Carlyle Marney as Ethicist
By Michael C. Blackwell
[Dr. Michael Blackwell has been president of the Baptist Children`s Homes of North Carolina for 15 years. The material in this article reminds us of what a powerful ethical giant Marney was. 1998 marks the 20th anniversary of his death, who, though he "being dead yet speaketh" (Hebrews 11:4).]
Early in his life Carlyle Marney knew the kind of man he wanted to be.
He is called One of a Thousand; he is a begetter of spiritual children; He is a birther, he is a nurse; he knows and unfolds dark things to sinners. He pleads, he slights and despises the things that are present, and he is sure of a world to come.[i]
The words were from John Bunyan`s Pilgrim`s Progress, but they characterized the thrust of Marney`s ethical ministry. Marney died five days before his sixty-second birthday. He was born July 8, 1916, as Leonard Carlyle Marney. To all except immediate family, he was always "Marney." He died in his office in Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, on July 3, 1978. He suffered a heart attack as he was preparing to leave for a week of lectures at the Pastor`s School at Furman University.
Marney`s birthplace was Harriman, Tennessee. His parents, John Leonard and Sara Victoria Mays, were tenth generation Americans whose family had moved but once since 1720. His father, a turnplow designer, never went to school. His heritage, Marney said, put him on the underside. His East Tennessee upbringing provided a laboratory for all the contradictions of southern religion. His earliest memories were of Sunday afternoons at his grandfather`s home when the family debated the hottest issue of the day-evolution. The Scopes monkey trial of 1925 was making headlines around the country. "The Knoxville Sentinel, which we read, was on Jesus` side," Marney once recalled, "but the Cincinnati Post, which Grandpa read, was on Darrow`s side. A little boy of eight years old, I was torn apart by this."[ii]
Marney was reared in ecumenical surroundings. His parents were Baptist, but aunts, uncles, and grandparents were Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian. He lived next to the Presbyterian manse. His mother went to the Methodist church on Sunday mornings to learn "how to live," but attended Trenton Street Baptist Church on Sunday nights to be sure she was still "all right."
Marney said Harriman was "a marvelous place to grow up." Liberal, Protestant, northern people moved there. "There was lots of Yankee manufacturing money," he noted. "A Yankee general camped there during the Civil War and later returned to found a town, where he thought there were enough coal and timber and iron for a boom." Harriman never because an industrial center-another Birmingham–, "but it was sort of a mixed-up place."[iii]
Harriman was also headquarters for the Women`s Christian Temperance Union, and Marney attended plays in the WCTU temple. "We could hear Holy Roller meetings going on at the bottom of the hill on summer nights. But down the hill the other way was the Andrew Carnegie Library-which I devoured as a little boy." Marney got his first library card at age eight and started reading three or four books weekly. He read Quo Vadis when he was thirteen. "I didn`t resolve the furor that cooked up until I had a doctorate in church history."[iv] Marney`s love of books never waned. He would later confess to friends a "theological lust," his way of describing his life-long love affair with books.
Marney`s ethical awareness began early. "I wasn`t yet five years old when I heard my grandpa talking about how blacks ought not to be treated," he said. He remembered his own father, dying at age eight-four and "hallucinating in the hospital on his deathbed" saying, "They`re not treating those folks right." From those vivid memories, Marney said, "I had no choice but to be true to a heritage of which I`m proud, though it`s not the typical southern pattern."[v]
When he was nineteen, Marney "made a decision to move toward people" and away from trees. He had seriously considered forestry as a career. Within a year, Marney decided to enter the ministry. "The Baptist part was more or less automatic because that was where I had been reared." He attended a Baptist school, Carson-Newman, where he distinguished himself not only as a scholar but as a football player. He also served as Educational Director of the First Baptist Church of Kingsport, Tennessee. While there, he met a Presbyterian Minister of Music named Elizabeth Christopher. They were married in 1940. Their children were Rita Christopher, born in 1944 and Susan Elizabeth, born in 1947. The Marneys would later have three grandchildren.
Marney preached his first sermon in Kingsport. The pastor, J.G. Hughes, became ill and informed Marney that he would have to preach. And Marney preached the one prepared sermon he possessed! "He did well at it," his wife recalled. He began to supply regularly when the pastor was away. When he entered Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1940, Marney confirmed his desire to be a preaching minister.
