A Theology (and Ethic) for Radical Believers and Other Baptists
By Curtis W. Freeman, Research Professor of Theology and Baptist Studies
Duke University Divinity School, Durham, NC
I
Despite the fact that the direct and spiritual descendents of the Radical Reformation now constitute a majority of Christian groups in North America, their perspective is vastly underrepresented in systematic theology. It is common to find standard accounts of theology identified as broadly Catholic or Protestant, but who speaks for those whose understanding of the faith is none of the above? Anyone who has asked this question or has wondered why this branch of Christianity has produced so little theology will welcome these books.
The completion of McClendon`s three volume Systematic Theology (Ethics 1986 revised 2002, Doctrine 1994, and Witness 2000) constitutes the life work of one of the most widely respected but rarely consulted theologians in America. Brethren and others in the Believers Church tradition will recognize the authenticity of one who speaks their language and gives voice to their convictions. Like his friend and colleague, John Howard Yoder, McClendon understood what it meant to be an outsider participating in Protestant and Catholic conversations.
Perhaps this sense of otherness heightened McClendon`s sensitivity to the "struggle" of theology, which he says begins with "the humble fact that the church is not the world." Those within established church traditions may misunderstand this admission as a sectarian retreat into otherworldliness, but as McClendon explains, no escape is possible "inasmuch as the line between church and world pass right through each Christian heart." This conviction that the theology of the church is not the standpoint of the world has long been held by free churches, which McClendon identifies as his community of reference. He innovatively denotes them as "baptists," using the lower case "b" to include such diverse groups as Täufer and Baptists to Pietists and Pentecostals. This standpoint is summarized in a hermeneutical motto called "the baptist vision." This is that: the church is the apostolic community, and the commands of Jesus are addressed to us. Then is now: we are the end time people, a new humanity anticipating the consummation of the blessed hope.
From the perspective of standard-account Christians, the baptist vision seems to get everything backwards: Christian life before Christian faith, ethics before doctrine, convictions before reasons. This backwardness, however, is not merely a difference for the sake of difference. It reflects the reversal of perspective in "the view from below" where baptists first learned to see things. McClendon reminds us that our radical foremothers and forefathers rarely acquired a majority consciousness that presumed to speak for everyone, due in no small measure to the fact that their heritage was rooted in soil watered by the blood of those who dared to differ. The life and thought of the spiritual descendants of radical believers like Michael Sattler, Claesken Gaeledocter, Roger Williams, and Alexander Mack has always been socially disenfranchised and religiously marginalized from the theological mainstream.
II
This vision makes McClendon`s Systematic Theology different. In the typical Protestant and Catholic accounts, theological ethics (or moral theology) comes after apologetics and dogmatics, but McClendon proposes that ethics stands first. Beginning this way implies a pedagogical (and catechetical?) priority for ethics, not a logical one, because this particular order follows the pattern of Christian experience that faith is lived out before it is thought through.
The scope of this radical vision evidently did not even become clear to McClendon until after two decades he finished the project. In the final edition of Ethics, which he significantly revised after the completion of volume three, the title of chapter two changed from "What is Ethics?" to "What Sort of Ethics?" The extent of the difference becomes apparent to anyone who compares the two editions. In the original, McClendon muddled his way through a survey of recent Christian ethics, theoretical accounts of decision-making, and how some ethicists go about their work. It had enough of the familiar philosophical markers (like utilitarian and deontological theories) to be recognizable as "ethics." In the second edition the treatment of philosophical ethics is held until the final chapter which retrospectively reflects on "why narrative ethics?"
Central to the first edition, which began as an article in a technical journal for professional ethicists, was a three stranded structure of the splanchnic (or organic) strand where morality is grounded upon response to environment, the somatic (or communal) strand in which a rule or way of life furnishes community guidance for employing social practices, and the anastatic strand that indicates how revisionary events direct moral transformation. This three stranded structure remains, but it is reconfigured so as to make explicit why the gospel story does not require theoretical accounts of morality to count as ethics.
In the original edition McClendon described how the field of Christian ethics as practiced by both Protestants and Catholics has led to an emphasis on "decisionism" rather than attention to the gospel "story." The revised edition reveals that McClendon came to understand just how much his own thinking was still under the influence of "Constantianism" when he began writing. Whereas in the first edition McClendon stated that "Christian ethics" refers to "theories of the Christian way of life," his second attempt to describe what sort of ethics Christians are committed to does not begin with "ethics" or "theories" at all. Instead he starts with the gospel and unravels its three stranded moral structure which he identifies as the way, watch-care, and witness.
