Clarence Jordan: A Radical Pilgrimage in Scorn of the Consequences
Clarence Jordan: A Radical Pilgrimage in Scorn of the Consequences
by Frederick L. Downing
(Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2017, 307 pages)
Reviewed by Walter B. Shurden
Asked to be buried in an unmarked grave, Clarence Jordan’s friends put him in a cedar crate in his work clothes and laid him in the red Georgia dirt he loved so dearly. Sadly for the rest of us, Jordan lived a short 57 years. He died, said his brother Frank, “of a broken heart.” Later generations of Christians would extoll those Jordan years as “prophetic,” “saintly,” “courageous,” and “radical.” This life lived “in scorn of the consequences” has been waiting for this literary gift from Fred Downing. It is a comprehensive, engrossing, and challenging account of the life, ministry and thought of Clarence Jordan.
Born and reared in Talbot, County, Georgia, soaked in Southern culture, and pickled in the Baptist faith, Jordan graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in agriculture. He entered the Christian ministry and before he finished theological studies at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary he had earned a Ph. D. in the Greek New Testament, a book he would later translate into Southern colloquial speech known as The Cotton Patch Version of the New Testament. (Every Southern Christian should own a copy.) At Southern, Edward A. McDowell, a New Testament professor, taught Jordan how to read and relate the teachings of Jesus to the surrounding culture. Good theological education matters. Jordan, in keeping with his Baptist tradition, became a magnetic, powerful preacher. His preaching not only spread his fame, it helped fund his later visionary experience in Christian communal living.
By the time he had finished Southern, a radical gospel had seared Jordan’s conscience with non-violence, racial equality, anti-materialism, passion for the poor, and the far-reaching idea that the church had become a slave to culture. With that explosive gospel, he and his wife, Florence, along with Martin and Mabel England, bought 400 acres of land in Sumter County, near Americus, GA. Armed with an abundance of idealism and audacity, they built an interracial community on that dilapidated farm. They called it Koinonia. They found the word and the model for their community, of course, from the Book of Acts.
All of this was in 1942, more than a decade before the Civil Rights Movement and a dozen years before Brown v. Board of Education! MLK, Jr., called Jordan “my friend, my mentor, and my inspiration.” Andrew Young echoed King: “When we first heard about Clarence Jordan and Koinonia,” he said, “we considered it too radical, too dangerous.” Young went on to say that he and King were trying to get people the right to ride on a bus or shop in the local stores, “but here was Clarence—smack dab in the middle of Ku Klux Klan country—going for the whole loaf! Clarence put the rest of us to shame until we did something about it.”
Predictably, this experience in interracial living in Southwest Georgia conjured tons of hostility. First it was intimidation, next rejection, then terrorization, and finally outright violence. Rehoboth Baptist Church excommunicated the Jordans. The business community of Americus boycotted Koinonia. A Grand Jury, the FBI and the GBI investigated them on the scurrilous charges that they were a communist front. And the KKK came in the night with bullets.
The bibliography and footnotes clearly indicate that Fred Downing, head of the department of philosophy and religious studies at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, GA, spent years researching the book. He utilizes sources never before mined for a study of Jordan, and he borrows a theoretical approach from Eric Erickson, James Fowler, Donald Capps, and Walter Brueggemann that adds uniqueness to his interpretation. Downing drills into Jordan’s childhood, especially his relationship to his mother, to find a major source of his moral sensitivities. In that childhood, Downing finds a theme of “abandonment and community” that marked Jordan for life. In addition to this exploration of his growing-up years, Downing relates familiar Clarence Jordan stories that formed Jordan’s life for the future: the impact of the night cries of the chain gang in the Talbot County jail behind his home; the refusal in his senior year of the ROTC commission at the University of Georgia; his spiritual awakening while ministering at the Haymarket in Louisville, KY; his excommunication from his Baptist people; his eventual partnership with Millard Fuller and the founding of Habitat for Humanity.
Downing contextualizes Jordan, comparing him in a surprising way with other leaders of his time. These leaders include George Wallace, W. A. Criswell, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The author also has an extensive and intriguing chapter on Koinonia Theology—how Jordan read and interpreted the Bible. He selected the Sermon on the Mount as his biblical manifesto, unlimited love his theological theme.
Some popular interpretations of Jordan get stuck with the “early theological Jordan,” those first years at Koinonia before he was alienated from the surrounding community and the idealism dimmed. Downing depicts a dynamic Jordan who kept moving theologically, one who became more and more radical in his later years. He summarizes the legend and legacy of Clarence Jordan in two very helpful chapters. Jordan left us with The Cotton Patch translation of the New Testament, Habitat for Humanity, created with Millard Fuller, Koinonia Partners, and an exemplary life that continually shames religion in the South. One of those 10-talent people that we all envy, Jordan thought brilliantly, felt deeply, preached powerfully, wrote creatively, and lived bravely.
Like a good sermon, this book evokes. My bet, if you take Jesus seriously, is that you will put it down several times to ponder your own life. It will make you wonder, if you are my age, what you would do if you had your entire life to live over again. You will tell others about it. You will scrutinize your spiritual commitments. Clarence Jordan, said Robert Parham, was a Southern Saint in denim britches. But Downing is clear that Jordan is more. Clarence Jordan is a “dangerous memory,” confronting and rebuking our racism, materialism and militarism. It takes courage to live well. Jordan lived well. The story of Clarence Jordan, Downing says, can be understood as “something like a ‘scream’ in a dark night while other of us have been asleep.”
I guess you could if you tried hard, but I don’t know how you could write a bad book about Clarence Jordan. This remarkable study of Jordan is Downing’s third in a trilogy of religious biographies. The other two focused on Martin Luther King, Jr., and Elie Wiesel. They won awards. I expect no less from Clarence Jordan: A Radical Pilgrimage in Scorn of the Consequences.
Walter B. Shurde is Minister- at- Large at Mercer University in Macon, GA
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
