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

By James W. McClendon, Jr., Ryan Andrew Newson and Nancey Murphy

James Wm. McClendon, Jr. was the most important "baptist" theologian of the twentieth century. McClendon crafted a systematic theology that refused to succumb to the pressures of individualism, grew out of the immediacy of preaching the text, and lamented the stunted public witness of a fractured Protestant ecclesiology.

This two-volume set mixes previously unpublished and published lectures and essays with rare and little known works to form a representative collection of the essential themes of McClendon's work. The first volume focuses on the philosophical and theological shifts leading to McClendon's articulation of the baptist vision. The second volume specifically elucidates the more philosophical themes that informed McClendon's work, including ways in which these themes had immediate theological import. Taken together, the set provides the most comprehensive presentation of McClendon's work now available, revealing the sustained and systematic character of his vision over the course of his life. These two volumes will provide scholars, preachers, and students with McClendon's radical, narrative, and connective theology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781481303286

Book preview

PART I

Retrospect

§26

Three Strands of Christian Ethics

(1978)

Editors’ Introduction

During his 1977 sabbatical year, McClendon frequently visited the University of Notre Dame, participating in and being challenged by theological and philosophical conversations with moral theologians from across the Christian spectrum. It was over the course of this year that McClendon formulated his three-stranded method for analyzing Christian ethics, which (together with What Is a ‘baptist’ Theology?) enabled him to formulate the idea of a three-volume systematic theology written from and for heirs of the Radical Reformation. As McClendon’s student Terrence Tilley describes it, this essay was the fountainhead of a systematic theology that could be comprehensive and yet perspectival, formed by narrative, begun with ethics, shaped by what the practice of the church is and should be, and concluded with ‘witness,’ rather than ‘foundations.’ * As such, this essay is not only crucial in understanding the origins and content of McClendon’s systematic theology; it also marks a watershed in McClendon’s methodological development, without which one cannot adequately understand the essays in these two volumes. McClendon here parses out Christian ethics in terms of three distinct but interrelated strands—the body, social, and resurrection strands—arguing that while no one strand can be neglected or do the work of the whole, ethicists can (and for the most part do) focus predominately on one strand as they go about their work. McClendon concludes by analyzing three diverse contemporary ethicists using his schema (Iris Murdoch, Stanley Hauerwas, and John Cobb), an analysis we have excluded here. By bringing resources from McClendon’s early philosophical work to bear in crafting a method for analyzing Christian ethics in a pluriform world, this essay helpfully orients the reader to themes and foci that recur throughout the essays and lectures in this volume.

This is an essay in theological ethics; to be particular, it attempts to map the terrain of Christian ethics.¹ As its scope is large, its scale is of course small. It leaves many other controversial questions untouched in order to address one such question: What is the necessary shape of Christian ethics? It answers by providing a typology. This is not, like H. R. Niebuhr’s, a typology that implies that one should choose one’s type; rather it claims an essential role for each of the typical elements it presents. To the extent that moral theologians concentrate on one of these strands only, their work is partial and deficient. This will be illustrated in the closing section. There are three sections: a first, in which the strands are given preliminary identification, a second, in which it is argued that exactly these three interdependent strands are present in biblical ethics, and the last, in which the typology of three strands is used to characterize the work of some contemporary Christian moral theologians, as just mentioned.

There is by now good reason for discontent with the moral theology of the recent past, which was conducted in two main ways. One way was to claim that the morality of Christianity follows from its doctrinal truths—in the customary jargon, the ought follows from the is, the imperative from the indicative, the appropriate practice from the proper theory. This deduction was seen by some as singular, all-at-a-stroke, everything following from some one Christian doctrine or principle or nexus of these, so that theological ethics could nicely be contained in a separate ethical volume (Brunner? Tillich? R. Niebuhr? Lehmann?). By others the deduction was drawn doctrine by doctrine, producing, as it were, ethical postscripts to the several sections of the dogmatic system (Barth? H. R. Niebuhr? Gustafson?). The objections to this is to ought procedure were both logical and practical: it was argued either that the inference was impossible, or that the ethics thus generated was not in practice Christian.

