In the end, what we have in District of Columbia v. Heller is a unanimous decision. The vote is 5-to-4 on the interpretation of the amendment’s intention, but it’s 9-to-0 on the specification of intention as the interpreter’s task.

While since college I have had interest in Constitutional Law, Stan Fish’s most recent article on Supreme Courts ruling on Gun Law is worth reading for everyone. And raise the ever important question of what is the goal of interpreter. Here is the link.

As American Christians (this could be true in other countries as well, but this is my context) it seems as if one of the thing we value most is being taken seriously by those outside the faith. We want to be unnecessary to society so we attempt to adapt more to our contemporary culture in hope that they will realize that we are not that fair off and want to convert. In our attempt to be taken seriously, we actually become uninteresting. If we are just a step off from culture and seek to be taken seriously by the world on its terms, we end up just becoming a group of people with slightly different beliefs then our culture.  Yet there are some Christians who aren’t willing to be so captivated by being taken seriously and exchange they become actually interesting. I think this difference is highlighted extremely well in two interviews that just appeared on The Other Journal. The first is an interview with Jim Wallis, who’s desire to become a player in American politics has made him uninteresting. Sure we can take him seriously, but it becomes boring fast. The second is an interview with John Milbank. He is difficult to take serious, but the type of faith he talks about actually allows for Christianity to be something radical. 

Here is a long paper I wrote for a selected readings class reviewing McClendon’s three volume systematic and theology and what it has to offer the church. I am not quite happy with the paper as it is hard to condense and build something good when your using 1500 pages. I should have tried a more focused topic, but I think the paper allowed me to make some decent reflections.

Hence there is a temptation (no weaker word will do) for the church to deny her “counter, original, spare, strange” starting point in Abraham and Jesus and to give instead a self-account or theology that will seem true to the world on the world’s own terms.¹

James McClendon’s three volumes of Systematic Theology, Ethics, Doctrine, and Witness are perhaps the most expansive attempt to do Narrative theology systematically. This comes with many challenges, one of which is what sort of audience would gain from forming systematics in a Postliberal narrative theology. Being that much of Postliberal work is centered upon the uniqueness of the church, the purpose of this essay is to explore what each volume means for a postmodern church that finds itself in an incoherent setting. McClendon has placed each volume in relation towards its task for church, so each will be explored accordingly in its ecclesial context.²

A great deal can be said about James McClendon’s three volume Systematic Theology, yet in my estimation very little of it has been said. While it takes theology a great deal of time to infiltrate the academy, there remains two possibilities for the lack of literature surrounding McClendon’s project. The first is that it is not any good. Perhaps it simply is not enough, or ordered well enough to teach, or just widely considered inadequate.³ Yet there remains another possibility on why not enough is said about McClendon, and that is McClendon’s work is not helpful to those in the academy. This does not mean that it is not academic, because it certainly is, but rather that it should be imprinted with a disclaimer: Warning to those schooled in Academic Theology—This book, if taken seriously, could be dangerous to your career.⁴ The real task of McClendon’s theology is that it primarily seeks to do theology in the light of the church. While all theology makes this claim, most theology is often conceived “in technical and academic terms often determined by other disciplines.”⁵ This primarily makes theology the work of academics for other academics, a task in which then clergy are forced to study before they reach the pastorate.

For McClendon, however, his Systematics is essentially tied to three direct questions for the church: How the church must live in order to be the church, what the church must teach in order to be the Church, and how this kind of faithful church takes its place in the world. So in many ways this makes his work difficult to assume a normative place in the academy because McClendon doesn’t seek theology on the grounds of academia, but rather the grounds of the church so that it may claim its “counter, original, spare, strange” starting point.⁶ Compound that with his Baptist ecclesia focus, and you have a catastrophe for how to integrate his work into the academy that lends him to being easily dismissed as sectarian, impractical, and unimpressive if not dismissive in previous theological attempts. This is even without mentioning that McClendon often breezes through centuries of earlier work to say what he feels if faithful now, rather than belaboring through the history of everything before coming to some half hearted conclusion.

The trouble of such a dismissal is that we live in a time that is necessary to recover the “counter, original, spare, [and] strange” starting point.⁷ As Barry Harvey reminds us in his review of McClendon’s work, the church is currently not in the best of shape. He writes, “Sadly, the church mimics this state of affairs, its common life and language in disarray, it practices truncated and disjointed, its core convictions splintered into unintelligible bits and pieces, and its members at the mercy of every power, principality and advertising agency.”⁸ If the church is going to recovery its call the church (more so then the academy) is going to need to hear McClendon’s voice.

In an attempt to distill all 1400 pages of McClendon’s work into simple a message for the church will obviously fail to do justice to the fullness of his work, the attempt here will be to pull out major themes answering McClendon’s three questions for the church. For this the wholeness of his argument will be overlooked but hopefully this contribution will show some of what McClendon has to offer us in our ecclesia context today.

Ethics: How the Church must live in order to be a living church.

