MTS-05: Hauerwas on McClendon

Discussed on January 24, 2013, with Stanley Hauerwas as part of my MTS Thesis Proposal.

Source: James McClendon, Biography as Theology (Wipf and Stock, 2002)

Discussion Prompt

James McClendon's central claim throughout his Biography as Theology is that "The truth of faith is made good in the living of it or not at all; that living is a necessary condition of the justification of Christian faith."[1] The lives of Christians not only reflect the faith of particular people, they also make present the true faith to which all Christians are commonly called. The particularities of religious experience certainly do not determine Christian doctrine, but it is within the lives of believers that doctrine gains its coherence.

McClendon was a soldier during the 20th century, a time period he suggests was marked by increasing disenfranchisement with the institutional church, especially during the American "conflict" in Vietnam. The religious experience for Christians in America especially was one of moral dyslexia, trying as many Christians did to make sense of supposedly liberating movements such as feminism, free love, and Vatican II.[2] The modern "utilitarian calculus" of states and the "propositional" theologies of the institutional church, which combined to make something like Vietnam possible, were exposed as fraud. A "new" form of theological method of understanding post-modern religious experience must fill its place.

Cautiously avoiding the phrase "narrative theology,"[3] he argues that "propositional theology," the method of the Barths, the Rahners, and the Tillichs of the world, had lost traction in the post-modern world emerging in the shadow of the wars of the 20th century. Stories, not scholarly debate, would prove of most value. The lives of the Christians he profiles are shaped by a theological vision so that "a key to these biographies is the dominant or controlling images which may be found in the lives of which they speak."[4]

A name he gives to the necessary replacement to the paradigm of "propositional theologies" he variously refers to as "biographic theology," an "ethics of character," and "a theology of life." Far from being without its own "reasoned truth,"[5] McClendon's entire work is dedicated to describing how lives are in fact inherently theological.

"The living out of life under the governance of such a vision is the best way to conceive of 'religious experience' in so far as the latter can be a datum for theology."[6] For Hammarskjold, it is Christ as Brother, King followed the liberating Christ, Jordan shared in God's Movement, and Ives sang of the church's Rugged Plurality. These images help illumine for us the image (and images) of God and for God. Their lives become for us a window to understand more fully the work of god in our world and help us in the work God calls to us.

After all, "Theology is done not only from a perspective but to and for a community."[7] In such a community, "there is a continual blurring of the line of application between the teacher and his disciples."[8] While McClendon does not appear to have virtue ethics in mind, he is very close to virtue theory that suggests that the cultivation of good habits establishes good character by making the virtues second nature. By making a habit of praying, eventually I find that I have become prayerful.

One can easily read McClendon's account of the apocalyptic parable of the sheep and the goats from Matthew 25[9] in this exact light. Of both the sheep and the goats, he claims "that actions by which their final destiny is judged... are instead ones in which they acted unknowingly, and yet showed themselves for what they truly were."[10] The sheep are as surprised as the goats; they each ask when it was they did the things for which they are either praised or condemned.

In his closing chapters,[11] he turns to the distinction between objectivism and subjectivism, claiming that it is "has not proved satisfactory in modern theology."[12] Propositionism is here aligned with objectivism, for it assumes a universal reason accessible to all. More problematically, objectivism assumes an exclusion "from personal participation in the atoning work" of Christ. McClendon seems to associate objectivism primarily with the abstracting work done in theorizing forms of philosophical/"theology proper"[13] for being "more suited to attacking rival theologians than informing the Church of God."[14] He accuses these forms of theology of "the time-defying strategies of modern intellectual work."[15]

However, he avoids the easy move of dismissing objectivism and its propositional outgrowths in theoretical and philosophical forms of theology. After all, subjectivism assumes the self as the source of reconciliation. McClendon does not advocate for complete disavowal of objectivism or of propositional theology. Biographical theology instead must insist that these 'objective' forms of theology "be in continual and intimate contact with the lived experience which the propositional doctrine by turns collects, orders, and informs."[16] Doctrinal significance and meaning, in other words, must be "exemplified in contemporary Christian experience."[17] We must be on guard, McClendon reminds us, against uncritical forms of propositional theology that might deny its contingency upon the biographical form. McClendon suggests that we can tell that propositional theology has "[retreated] to the uncritical form" when/if it abandons any "attempt to confront or be confronted by Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ."[18]

Finally, McClendon closes by turning to the saints to illustrate lives lived that must be brought into contact with purely doctrinal theology. Such lives cannot possibly be described as being composed of experiences of some quantifiable, objective "God" (which assigns "a cognitive priority to the compressed, the non-durational, the abstracted products of actual or durational experience,"[19]), but experiences with Emmanuel, the God-with-us. We are known not by some radically unknowable god, as Paul encountered at Mars Hill, but the God who both reveals and names himself so that we might (even objectively) know and be known by God. McClendon sums it up by saying

The compelling aspect of the lives to which we are drawn is often more powerful than the propositional religious goals we are in the position to formulate... the doctrine we may draw from their life stories, if it is compelling, is so just because it had prior embodiment in them and may be embodied again.[20]

Questions for consideration

Is war possible within a theology of character? What stories constitute "war" and its exercise, if biographic/narrative shall hold primacy over and above "propositional" forms much more dominant in today's world?