The other way was to hold that ethics rested on its own bottom; in this case the connections with theology were even more tenuous or abstruse—at one extreme metaphysical (early Whiteheadians), at the other psychological and emotional (Braithwaite). The objections were again both logical and practical: it was argued that religious convictions had been made epiphenomenal and thus morally irrelevant, or it was doubted that the autonomous ethics described by this method could adequately and accurately account for the actual Christian morality in, say, a midwestern American village or a church in a Soviet city. Perhaps these critical strategies will again be employed in challenging the view I will put forward here. Before doing so, however, one should give full weight to another, more fundamental, disadvantage that both the recent ways suffered: neither of them had the conceptual machinery to say how it was that everyday religious convictions, which seemed to be (at least in part) about how matters stood both in and with the world, could necessarily have to do with morality, which seemed to be concerned with what we must do and what attitudes we must take up. Lacking an adequate grammar of convictions, these main ethical theories of our recent theological past knew more than they could tell us. They knew there must be a connection between the cognitive or the representative, the practical, and the affective dimensions of Christian convictions, but they could not say what that connection was.²

Now, however, work on the theory of language and on the nature of religious convictions,³ growing out of developments in philosophy during the same recent past, indicates that what our predecessors mistook for logical gulfs are not there; the bridges they did or did not build were simply not needed; thus we are set free to attempt a quite different account.

Begin with a remark in the Investigations.

The strength of the thread does not reside

in the fact that some one fibre runs through

its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.⁴

I want to change the image just a bit and speak of a rope composed of many strands. No one strand is the rope or can do the work of the rope, and there is no unseen center strand that holds all the rest together. Nevertheless, the rope holds. I suggest that Christian morality is this many-stranded rope, insofar as there is no one strand or principle that really makes Christian morality what it is. Now there is something hard to swallow about this. Philosophers and theologians have long looked for a single principle of ethics—duty or law or love or whatever—as if rationality (or monotheism!) depended on it. Yet some contemporary moral philosophers such as Hampshire,⁵ MacIntyre,⁶ Williams,⁷ and Harman⁸ have been teaching us to look instead for morality where (and as) we find it rather than seek the elusive single principle. In that counsel consider the following picture.

I. The Strands Unlaid

In this account there will be no sharp distinguishing of the ethical from the nonethical, of the moral from the amoral. Human life is characteristically, perhaps inextricably, morally involved.⁹ Christian life is no exception to this rule. We are involved, first, via our organic immersion in the environment, an immersion to which our reaction is emotional before it is rational. We are pleased (or pained), attracted (or repelled), delighted (or horrified). Behavioral psychology trades on these facts and purports to offer a complete account of behavior. Analytical psychology trades on them also and offers a more imaginative if less confirmable account. Ethics has not begun to manage the material offered in the psychoanalytic account; theology has tended either to ignore or to reject it or to incorporate psychoanalysis as a substitute theology (Dionysian motif in theology). These alternatives are not satisfactory; in the first strand both comprehension of the psychological revolution and its significance for our moral behavior and recognition of the more general fact of our organic grounding in the world require full theological undergirding.

Organisms react to their environment; this is the basic fact of strand 1. Happily for organisms, this mode of delight generally prevails over other reactions. We (and here we includes all us organisms, from viruses to Augustine of Hippo to Doctor Francis Crick) cling to the environment, so far as it is hospitable, from mother’s nipple to our own front yards to the partner in sex to the vast ocean sea—and to God so far as we apprehend God. Put more abstractly, we cling to life or at least to our own life. Virus, infant, and lover cling to mother’s nipple in different ways, but there is a discernible continuity—we might speak, therefore, of the viruses’ delight, the infant’s delight, and the lover’s delight. What is wanted is merely to see that the mode of life in which we humans interact with an environment that is other than ourselves has such a claim upon us that it is perilous to disregard it in our moral reckonings. We yearn for these delights (and shrink from these horrors) in the rhythms of a gut ethic (to be fancy, a splanchnic ethic) that is ours while life lasts. No one need be told to delight in the delightful, but moral theology may need to remind itself that we must so delight; and, in seasons when the moralities of church and of society have seemingly lost their way, the gut morality may seem all that remains—as is evidenced by the way popular psychology affords moral guidance to today’s middle-educated church members.