…but perhaps enough has been said here to show that Christian ethics, because truth entails character, must that truth in a community that is of necessity story shaped, and to show that Christian morality involves us, necessarily involves us, in the story of God⁹

One of the most striking characteristics of McClendon’s ethics is that it is firmly based in resurrection, and that “resurrection, according to McClendon, requires that our lives be based on miracle.”¹⁰ It is hard to argue on how radical a claim this is in our churches; it certainly doesn’t help advance his Ethics in the academy. The problem with addressing how this radical claim plays in churches is partially based on what this means for his ethics. In some churches basing our life in the miracle of the resurrection is hardly that difficult; how else can we be saved? For these churches, however, McClendon’s radical ethical demands because of this fact will seem unintelligible. Pacifism, earthly embodiment, a community of watch-care, and the radical demands of discipleship will hardly play well here. Yet at the other end of the spectrum falls churches that are unable to believe in the Resurrection or miracles in general. They too would find difficulty in the particularity of McClendon’s ethical demands. The church for them cannot serve as God’s social agent for change in the world, for that leaves too many people out of the picture, and miracles cannot guide us because it often makes us unintelligible to outside world. Here, McClendon’s ethics serve as a radical indictment of much of our modern church’s false dichotomies, thus calling forth a radical faithfulness.

Ethics is broken down into three primary sections each with a biographical sketch: Embodied Witness (sphere of the organic) with a biography of the Jonathan and Sarah Edwards, A Community of Care (sphere of the social) with a biographical sketch of Bonheoffer, and The Easter Procession (the sphere of the anastatic) with a biographical sketch of Dorothy Day. Primary to understanding his narrative task is understanding what he considers the Christian story to be undertaking. He writes:

The Christian story in its primal form tells of a God who [unlike gods of human fabrication] is the very Ground of Adventure (anastatic), the Weaver of society’s Web (social), the Holy Source of nature in its concreteness (embodied)—the one and only God, who, when time began, began to be God for a world that in its orderly constitution finally came by his will and choice to include also—ourselves. We human beings, having our natural frame and basis, with our own [it seemed our own] penchant for community, and [it seemed] our own hankerings after adventure, found ourselves, before long, in trouble. Our very adventurousness led us astray; our drive to cohesion fostered monstrous imperial alternatives to the adventure and the sociality of the Way God had intended, while our continuity with nature became an excuse to despise ourselves and whatever was the cause of us. We sin. In his loving concern, God set among us, by every means infinite wisdom could propose, the foundations of a new human society; in his patience he sent messengers to recall the people of his Way to their way; in the first bright glimmers of opportunity he sent—himself, incognito, without splendor and fanfare, the Maker amid the things made, the fundamental Web as if a single fiber, the Ground of Adventure risking everything in this adventure. His purpose—sheer love; his means—pure faith; his promise—unquenchable hope. In that love he lived a life of love; by that faith he died a faithful death; from that death he rose to fructify hope for the people of his Way, newly gathered, newly equipped. The rest of the story is still his—yet it can be ours, yours…To outsiders the story is sure to count as a myth among myths, but to us it is no myth, but our only way of telling the whole truth.¹¹

Although the length of the quote is overwhelming, it’s fullness accurately displays the task McClendon has at hand for the church in ethics, and throughout his entire trilogy.

What McClendon primarily offers the church in Ethics is a radical new way to life that both embodies this larger story, and a new understanding of community which comes from the person who makes all of this stand. While there are those skeptical of a three strand metaphor, McClendon’s work in Ethics is so balanced that it is hard to find him favoring one strand over another forgetting the dimensions.

What does Ethics actually provide the church for it ecclesial context today? To begin, it offers the church a language, a story, and practices around which to form. The voice that he wants the church to regain at the beginning of Ethics is actually embodied in his book. Harvey’s point above should serve as a sharp warning to the church, and the language McClendon uses with the primacy he places on the story of God, will be the first step in helping the church establish itself as ‘original’. Second, McClendon does not look to be taken seriously on the world’s term, and is not concerned with situational ethics. His biographical sketches don’t serve as case studies for a particular ethical question, but rather as stories of persons and couples who attempted to embody what this strange story might have meant in their context. In order for the church to live what it is called to be, it must begin to reject attempts to be taken seriously that lie outside the story of God. Such attempts have watered down the churches ethical stance in the past, and have only given a church that mirrors and compromises to part of the culture it lives in, rather than seeking to bring the gospel towards it. Reviewer Robert Barron likens McClendon’s approach to Balthasar’s “kneeling theology.”¹² While the church has stood in the corner of societies marketplace begging for people to take it seriously, McClendon understands that things can only make sense from within the story of God, not outside of it. Thus, he understands the world will see the church as believing and enacting in a “myth among myths”¹³ it is the only way the church has of speaking the truth. Finally, most practically speaking Ethics understands that ethics are an act of being formed, transformed, and of character. While there are rules of the game, ethics is a game, in which above all things McClendon allows for grace to work. To go back to our previous picture of two churches, McClendon does not allow himself to be limited in his work, but truly sees the opportunity for churches to perform a miracle on themselves in light of resurrection, and begin to live what it was originally called to do.¹⁴

Doctrine: How the Church must teach to be a truthful the Church.

