders and benefactors, and its first president was Harold John Ockenga. Its campus, on a wooded hill in Hamilton, had previously belonged to a Roman Catholic religious order. Addison came to it as a senior and experienced teacher, and he was one of the scholars who gave the young school its early standing. For Valerie the marriage meant a new home, a new school, a stepfather and four stepsisters, all of them a good deal older than she was. She had spent her childhood with one parent; now she had two.

Four Good Years

By the accounts of those who knew them, the years with Addison were happy ones. He was, by these accounts, warm and protective, and he enjoyed her company and her mind. She, who had been both mother and father to Valerie for most of the girl’s life, now had a husband to share the burden and a household that was not organised around one woman’s capacity to cope. She went on writing and speaking, and he encouraged her to do both.

For a woman who would later teach a great deal about marriage, these years matter. Her first marriage had lasted little more than two years and had been lived almost entirely on a mission station, in two languages not her own, under the shadow of a dangerous plan. Her second was lived in an ordinary American town, among books, students and church, in the middle of life.

Cancer

It did not last. In the last year or so of his life Addison was found to have cancer. The illness was long and hard. Elisabeth nursed him at home, through the treatments and the slow failure of a large and vigorous body, and she watched the man who had restored her to ordinary happiness become weak and dependent. In these years, and in the time just after, she took lodgers into the house. One of them, a man named Lars Gren, was to matter a great deal in the years ahead.

Addison Leitch died on 17 September 1973, at the age of sixty-four; a few accounts give the following day. Elisabeth was forty-six, and for the second time a widow.

The two bereavements could hardly have been more different. The first had come suddenly, by violence, on a river in the forest, to a young wife with a baby, and it had been turned almost at once into a public story with a meaning attached. The second came slowly, in a quiet house, after months of nursing, to a middle-aged woman with a grown daughter, and no one made a book or a magazine spread out of it. She was left to grieve without an audience.

She did not write a book about Addison’s death, but it went deep into everything she wrote afterwards about suffering, loneliness and the will of God. Her conviction that suffering is never wasted was not formed in a study. It was tested at the bedside of a dying husband, and in the empty house afterwards. Readers who later found her firm, even stern, on these subjects were reading a woman who had twice been through what she was describing.

The verse at the head of this chapter speaks of the good reward that two receive for their labour together. The Preacher goes on to say that if one falls, the other will lift up his fellow, and he pities the one who is alone when he falls. Elisabeth Elliot knew both sides of that saying. For four years she had a companion in her labour. Then she was alone again, and the One who had lifted her up in 1956 had to do it a second time.