Though "Biography at its best will be theology,"[21] theology is never merely about human lives, never reducible simply to biographies. That being the case, how do these lives acknowledge and glorify "the God who lives?" Put another way, where and how does the God of Israel and of Jesus enable the lives so lived?

Though he initially points away from Tillich by name, one wonders how closely related McClendon's "governing images" is to Tillich's "ultimate concern."

Footnotes

[1] James McClendon, Biography as Theology; How Life Stories Can Remake Today's Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1990), p.viii

[2] Ibid., 2

[3] Ibid., 9. He calls it a "fad," but does not seem to reject the title per se.

[4] Ibid., 22, 149, 158, 166, 171.

[5] Ibid., 69

[6] Ibid., 166-167

[7] Ibid., 1, 22-23.

[8] Ibid., 142-171

[9] Ibid., v. Reasoned truths were one of three criteria of "theologies that had long sustained religion." The others were singular revelation and implicit trust between individual Christians and the institutional church.

[10] Ibid., 69

[11] Ibid., 70

[12] Ibid., 74

[13] Ibid., 6

[14] Matthew 25:37 & 45 are ironically similar.

[15] McClendon, 148

[16] Ibid., 148

[17] "Theology proper" does not appear in McClendon's work. It was used in the Philosophical theology class by Sean Larsen, though I cannot be sure it was he who used the phrase. It may very well have been in the Hadot reading.

[18] Ibid., 149

[19] Ibid., 159. I would add to "time-defying" the accusation of "idolatrous," as each denies God's sovereignty over creation.

[20] Ibid., 149

[21] Ibid., 149

[22] Ibid., 167

[23] Ibid., 160

[24] Ibid., 161

[25] Ibid., 22

Discussion

Discussion transcript

Stanley Hauerwas: He's from Shreveport, Louisiana.

Logan: Uh-huh.

Hauerwas: He was a Southern Baptist — went to Southwestern in Fort Worth.

Logan: Huh.

Hauerwas: And then to Golden Gate Seminary in San Francisco.

Logan: Is that still around?

Hauerwas: Yeah.

Logan: Oh.

Hauerwas: He was fired there, because he was—

Logan: For protesting, or something?

Hauerwas: No, he wasn't a fundamentalist. Then he got a job at the University of San Francisco, and was fired there for writing a letter in protest of the Vietnam War on University of San Francisco stationery.

Logan: Yeah, I came across what he called his theological autobiography in the Mennonite Quarterly.

Hauerwas: Yes.

Logan: I thought that was really interesting. I realized my second paragraph turned into this necessary prelude — it doesn't really have anything to do with what he wrote, but it kind of does. Anyway.

Hauerwas: On the second page, where you briefly summarize Hammarskjöld as Christ his Brother, King as the liberating Christ, and so on — do you think those images work well?

Logan: I didn't focus on them much. I thought they were fun to read, but I wasn't convinced by them — they weren't convincing, I guess.

Hauerwas: I thought they seemed a bit artificial for the construal of those lives, and that putting each of those lives in the context of atonement was a bit forced.

Logan: Yeah, I get that sense. I wanted to read your — I think you wrote something on the memory of MLK? Carol told me about it, I didn't get around to it, but at least the liberating-Christ-and-Exodus material — I thought that was good, partly because I know more about King than I do about Hammarskjöld. I learned a bit about Clarence Jordan, and mostly skipped over the Charles — Ives, sorry.

Hauerwas: Charles Ives.

Logan: Right. So I mostly focused on the chapters where he was really doing the work of advancing his theology. I wanted to say, about my question yesterday — it was really more about silence than about elites.

Hauerwas: That's a good question.

Logan: I think I might write on that for the other class. I know you've said that sometimes, in order to keep from lying, you must remain silent, which speaks to Lauren's comment about silence as privation — but I'm not convinced silence is necessarily without positive value. There's something about silence, even as a rhetorical device, that I find intriguing. For me it connected to the lives that weren't self-speaking — Martin of Tours didn't write. A lot of the martyrs we've read about didn't write. Ignatius of Antioch did — they talked, but nothing that was recorded for the future the way Augustine seems aware that more people will read him than just the people in his own immediate context. Which I'm still wrestling through — even in that other class, I'm wrestling with whether the academy is the institution I wish to be ordained by. I just don't know yet. It's still a very live question.