Christian ethics grasps the live flesh of Christian existence; Christian doctrine traces its living skeleton, the bones within that flesh that give stability and coherence to its life. Without Christian life the doctrine is dead; without Christian doctrine, the life formless.¹⁵

In starting with ethics, McClendon made himself vulnerable to the critique that what one actually believes is not as important as what one does, Doctrine firmly shows that McClendon has no such illusions.¹⁶ And while Ethics may have been a tough pill to swallow for the academy and the church, Doctrine builds up and gives life to the formulations he presented there. The way in which he goes about the task in this volume actually makes his book on Ethics all the more necessary to the task that McClendon is trying, particularly in his outline for confronting the task of establishing what the church must teach to be the Church.

Doctrine beings with a prospect that is aptly titled, What is Doctrine? Much is determined here, but his central argument is placing “doctrinal theology as practice supportive of and thus necessarily related to the practice of teaching…in Christian churches.”¹⁷ Here Hauerwas’s warning echoes strongly because what McClendon is trying to do is rescue doctrine from academia. As this book continues each question will be undertaken as it relates to practices, the teaching, and the life of the church.

The first part of the book is The Rule of God showing that McClendon is going to base the beginning of his Doctrine is eschatology. Compared to other Systematics this may seem as an awkward place to start, but becomes an essential starting point if the goal is what the church must teach in order to be the church. When beginning with that point, the rule of God becomes the first reality that church must proclaim. He writes, “The biblical vision of God’s rule is such a picture; more precisely it’s an ‘end-picture,’ where ends means both aim and limit of life. The end is where we end up; it is also the present intention or purpose that steers are course.”¹⁸ The rule of God is the reality that the church must understand itself as existing in before it can become the church. However, it is important that the church does not confuse itself with the rule of God, but that the rule has a politics “implying a community that be its sign and foretaste, namely Christ’s people and church.”¹⁹ The politics that rules employ is not that of “human conquest, but by the radical politics of the cross.”²⁰ Thus, to fully understand this rule, one must be acquainted with its ruler, Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God.

Part II is the next obvious parallel for the rule of God, and that is the identity of its ruler. This part purposely falls at the center of McClendon’s work, and has been consistently the center of his work even during Ethics. Jesus reveals for the church that the reign of God, is not as a far off dream, but as a reality in the present, and we see the costliness of his life, the type of love he exemplifies, and what faithfulness looks like. One of the most important to this section, and what has gained the most attention from the academy, has been McClendon’s two-narrative Christology. The life of Christ from the outset is associated with God, but in his resurrection the reality becomes clear that the human narrative of Christ, and the narrative of God in scripture coincide so that, “what Jesus suffers, God suffers, what Jesus speaks, God speaks.”²¹ Here the politics of the lamb are fully displayed so that, “Now God’s power is not just an abstract capacity but looks like something—surprisingly enough, like weakness to the point of death; now God’s love is revealed, not only as faculty; but as a forgiving embrace even of those who would kill God.”²² And if you follow this clearly, McClendon has brilliantly connected his ethics with life into the rule of God, and with Jesus into what the fullness of what the rule of God looks like.

In the final section of Doctrine McClendon turns his gaze towards The Fellowship of the Spirit. Here he roots the Christian community concretely with the Jewish community (although it is clear he has been doing this all along) and explores the signs this community is called to embody, as well as the mission it is to be on. What primarily happens in this section is the confrontation of what McClendon has been talking about in relation to doctrine and its movement into the community of God. In writing on worship he says “We cannot say what Christian worship must be without invoking God’s salvific dominion over all to the end of time, without encountering the fellowship of the Spirit.”²³

The question remains of what does Doctrine do to the church to teach it to be the church? First, he builds his case in such a way that it logically plays into what he did in Ethics and what comes out of it. He connects ethics to the reality of the rule of God, the relationship to that rule with its Ruler, and then shows exactly how the community is to live into that space. Second, he names practical signs that church should be about: faithfulness to the story God identifies with, peacefulness, forgiveness, worship that does not co-opt God, and mission that follows the Spirit into the reality of the resurrected Christ. Finally, what McClendon has done is provided a new way for the church to do theology. While he is carefully aware of the voices and histories of the doctrines he dialogs with, he does not limit himself to their previous understandings, but rather seeks to understand a fresh way for what God is calling forth in our present time. His understanding of catachresis²⁴ as what the church has always been doing, allows for the church to continue in the process of putting/borrowing language to what God has done in Christ, and that is a priceless gift to a church figuring out how to live faithfully today.

Witness: How a true and faithful Church shall take its place in the world.