The way Christians are called to follow has its roots in the way of old Israel which was paradigmatically exemplified in Jesus as the way of the cross, and indeed, of nonviolence. This way requires a community of fellow pilgrims who provide the watchful care over fellow travelers along the journey, and finally witness to those not (yet) on the way. McClendon then shows how in the first millennium of Christianity these motifs became institutionalized: the way in the example of the saints, watch-care in the practice of penance, and witness in the canon of Scripture. He further displays how in the second millennium all three motifs were interiorized by Catholics (Thomas Aquinas), Protestants (Martin Luther), and baptists (John Bunyan).
By so narrating the story McClendon is then able to show "Christian ethics" to be an "invention" by constantinianized Christians committed to the project of Enlightenment rationalism as a means of justifying the moral content of the gospel. Given the waning (and perhaps passing) of modernity McClendon proposes to reclaim the three gospel motifs for postmodern existence: (1) the way as the Easter procession (the anastatic strand), (2) watch-care as the renewal of the community of care (the communal strand), and (3) witness as the stress on embodied existence (the organic strand). He hopes that just such an explication of the vision can bear truthful witness to the topsy-turvy order of the new creation where the last comes first, the least is greatest, and the meek inherit the earth.
There are many minor editorial changes in the revised edition of Ethics that will be overlooked by all but the most careful of readers. One that I did not miss, because it was a matter of much conversation between us, is his description of liberty as one of the five distinguishing marks of baptists. In the first edition he identified liberty with "soul competency," a term first introduced in the 1920s by Baptist theologian E. Y. Mullins. In the second edition "soul competency" recedes into the background as a "related theme." Also in the first edition McClendon made a glancing critique of soul competency as not sufficient "to do justice to the shared discipleship that earlier baptists had embraced," but in the revised edition he characterizes soul competency as "Mullins`s anthropocentric motto" that "was framed too much in terms of the rugged American individualism of Theodore Roosevelt to do justice to the shared discipleship baptist life requires."
There are other major changes. Chapter nine on "Resurrection Ethics" retains the same title in both editions, but the order and content in the much improved revision is hardly recognizable as the same chapter. The section on Koinonia at Schleitheim is shifted from the end to the beginning, and the chapter concludes with a wonderful description of "the difference made by the resurrection." It indicates how McClendon`s mind changed in the decades between the writing and revising of volume one-a change for the better to be sure. The revision retains the rich biographical narratives of Sarah and Jonathan Edwards, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Dorothy Day that so wonderfully display the three strands, but make no mistake-the revised Ethics is a very different volume which sets the stage more clearly for the whole Systematic Theology. Anyone who read the first edition and assumes that the revised one is not worth (re)reading is missing a wonderful new book that is McClendon at his best.
III
How must Christians live to faithfully follow Jesus Christ the risen Lord? This is the question of Ethics. What must the church teach to be the authentic community of disciples now? That is the question of Doctrine. Because the church as a confessional community has been authorized by Christ to extend his teaching ministry the doctrinal question is unavoidable (Mt 16:15-19), and because the church as a gathered community seeks to continue in the way, watching over one another and bearing witness to friend and stranger, this teaching authority must be exercised for the church to be the church (Mt 18:15-20).
McClendon contends that for the church to exercise its teaching office well requires the correlative practice of Bible reading. But if the "this is that" and "then is now" hermeneutics is to be practiced by all Christians, is not the baptist vision open to subversive forces contrary to the gospel? That this is so requires only the utterance of the word "Münster" which no matter how softly spoken never ceases to awaken the slumbering opponents of radical biblicism. McClendon`s proposal entails a recovery of the plain and spiritual sense of Scripture by attending both to widely shared convictions and historical-critical rules while concentering on the risen Lord Jesus Christ. He thus counters the anti-enthusiasm critics with a biblicism that is Christ-centered and faithful to the gospel.
The connection between hermeneutical theory and the practice of Bible reading is clarified at the end of Doctrine through the story of Roger Williams. John Cotton and the Massachusetts Bay Puritans believed that their commonwealth fulfilled the types of Israel in the Old Testament which justified the use of civil power by church authorities to punish those like Williams with whom they disagreed. Against this view Williams argued that Israel was a type of Christ`s church, not the Puritan colony. He thus obliterated the basis for any union of church and state based on the Old Testament. By fulfilling all the offices of ancient Israel (prophet, priest, and king), Christ who proclaimed, served, and ruled though suffering love shows the Puritan government to be scripturally invalid. McClendon concludes that for Williams since the figures and types of the Old Testament were fulfilled in Christ: "From Jesus onward, government interference in anyone`s faith, be that faith false or true, constituted disobedience to Jesus himself." McClendon`s ability to tell a story in simple Hemingway-like prose leaves readers wishing that Doctrine had more of the deliberate use of narrative that he employed in Ethics. Yet to have done so would have increased the length of an already long book by another third.
