The Collected Works of James Wm. McClendon, Jr.: Volume 1

PART I

Prospect

§1

The Radical Road One Baptist Took

(2000)

Editors’ Introduction

In this autobiographical essay written in the last year of his life, McClendon reflects on the events that prepared the way for his conversion to the baptist vision, a conversion marked by reading John Howard Yoder’s Politics of Jesus. In a telling handwritten note inside the front cover of his original copy, McClendon writes, 5/11/1975—On about this date, reading this book, I discovered again the disciple’s way of my young manhood, and set out from this turning point to follow it anew. In what follows, McClendon articulates the wider circumstances that precipitated this convictional conversion, as well as the direction his life’s work subsequently took. Besides providing a brief biographical introduction to McClendon’s life, this essay also orients the reader to an important point of transition in McClendon’s work, which serves as an organizing motif for the present volume.

I was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1924, the son of a Methodist father and a Baptist mother. My parents faithfully attended their respective churches, but motherhood being what it is, I was usually taken along to the Baptist Sunday school and church. The church building was beautiful, echoing the Byzantine style, and the services as I now recall them were stately and serious. Throughout my youth the pastor was a man of considerable liturgical skill, a widely known denominational leader, and also a leader in a Baptist version of ecumenism both in Shreveport and beyond, making round-the-world trips and preaching and baptizing on all the continents of the earth. I admired him. In my tenth or eleventh year I was inwardly persuaded that faith in Jesus was the Way for me. I presented myself to the church in the customary manner and was immersed in the Byzantine church baptistery—an event still powerful in my memory. The reading of the Bible (King James Version), attendance at morning and evening Sunday services, and home prayers, at least before every meal, were a part of the discipline that surrounded me as I grew through the school years. So was enrolling in the high school Junior ROTC—a step I took as a matter of course, yet without displaying any noteworthy military talents.

The Experience of War

American entry into World War II came while I was a college freshman. The question that the Pearl Harbor attack raised for American Christian youths like me was not whether to enlist in the armed forces of our country, but in which service to enlist. The churches’ (and my parents’) attitude to war was that it was a necessary evil in an evil world—which seemed a view common to most people around me throughout my college and even seminary years. Pacifism was not an issue in the South that I knew. None of the Baptist churches I belonged to in those years made any pretense of opposing war as such, nor did the teachers in the Baptist and Presbyterian schools I attended. I enrolled in the Naval Reserve during my second college year, but the navy, after calling me to active duty in the summer of 1943, sent me back to school. By the time the war with Hitler’s Germany had ended, I had been commissioned an ensign, USNR, and had graduated from navy electronics schools at Harvard and MIT. Soon I had orders to report for duty as electronics officer aboard a ship I was to meet in Pearl Harbor, an attack transport, the Herald of the Morning, AP 173. On the day I went aboard my ship in 1945, the peace treaty ending World War II was signed in Tokyo Bay, prompting a McClendon family joke that when Japanese intelligence learned I was now aboard ship, they just gave up. Though my ship had been fitted with small boats to transport troops to assault enemy beaches, her postcombat assignment, starting about the time I came aboard, was to be a troop transport, bringing home Americans stationed across the Pacific: from Hawaii, the Philippines, and eventually Japan as well.

While I was still ashore in Honolulu, a Baptist former missionary to Japan had given me the name of the longtime secretary or executive of the Tokyo YMCA, Soichi Saito. This gentleman, I was told, spoke English and would probably welcome a visitor who was acquainted with some of his pre-war American friends. So when my ship steamed into Tokyo Bay and berthed in Yokohama, I took a commuter train to Tokyo, standing somewhat self-consciously in the aisle in my gray navy uniform with its shoulder boards and stripes, tall among the shorter Japanese.

