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CONTEMPLATING THE SYSTEMATIC ETHICS OF JAMES WILLIAM McCLENDON JR.

Daniel Hertzler

Systematic Theology: Ethics. By James William McClendon Jr., Abingdon Press, 1986.

As one who cut his eyeteeth on the Congregational discipline of John S. Mast and his wisdom teeth on the Mennonite writing of Guy F. Hershberger, I could not but be concerned about ethics. Indeed, it goes farther back than this. At the age of eight or nine I was taken to the woodshed by my father for bad-mouthing my mother. In my experience behavior has been serious business.

Actually, as I read James William McClendon Jr.'s ethics I find that what I have been concerned about is morality. He writes that “ethics and morals are related as theory and practice; thus ‘ethics’ is the study (or systematization) of morals. . . .” Meanwhile, he notes, “‘morals’ (or ‘morality’) means the actual conduct of people viewed with concern for right and wrong, good and evil, virtue and vice” (p. 47).

In contrast to my interest in ethics, I have had trouble getting really stirred up by systematic theology. At Eastern Mennonite College I took the required course and kept notes on the lectures. I do not remember any specific fact from these, but of course that can be said regarding many courses I took. Systematic theologians have a tendency to begin their discussions with topics such as “prolegomena” and this sort of approach makes the eyes glaze over.

Then I found McClendon’s theology, which begins with ethics instead of the other way around. Maybe I could get into this. I also found him of interest because of his “testimony” in Mennonite Quarterly Review (October 2000), the first of 12 essays on how contributors' “theological or ethical understandings have been shaped by an engagement with the Anabaptist tradition.”

In “The Radical Road one Baptist Took,” he tells how he grew up in Louisiana among Christians who assumed that when the government called, young men should be available to defend the country. So he did his “duty” and became a part of the U.S. occupation of Japan following World War II.

After the war he became a theologian and in 1967 attended a “believers church” conference in Louisville, Kentucky, where he met John Howard Yoder. A few years later he read Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus “and by the time I had finished I had undergone a second conversion.” Anyone who was converted by reading The Politics of Jesus gets my attention.

Now this reconverted Baptist was still a theologian and it came to him that Baptists today need a theology, even though for centuries they have gotten by without this sophisticated reasoning. He observes, as I have, that theologians typically began with “prolegomena,” that is “foundations.”

He notes two problems with this. For one, “Many students, starting there, quit as soon as they can.” For another, theologians who leave ethics to last, often do not get it written. He wonders how the story of Christianity might have been different if the church leaders at Nicaea had tried “to secure Christian social ethics before refining Christian dogma” (p. 42). A haunting question indeed.

So the first of McClendon’s three volumes indeed is ethics. But it is still systematic theology and we are urged to read it slowly for, as he says, writing it was a slow process.

What then has McClendon done? Too much to comment on in detail, but this much I see as important: with the help of John Howard Yoder and others he challenges what some have labeled the “myth of redemptive violence,” the assumption that Christians must at times do evil—such as fight in war—to avoid worse things happening.

Then he goes on to segment the ethical life, to discuss it in terms of three separate spheres: body ethics, social ethics, and resurrection ethics. Each of these gets three chapters, an introduction, a biographical example, and further discussion. Finally, in the last chapter he defends what he terms “narrative ethics.” Every ethical theory has a story in back of it, he says. Some are not willing to acknowledge this.

McClendon discusses at length the point that none of these three spheres of ethics is adequate alone. As he observes, “The moral life is not complete except in the union of its several strands.” Yet for discussion purposes he segments them.

It is of interest to observe the persons chosen as biographical examples of ethical integrity. For body ethics McClendon presents Sarah and Jonathan Edwards. Jonathan is famous for a hellfire sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” but McClendon points out there was more to him than this. Sarah and Jonathan were a romantic couple, he reports, who conceived 11 children, six of whom were born on Sunday.

The follow-up chapter seeks to develop “an ethic of sexual love.” In summarizing this discussion he asserts that love is a feeling, it is a virtue, it is a gift. “As a gift it returns to the giver; God is love, and to the extent that we abide in love . . . we abide in God, and he in us” (p. 155). It is hard to see how to argue with this summary of Christian love.