At Southern, Marney compiled an outstanding academic record. His major professor, Dr. Sydnor Stealey, called Marney his most brilliant student. Stealey guided Marney through his Doctor of Theology program in church history, and the two men remained life-long friends. In later years, Marney said that if he had his time to do over, he would have attended schools outside his region. "But it`s in the South that my education and my exposure to classic social influences happened," he said. Marney took his teachers seriously. "And those teachers were in touch with the classics. A man can get a fairly classic education south of God."[vi]
Marney`s seminary education included more than books. He served as student chaplain at Fort Knox, Kentucky, from 1940-41. He witnessed race riots in prison stockades. He continued his chaplain`s work when he was called to pastor the Stithon Baptist Church in Fort Knox (1941-43). When he received his Th.M. degree from Southern in 1943, Marney moved to the Beaver Dam Baptist Church where he served until 1946. During the Beaver Dam years, he was invited to preach in Memphis where his old pastor was then serving. He preached "All the Sons of the Earth," a positive ethical statement on race relations. It was Marney`s first experience with "rejection over preaching." "Perhaps it wasn`t a very good time to lay these social issues out…I got through the sermon, and was never asked back. But then I didn`t expect to be."[vii]
Was Marney destined to be on the cutting edge of ethical issues? His own insight at age twenty-three provides a clue.
There are strange meeting places in a man`s life where all he has done and thought and prepared comes together in frightening, compelling synchronization. And a step he took in the dark opens a vista of which he could at best but have dreamed. It is as if a hand had stacked his deck.[viii]
However his deck was stacked, Marney took a step in the dark in 1948 when he left his pastorate of the Immanuel Baptist Church in Paducah, Kentucky, to become pastor of First Baptist in Austin, Texas. He was thirty-two at the time. The church had five thousand members, a staff of twenty-five, and was located across the street from the capitol and down the street from the university. He preached to people who understood his ethical/social/political criticisms and affirmations. Marney discovered himself to have "an almost perfect willingness" to be "barker, front man, even a bell-wether outside the main tent."[ix] He was also "determined not to be a professional…, to be more man than functionaire…, to be more Christian than ever I could be Baptist." He swore three oaths:
I would never become economically enslaved to a place or a status.
I would never walk across the street to get any post or positions nor would I ever want one to the point I would pay too much for it.
I would follow faithfully whatever new light I might be given, wherever it led.[x]
The bright light which led him to Austin kept him there ten years. He quickly became involved in the broader social issues of a larger community. Some of his sermons were printed in book form. "I offered my wares to the Baptists south of God in terms of manuscripts and other things, which they rejected."[xi] Marney became involved in a church power struggle during his first year. A long-time member forced the issue, and the matter of whether Marney would stay was decided on the church floor. The vote was six hundred ninety-six to sixteen, and Marney remained another nine years. Within a few years, some three hundred members who could not reconcile themselves to Marney`s ministry left and formed a new church. And they had Marney`s blessing to their venture.
In Austin, Marney was caught up in a "pit of beautiful influences, minds, and opportunities." He developed friendships with other liberals and intellectuals with whom he would have "exciting, stimulating, agonizing, debating, acrimonious, insulting, uplifting hours of discussion." At James McCord`s invitation, Marney began teaching Christian Ethics at Austin Presbyterian Seminary. He preached ethical integrity from the pulpit. He practiced it on the floor of the Texas legislature. One week he spent forty hours before various committees trying to defeat thirteen racist bills. He and some friends convinced Governor Price Daniel, a member of Marney`s church, to oppose the bills and they were killed.[xii] Marney infuriated many people. Noel Smith, editor of the fundamentalist Baptist Bible Tribune said that "Marney`s head needs examining." The issue? Marney had agreed with the Nels F.S. Ferre lecture at Baylor University.[xiii]
Marney`s reputation grew. As he began to publish books, write articles, and speak across the country, a group of people in Charlotte, North Carolina, heard about him. They were from the Myers Park Baptist Church, and they wanted him to be their pastor. Neither Marney nor his wife Elizabeth was interested, but with the encouragement of the committee and friends like Dr. Sydnor Stealey, they visited Charlotte. On the way, they stopped in Maggie Valley, North Carolina, and determined that whether or not they came to Charlotte, they would buy some mountain property. They did come to Charlotte, and they did buy the mountain property, some forty-five acres on the north end of Wolf Pen Mountain near Waynesville.
"The real crisis for me was Charlotte," Marney said. "With the heavy emphasis on property and profit, banking and commercialism and family, I ran into psychic incest, perversion and political manipulations."[xiv] He became, more than ever, an ethical prophet. "A man makes his own list according to where he hurts," he said. "Everybody`s moral condition is a reflection of his own. Everyone`s poverty is an extension of his own. Where," he asked, "have we borne a witness based on courage rather than affluence?"[xv]
Time magazine called Marney a "fiery minister" who told businessmen that "the profit motive is ethically bankrupt" Time said Marney was a staunch believer in church-state separation who wants religious teaching banned from all schools.[xvi] The Time article, which spotlighted several preachers of the Southern Baptist Convention, came on the heels of Marney`s Structures of Prejudice, which, among other things, was a scathing critique of capitalism. Although roundly criticized by many members of the business community, other businessmen asked Marney to teach them ethical responsibility in business matters. His seminars on business ethics were well attended and received extensive local newspaper coverage.
