Henlee Barnette: Prophetic Practitioner
By Larry L. McSwain, Professor of Ethics and Leadership
McAfee School of Theology, Atlanta, Georgia
Note: This speech was delivered at the Baptist Center for Ethics luncheon during the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship meeting on June 22, 2006, in Atlanta, GA.
Henlee Barnette spent more than seventy of his life seeking to communicate and demonstrate the ethical imperatives of the gospel to parishioners, students, and the larger scholarly world. It did not matter very much where Henlee was-starting a new church in Kannapolis, NC as a new convert; serving rural immigrants in the Haymarket neighborhood of inner city Louisville as pastor/superintendent of the Union Gospel Mission; helping start the first inner-racial pastor`s conference in Birmingham, AL in the 1940s; teaching thousands of students in Howard College, Stetson University, and Southern Seminary; or writing understandable books that translated the foundational principles of the biblical story into ideas that would work in the modern world.
Whether it was Communism, basic Christian ethics, ecology, Clarence Jordan, or the dilemmas posed by situation ethics or the technologies of medicine, Henlee had a way of speaking truth to power in ways that were clear and workable. Henlee never lost his Appalachian roots, even when communicating the insights of Luther, Brunner, Fletcher, Tillich, or James Luther Adams.
I first met Henlee Barnette by reading his Introducing Christian Ethics[1] as my textbook in the first class in ethics I took with Bill Pinson at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. I was captured by the power of his ability to state the prophetic vision of Scripture in ways that made sense in the practicalities of the social agendas of the world in which we lived in the 1960s. Reading it made me want to know him and work with him. So I applied at Southern Seminary for graduate study to learn more from this prophetic practitioner. But that was never to be. When I arrived at Southern and discovered he had a full contingent of Ph.D. students, providence would lead me to study with Nolan Howington and Willis Bennett instead. But during that first year he asked me to serve as his Garrett Fellow, grading the papers for his M.Div. course in Christian Ethics. So I sat in the course and watched and learned. What emerged was a mentorship in Christian ethics, especially civil rights, for which I shall ever be grateful.
He was not only a teacher. He was an activist. The next year he gave my name to Willie Holmes, president of Simmons University Bible College, who employed me to teach Introduction to Christian Ethics, my first venture in teaching. Through that experience I met many wonderful people, including Emmanuel and Marie McCall who walked my wife Sue and me from a Simmons Baccalaureate event during the H. Rap Brown riots in Louisville to our car the month before she would deliver our first child.
When the City Council in Louisville was debating open housing ordinances he asked me to go to the demonstrations outside City Hall and my eyes were opened. I was nervous as the police barricaded us from entering City Hall, only to have the press of the crowd break through the doors. I was certain we would be arrested, but Henlee just laughed. He called one evening in March 1968 to tell me Martin Luther King, Jr. would be preaching at West Chestnut Baptist Church the next evening. I went, listened, was inspired, and marched the streets of Louisville that night as we sang "We Shall Overcome." I shall ever be grateful for his thoughtfulness in making a call to a graduate student that would change my life.
There is so much to say about this man. He was deceptive. He could sit quietly in a graduate colloquium, seeming to rest his eyes as students presented their papers, only to lift his head at a salient point to interject what Martin Luther, Paul Ramsay, Emilé Brunner, or Paul Tillich might offer on the subject. He was ever the gentle nurturer of scholarly thought in a non-threatening and affirming manner.
His lectures were a mix of thoughtful historical insights from the thinkers of the church to plain stories of action by a North Carolina mill worker, or Clarence Jordan at Koinonia Farms, or a local politician, or a Black pastor in the city. He seemed to know them all.
There are two primary values that shaped the man. The first was the prophetic consciousness of the Old Testament prophets and Jesus, the bearer of the Kingdom. Henlee had indomitable courage and it led him to study beyond his background, challenge the conventional in church and society, and risk rejection for the cause of truth. He never seemed to me to be bothered in the least by those who disagreed with him. Prophets have to have an inordinate ability to sleep at night and that was true for Henlee. He always responded to his critics who wrote to him, usually in a humorous vein. I remember specifically his letter to the Baptist layman who wrote complaining the use of his Cooperative Program gifts to support Barnette. Henlee promply looked up the record of his church`s giving and responding with a letter offering to refund his investment that year. He enclosed a dime in the letter!
