James William McClendon, Jr.

James Wm. McClendon, Jr., in his office in Pasadena, CA in April 2000, a few months before his death.

James William McClendon Jr. (1924–2000) was a Christian theologian and ethicist in the Anabaptist tradition,^[1] though he preferred the term 'baptist' with a lower-case 'b'. He was married to philosopher Nancey Murphy, who is a senior faculty member at Fuller Theological Seminary.

Biography

McClendon was born in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1924. Raised in Louisiana to a Methodist father and a Southern Baptist mother, both traditions would influence him. McClendon was converted and baptized in his mother’s congregation–though only after exposure to African-American Baptist life. (His family was wealthy enough to have a black maid and she exposed Jim to Black Baptist life.) ^[2] He studied at the University of Texas, where he took some undergraduate classes with Robert Lee Moore, whom McClendon credits with providing rigor in his theological work.^[3]

McClendon went to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, graduating just as the Japanese surrendered, ending WWII. Along with many other U.S. sailors of his generation, McClendon saw the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki firsthand. This experience had a slow, but lasting effect on McClendon's life and thought, though McClendon did not immediately recognize this. After leaving the military, McClendon earned a second B.A. from the University of Texas and a Bachelor of Divinity (a graduate degree equivalent to a modern U.S. Master of Divinity) from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) before earning a Th.M. at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Unable to work with the mentors he wanted at Princeton, McClendon returned to SWBTS (then known as Southwestern Seminary) to pursue a Th.D. under Walter Thomas (W. T. ) Conner (1877-1952), arguably the greatest theological mind SWBTS has ever produced. Connor taught at SWBTS for almost 40 years (1910-1949).^[4] Unfortunately, Conner died before McClendon’s doctoral work was much off the ground. McClendon later accused the seminary of not giving him much supervision, nor teaching him much in the way of theology. Ironically, McClendon found this liberating. First in the pastorate and then as a teacher, McClendon explored many major contemporary theologians without much in the way of preconceptions, asking all the questions he should have had answered in the seminary! Everyone from Barth to Tillich was a live possibility!^[5] These explorations would bear fruit in his little book Pacemakers of Christian Thought. McClendon called this book a "kind of theological appetizer" (Pacemakers, vi), in which he introduced Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, William Temple, E. J. Carnell, Brunner, Tillich, Bultmann, W.T. Connor, and Austin Farrer.

Along the way, McClendon would marry his first wife Marie and have two sons. By the early 1970s, McClendon attained a permanent academic position at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP) in Berkeley, CA. However, for almost a decade prior McClendon hadled the life of an academic vagabond, holding numerous visiting professorships which took him all over the United States. These academic troubles took a huge toll on McClendon's marriage to Marie. Though he sought marital counseling, Marie divorced him. At this time, divorce was rare among clergy and unheard of among Southern Baptist ministers. This tragedy would prevent McClendon from ever again being hired by an institution of his home denomination. Years later, McClendon would marry Nancey Murphy. Murphy, raised Catholic and turned Anabaptist, met McClendon while a graduate student in Berkeley. Murphy, an ordained Church of the Brethren minister, would go on to teach Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA.

Career

McClendon was recruited by Southern Baptists to teach theology at their (then-brand-new) institution, Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary near San Francisco. The U. S. Civil Rights Movement was in full swing and McClendon rocked the boat by speaking out in its favor. When he helped students raise money to respond to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s plea for volunteers to come to Selma, Alabama, Golden Gate promptly fired him – despite his tenure and without a hearing! This began McClendon’s long career of teaching outside Baptist institutions.

He was first hired by the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit school, thus becoming the first Protestant in America to teach theology at a Catholic institution. But this, too, was not to last. The Vietnam War was heating up, McClendon’s sons were facing decisions about whether or not to resist the draft. McClendon opposed the war on Just War grounds. He said so publicly and in print and joined students at “teach-ins” and other protests. This was too much for a Catholic institution in 1965–McClendon was fired again.

It is the rare academic career that survives one forced termination, never mind two in close succession! McClendon began taking every Visiting Professor slot that came his way, criss-crossing the country to teach at such places as Stanford University, Temple University, the University of Notre Dame, St. Mary’s College of California (Moraga), and Goucher College before eventually finding another tenured position at the (Episcopal) Church Divinity School of the Pacific(CDSP), part of the Graduate Theological Union(GTU) located in Berkeley, CA. (McClendon was also part of the core doctoral faculty of GTU.) McClendon was to stay at CDSP from the early 1970s until his first retirement in 1989. After retiring from CDSP/GTU, Jim became Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena where Nancey Murphy was on faculty.^[6]

When McClendon arrived, CDSP was fond of saying that it was both “Catholic and Protestant.” McClendon figured that since he had taught at both Catholic and Protestant schools, he would fit right in. But he didn’t. In reading Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus in 1974 (two years after it was published), McClendon rediscovered his heritage in the Radical Reformation – part of what he liked to call the “small b” baptist tradition. In the 1980s, McClendon undertook to write a systematic from within this 'baptist' tradition, but in a way that could be understood by the mainstream. The result was his 3-volume Systematic Theology. Ethics (1986) explored the question “How must the church live in order faithfully to be the church in this time and place?” Doctrine (1994) explored the question, “What must the church teach in order to live that faithful life?” Witness (2000), explored cultural conversations with the arts, the sciences, music and philosophy, which McClendon considered dialogues necessary for a faithful church in a North American context. McClendon saw this final volume finished shorlty before his death in 2000 at the age of 76.^[7]