Marney`s workaholism was in full bloom during the Charlotte years (1958-1967). "When I`m excited about a project, I can get by for months at a time on three or four hours of sleep a night," he said in 1962.[xvii] His study was always at home, and he would often rise at three in the morning, warm up the coffee, and write until dawn. Then, he said, he would go to the office, put himself in neutral, and go where they pushed him. Marney seldom relaxed during the Myers Park years, although he did ride his horses occasionally. Seven of his books were published while he lived in Charlotte.
Marney learned the ethical use of power during the Myers Park years. When his church faced the integration question, he enlisted the help of nineteen former board chairmen, part of the community power structure, to write the document that would integrate the church. He knew there was opposition among those nineteen men, but he was reasonable: he started with the opposition-where the power really was. "If you are going to play power, you had better use power."[xviii] Said Dr. Sam Byuarm, professor of sociology at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte:
Marney was a radical, the iron fist in the velvet glove. Radical as far as Myers Park Baptist was concerned. But there was a sanity in what he was saying and what he was doing and they couldn`t deny it. The sanity and the ethics-he had them on this.[xix]
As Charlotte`s Chamber of Commerce sought to integrate the city, Marney worked behind the scenes. "I was amazed at the ethical awareness of some of the business leaders," hye said. "But I read through their ethical language to see that what they were seeing was that, economically, this is a thing we had better do." Marney said the real issue in Charlotte during the mid `sixties was not race. "It was economics, money, banking, interest rates, loan policies, employment."[xx]
If Marney`s ministry was known only in the South in the early `sixties, that was quickly dispelled in the mid `sixties. As he spoke at Yale, Chicago, Duke, Harvard, Cornell, and other major centers of learning, he also spoke to the nation. That came in a controversial 1965 Christmas Eve service which was telecast nationwide by CBS. Marney`s sermon drew five hundred letters of praise and protest. CBS said it was the finest service of that type they had ever broadcast. One critic called the sermon "a blasphemous substitute for what Baptists have traditionally believed and preached."[xxi] Marney found the controversy tremendously stimulating and uplifting. The Charlotte News reprinted the entire sermon on January 13, 1966.[xxii]
Marney`s "blasphemous substitute" critic was probably right. Marney`s criticisms of Southern Baptists probably reached a zenith in 1964. They were dutifully reported by the Charlotte newspapers:
A social revolution is going on, but we Baptists who are on God`s right hand had precious little to do with it except when run over from the rear….There are hundreds of colleges and dozens of seminaries and scores of Baptist organizations which provide little kingdoms which little men just love to run. They won`t give up their thrones for unity`s sake….The Southern Baptist Convention is a Jesus cult dressed like Buster Brown and Little Lord Fauntleroy with a bowie knife handy to cut the throats of any who disagree with a regional point of view.[xxiii]
Marney`s hectic pace of writing, preaching, lecturing, and teaching continued unabated until Sunday, September 5, 1966. He had just returned to Charlotte from a six-week lecture tour ranging from Florida to upstate New York. After preaching at eight-thirty in the morning, teaching a Sunday School lesson, and preparing to preach at eleven o`clock, Marney became ill and was rushed to Charlotte“ Memorial Hospital. He was fifty at the time. He would return to Myers Park several times following that fateful September heart attack, but never again as pastor. He remained in the hospital over five weeks, and then went to his cabin at Wolf Pen Mountain to recuperate.