In sum, the splanchnic strand centers upon the organic and its reactive nature.* Organisms finding value in this reaction, delighting in objects of delight, are already moral in some degree; there is a significant continuity between the delight of the amoeba in its food and the delight of the saint in the beatific vision. The Song of Songs, interpreted both literally and allegorically, is the text. Love is eros, and (pace Nygren) the Christian ethic incorporates this eros in its full range, from Freudian primary process to the Platonic quest for the Form of the Good.

Beside this strand, Christian ethics characteristically lays another. Let us call it corporate ethics, or for parallelism somatic or body ethics, meaning not the bodies of individuals but the social or corporate body—in Christianity, the body of Christ. Individual organisms may kill, copulate, stay near, or go away, and do all these things in accord with feeling-tones of delight, sympathy, revulsion, even rage. But (a grammatical point, not an empirical one) only social organisms can engage in practices¹⁰ such as being married, fighting a duel, incurring a debt, speaking a language, or offering a sacrifice, practices for which there can be specified a set of constitutive rules.¹¹ Such practices afford an arena to the moral life; that is, they provide the occasion for moral blame and praise, both of performances within a practice ("Was he a courageous duelist?) and in our judgment that a given practice as such fits or does not fit the practical network or form of life of which it purports to be a part (it is unchristian to duel"). Such judgments are moral as surely as are judgments of the goods in which we delight under strand 1, yet they cannot be reduced to strand 1 judgments (though significant philosophies have disputed this claim) without neglecting at least a part of their value in the world in which they arise—the world constituted by the practices themselves. For the rightness or wrongness of an act within a practice, or the fitting or unfitting role of a practice in its traditional form of life, is a different kind of judgment than the attractions and repulsions of our organic eros can yield. So we have here a second strand.*

The somatic strand centers upon a human community with its given forms of social life. Here rightness (of actions) has the central function strand 1 gave to goodness (of objects), and the good person is one whose character displays the virtues that make for such right action. Correspondingly, love takes the form of loyalty and trust and is called chesed (pledged love, loving-kindness). Delight can now have a second-order incarnation: the dweller in the somatic strand can delight not only in the beloved but also in the structure of marriage and the strategy of its fulfillment (His delight is in the law of the Lord); he can be horrified not only by the sight of blood, but by the sight of injustice. God appears in strand 2 not merely as the adorable Self or sublime Form of strand 1, but as the covenant Friend, the holy Commander, the jealous Husband, the brooding Hen, the suffering Servant. This strand more clearly than the splanchnic requires the narrative form for its exposition. So the demand to love, exemplified by God’s own self-giving love, issues an agapaic self-sacrifice, in living out the story of the cross. Accordingly, there now appear the communal virtues we so frequently demarcate as Christian—patience, meekness, faithfulness.

To distinguish the first two strands should make it easy for Christian readers to anticipate the shape of the third. There is in Christian morality not only the inner gravity that draws us to the perceived good (strand 1) and the communal authority that links us to the shared right (strand 2), but a directive from outside our perceptions and our alliances, a moral authority that creates or recreates in the name of the transcendent future. I call this the anastatic strand, strand 3.

The anastatic is the revelatory, venturesome, morally creative strand. Taken alone, it has produced Christian deviations ranging from ancient gnosticism to modern antinomianism. Taken in connection with the others, it turns its power back into the splanchnic and somatic strands, infusing them with freedom and wholeness. Yet it is logically distinguishable from both, a distinction witnessed by the strange eschatological language of the New Testament and by the freedom of God’s electing love in the Old.¹² Love in this strand is koinonic, transforming the eros of strand 1 and the friendship of strand 2 into a present participation in the power of the future; here the image of God is—the risen Christ.