In Tokyo I found the YMCA, located in the historic Ginza district, and was indeed received by Saito, who spoke competent if unpracticed English. He promptly presented me with a welcome gift, a large Japanese persimmon, and offered me a knife with which to cut into it. The staff of the YMCA, mainly young women in kimonos, gathered in a circle around me, politely bowed, and waited for me to slice. What I did next is a matter that, more than fifty years later, I hesitate to report: having been alerted by the ship’s medical officer to the danger of eating raw fruit in strange lands, I awkwardly stammered to my Japanese hosts that I would take the persimmon back to the ship with me. What did not even occur to me was that in Japan immediately after the war that persimmon might have been the only fruit my hosts had seen that day or any recent day. Quite conceivably, some of them were hungry that morning. Had I cut the persimmon and shared it with the watching staff, each might have had a bite—a little symbolic meal of peace. As it was, I left with their persimmon, maybe their only persimmon, bulging in my pocket.

But the main event was still to come. Mr. Saito took me, recent enemy, uniformed naval officer, on a walking tour of central Tokyo. Soon we came to a vast, cleared area, the site of the firebombing of the city during the preceding year. Firebombing, a tactic that made atom bombs redundant, had been developed in Europe as the most effective way to destroy cities. It involved creating a heat so intense that high winds rushed in to make an entire city a holocaust of unquenchable fire. When in the last stages of the war this technique was tried by the United States on densely residential Tokyo, firebombing scored another success. Secretary Saito and I stood in an area where for many blocks in either direction one could see only paved streets and empty lots—much as in a new part of a city still unbuilt—in the heart of Tokyo’s residential district. Here houses or apartments had stood close together. Here a few months earlier housewives had hung wash on lines. Here children had recently done homework and ridden tricycles and played hide-and-seek. There had been no hiding in Tokyo the night of the fire. Mr. Saito located a small X seared into the asphalt of an empty street. Here, he said, one of the bombs had landed and begun its hot work.

I was young, I was callow, and I still had a youth’s insensitive exterior. I had felt a certain awkwardness in accepting the persimmon, though I was not sure why—certainly not because of hungry staff members at the YMCA. I felt no awkwardness, though, in surveying the devastation my nation had caused in my war. So, I said to myself—this is war. I’m certainly glad our side won. Inwardly I shrugged. Outwardly I thanked my host for his interesting tour and went my way with the persimmon still innocently resting inside the flap pocket of my gray uniform.*

This part of the story can be concluded quickly. In the 1950s and again in the 1960s, America made war again, this time in Southeast Asia: Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. I was no pacifist, but I had become by then a politically concerned university professor at the (Jesuit) University of San Francisco. The faculty on which I taught needed some organizing, I thought, to help it oppose what I conceived in Niebuhrian fashion to be the wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place. Soon I became the leader of a large faculty group opposing that war: we publicized a joint letter to President Lyndon Johnson urging him to withdraw from Vietnam. The university, eager not to have its patriotism questioned in the turbulent 1960s, soon thereafter asked me to resign my post, though my teaching evaluations from students had been the highest in the faculty. I was asked to go, and I left. A couple of teaching appointments later, I found myself teaching a January session on the ethics of war and peace in an eastern college. There it dawned upon me that I had come to oppose not only Asian wars, not only unjust wars, but all wars. Perhaps I recalled Mr. Saito and firebomb-devastated Tokyo. At the very least, I no longer believed that violence was an option for a Christian. Imperceptibly, without the splendor of a conversion, I had become some kind of pacifist! Yet I had done so without acquiring any grand theory of nonviolence (I still lack one); without even the dignity of belonging to a peace church (I have some doubts about that category); without learning very much about the broader peace movement, though I had attended Quaker meetings in Baltimore. I simply believed, by that January 1970 term, that war in our time was wrong: wrong for me, and thus wrong for anyone like me, and—since I could heartily wish that all were like me in being followers of Jesus—at least potentially wrong for everyone the world round. Certainly it was wrong for my older son, who by that time had declared his conscientious objection to war to the local draft board, had been rejected by their process, and was engaged in a struggle to claim his right to alternative service, which was not easy for a youth whose only church connection was Baptist. I stood by my son Will and in doing so found my own convictions strengthened.