On November 25, 1966, Marney told a reporter that he had been a lifelong workaholic. "I worked eighteen and twenty hours a day. A man doesn`t do that because he loves God. There are other drives. It`s a crime. I don`t intend to do that anymore." Marney said he had always wanted to be known as a man who could do well in anything he undertook. As to his future, he said, "I`m not searching for the answer. I don`t have to-it`ll come." He reiterated the vow that he would not return to the old "crime" of preacher, lecturer, writer.[xxiv]
Marney agonized seven months before deciding not to return to Myers Park. His agony, depression, and anger forced him "to follow any new light….that would put me nearer the center of the sea of troubles that now beset the Great Church." Marney`s "new light" was an Interpreters` House, to be housed at Lambuth Inn, Lake Junaluska, near what would become his and Elizabeth`s permanent home on Wolf Pen Mountain. "I rejoice now," he said, "in this strange new turn of which all my life has prepared me."[xxv]
Indeed, life had prepared Marney for an Interpreters` House. It was a logical culmination to a life-long pilgrimage. "We can`t rest in a bland changelessness, or go on looking for a world that never was, or deny history, or act as if our creatureliness were a life," he said. "We have to make a prophetic fellowship of pilgrimage to go with our priestly concerns in the world," Marney named Interpreter`s House after the house of the same name in Pilgrim`s Progress. Christian, the principal character, journeys from the City of Destruction to Mount Zion. On the journey he stops at Interpreters` House, and with his burden, and his half-released guilt, says, "You would show me excellent things such as will help me on my journey." Marney`s final journey would be as Keeper of Interpreters` House:
Where a man as an interpreter, exposed to the things of God; reached for the most he could get, true to the tradition in which he had started; worked with what he got, receiving "all who came," in the context of the Kingdom of God, and the things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ.[xxvi]
The purpose of Interpreters` House was to give those who came "the assurance that the journey inward is worth taking; to give your distinctive inwardness a grand and high meaning." Interpreters` House would "permit a man to endure, understand, and accept his own inwardness." Here, "the self-soul recovers its courage for the outward journey where he must live in an environment that furnishes him a role, a vocation, a priesthood." The real business "is the inwardness of you and outwardness of you, and both need interpretation….You learn to receive your own inwardness in such a way that your outwardness becomes a redemptive journey."[xxvii] Close to ten thousand people joined Marney in the Interpreters` House journey. "The goal is not to come out unscathed," he told participants. "I have no hope that you won`t bleed unnecessarily, unworthily and fatally."[xxviii]
From Interpreters` House, Marney continued "saying a Mass for all mankind.[xxix] He vowed to continue to tell the truth "as much as I can bear and then a little more."[xxx] That "little more" caused Marney soon to return to the old "crime" he had earlier disavowed, namely, a crowded schedule of lecturing, preaching, and writing. One project he was intently interested in was the Yale lectures on preaching which he was scheduled to deliver in 1980. According to Mrs. Marney, he had tentatively decided to lecture on Interpreters` House.
When Marney died, Interpreters` House was closed, and a thundering voice of ethical prophecy was silenced. The wounded healer had himself been mortally wounded. The pilgrim who "would show me excellent things" had taken his final journey. His redemptive suffering which had shed "new light" to those willing to follow, was now complete. His wounds were worth the journey and the journey worth the wounds because "everywhere a good man suffers he releases redemption for the need that surrounds him-the watchers taste his redemption in the way he suffers."[xxxi] But Marney would insist that "the redeemer is always numbered with the transgressors."[xxxii] Such was Marney`s journey. Such is his legacy.
Endnotes
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[i] Carlyle Marney, "The Interpreter`s House," n.d., n.p., (Mimeographed Sermon), p. 8.
[ii] Bill Finger, "Preaching the Gospel South of God," The Christian Century, October 4, 1978, p. 914.
[iii] Ibid., p. 915.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Ibid.
[vi]Ibid., p. 916.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Carlyle Marney, "Lecture III," McCormick Theological Seminary, Summer, 1963, p. 3.
[ix] Carlyle Marney, "The More Excellent Way," n.d., n.p., (Mimeographed Sermon), p. 95.
[x] Carlyle Marney, "The Priest at Every Elbow," n.d., (Mimeographed Sermon), p. 5.
[xi] Finger, "Preaching the Gospel South of God," p. 916.
[xii] Ibid, pp. 916-917.
[xiii] Baptist Bible Tribune, January 9, 1953, p. 1.
[xiv] Finger, "Preaching the Gospel South of God," p. 918.
[xv] Carlyle Marney, "Truth and Revelation," n.d., (Mimeographed Sermon), p. 116.
[xvi] Time, October 17, 1950, p. 88.
[xvii] Charlotte Observer, June 9, 1962.
[xviii] Finger, "Preaching the Gospel South of God," p. 918.
[xix] Mary Kratt, Marney, Myers Park Baptist Church, 1979, p. 37.
[xx] Finger, "Preaching the Gospel South of God," p. 918.
[xxi] Kratt, Marney, p. 21.
[xxii] Ibid.
[xxiii] Ibid., p. 46.
[xxiv] Charlotte News, November 25, 1966.
[xxv] Kratt, Marney, pp. 68-69.
[xxvi] Carlyle Marney, "The Interpreters` House," n.d., pp. 7, 9, 10.
[xxvii] Carlyle Marney, "The Interpreters` House, II, " n.d., pp. 6-7.
[xxviii] William H. Willimon, "A Prophet Leavzes Us," The Christian Century, July 19, 1978, p. 695.
[xxix] Carlyle Marney, The Coming Faith, (Nashville: Abingdon, 1970), p. 129.
[xxx] Ibid.
[xxxi] Carlyle Marney, The Suffering Servant, (Nashville: Abingdon, 1965), p. 35.
[xxxii] Ibid