If this threefold analysis is correct, it ought not to seem an imposition upon everyday Christian moral language, but ought (like a suitable grammar) to elucidate that very language. A preliminary test is afforded by recalling the problem about applying good to God. In some recent philosophers, God is good is seen as a howler, for how can God be good and the author of goodness? Does not the latter claim evacuate the former?¹³ If the grammar of good, however, belongs to the strands themselves, such a claim cannot be understood apart from them. In splanchnic terms, God’s goodness is a beauty perceived both indirectly (in the beauty of all that is) and directly (in the divine beauty inferred by or revealed to attentive beholders). In the somatic strand, God’s goodness is a fidelity whose meaning is best compared to the meaning of the covenant fidelity of God’s people; God is the perfect member of his own community. In the anastatic, God’s goodness is that which irrupts from beyond all human calculations—the resurrection of Christ. So good in strand 3 is related to good in strand 2 as healthy in healthy climate and healthy people—a relationship that gives sense to the psalmist (cf. Pss 23:6; 27:13) who hopes in the goodness of God. But if these points are taken seriously, Williams’ objection cannot stand, for we cannot say in which of these senses he means the term.

At this point we could seek the formal similarities between these strands of Christian ethics and the features of a universal morality. Even to mention this possibility is to recall the fact of human moral diversity, a diversity exemplified by the conflicting desires and urges of strand 1 as well as by the variety of forms of human moral community conceivable under strand 2. Can the diversity be shown as variations on universal themes?¹⁴ Before offering too hasty an answer, we do well to investigate more clearly the shape of these strands or else our generalizations may be distortions. For a Christian theology, this demands exploring their biblical setting, and the next section will attempt this.*

II. The Strands Relaid

It is important to remember the cultural and moral pluriformity that also lie behind and within the biblical narratives. Consider the evidence for this in the story of the testing of Abraham—the Akedah (Gen 22).¹⁵ Many currents flow in the story, currents we may suppose Abraham internalized at least as fully as do modern pluralists. All the more will the story illustrate for us the presence of all three strands.

Nothing, to be sure, is said about the feelings, gut or other, of the patriarch as he ascends the mountain with his son, his only son. Yet the pathos of the story depends upon this mute presence of feeling. His servants and his saddle-ass are ominously left to the rear. He carries in his own hand fire—and a knife. Isaac his son follows, carrying split firewood. What goes on? Abraham is going to kill his son! Surely gut morality will cry out within him, Stop! It is horrible to kill one’s son, one’s only son! But the march is not stopped, and we may remember that in the psychic depths there is another voice, the voice of paternal jealousy, oedipal rage, which cries out in unconscious delight, Go. It is delightful, virile to kill one’s son, one’s only son!

In fact neither voice is sufficient, though both may be necessary, to tell us what goes on. For Abraham’s purpose is not merely to kill, but truly to sacrifice his son. And for sacrifice the conceptuality of strand 1 is no longer adequate. For now we must reckon with a human culture, one in which a practice, such as the practice of sacrifice, can occur, and without which the very notion of sacrifice makes no sense. And indeed we must reckon not with a single culture, but with a complex of cultures—for Abraham was an emigrant and an immigrant, a transcultural figure par excellence. So the point of the story as it was first told may have been this: we Hebrews have a sacrificial practice, but our God does not require the sacrifice of a child.

Abraham would finally not sacrifice Isaac his son, not because he lacked in fidelity—or Isaac in obedience—but because God will provide himself with a young beast for a sacrifice (v. 8 NEB). So the solution to the strand 1 dilemma, to kill or not to kill (a dilemma focused by the strand 2 practice of Israel’s child-sacrificing neighbors), comes not from strand 1 but from a revision of strand 2 practice: God will provide. And in the story, God does. Strand 3 provides the revision.

Kierkegaard, in his pseudonymous moral-theological reflection on the story seems to say that the theological point is just this.¹⁶ God can command anything, kill your son, whatever, and mere ethical considerations don’t, shouldn’t, matter to faith. Faith is taking God’s orders, period. What is right about this is that as the story stands in the present text, Abraham’s obedience to God’s command is made the final point. The story ends, not at its first terminus in verse 14 (the LORD will provide), but with the angel of Yahweh calling a second time (15) to single out Abraham’s obedience as the feature that is to be rewarded. Concluded in this way, the whole story becomes a commentary on 1 Samuel 15:22: To obey is better than sacrifice. But this won’t help those who would distinguish Abraham’s obedience from morality (a teleological suspension of the ethical), because obeying is itself a moral practice, perhaps morally baffling in strand 1 terms, but perfectly at home as a practice alongside other practices in strand 2.¹⁷