God is the God of culture as we all of nature; therefore culture’s hope like nature’s destiny lies in the gospel of God’s grace.²⁵

Witness begins with a parabolic image of a ship set for Italy, upon which the Apostle Paul was a prisoner-in-transit. McClendon writes of this story:

Yet when a crisis at sea ended in shipwreck, this prisoner was indispensable, for it turned out, in Yoder’s words, that he had read the weather better than the captain of the ship and had more authority than centurion. Thanks largely to this ‘Messianic Jew,’ all hands survived and came safe ashore. Admitting that the parable made its point more strongly than he would like, Yoder nonetheless drew a lesson: the “good news for society…provides relevant wisdom and enabling vision, precisely because it substance is not [society’s] own…The New World that is on its way, and is anticipated in the confessing, baptizing, reconciling, thanks-giving, serving community, is also…the future of the yet unhearing world.’”²⁶

The final volume of his Systematic theology is perhaps one of the best answers for old and tired critiques of Anabaptists like McClendon: that they are sectarian.²⁷ His comprehensive answer to the question of the place that should be towards the world, is one of his greatest gifts to the church.

While this section has a variety of different topics it is worth spending some time on a major gift that plays throughout the entirety of witness, namely, that McClendon is not about the church being in control. If McClendon’s friends are right about Christendom, the desire to be in control is one of the most horrible temptations that the church feels. Even today the church is clamoring to be at the table of culture whether it be James Dobson’s desire to be a king maker in the Republican process, or Jim Wallis’s moderation of Democrats debates on values. Yet, this desire to be taken seriously by culture is the poison in the well. What becomes clear in McClendon’s work with culture is that Christians should feel safe in the rule of God, and no longer need to clamor to be recognized. When he talks about the soil in the parable of the sower, he does not see it as the job of the church to change the nature of the soil (culture for McClendon), but rather he sees the job of the church to be aware of what is going on in the soil and be faithful in light of that. This frees the church to be able to rest in God’s rule. Hauerwas puts it this way in regard to politics and nuclear war:

I believe we do have an alternative to the desperation that fuels our fear of nuclear war.  That alternative is, quite simply, the need to reclaim the significance of the trivial.  For it is my belief that there is no more powerful response to totalitarians than to take the time to reclaim life from their power.  By refusing to let them claim every aspect of our life as politically significant, we create the space and time that makes politics humane.  Therefore there is nothing more important for us to do in the face of the threat of nuclear war than to go on living - that is, to take time to enjoy a walk with a friend, to read all of Trollope’s novels, to maintain universities, to have and care for children, and most importantly, to worship God.²⁸

The church should always have something interesting to say and do considering what the rule of God means for witness, yet at the same time because of the rule of God the church can rest knowing that it does not solely bare the sake of world.

For the modern church another useful section comes not from McClendon’s pen, but by his wife’s, Nancey Murphy. Science and Society is an amazing critique of Darwinism, simply because it gives up evaluating the science of it, and moves to a critique of the theology of Darwinism. She explores the negative view of nature that seems to come from Darwinism, as well as its contribution to eugenics. As a result of this reading of Darwin, the church is called to reconsider its story²⁹ and understand that “Risk, adventure, and suffering unto death are inelimitable parts of the story, not only the divine risk and suffering on behalf of humankind, but that risk and suffering as the intended model for all human faithfulness.”³⁰ Both McClendon and Murphy point us towards an account of “the moral character of God, who participates with creatures in a world where suffering is inevitable, and who brings good out of evil in all imaginable ways—even creating the capacity for sharing in the midst of ‘carnivory.’”³¹ Murphy allows for Christians to be active in the pursuit of the truth in the realm of science, but also allows for the corrective that everything will someday be reconciled to Jesus Christ.

While up until this point there has been no critical engagement with McClendon in this paper it seems that now would be an appropriate time to discuss two aspects he fails to do service to for the present church. While it is already been noted that most serious engagements with his thought is revolved around his narrative Christology, this is not without reason. The section of Doctrine that deals exclusively with Christology is perhaps the section that is most tailored to academia, and without surprise it seems he moves furthest away from his task for the present church. This is not to say that his narrative Christology is not provocative, but it does give little life to the church. Throughout the rest of the Volumes his Christology is pivotal for a change in the churches engagement with the world, and for some reason the arguments fall away from the church in that section. Second, while Witness does an excellent job in engaging in art and science, it seems to fall flat on the subjects of economics, politics, and other social concerns for the modern church. There are two possible reasons for this. One is that McClendon is indebted to Hauerwas and Yoder, so it is not necessary to tackle topics that have already been done, but to move the conversation into a realm both those thinkers have done little with. While this seems probable, a more fair assessment might be to say that he is providing the utensils and language necessary for the church to imaginatively deal with areas with what he has done. Either way, Witness does seem to leave some larger questions for the churches faithfulness in the world unanswered.

Even with the some minor holes in what McClendon has provided for the present church, there is much to celebrate. One of the most notable contributions that is played through all three books is that McClendon is reclaiming the notion of a Christian God. While Postliberal theology has done much to free Christianity from its attempts to make God into a universal god that lacks particularity, no place is this laid out clearer then in this work. Throughout the book he makes no need to follow the platonic god, or Tillich’s god, but rather builds before the church a radically biblical notion of God, yet at the same time remaining aware of the cultural particulates we are in. In fact in Doctrine he states, “All honor to Athanasius and Basil and Leontius, but they did not write Scripture, and it is to Scripture we must return in fashioning our convictions.”³² Here he succeeds greatly, and this will allow the church to build a notion of God that is no longer held captive by matters settled in the past, but rather imaginatively move forward with past discussion into a beautiful and exciting realm.