I tell you this true story to show that I am not to be readily classed with this or that or the other set of pacifists. In my case a conviction grew, but not from a root in high pacifist theory, and not from training in a peace church ethos. That frees me, though, as others may not be free, to ask about the necessary connection here between Christian ethics and Christian doctrine. Is there a structure of Christian faith, even though not explicit, that had worked upon me, a teacher of ethics and doctrine, leading me to a conviction I had not expected along paths I did not seek? I now believe there is.

Theological Consequences

My academic training in theology came first from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, which could rightly boast of its size if not of its high academic standards; then from Princeton Theological Seminary (somewhat more rigorous academically); and finally again from Southwestern, where I had hoped to finish a doctorate under a fine old systematician, Walter Thomas Conner. Unfortunately, he died and I was left to finish my doctoral work with little supervision—an outcome that may incidentally have raised my academic sights a bit. Left to myself, I concentrated on biblical theology and wrote a dissertation that, had I named it properly, might have been called The Doctrine of Perfection in 1 John and Its Reflection in Modern Christianity.¹ Something biblical was at work in me but, at the same time, left to myself, I began to widen my exposure to ecumenical Christianity—to Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism, but especially to the wider Protestant heritage whose chief U.S. theologians in those days were such as the Niebuhr brothers and Paul Tillich. To my surprise, though, I found they had little to say about the perfectionism of 1 John and its heritage. Their work, closely examined, had clearly misunderstood it.

After a few years as a Louisiana Baptist pastor, in 1954 I accepted the invitation to teach at the Golden Gate (Southern) Baptist Theological Seminary in the San Francisco area. During those years, especially, I sought to widen my ecumenical bearings and connections, and when in 1966 I decided to leave GGBTS (partly on account of my tension, growing out of opposition to that Southeast Asian war already mentioned), I was blessed with non-Baptist friends who helped me find places to teach: Stanford for a visiting term, the University of San Francisco (where patriotism, I later learned, was not about to let itself be threatened), and briefly on the East Coast at Temple University, at Goucher College in Baltimore (where I taught the course on war and peace), and at the University of Pennsylvania, all for short visiting appointments. In time, I received a more permanent invitation to teach in the San Francisco Bay Area where my family had remained, in the (Episcopal) Church Divinity School of the Pacific, which was part of the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California. By this time I had gained possibly the widest-ranging teaching experience of any living American theologian: the schools I had served were Southern Baptist, Roman Catholic (my appointment at the University of San Francisco was the first of its kind in the United States), secular, Episcopalian, and (in the case of the GTU) ecumenically Christian.

Two circumstances shaped me theologically during the Church Divinity School years (1971–1990). The first was that I found Episcopalians liked to say they were both Protestant and Catholic, yet I found the setting theologically uncomfortable. Why? Was the old Baptist claim that we were neither Protestant nor Catholic correct? Did our often-denied roots in Anabaptism, the Radical Reformation, exist after all? My seminary teachers had scorned that connection: Baptists, they had assured me, were a variety of Reformed Protestants. Then why didn’t I as their graduate fit comfortably into an environment rich in the Reformed (and Catholic) heritages?

The second circumstance seemed a mere happenstance. In 1967 I had briefly attended a Believers Church conference in Louisville, Kentucky (part of my determination to be ecumenical), and there had met young John Howard Yoder, one of its organizers. Later, in 1972, Yoder published The Politics of Jesus, and a year or two later, I read it. That book changed my life. Implicit in it I found all the old awareness of being part of a Christianity somehow unlike the standard-account sort I had worked so hard to learn and to teach, yet somehow like what I had known as a youth growing up Baptist. Night and day I read through the Politics, and by the time I had finished, I had undergone a second conversion, not as at my baptism merely to follow Jesus, but now to follow Jesus understood this way—Jesus interpreted by John Yoder’s scornful passion to overcome standard-account thinking, Jesus who (among other things) rejected the Zealot option, Jesus who would not do harm even in the best of causes, even in his own. By then, as I have said above, I had become some kind of antiwar Christian. I had stored in my memory something my friend Stanley Hauerwas had once said to me in a telephone conversation—he in South Bend, I in Berkeley—that John Yoder had persuaded him that violence was not an option for a Christian. Isn’t that just right? I thought. I had opposed one war, even at the cost of my job. These persisting attitudes, my boyhood formation, Yoder’s relentless logic all converged; I was converted. I was—though I still have no love for the term itself—an Anabaptist Baptist.