This leads to the question whether obedience (and the commands that are to be obeyed) is in fact, and even necessarily, the central or allsufficient practice, the sum of Christian morality—or even the whole of biblical strand 2. Some have held this view, and the treating of law as central to biblical or to Old Testament ethics seems to lead to this position. But I would grant an important place to law in Old Testament and New,* and also that obeying God is a proper biblical moral practice, without granting that it follows that biblical or Christian ethics is typically an ethics of command-and-obedience.

There are two reasons why it is not: one logical, the other exegetical; but the two are not independent. As we have seen, it makes no sense to define moral goodness as obedience to God and then to claim that God is (in that sense) good (For whom does God obey?). But if it be said that we learn morality by obeying God, who is (in some other sense) good, then obedience need not be the all-sufficient moral practice (though it might be an indispensable element of this morality), and our question about what biblical morality itself is remains open. Further, some have cogently argued that for any command to be moral, and not just a demand such as carry an extra sock around with you, a moral practice must be presupposed.¹⁸ And in the Bible, at least, obedience to God cannot be understood as such a practice independent of other moral practices. So we have double reason to suspect the claim that biblical morality simply equals obedience.

This brings me to the exegetical point, which is that the biblical community (the community or communities to whom the books are addressed and among whom the books appear) is a community of structured interrelations in which God has a member’s role. God belongs to the biblical community. Not as others do, but as God does—hence the quotation marks around member and belongs. Nevertheless, belongs, so that prayers to God can be appeals to remember his pledged love (chesed), just as one who has entered into the moral practice of promising, or advising, or buying and owning, might be enjoined to carry out the action that one’s role within that practice requires: Keep your promise, and so forth.

I believe (to expand the exegetical point a little further) that this is the way in which the Ten Commandments, and more generally the law laid down in both Testaments, is to be understood from the moral point of view. The commandments are commandments, all right, second-person singular imperative, thou shalt not. Their moral status, however, depends upon the existence of community practices: thus there is a practice of family child rearing, so the fifth (fourth) commandment to honor parents has a point; there is a practice of ownership, so the sixth (fifth) commandment has a point; there is a practice of marriage, so the seventh (sixth) commandment has a point; and so on. Without the existence (I do not say acceptance, for that would exaggerate the voluntary aspect that is nevertheless significant) of the practice, the hearers of the Ten Words could not have known what was being forbidden. So also with the first commandment: the writers or editors who juxtaposed them would have us see that apart from the covenant (cf. practice) whose compacting is recorded in Exodus 19, the warning (20:3) (cf. command) against betrayal of God, this God, who brought you (singular) out of the land of Egypt (20:2), would make no sense. So the first force of the commandments is to remind hearers of the practice and to epitomize the role of the practice in the common life. (Jews have known better than Christians that the commandments stand for the entire form of life and are not to be abstracted from it as independent rules.)*

While the existence of a practice gives a particular shape to the moral life—gives, so to speak, the coin of moral exchange—its existence does not as such tell what to make of that practice. Both a nation of philanthropists and a nation of thieves will have the practice of ownership. So the law not only signals the practices that are to prevail, but gives a direction to life under these practices.¹⁹

So there is for strand 2 a basic fact, behind which there can be no further moral appeal because this fact is the constituting of the community in which the characteristic strand 2 practices can alone appear. God sets life straight through this people in history, starting here. It is from the Jews that salvation comes, says the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel (John 4:22). Now we may want to ask, is the constitutive act itself moral, then? But how do we mean that question? We cannot mean it in the ordinary strand 2 sense of inquiring how this practice coheres with the other practices of the community, for we are inquiring about the constitution of all the practices. The constitution, the election, the birth of the relationship, is placed by biblical writers at Sinai (Exod 19 JE*); it is also placed back at the calling of the first forefather, Abraham (Gen 12 JE), and by another tradition at the time of Noah (Gen 6:18; 9:8ff. P). But in every case, these traditions seem at pains to tell us that the constitution was not an evolutionary development within an existing social arrangement. (If today’s scholars judge otherwise they are theologically revisionist.) Can we then look back to strand 1 and suppose that God chose Israel because Israel delighted God? But this is uniformly denied by biblical writers. For example, when the prophets recall the constitutive clay, they seem to lose their rhetorical gifts. Israel in Egypt was a child (Hos 11:1)—but not a comely or delightful or attractive child. Abraham was one man (Ezek 33:24)—but not a wise or virtuous or striking man. The object of election was not even especially or lusciously wicked! It is after the election that all such traits appear.