As the baptist vision in Ethics seems upside down (or is it right side up?), so the view in Doctrine initially appears backwards. Whereas in the typical arrangement of doctrinal loci, eschatology comes last, in the baptist vision the last comes first. This "beginning with the end," as McClendon explains, is not arbitrary. The fact that baptists from Hans Hut to Tim LaHaye have been inclined toward chiliasm of one sort or another suggests that eschatological doctrine is of particular interest (and importance) to radical believers. With the resurrection of Jesus as the hermeneutical touchstone McClendon describes what the church must teach to clarify "the new that comes in Christ." Eschatological doctrine then sustains the practice of costly discipleship grounded in the conviction that the just God will vindicate the righteous in the end. McClendon engages a wide range of theological conversations, but he consistently demonstrates that the beliefs and practices of radical believers such new birth or original sin do not fit the standard Catholic and Protestant accounts without theological reconfiguration.
The chapter "Jesus the Risen Christ" is the center piece of Doctrine. McClendon shares with D. M. Baillie the observation that modern historiography has brought an end to the haunting docetism that explained away Jesus` humanity as simulation rather than reality. Yet the historical purge of docetism has not been free of fallout. From the old quest for the historical Jesus to the continuing quest of the Jesus seminar, historical-critical investigation into the human life of Jesus has stretched the old two-nature Christology to the limits. McClendon proposes a two-narrative model as an alternative approach: one the kenosis story of God`s self-giving and the other the plerosis story of divine fulfillment in human up-reaching. Jesus embodies both stories, and as McClendon helps us to see, the gospel witness is that these two are at last indivisibly one.
Of particular importance is the centrality of McClendon`s reading of the primitive Christian hymn in Philippians 2:5-11. Following a line of patristic interpretation, he takes the hymn as an example of earthly living in Christ, not the more common understanding of an incarnational story about the heavenly leaving of Christ. By so rendering the hymn as a model of Christ`s servant Lordship (and correlatively as an example of servant discipleship for those who follow Jesus in the servant way), McClendon avoids the lingering doceticism of the two nature model which the kenotic Christology attempted to address by attempting to explain how deity can "empty" itself. Anticipating the possible misunderstanding (and misrepresentations) of readers who might take this two narrative approach to regard Jesus simply as the "lucky winner" adopted by God, McClendon affirms "that there was never a time when God did not intend to raise Jesus from the dead, never a time when the whole story pointed to anything less than the ultimate exaltation of this One." Careful readers need look no further for his orthodoxy, but careless ones may miss the seriousness with which he takes the challenge of historicism. As the two-nature model provided previous generations of Christians with a useful account of the faith, McClendon hopes that his two narrative Christology might enable the contemporary church to faithfully teach what entitles Jesus to be our Lord, or why the confession of Christ`s Lordship is consistent with the conviction that God is one, and finally how Christ-like the lives of disciples are to be. Doctrine is an excellent account of the faith for Christians that wants to know what the church must teach to be the church now.
IV
If Ethics points the way for disciples who follow Jesus in the Easter procession and Doctrine describes the watch-care of the disciple community for one another, Witness is a conversation with those not (yet) on the way about the new world that has begun through Jesus Christ the risen Lord. Because genuine conversation takes seriously the questions and concerns of one`s conversation partners, it proceeds ad hoc. So it is with this book which lacks the simple elegance of Ethics and the systematic structure of Doctrine. Nevertheless, Witness provides an important example of the sort of deep conversations about art, music, science, and philosophy that Christians must engage in if they take seriously the commission to make disciples of all nations (Mt 28:19-20).
Like Ethics and Doctrine, Witness seems to put things in reverse order too. It became common in the modern era for critical theology to begin with a prolegomena as a foundation for doctrine and ethics. The obsession with a preliminary justification of beliefs in the standard-account theologies was motivated in part by a desire to hold on to the status quo Christian establishments that were being questioned by a rationality loosed from revelation. Such theology accepted the premise that meaningful language must be in universal terms shared by everyone. In different ways both liberals and evangelicals bought into this agenda that transformed the gospel into a set of ideas that could be made credible and defended and, so it was thought, would conquer the ideas of the Enlightenment.
But rather than convincing skeptical opponents that Christianity was the most rational choice, the apologetic strategy often had the opposite effect of putting theologians on the defense and diverting attention from content to method. This preoccupation with method became an annoying habit (as Jeffrey Stout once observed) like a speaker repeatedly clearing his throat without ever saying anything. By putting off critical questions until the third volume, and in effect by saying something first without a lot of throat clearing, McClendon pursued a different strategy than the standard accounts. Here he joins the heirs of the Radical Reformation who rarely acquired a majority consciousness that assumed they should speak for everyone and consequently maintained that theology needs no foundation other than the confession of faith in Jesus Christ (1 Cor 3:11).