The remainder of the story is easy to tell. Before long I had agreed with Daryl Schmidt, a Mennonite graduate student in New Testament in the GTU, to coteach a seminar on the heritage of the Radical Reformation. We would start with the Sermon on the Mount (well within Daryl’s academic competence); after that we would track the heritage from the sixteenth century to the present. The seminar was a big success—it attracted students, some of whom (for example, Ched Myers, Nancey Murphy) have since made names for themselves in this kind of Christian thinking. I repeated the seminar in subsequent years, and have most recently taught it again at Fuller, where following Nancey (now my wife) I came to teach about a decade ago. In a few more teaching years after that radical conversion (in about 1980), I realized that I had to do what I thought no one else was doing: produce a systematic theology whose primary community of reference would not be Catholics or Protestants or those who were somehow both, but would be the heirs of Radical Reform.

That is easy to tell, but it has been hard to do. The book I envisioned would have three volumes, one on ethics (How must the church live now to be really the church?), one on doctrine (What must the church teach now to be really the church?), and a third one, taking the place of but not in any sense duplicating the usual prolegomena to systematic theology. The third and final volume, now called Witness, is due out in the year 2000, ending my two-decade task. But why has it been so hard to do, so slow to complete? Because I was determined to write every sentence in light of my new-gained radical convictions, but to write in such a way that standard-account people, those who shared my pre-Yoder standpoint, could make sense of it, and if not be convinced (for who can say when God will work a conversion?), could at least recognize that this, too, was a distinct, responsible Christian heritage that could not be subsumed under the other sorts. Ethics had to show why Christian conduct led on to peace, but without seeming dogmatic. Doctrine had to show how the risen Jesus Christ changed everything, made the world itself new, so that a Christian church, to be a Christian church, must center on Christ and, through him, on the God of peace. Witness had to show that we were not sectarians (in the pejorative sense), but that we had a theology of culture that could make sense of the whole world while inviting that world to find its way back to its own true center. The trilogy had to show that we were on the side of the world, even though we said No to its worldliness.* In a way, for me it was back to the doctoral dissertation of half a century before—to perfection and its perplexing demands.

Along the way, of course, there were other tasks. In the wake of the death-of-God theologies there was my book about God, coedited with Axel Steuer, now president of Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota.² With Nancey Murphy I coauthored an article³ about the shift from modernity to a new, postmodern way of philosophical work—a shift that took by surprise many a theologian who had a better education than I but had nevertheless been left by the shift in an intellectual backwater.* I coedited a book with younger colleagues Curtis Freeman and Rosalee Velloso that tracked the theological texts from the fifteenth century (Petr Chelčický) to John Yoder himself, showing how baptists (my preferred label for this band of thinkers because the term points out to Baptists that maybe they are baptists!) had thought independently, yet in important ways were alike.⁴ And I wrote other things as well, not least the book Convictions, with James M. Smith.⁵ But the series of three volumes has been my work, my life, my strong demand for nearly twenty years.