Second, McClendon reasserts a radical embodiment that moves the church past its proclivity to dualism. Even though the first section of Ethics is devoted to this point, it is an aspect that spills over into every act of McClendon’s work. Often the church does not believe “that the God we know will have to do with things.”³³ There exists no such temptation in McClendon’s work as he is continually focuses the church’s attention to the present reality, and our embodying selves, rather than some distant future. Also, reflective of this is the work with the Rule of God, for in this section God’s act of creation is no longer seen as an attempt to ground commonality between people’s, but rather is read through the lens of the cross and resurrection. This will hopefully allow the church to do the work necessary to build upon the work he began in Witness and move further into the notion that God’s rule is the present rule.

All of this is reflective to the overall strength of McClendon’s work: faithfulness. That is not to say other theologians don’t share a similar goal, but that in McClendon’s works it takes the shape of inviting the church on a journey to reread the Bible, and to seriously consider what the narrative is all about. Since the first edition of Ethics began with the line, “Nineteen seventy-four…was the year I read John Yoder’s Politics of Jesus…but that book changed my life”³⁴ then it seems fitting that McClendon might have had this line in mind when he began his project:

Then to follow Jesus does not mean renouncing effectiveness. It does not mean sacrificing concern for liberation within the social process in favor of delayed gratification in heaven, or abandoning efficacy in favor of purity. It means that in Jesus we have a clue to which kinds of causation, which kinds of community-building, which kinds of conflict management, go with the grain of the cosmos, of which we know, as Caesar does not, that Jesus is both the Word (the inner logic of things) and the Lord (“sitting at the right hand”). It is not that we begin with a mechanistic universe and then look for cracks and chinks where a little creative freedom might sneak in (for which we would then give God credit): it is that we confess the deterministic world to be enclosed within, smaller than, the sovereignty of the God of the Resurrection and Ascension. “He’s got the whole world in his hands” is a post-ascension testimony. The different it makes for political behavior is more than merely poetic or motivational.³⁵

For McClendon (and Yoder before him) this new look at faithfulness, and reading the Bible is to not that the church become removed, sectarian, irrelevant, or that its claims are unrealistic and insensitive to our current world, but rather it is an act that allows us to truly to begin the work of God in the world. There is no greater need for our current church.

Much has been said about McClendon’s work, and hopefully much more will be. It might be clear that McClendon may never have has day in the academy, and if he did it might be an offence to the work he has provided us. What more words should be said about McClendon will hopefully come from within the church, as his teaching allows for it a chance to regain its “counter, original, spare, strange” voice and move away from the temptation that exists to play power games, to retreat in dualism, to ground human knowledge in creation, or forget about the radical task of faithfulness. Such is the hope of his work, and so it is a great hope for our present church.

Bibliography

Barron, Robert E. “Considering the systematic theology of James William McClendon, Jr.” Modern Theology 18 no 2 Ap 2002, p 267-276.

Harvey, Barry. “Beginning in the middle of things: James McClendon’s Systematic theology.” Modern Theology, 18 no 2 Ap 2002, p 251-265.

Hauerwas, Stanley. Christian Existence Today. Ada, MI: Brazos Press, 2001.

—-. “Reading James McClendon Takes Practice: Lessons in the Craft of Theology.” Conrad Grebel Review, 1997: 235-50.

McClendon, James Wm. Doctrine. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994.

—. Ethics. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2002.

—. Witness. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2000.

TNIV Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006.

Yoder, John H. The Politics of Jesus. Grand Rapids: WB Eerdmans, 1972.

1 James WN. McClendon, Ethics (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2002) 17.

2 It is true that each book attempts to propose individual questions for the church, it is worth nothing that one of the strengths of McClendon’s work is that in Ethics he does not shy away from questions of doctrine and witness, and that it continues for each volume. In this way his work is intertwined in a way that is helpfully served by distinctions, but not closed in its approach to each question.

3 I do think a fair amount could said about how it might be a disservice to Postliberal theology to do a Systematic theology. From what I understand from their wider work Systematics employ too much control over who God is free to be, and would require a use of elements secondary to Scripture. However, this raises a more important question of whether or not McClendon balances out Postliberal concerns in his theology. Or does his work even fit the same school modern Systematics did.

4 Stanley Hauerwas, “Reading James McClendon Takes Practice: Lessons in the Craft of Theology.” (Conrad Grebel Review, 1997) 176.

5 Ibid. 175

6 McClendon, Ethics, 17.

7 Ibid.

8 Barry Harvey, “Beginning in the middle of things: James McClendon’s Systematic theology.” (Modern Theology, 18 no 2 Ap 2002) 251.

9 McClendon, Ethics, 351.

10 Hauerwas, 176

11 McClendon, Ethics, 153. Parentheses added by me.

12 Robert Barron,”Considering the systematic theology of James William McClendon, Jr.” (Modern Theology 18 no 2 Ap 2002) 269.