So it seems that we have here the clue to a third strand of morality, one that leaps over the bounds of communities and their moralities. Here is a moral creativity to match the natural creativity that (by Christian conviction) underlies strand 1. Indeed there is biblical evidence of such a third strand, one that addresses that which is dead as though it were alive and brings the dead to life. But to see this fully we must consider yet another sort of limitation within strand 2.

We have seen that it is misleading to treat the forms of life that are reflected in Old Testament law as if their morality were essentially command plus obedience. For while it was possible in the New Testament as in the Old to affirm the law as holy, just, and good (the words, by the way, are from Paul, that alleged rejecter of the law), and while Jesus could be represented (in Matthew) as a new lawgiver, a second Moses, these facts must be understood in a context that saw the Christian movement as a way, in our terms as a congruent set of practices in community (see Acts 2:42). These practices are rooted in the Jewishness that formed their matrix, but are best represented in the way or life story of Jesus—a way that is as normative for Paul as for the synoptic evangelists, and which Paul can refer to as the word of the cross (1 Cor 1:18), rhapsodize as the more excellent way (1 Cor 13), and exemplify by his own mission to the Gentiles.

Now Paul, as the theorist of agape, was also the pioneer in exploring the defect of agape, which is the very limitation of biblical strand 2 now to be considered. Unfortunately for subsequent Christian relations with the Old Testament and with contemporary Judaism, Paul worked this out in terms of the deficiency of law. The commandment which should have led to life proved in my experience to lead to death, even though the law itself is holy (cf. Rom 7:10-12). Paul had a right to express this paradox in terms of law: after all, he was a birthright Jew. Perhaps Gentile Christians had better express the paradox in terms of agape, which according to Paul epitomizes the law (see Gal 5:14). Anyway, Christian consciousness discovers just this self-giving love is relentlessly followed by pride in that very self-giving; self-righteousness is the mode in which the righteousness of the way of the cross again and again swells and bursts; no humility is likelier to stumble and fall than utter humility; sin finds its opportunity in holiness (see Rom 7:11-12). So say the saints from Augustine on, and many of them have shown us they know whereof they speak.

Or if we shift focus from the individual to the culture, similar phenomena appear. European nations may or may not have imbibed the Way of Jesus of Nazareth, but crusades to the east, pogroms in the ghettos, and national world missions to the distant underprivileged suggest an extraordinary degree of pride veiled by and springing from religious motives. (Among these missions our own recent national adventure in Southeast Asia found its historic place.) Thomas J. J. Altizer names this phenomenon in history the appearance of Faustian man, and calls for its remedy by a turn to the self-annihilating religions of the East.

Paul found a different remedy. In Christ Jesus the life-giving law of the Spirit has set you free from the law of sin and death (Rom 8:2). In present terms, the defects of somatic morality are cured, not by more of the same, but by an in-breaking of a different kind, which transforms without destroying the other: this is the anastatic or resurrection morality. Strand 2 cries out, both in the theoretical way mentioned above, and in the experiential way just mentioned, for such an in-breaking. The limitation of strand 2 cannot be met by a mere return to strand 1, but must be met by the appearance of quite a different strand.