Hauerwas: It's interesting — when you said Jesus didn't write, neither did Socrates. Not writing may be an extraordinary act of trust: that you don't need to leave a tombstone in order to be remembered. And you may not be remembered. The whole role of the anonymity of death — I find that fascinating.

Logan: That's what was in the back of my mind — especially when we were talking, at the beginning of the other class, about what language does, and I thought: what if we have language because we're so afraid of the final silence? We don't know what's going to happen when we can no longer speak for ourselves, or when nothing can be spoken until Christ comes again. That started unraveling in my head, but I didn't have time to go there.

Hauerwas: God doesn't speak.

Logan: Yeah — he has people who speak in his voice.

Hauerwas: There's a contemporary theologian, a Quaker, writing on silence—

Logan: You'd have to be a Quaker, I imagine.

Hauerwas: I'm blocking her name — she's English, did her work at Cambridge. Let me see if I can pull it up... [pause] Can't find it.

Logan: That's okay — I might be able to search for it later.

Hauerwas: [pause] I asked Sean whether silence is a rhetorical device, and he said yes — so at least that opens the door a little.

Logan: Of course it is — but so is everything.

Hauerwas: Ha — right. You quote, "Theology is done not only from a perspective but to and for a community." That, of course, is remarkably ambiguous — worth thinking about what community makes these lives, these stories, necessary. Hammarskjöld's such an interesting case — no one knew he had any religious convictions at all while he was alive, until Markings came out.

Logan: That was posthumous, right?

Hauerwas: Oh, yeah.

Logan: He never names virtue, or virtue theory, or ethics.

Hauerwas: No — when he first wrote Biography as Theology, he wasn't aware of any of those developments yet. That came later.

Logan: Okay.

Hauerwas: I read Biography as Theology right when I'd just started teaching at Notre Dame — I'd read an essay version of it in Cross Currents, wrote and told him how much I appreciated it, and that's how we got to know each other.

Logan: Oh. So when did virtue become a thing for him — he names narrative, but I thought it might be in a newer preface rather than the original.

Hauerwas: It's in the newer preface, I think.

Logan: He doesn't seem to have a problem with narrative theology, but keeps it at a distance because it's a fad. Would he disown what's now called narrative theology?

Hauerwas: Probably — because he doesn't want to make narrative, "narrative" the concept, something that determines everything you need to say theologically. He's wary of how reductive some people make it.

Logan: Do you share that?

Hauerwas: Yeah.

Logan: That's what I figured.

Hauerwas: I have an essay called something like "Narrative — Thirty-Five Years Later," in one of the books, I can't remember which, where I talk about some of this.

Logan: Just so I have a sense of it — when did narrative theology become a thing, and what marks it? Would it be MacIntyre's After Virtue?

Hauerwas: No — it came from a lot of different sources. There's an essay, I think it's in Truthfulness and Tragedy, on narrative, where I locate some of the sources. It came from John Dunne at Notre Dame, who had a very different understanding of narrative than I did. It came from Hans Frei's Christology, his attempt to develop Christology narratively. It came from me trying to give an account of how to think about selves. So — a lot of different sources.

Logan: Okay.

Hauerwas: I thought this was very nice — "the sheep are as surprised as the goats; they each ask when it was they did the things for which they are either praised or condemned." Is that McClendon?

Logan: He uses that parable — I don't want to claim something that isn't mine, but I don't remember reading that specific observation in him. I just noticed that the people who are condemned are as surprised as the people who are praised.

Hauerwas: It's very nice.

Logan: Which made me think of habit as the foundation for vice as well as virtue.

Hauerwas: Absolutely. Absolutely — very important. I thought what you had to say was fine, in terms of the questions you ask — "is war possible within a theology of character?" You bet, of course. War is a wonderful formation of character.

Logan: Yeah, well — I realize that's one of the things I want to go into writing the thesis about: what are the stories? One of the things I've been telling people is this sound bite I have in my head — if we're talking about just war and immediately thinking last resort, proportionality, and so on, our imagination's been co-opted in some way. What we should be thinking about is dismembered bodies, widows, and orphans.

Hauerwas: Right, right.

Logan: And that's my way of saying that Martin has something as important to say as—

Hauerwas: Augustine.

Logan: Right. So I'm trying to think through what, in that sense, narrative can bring to something like what McClendon calls "propositional theology."

Hauerwas: Right — I think that phrase can be quite misleading. It's a holding term for what he doesn't like.

Logan: Did he ever come up with a better term?