13 McClendon, Ethics, 153.

14 One interesting note is that ethics aren’t propositional. Which opens his work to being built upon. I think he offers a concrete base, especially in the language he uses, but allows for faithfulness to come from context, rather than being thrust into it. Although, I think the question of nonviolence is ontological decided in the Cross, so it doesn’t qualify as a proposition.

15 James Wm. McClendon, Doctrine (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994) 9.

16 I think starting with Ethics provided McClendon the ground to argue that if you are not living out your doctrine, or the story of God, you are not actually telling the truth with your doctrine.

17 McClendon, Doctrine, 62

18 Ibid. 66.

19 Ibid. 68.

20 Ibid. 99.

21 Ibid, 276.

22 Barron, 272.

23 McClendon, Doctrine, 415.

24 McClendon, Doctrine, 107.

25 James Wm. McClendon, Witness (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2000) 56.

26 Ibid. 309

27 I think it would be fair to say that this is the same critique both Hauerwas and Yoder have been dismissed as, and I think McClendon’s answer couldn’t be more clear. I think those who have dismissed the others will continue to dismiss him the same they have done with others answers to the sectarian charge.

28 Stanley Hauerwas, Christian Existence Today (Ada, MI:Brazos Press 2001) 256-257.

29 See, footnote 11

30 McClendon, Witness 122.

31 Ibid. 124.

32 McClendon, Doctrine, 276.

33 McClendon, Ethics 91

34 Ibid. 17.

35 John Howard Yoder,The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids: WB Eerdmans, 1972) 246-247.

Lately I have been thinking about how important language is to the theological task, and how through the continuation of words like sin, holiness, judgement, redemption, gospel, and other terms we can begin to gain insight into how God is active in the world. One in important question is what we mean by gospel, I thought this quote from Karl Barth was worth sharing:

The gospel is constituted by the mighty acts of God in history for the liberation of the cosmos. It is not a set of rickety arguments about the divine order; it is not the expression of some sublime religious experience brought mysteriously to verbal form; it is not a romantic report about awareness of God in nature; it is not a speculative, philosophical theory about the nature of ultimate reality; it is not a set of pious or moral maxims designed to straighten out the world; it is not a legalistic lament about the meanness of human nature; it is not a sentimental journey down memory lane into ancient history. It is the unique narrative of what God has done to inaugurate God’s kingdom in Jesus of Nazareth, crucified outside of Jerusalem, risen from the dead, seated at the right hand of God, and now reigning eternally with the Father, through the activity of the Holy Spirit, in the church and the in the world. Where this is not announced, it will not be known.

My current dream trip would be to go through Yosemite, rock climb little, camp out, and enjoy the park. While I was hoping to get to that this summer, it isn’t looking likely. However, right now you can head over to the NYTimes and get some pictures/thoughts from someone who worked with Ansel Adams. Most of the shots are pretty amazing, and the commentary is good as well. Here is one I liked. Here is the article, and link to interactive bit.

Here is a short paper for NT Class on how three passages of changed my understanding of why we eat at Shalom Group.

Why We Eat: New Testament Meals and Today

The week before our first class meeting I recently began having a small group, called Shalom, of people meet at my house on Tuesdays to discuss what it means to faithfully follow Christ and be held accountable in that mission. Our first meeting had 8 people, with only 3 returning the next week. Slowly throughout the semester that group of 3 from the first meeting has most recently turned up as 12 people crammed into my small living room on Tuesday evenings. One practice we sought to establish early on was that of eating together every fourth week. In beginning this process I didn’t know what to expect, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt. A week before our first class assignment was due I asked Rob which of the three topics would be most helpful for a group and he instantly responded, “Meals.” The following is my assessment of how the three passages used in my papers, helped form my understanding of meals and how that relates to my home group.

The Feeding of Five Thousand

Out of the three passages, this is the hardest to relate to the way we practice meals at Shalom, but it is intrinsic to why we meet. While I believe in the miracles of the gospel, up until doing the paper on these verses I had very little use (or understanding) of the stories of feeding large amounts of people. At the most basic level it meant that Jesus was God over material things, thus he could make bread and fish multiply. Not really a good point for preaching, but it worked. After doing the assignment I began to understand that this passage is not just about a God who has the ability to multiply bread, but also as a story that illuminates more about who the person of Christ is, and in particular to Luke’s telling, how this event is linked to the messianic confession of Peter.

In doing research for this assignment a couple of themes became clear. The first was Luke relating Jesus to Moses, something I had never explored before. In Exodus, Moses is seen as the prophet who provides food in the wilderness at the hand of YHWH. This leads to each of the gospels presenting Jesus as a new Moses, however, Luke goes a step further. Luke Timothy Johnson believes because that with is lesser emphasis on the twelve in Mark’s gospel, Luke’s editing is motivated by a desire to show not only Jesus as the Moses who feeds his people in the wilderness, but also Luke is attempting to show the Twelve as the tribes of Israel, and Jesus as the their leader before he heads toward Jerusalem.[1] This reality is drawn more clearly because Peter’s confession immediately follows it. Another aspect was the liturgy of ‘taken, blessed, broken, and given.’ Fred Craddock even suggests that the Greek for ‘broken pieces,’ is the same name used for the Lord’s supper in the Didache.[2] This passage also serves as a sign to Jesus’ disciples that true power doesn’t rest in the Denari or money, but rather in the Lord.