McClendon helped found what came to be known as the narrative theology movement in the late 1960s.^[8] His system is post-foundationalist and primarily oriented toward constructing a theological-biblical hermeneutic for Christian communities to live more faithful lives in the world. His ethics is nonviolent and communal, and his doctrinal emphases include ecclesiology, eschatology, Christology, and resurrection. His other books include Convictions: Defusing Religious Relativism, coauthored with James M. Smith, and Biography as Theology. McClendon is frequently mentioned alongside John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas in seeking to reclaim the importance of character in theological ethics.

Philosophical background

McClendon was influenced by the philosophy of J. L. Austin, and credits Austin with showing him a different way of going about the task of theology than he had previously thought possible. McClendon relies on Austin heavily and explicitly in his book Convictions, but Austin's influence can be seen throughout his work. Later in his life, McClendon came to associate this shift as part of a broader philosophical shift from modern to postmodern modes of thinking and speaking, although he was always careful to specify that he was an adherent of "Anglo-American" postmodernity.

Biography as theology

McClendon is perhaps best known for his argument in Biography as Theology, which introduced McClendon as a member of the budding narrative theology movement. His thesis is that by paying careful attention to certain "striking" lives that we see from time to time, we will be able to identify guiding images, narratives, and convictions that made such people who they were, and that such lives will provide the means by which people may judge how theology should faithfully evolve for the current and next generation. So, for example, McClendon provided biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr., Charles Ives, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Clarence Jordan in Biography as Theology, and explored how their lives both confirmed and affected the doctrine of Atonement in Christianity. In later work McClendon would focus on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, Jonathan Edwards and Sarah Edwards, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others. McClendon believed this method was a helpful corrective to what he called "decisionism" in theological ethics, particularly as associated with the situational ethics of Joseph Fletcher. In short, McClendon believed that it was impossible to attend to the question of what one would do when facing a particular "hard situation" without providing a thicker, more detailed understanding of the "who" that was facing a dilemma; in this way McClendon was in line with the reclamation of virtue ethics and character ethics that took place in some theological circles beginning in the 1970s.

The baptist vision

McClendon worked in service to adherents of what he termed "the baptist vision."^[9] The 'b' was intentionally de-capitalized in order to point out the superfluity of the pejorative "ana" applied to the Anabaptists in the 16th century. For McClendon, the baptist vision is a communal hermeneutical orientation taken by congregations and individuals toward scripture and the world, in which the text is understood to be of immediate import to the community in question. McClendon often summarized the baptist vision with reference to Peter's speech in Acts 2:16 (KJV): "But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel"; in short, the baptist vision sees scripture and the world as though "this is that, and then is now."

Selected bibliography

Pacemakers of Christian Thought, Broadman Press, 1962.
Biography as Theology, Abington Press, 1974.
Understanding Religious Convictions, University of Notre Dame Press, 1975.
Is God God? (edited with Axel D. Steuer), Abington Press, 1981.
Convictions: Diffusing Religious Relativism (with James M Smith), Trinity Press, 1994. (revised version of Understanding Religious Convictions)
Baptist Roots: A Reader in the Theology of a Christian People (with Curtis W. Freeman and C. Rosalee Velloso da Silva), Judson Press, 1999.

Ethics: Systematic Theology Volume 1, Abington Press, 1986.
Doctrine: Systematic Theology Volume 2, Abington Press, 1994.
Witness: Systematic Theology Volume 3, Abington Press, 2000.

The Collected Works of James Wm. McClendon, Jr.: Volume 1
The Collected Works of James Wm. McClendon, Jr.: Volume 2
The Collected Works of James Wm. McClendon, Jr.: Volume 3

References

1. A Genetic History of Baptist Thought. William H. Brackney. Mercer University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-86554-913-3. pp. 59-61, 510-514
2. https://levellers.wordpress.com/2006/12/07/mentors-5-james-wm-mcclendon-jr/
3. "James Wm. McClendon - on R.L. Moore". Retrieved 23 January 2013.
4. Curtin Freeman, 'The Coming of Age' of Baptist Theology in Generation Twenty-Something,' Perspectives in Religious Studies: Journal of the NABPR (1999), p. 30.
5. https://levellers.wordpress.com/2006/12/07/mentors-5-james-wm-mcclendon-jr/
6. https://levellers.wordpress.com/2006/12/07/mentors-5-james-wm-mcclendon-jr/
7. https://levellers.wordpress.com/2006/12/07/mentors-5-james-wm-mcclendon-jr/
8. http://www.thewitness.org/archive/dec2000/mcclendon.html
9. https://www.goshen.edu/mqr/pastissues/oct00Mcclendon.html