Hauerwas: No.

Logan: Do you have one?

Hauerwas: No — well, I use "systematic."

Logan: Oh.

Hauerwas: I thought your line — "where and how does the God of Israel and of Jesus enable the life so lived" — is good. What creates the conditions or possibility that we'd have lives like Martin, or Torres?

Logan: Right — well, that's where I saw — I think it was in Short Cummings's description of the people he profiled — he seemed to be describing what mattered for them, as opposed to what might matter for God. I'm also reading Bretherton's Christianity and Democracy right now, for another class, and I keep thinking, "This is all well and good and very interesting, but where is God in all this?"

Hauerwas: Mm-hmm.

Logan: I think he has sections later that get to it, but that's what I'm hoping to develop too — it's great that these are their images, but on what grounds, or how, does God get to us from those images?

Hauerwas: Right — because, take Clarence Jordan. That wonderful exchange between Clarence Jordan and his brother.

Logan: Oh, yeah.

Hauerwas: How did Clarence Jordan get to where he got, and his brother to where he got, coming from exactly the same circumstances? How do you account for a Clarence Jordan going from ROTC at Auburn to Koinonia Farm?

Logan: I was actually struck by his brother's honesty about his own political ambitions.

Hauerwas: Right, right.

Logan: At least he says it outright.

Hauerwas: Right.

Logan: Interesting. Yeah, I think this piece is probably going to be most helpful for the thesis. What I'm reading next is Augustine's letters to Boniface—

Hauerwas: Uh-huh.

Logan: —Ramsey's chapter on "War and the Christian Conscience"—

Hauerwas: On Augustine.

Logan: Right — and then Bainton and Yoder, a couple of chapters from Christian Attitudes, before the last thing, which is Dan Bell's Just War as Christian Discipleship.

Hauerwas: Right, right.

Logan: So I'm trying to work out which direction I need to orient myself in, so I only write what I need to write and focus on what I need to focus on — if you have suggestions, or see movements here I need to draw out more. The Tillich "ultimate concern" thing was kind of curious — I threw that in at the last minute.

Hauerwas: Jim was a sworn enemy of Tillich.

Logan: Really?

Hauerwas: Oh, yeah — he had very little use for him. As do I.

Logan: Huh.

Hauerwas: In terms of your reading — you're a careful reader who doesn't rush, and that's good. I think concentrating on Augustine, and Ramsey on Augustine, is the right move. You're going to need to know Bainton and Yoder, but that may not be the heart of what you're going to write about — you need to know them to get the significance of Bell.

Logan: Okay. The chapters I focused on are all interesting, but I want to know: what is this thing we're calling just war, and how did it — did the snowball get thrown — and how does that miss something like Martin of Tours and the early soldier saints?

Hauerwas: Right. What you'll discover is, one, Bainton gives a far too coherent account of how it developed.

Logan: Too coherent?

Hauerwas: Too coherent. And Ramsey does too, in some ways. Historically — for example, in the Middle Ages it was sometimes thought that if a war didn't have a religious purpose, like reconquering the Holy Land from the Muslims, it couldn't be just. Then Ramsey's argument is essentially the opposite — that it cannot have a religious purpose, it must have a direct political end in response to an offense. So the relationship between what was historically thought to be a just war and what we now call just war theory is very murky. There are even suggestions that non-combatant immunity originated from nobles not thinking it honorable to kill peasants — meaning it didn't come from a presumption that you only try to kill combatants, but that you only try to kill combatants who are your class equal. So the historical reconstruction of what just war meant at different times makes it a much more complicated set of developments than what's now listed under just war theory.

Logan: Interesting. That relates to another question — something from a class the other day. Last semester I was in a women's studies course, and one of the methods that came up — I don't know if they originated it, but that's where I encountered it — was social construction theory. If I understand it right — and I might not — it seems to propose... we were talking about the form not being able to give way, or something, I can't quite remember. Anyway, I'm interested in the idea that war is a social construction, and I don't know whether that's going to be helpful or harmful to actually getting the paper written.

Hauerwas: You have to be very careful with the language of social construction, because it sounds like there's just a bunch of raw data out there that I impose my concepts on — which is a very doubtful philosophical position. It makes the world one thing and language another. Do you socially construct your language? So I'd be careful with that language. There's quite appropriately a question of where our concepts come from — but that's not necessarily the same thing as social construction.

Logan: Okay. I wish I remembered what Sean said — something about the form holding — well, I think I've got it recorded, I can go back to it. I've done a lot of talking. Is there anything you think I need to shut up and go read?

Hauerwas: No, I think you're making good progress.

Logan: Okay.

Hauerwas: Just keep at it.

Logan: All right — I'll cut it short then, and I'll...