In the end, however, we at Shalom must always remember when we gather together and break bread that we do in fact worship a miraculous God, who is confined to our limits, and who illuminates into our presence that he is God overall. In Luke’s gospel it should be noted that the final meal shared is not at Passover, but a meal where the resurrected Christ shows up miraculously in the breaking of the bread in the presence of confused and defeated disciples. Christ can indeed appear in the midst of our meals, and in the end that might be our greatest hope.

The Parable of the Great Banquet

After the first assignment I felt that I gained not only significant insight to the nature of meals, but also into what it means to read the gospels as a cohesive narrative. This is why I was so disappointed with the commentaries because of the narrow lens they read this parable through. It seemed as if each commentary interpreted the parable without attentions to its place in the narrative.[3] Just reading the parable within the context of Chapter 14, shows much more going on than what the parable suggests. The chapter begins with Jesus addressing people to banquet a certain way, and ends with a discussion of the cost of discipleship. In the middle falls this parable, which read out of context appears only as an eschatological promise. Yet read within the context, Jesus radically speaks to how we should eat in the here and now, and I think directly draws this to the cost of following him.

Yet for our group at Shalom this parable speaks of inviting those who we would not have thought of into eating with us. It means that the Kingdom of God is actually present in this event, and that if we are willing to follow Christ we will begin to eat in this way. Embodying this kind of radical invitation in my home has meant actually being open and vulnerable to these people I didn’t choose, and also lead to another dimension for our worship together. Halfway through the semester I began volunteering at the Stop, Drop, and Role center of the Seattle Mennonite Church. On the Thursday evenings I volunteer I normally show up to 15-20 homeless people already gathered in the lobby, and I go to the kitchen along with several of them and begin to cook. Sometimes it is a Turkey, other times left over chicken, but I spend an hour preparing a meal with those who I would never have come in to contact without making myself available. I then serve them, do the dishes, and head out back to my home. While one night is hardly a radical practice it has begun to open holes for God to come into my life and change my eating patterns. As Stanley Hauerwas says, “Salvation is how God transforms our sinful tables into his salvation feast with those who you would not have expected or invited.”[4] For Shalom it is necessary that we begin to allow for that transformation to take place.

1 Corinthian’s and Abuse of the Banquet

Last semester I wrote an entire paper on the issue at hand in 1 Corinthian’s 11:17-34, but it didn’t begin to practically take place until we began eating at Shalom, along with my volunteering at the SDR center. While one commentator wrote this about the Corinthians, “Corinthians who are abusing the Lord’s Supper have minimized or lost the basic Pauline sense that the life of faith is a life of community”[5] it could equally be said about the church we live in today.

One of the primary issues present in this text is “the problems of a socially stratified community.”[6] Those who are abusing the supper have “privatized their faith” and “lost any sense that love as the right relation to others is the proper and necessary expression of their faith as the right relation to God.”[7] While we are able to put 2000 years between us and the text it is not hard to see how these issues stand in relation to our world. What Paul does is remind the Corinthians of what the cup means, and the relationship between how a community eats together and its health (literally). We live in a tragically fragmented society and it is our hope at Shalom that we can begin to reconnect the pieces of our lives into a more cohesive whole that radiates the reality that Jesus has risen from the dead.

When we began Shalom it seemed like a good idea to eat together. It would give me a break from leading the discussions, allow for some regular conversation, and allow us to display some hospitality. While those realities still remain, I have come to a fuller understanding of why we eat together. We eat together to remember trust in Christ, to display his ability to show up in the unlikeliest of circumstances, to proclaim the messianic confession with Peter, to invite those into our lives who might not otherwise, to be transformed, to proclaim, and to take care of those who we share our lives with. If salvation in some way takes the shape of who we make our lives vulnerable too, then the practice of eating is an area of our lives that must be joined with the reality of the Crucified and Risen Christ.

Word Count 1525

Bibliography

Craddock, Fred B. Luke. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1991.

Culpepper, R. Alan. “Luke.” In New Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in 12 Volumes, by ed. L. E. Keck, 1-490. Nashville, TN: Adingdon, 1995.

Dunn, James D.G. 1 Corinthians. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995.

Hays, Richard B. First Corinthians. Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1997.

Johnson, Luke Timothy. Sacra Pagina: Luke. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991.

Nolland, John. Luke. Dallas, TX: Word Books, 1993.

Sampley, J. Paul. “The First Letter to the Corinthians.” In The New Interpreter’s Bible, by et al. Leander E. Keck, 771-1004. Nashville, YN: Abingdon Press, 2002.

TNIV Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006.

Willimon, William. Who will be Saved? Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2008.

[1] Luke Timothy Johnson, Sacra Pagina: Luke (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991) 146-149.

[2] Fred Craddock, Luke (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1991) 137.

[3] To be fair, I did not use the Johnson commentary on this assignment, so that might have been better.