The second vale that guided him was a maxim he lived by, a quote by Sir Roger de Coverly he learned in the fifth grade, "There is much to be said on both sides of every question." He was a pragmatic prophet, never living in the ivory tower, but constantly seeking to apply the prophetic message to the realities and complexities of real life, whether in the corridors of Norton Hospital, the hallways of City Hall, the sanctuary of the church, or the minds of students in a seminary classroom.
John Claypool was Henlee`s pastor and loved to tell stories about him around the lunch table at McAfee. He never laughed more than when he described riding with Henlee on the airplane to the Christian Life Commission meeting in Atlanta where Henlee would debate Joseph Fletcher on situation ethics. Ever serious, John said to Henlee, "Henlee, don`t you think paradox is probably the most important theological category for making sense of reality?" True to form, remembering his childhood teacher de Coverly, he thought for a moment, smiled with that mill worker`s twinkle of his, looked at John and said, "Yes" . . . and "No." Then he roared with laughter. That was Henlee Hulix Barnette.
The last conversation I had with him was about a year before he died. I called on the telephone to see how he was. Henelee had been to a banquet the night before to receive an award at the Union Gospel Mission, where he had served in the Haymarket. He was scheduled that night for another social event.
I inquired about what he was writing. His first response was, "Whatever is making me mad today." Then growing more serious he said, "I am spending most of my time writing my memoirs for my children, but they aren`t worth publishing." Well they were worth publishing and we should all be grateful to Walter Shurden, Center for Baptist Studies, and Marc Jolley at Mercer University Press for convincing him to allow the rest of us to read the wonderous story of his life and work.[2] All you have to do to get the rest of the story is read it in his own words.
I want to close today with a question for all of us. "What will happen to the great tradition of twentieth century Baptist social ethics in the Twenty-first Century? When you study this tradition, the great contribution of Baptists to the world has not been our theology. We have had good theologians. But it is the ethicists among us who stand out-after all we are meeting in a state that produced two Baptist Nobel Peace prize winners-Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jimmy Carter.
Look carefully at the Baptists who made a difference, and with one or two exceptions, they were formed in their prophetic consciousness by theological education. Whether Rochester Theological Seminary for Walter Rauschenbusch and Howard Thurman, Crozier Theological Seminary for Martin King and Martin England, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for T. B. Maston, Foy Valentine, Jimmy Allen, James Dunn, Bill Pinson, Bill Moyers, Joe Trull, Bill Tillman and a host of others, or Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for J.B. Weatherspoon, O. T. Binkley, Clarence Jordan, Henlee Barnette, G. Willis Bennett, Paul Simmons, Anne Davis, Glen Stassen and a host of others, it was seminaries that shaped the prophetic consciousness of this generation. That consciousness can no longer be found in the six seminaries of a denomination more committed to affirming a culture of consumerism, so-called just war, and right wing politics. Unless we build a new tradition of prophetic consciousness that challenges our culture in institutions supported by the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, we risk losing an emerging generation that knows little more than the names of these giants of social consciousness. Some of these institutions of support are non-Baptist settings where there is a strong social consciousness, and Baptist students receive scholarship support. Do they understand their Baptist social tradition? Others are new and relatively small seminaries which cannot yet support full time faculty in ethics. A few do not even require a course in Christian Ethics, a genuine tragedy for the future of our churches.
Our time is short. Our resources are limited. But with resolve and commitment, we must rebuild a tradition that made a difference, not only in America but the world, as a "light set on a hill" that the good news of Jesus Christ is a message that transforms both individuals and the social and political systems of this world with justice, mercy and peace. The best honor we can give these men and women of the past is to build on what they taught with a twenty first century Christian ethic that is shaped by free and faithful Baptists.
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[1] Henlee H. Barnette, Introducing Christian Ethics (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1961). The book has been translated into several languages and is still in print!
[2] Henlee Hulix Barnette , A Pilgrimage of Faith: My Story ( Macon: Mercer University Press, 2004).
[3]See the forthcoming Larry L. McSwain and W. Loyd Allen, editors, Twentieth Century Shapers of Baptist Social Ethics (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2008).