More specifically McClendon`s order follows a pattern laid out by Harold Bender in his classic essay The Anabaptist Vision. Bender described the Radical Reformation as a movement which at the core was the belief that the essence of Christianity is discipleship. McClendon`s three volumes reflect this conviction, but the emphasis on living the faith should not be mistaken for a fideistic irrationalism that excludes thinking the faith. Decades before the language and ideas of postmodernity became the lingua franca of both academic and popular theology McClendon worked on cutting the Gordian knot that tied nonfoundationalism with relativism.
Granting the then outrageous (but now consensus) premise that no one floats in mid-air or sees from a God`s eye point of view, McClendon defused the claim that this then means that no beliefs are better than any other. Using the speech-act theory of J. L. Austin (viz., How To Do Things With Words) McClendon displayed how religious convictions are justifiable. Theology that is true to its task then is referential and intelligible to some particular community. This argument is set forth in his groundbreaking book Understanding Religious Convictions (co-authored with James M. Smith and published in 1975, revised in 1994).
In the first edition of Ethics, which followed the publication of Convictions, McClendon envisioned that the subject (and title?) of the third volume would be the more standard-account-like "philosophical theology" or "apologetics," but in the second edition he explains that the final volume pertains to the "stance vis-à-vis the world that the church must maintain in order to be truly the church." This "stance or standpoint" he called "witness," which was his choice for the title of volume three. The modification in nomenclature is another indication of how his mind gradually changed over the course of writing this Systematic Theology.
Chapter one offers a preliminary description of a theology of culture which is crucial to understanding the nature of the Christian witness to complex cultural expressions such as science, literature, music, and art. Readers are wisely guided to see that the most faithful gospel witnesses are those that neither entirely reject nor wholly affirm the contemporary culture. McClendon maps the trajectory of such a theology of culture which first seeks to understand and connect with deep questions embedded in cultural expressions, then makes use of these cultural idioms to construe the world through the Christian story, and finally seeks to embody gospel practices in the church as a culture of hope remade by grace.
That McClendon`s three step trajectory draws from theologians Paul Tillich, Julian Hartt, and John Yoder is evidence of the eclectic theological method that is sometimes described as "postliberal." This model which concedes the cultural dependency of all forms of gospel witness seems to imply that all claims then are merely culturally relative. Here again McClendon draws upon the richer account developed in Convictions of the standpoint which he called "perspectivism." According to this view, convictional conflict is "expected but not inevitable, fundamental but not ultimate, enduring but not inherently ineradicable."
The central chapter of Witness examines the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. McClendon`s account does not simply suggest that Wittgenstein`s linguistic philosophy may be utilized by Christians in their conversations with contemporary culture (a common claim that is true enough), but rather that Wittgenstein as an authentic Christian provides a paradigmatic gospel witness for the church in this postmodern era. McClendon carefully attends to the philosopher`s biographical narrative to make his case. Whether the stronger point about Wittgenstein`s Christianity is sustained, readers will find such matters as the explanation of "forms of life" as "practices" to be very helpful.
The final chapter is a retrospective consideration of the theme of the entire volume which considers the place of theology in the university. McClendon explores such a project by reflecting on the one envisioned by John Henry Newman in The Idea of a University where theology serves to examine the deep convictions of culture and history. Theology for Newman was not merely a field of knowledge, but a condition for it, which as McClendon shows is necessary not only in religiously affiliated institutions, but in so-called secular ones as well.
I was one of a group of three who read Witness in draft form. In my letter to Jim (dated 5 November 1999) I reminded him that his audience would be "students like the young Curtis Freeman who picked up Ethics and said, `This is the book I`ve been waiting for.` These folks are out there, and they are legion. They will read Witness with great profit. It is a theological map to guide them through the maze of postmodernity with the encouragement to do more and better work than you have done." Sadly he did not live long enough to see the truth of that assessment borne out, but if its reception by my students is any indication, then those of us in the Free Church tradition may well look back on these volumes as the most important theological guide for the way forward.
I hope the same is true for those who read this journal. Jim McClendon was not merely a baptist doing theology, nor was he just doing theology as a baptist. He did baptist theology. If you only read one systematic theology in your life this is the one you have been waiting for. It is a theology for radical believers and other baptists too. He is one of our own.
1 This article previously appeared in the journal Brethren Life and Thought, volume 50 (Winter-Spring 2006): 106-15.
2 James Wm. McClendon, Jr., Ethics: Systematic Theology, Volume I(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1986; revised ed. 2002); Doctrine: Systematic Theology, Volume II (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994); and Witness: Systematic Theology, Volume III (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2000).
Editor’s Footnote: It is worth noting that McClendon describes T. B. Maston as “My first, best teacher of ethics” (Ethics, 63)