[4] This quote was on the back cover of William Willimon, Who will be Saved? (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 200 Back Cover.

[5] J. Paul Sampley, “The First Letter to the Corinthians.” In The New Interpreter’s Bible, by et al. Leander E. Keck, 771-1004 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2002) 934.

[6] James Dunn, 1 Corinthians. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995) 77.

[7] Sampley, 934..

If the Lamb is worthy to receive power, then the only rational worldview, in a cosmos where we have no control, is Apocalyptic.

John Howard Yoder, For the Nations: Essays Public, and Evangelical

‘The Christian story in its primal form tells of a God who [unlike gods of human fabrication] is the very Ground of Adventure [anastatic], the Weaver of society’s Web [social], the Holy Source of nature in its concreteness [embodied]—the one and only God, who, when time began, began to be God for a world that in its orderly constitution finally came by his will and choice to include also—ourselves. We human beings, having our natural frame and basis, with our own [it seemed our own] penchant for community, and [it seemed] our own hankerings after adventure, found ourselves, before long, in trouble. Our very adventurousness led us astray; our drive to cohesion fostered monstrous imperial alternatives to the adventure and the sociality of the Way God had intended, while our continuity with nature became an excuse to despise ourselves and whatever was the cause of us. We sin. In his loving concern, God set among us, by every means infinite wisdom could propose, the foundations of a new human society; in his patience he sent messengers to recall the people of his Way to their way; in the first bright glimmers of opportunity he sent—himself, incognito, without splendor and fanfare, the Maker amid the things made, the fundamental Web as if a single fiber, the Ground of Adventure risking everything in this adventure. His purpose—sheer love; his means—pure faith; his promise—unquenchable hope. In that love he lived a life of love; by that faith he died a faithful death; from that death he rose to fructify hope for the people of his Way, newly gathered, newly equipped. The rest of the story is still his—yet it can be ours, yours…To outsiders the story is sure to count as a myth among myths, but to us it is no myth, but our only way of telling the whole truth.’

I haven’t blogged in long time. I think the longest time in over a year. If I had to guess it has less to do with me having nothing to say (since most of you know I always have something to say), but rather my life has lately been captivated by what it means to follow Jesus, given my conceptions of faithfulness. Not surprisingly this didn’t start in mind, but rather in my interactions with a wonderful small group of people who met at my house. Our conversations since January have given me much more to think in the actual realities of following Jesus I profess to believe, then my former reading and collection of information.
All that to say, I think I am ready to start blogging again. But as I move towards that here is a current quote that has my mind captured:

Then to follow Jesus does not mean renouncing effectiveness. It does not mean sacrificing concern for liberation within the social process in favor of delayed gratification in heaven, or abandoning efficacy in favor of purity. It means that in Jesus we have a clue to which kinds of causation, which kinds of community-building, which kinds of conflict management, go with the grain of the cosmos, of which we know, as Caesar does not, that Jesus is both the Word (the inner logic of things) and the Lord (“sitting at the right hand”). It is not that we begin with a mechanistic universe and then look for cracks and chinks where a little creative freedom might sneak in (for which we would then give God credit): it is that we confess the deterministic world to be enclosed within, smaller than, the sovereignty of the God of the Resurrection and Ascension. “He’s got the whole world in his hands” is a post-ascension testimony. The different it makes for political behavior is more than merely poetic or motivational.

Crucial for me is the presumption that the gospel is a story meant to train us to live without explanation. Explanation presumes that if I can just account for why what happened did happen, then I will be able to live with what has happened… I think Christianity is the training for learning how to live without being in control: you learn to live in the silences, and you learn what the politics of living in the silences might look like… But to learn patiently in a world where you have no answers, it seems to me, gives you political alternatives that otherwise would not exist—through hope… I assume that God will show up in all different kinds of ways. That’s how I try to conceive of what it means to live hopefully without explanation. You don’t try to explain the death of a child. That will kill you. That will kill you.

HT: rustyparts

For a while I have been trying to come with a good post about why the Obama (or fill in the blank of anyone else running for president, he just happens to extremely popular at Mars Hill) fan parade has been bugging me but in the short conversations I tried to engage anyone on the subject it went nowhere. It was like attempting to talk an evangelical about voting for Bush in 2000. So, I decided to just let it go and not blog about. But then David Fitch (whose books I will buy after reading this) really wrote out this critique I wanted to write using Slavoj Zizek’s political theory, and gently critiquing this phenomena (phenomena being here national politics) that the church gets sucked into every four years.  Here is just one line, but please go to his blog and read the whole thing. Later I might engage in his questions at the end, but in the meantime his post is excellent. 

• When it comes to Christians of my evangelical tradition, I would suggest this “ideological cynicism” could work another way. We participate in National politics, its political ideologies of a more just society, even though we deeply suspect the corporate national machine insures nothing will change. We do this because it is much harder to think of the church itself as a legitimate social political force for God’s justice in the world. It is simply a lot less work to support Barak Obama for president than it is to lead our churches into being living communities of righteousness, justice and God’s Mission in the world.