One might conclude from these autobiographical recollections that I believe my own approach to radical reformation convictions and theology is normative for my students and colleagues. Assuredly I do not believe that. As this present special issue of MQR makes evident,† there are many approaches to this theology, and none of us is in position to say, Ours is best. We can only take a share in a very large task. I do look to my peers to provide an ethics that flowers into peacemaking: in Scripture’s words, Seek peace, and pursue it (Ps 34:14b KJV). It seems so far to be our special vocation among the followers of Jesus. When it comes to doctrine, theology in this style has grown from at least three foci—experience, Scripture, and community. Examples of all three are easy to find, and they are not mutually exclusive. In the focus on experience, those in the Radical Reformation tradition taste and see that the Lord is good (Ps 34:8a KJV). Such experience properly focuses upon the love of God the Father—both God’s love for us and our love for God. An early prototype is Hans Denck. When it comes to Scripture, the radical rule is to read it as the book of Christ—living, risen, lordly—whose costly way to his final triumph sets the tone for all radical reading strategies. Here a prototype is Michael Sattler, for whom Scripture is but a guide to the Way of Jesus. Community as a theological focus, if serious, demands a doctrine of the spirit. It is noteworthy that the Psalm just cited, like others, is addressed not to individuals but to a community of listeners. This solidarity in community is a proper third focus of Anabaptist theology. Prototypical is Menno himself, who shaped the churches according to his knowledge of the Spirit in their midst. Thus experience, Christ (witnessed in Scripture and alive), and community set the broad limits for our doctrinal task. But such limits are wide indeed, and an aim of the present paper has been to show by one example the variety of forms in which radical theology is shaped.

* McClendon also writes about Mr. Saito in Social Ethics for Radical Christians (§14) and The Church Seeking a Peaceable Culture: The Way of the Cross (§16), both reprinted in the present volume.

¹ Th.D. diss., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1953.

* For more on this, see Taking the Side of the World (§49) in volume 2.

² Axel Detlef Steuer and James Wm. McClendon, Jr., eds., Is God GOD? (Nashville: Abingdon, 1981).

³ Nancey Murphy and James Wm. McClendon, Jr., Distinguishing Modern and Postmodern Theologies, Modern Theology 5 (1989).

* This essay is reprinted in volume 2 (§27).

⁴ Curtis W. Freeman, James Wm. McClendon, Jr., and C. Rosalee Velloso Da Silva, eds., Baptist Roots: A Reader in the Theology of a Christian People (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson, 1999).

⁵ James Wm. McClendon, Jr., and James M. Smith, Convictions: Defusing Religious Relativism, rev. ed. (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity International, [1975] 1994).

† Mennonite Quarterly Review 74, no. 4 (2000).

PART II

Early Baptist Reflections

§2

Creation, Humanity, Sin

(1964)

Editors’ Introduction

From 1960 to 1968, McClendon wrote a number of articles for the now out-of-print Baptist Student, beginning with a series of brief summaries of prominent neo-orthodox theologians. The present essay is the first in a series delineating Basic Baptist Beliefs, published in 1964, which aimed to provide explorations of complex doctrinal positions accessible to the average student reader. While the tone and focus of McClendon’s work would eventually shift from what is presented here, certain themes can be found in this essay that remain throughout his career, themes such as antireductionism, anthropological holism, and (especially) christo-centrism. One can also hear echoes of McClendon’s dissertation, which focused on the Johannine theology of sin and perfection.

Creation

The Christian doctrine of creation begins neither in Genesis 1 nor in scientific speculation about world beginnings. It begins with John 1, with the gospel of Christ, and with our knowledge of whom we are having to do with when we have to do with Jesus. This is true for all Christian doctrines, not just the doctrine of creation. A Christian is not a person who has formed some wise or profound opinions about the world—even though these opinions include a high rating for Jesus of Nazareth! A Christian is a person whose life has been mastered by another, and if we ask the name of that other, it is Jesus Christ. Since this is true in every case, it is true of the Christian doctrine of creation: we start with Christ. If a person has come to know him, to be his servant, then he has come to see this world as somehow Christ’s world.

At least this seems to have been the way the earliest Christians (those to whom the New Testament first spoke) saw the matter. In the beginning, they saw Christ as a man among others in the world. But seeing him changed everything, and they saw the world in Christ. He was not one among many; he was that by which all else was measured. He was not just a bit of their world; he was everything that mattered. The world, then, belonged to him, not he to the world (John 1:1-10; cf. Col 1:15-17).