Next McClendon discusses social ethics and stresses that this strand cannot stand alone, particularly because there is a danger that a socially virtuous community may become smug and vain. The biography for this sphere is of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian executed because of involvement in a plot to get rid of Hitler.

This is one of the more definitive discussions I have seen of “the tragedy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” His death and the tragedy of his life, says McClendon, “was but an element in the greater tragedy of the Christian community in Germany. . . . They had no effective moral structure in the church. . . . No structures, no practices, no skills of political life existed that were capable of resisting, of Christianly resisting, the totalitarianism of the times” (p. 207).

The next chapter seeks to stress and illustrate the importance of connecting body ethics and social ethics. This happens through “establishing and maintaining Christian community with its symbolic meal” (p. 239).

In the third section of the book, McClendon considers resurrection ethics because “these two strands [body and community] yearn for a third, that they do not by themselves or even added together, constitute true Christian morality” (p. 243). What transforms them, he says, is faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The example in this part of the book is Dorothy Day, who was converted after a somewhat dissolute life and baptized into the Catholic Church. She would found The Catholic Worker, a radical newspaper which preached the gospel of peace when this was not a Catholic doctrine. She did enough radical things to have J. Edgar Hoover label her as “erratic.”

The commentary chapter that follows, “A Future for Peace?” is a wide-ranging discussion of the Bible, church history, and present Christian perspectives. McClendon finds that, as of old, many “have set out on militant crusades to save God’s world from others’ wickedness.” He perceives that a better strategy is “to let our actions for peace be altogether the practices of peace, and to take heart from the risen Christ still with us” (p. 326).

Is it necessary to write 326 pages to make this point? There are those who have focused the issues of Christian ethics with fewer words. For example, the late John E. Lapp observed that when his wife as a young person was instructed in church membership, the course was simply the Sermon on the Mount. “It must have been effective,” he said. “She is a better Christian than I am.”

Lynn Miller once put the Mennonite perspective on ethics in a single sentence. He said, “Mennonites believe that Jesus meant what he said and that it applies to us.”

Bill Dezort, a member of my own congregation, was in a Sunday school class visited by a person seeking to “study” Mennonites. Bill observed, “Mennonites believe you should be the same on Monday as on Sunday.” These are good points of reference, but they are only what one might call the tip of the iceberg. McClendon’s systematic ethics come from deep in the iceberg.

I reflect on the fact that the Old Order Amish do little theological writing yet appear to prevail as a Christian community. But then I recall that those of us who are Mennonites have taken risks which the Old Order Amish to this point have avoided. We live on the uneasy edge between a community of faith in Jesus and one which considers Jesus irrelevant. Some in that community are fellow Christians who seem quite capable of straining at gnats and swallowing camels.

In contemplating McClendon’s ethics I come back to his confession which I quoted at the beginning. McClendon has been there, done that, and concluded there is no real Christian life in it. Anyone tempted by variations on Jesus’ three classic temptations does well to listen to people like McClendon who have found a home in the Anabaptist vision after wandering in a theological wilderness.

Support for the way of Jesus turns up in interesting places. A Jewish scholar, David Flusser, has written a book entitled Jesus and dedicated the revised edition “to my Mennonite friends.” After all that has been done to Jews in the name of Christ, I find it of interest that a scholar such as Flusser has studied Jesus. But then I find that he grew up in an area where his Christian neighbors were friendly.

On page 102 he writes of Jesus that “being in Jerusalem he saw the imminent catastrophe as almost inevitable (Luke19:40-44). The future destruction of Jerusalem could have been avoided, if it had chosen the way of peace and repentance.” I would have hesitated to say this, but Flusser has said it.

Twice within the century after the death of Jesus, Jerusalem was destroyed for rebelling against the Romans. We cannot stand by in judgment. But we can remind ourselves that if we preached only that Christ died for our sins we preached a truncated gospel. It is necessary also to give attention to what Jesus said and asMcClendon concludes, “to take heart from the risen Christ still with us” (p. 326).

And what about McClendon’s other two volumes? Will I read them? Not tomorrow. Not the next day. But maybe later.

—Daniel Hertzler, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, is author of a memoir, A Little Left of Center (DreamSeeker Books, 2000) and instructor for Pastoral Studies Distance Education. He also walks the dog, cuts wood in season, works in the garden, and keeps a few bees. He and wife Mary have four sons and nine grandchildren.