These early Christians (among whom was the writer of the Gospel of John) did not suppose that Jesus of Nazareth, that human individual, had created the world. That would not have been their way of thinking about it. But they believed that what they saw in Jesus of Nazareth was God’s own power, God’s own Word. The Word had become flesh (John 1:14). And that same Word was the eternal Word by which worlds were made! Knowing him, they knew the source of everything. This was their faith, and it generated the Christian doctrine of creation.

Why is this bit of early Christian history important for us? Why should we care how the early Christians came to their creation beliefs? First, these facts imply that if we share their faith in Christ, we, too, will see the world as his world—we, too, will share their belief in the creation of this world through Christ by his Father. That is to say, the doctrine of creation is not a take-it-or-leave-it doctrine, a curious, old belief once held by some Christians of another day. Rather, it is a vital implication of our trust in Christ. If he is to us what he was to John, we, too, will confess with John that without him was not anything made that was made (John 1:3 RSV). Second, we will approach the creation testimony of the Old Testament not as a collection of antique beliefs but as a part of the sacred Scriptures, the Bible of these same early Christians.

How, then, shall we read the Old Testament stories? (Remember, the Old Testament creation testimony is not confined to Genesis 1–3. See also Pss 74, 104; Isa 51; Ezek 28.) It may help to consider three possible approaches to these stories. First, the literalist approach suggests that we take the words of the stories as so many literal accounts of what once happened. The many-headed monster (Ps 74:14); the crystal roof of the sky with the water above it, firmament (Gen 1:6); the tree with fruit that if eaten rendered one immortal (Gen 3:22)—all are prosaically literal—no imagery is intended. Since, however, literalism is never carried out consistently, this view usually consists in trying to be as literal as possible, allowing for imagery in many places. Its strength is that it tries to take seriously the truth of the testimony. Second, the mythical view regards all this testimony as worthless. It notes close parallels between the Old Testament and the creation myths of other ancient peoples (Babylonians, Phoenicians). It concludes that these stories are merely of antiquarian interest—no longer important in a scientific age. This view neglects the fact that the doctrine of creation is a Christian doctrine and that the Old Testament, including these myths, is the Bible of the church. But its strength is this: it recognizes the parallels between biblical stories and myths of the ancient cultures. Third, the interpretive view adopts the strong points of the other two views but avoids their weaknesses. It recognizes that our world picture has changed since ancient times and it does not attempt to make the stories scientific. It understands that the language is that of the ancient cultures. But it does not dismiss these stories as myths. Instead it seeks to interpret them, asking for the theological truth they contain. This view inquires: How do these stories shed light on the creation of the world by the Word? (In our century, Baptist theologians and Bible scholars have taken the interpretive view, except for a few who have taken the literalist approach.) The interpretive view recognizes the parallels and tries to take seriously the truth of the testimony. It is the same truth as that of the New Testament—God created the cosmos by his Word!¹

It might be in order to inquire what science does say about creation. In fact, it says very little. Science says is a phrase not much used by working scientists. The details about the beginnings of the universe are remote and are not a matter for dogmatism, either scientific or religious. In the main, speculative scientists have proposed two theories. The first, sometimes called the superdense state theory, holds that four to six billion years ago every atom in the universe was compressed into one lump. It exploded, and from that explosion, the universe was born. The other, called the continuous creation theory, holds that as long as there has been a universe, new atoms have been continually created. This view neither affirms nor denies a beginning of the universe.

What does Christian theology say about creation? First, that the world is dependent on God, not just in its first instant but in every instant. The world, in its first instant and in every instant, is due to the will of God. Without him, it would not be. Second, the God who made this world is none other than the Father of Jesus Christ. It is all his world. (Obviously, this makes the presence of evil in this world a lively problem for Christian theology.) Third (and here is the way toward solving that problem), this world is created for Jesus Christ. But, wonder of wonders, in thinking of Christ, God has a place for us. And so, thanks to our Elder Brother, it is also our world! Now, let’s discuss the Christian doctrine of