What is the biblical form of this strand? It does not separate Christianity from the Old Testament, for strand 3 is already present in the Old Testament. As we saw above, Israel’s covenant is based upon an original constituting act by God, an act that is not obligated by the covenant because it is itself the establishing of the covenant. Hebrew Scripture traced this precovenantal divine goodness backward to the primal meeting of God with forefather Abraham and before, and in eschatological vision projected it forward to encompass all nations. The nations would not be treated de novo as parallel cases to the selection of Abraham’s offspring; rather all nations (as we might say, all history) would by this strand be brought into connection with the Abrahamic blessing (Isaiah 60–66). In Christian perspective, the constitutive act that brought the nations (prospectively) and the disciples (actively) within the form of life to which law and prophets pointed and that Jesus had lived out to the full (fulfilled) was the resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the basic fact of strand 3. This fact could not be merely the repentance and enlightenment of the apostles, or merely the dynamic formation of the Church to carry out Jesus’ mission. Rather the resurrection was the divine free action that made all these other events possible (see Rom l:3-4 NEB).

At this third level (to use the New English Bible’s term), it becomes difficult for outsiders, and for the outsider in ourselves, to accept the schematism. Is there a strand 3 in the ethical life of Christians, or do we here slip into empty myth, tomfoolery, and a fresh excuse for self-righteousness? Or is this strand too distinctive even to be called a strand? The questions show we need more analysis. I think we can see that while, taken by itself, strand 3 leads to gnosticism and (in the bad sense) enthusiasm, taken in connection with 2 it is the very life of Christian ethics, even tying 2 properly back to 1 again.

Let me begin with that last point. We have seen the resurrection as a constitutive event for community, the kind of divine electing event that appeared earlier in the Exodus 19 story (on eagle’s wings). But in the event, the community that the resurrection brought into being was liberated from some constraints civilization lays upon the primal delights that typify strand 1. Thus the primitive Christians (and from time to time their successors) display psychic and bodily phenomena of an unusual order: there are visions, ecstatic utterances, miracles of healing and release, and a sense of community that runs bone deep, deeper even than the orderly moral practices of the somatic ethic.

This can be connected with what I take to be the characteristic term for community in strand 3, not ecclesia (purposeful assembly) but koinonia, shared fellowship. This sharing is a participation first of all in God²⁰ perceived as present and powerful, that is, in God and Spirit. "The koinonia of the Holy Spirit be with you all" (2 Cor 13:14). So the participation with one another is not mere community of beliefs and goals (our modern sense of society), nor mere membership in a religious body displaying a determinate structure, practices, functions, and offices (our modern sense of church); rather it is a participating mutual belonging, lending itself more to organic and psychic metaphors than to social and legal ones.

Now to the extent that the resurrection gave rise to such koinonic ways of being together, we see that it did not function as a mere prima causa of Christian existence (which as we saw was the minimal demand from strand 2) but also served as creator and sustainer of a necessary ongoing element of biblical morality. It was just this gracious element or strand that could preserve the way of the law from legalism and the way of the cross from self-righteousness.

In this sense the anastatic strand has a continuing license to criticize the ethic of chesed and agape. This is the line taken by the Fourth Gospel, where Jesus calls his followers friends, and authorizes for them a sharing of the Spirit by which they will do greater works than he had done (cf. John 14:12; 15:15; 20:22). Seen in this way, the anastatic strand is a summons to adventure—so its characteristic failures or sins are not the blindness or twisted vision of gut ethic, nor the pride and rebellion that are sins against the somatic community, but rather a faintheartedness in the presence of the contingent at one end of the moral spectrum or a recklessness and fanaticism at the other that are the typical perversions of adventure.*

Another way to make this last point is to see that the venture to which we are called by the resurrection is no different from that venture that Jesus Christ undertook in his actual life.²¹ We should not understand the resurrection as an ethical supplement to the life of Jesus, but as God’s affirmation of the authority of that life. Times change; the context in which the Way of the Son of Man must appear changes, too; but it is still that way that must appear. We know that it is this strand 2 that is legitimate, for it is this Jesus who arose from the realm of death. So strand 2 requires strand 3 for its constitution and for its fulfillment, but 3 requires 2 as its sphere, while both imply (and 3 affirms) 1 as their organic base. And what is required, Scripture displays. If we ask for direct evidence in the New Testament of the third strand, we find it unmistakably in such passages as Romans 8 or 1 Corinthians 15 or the Sermon on the Mount, but it is really present throughout, inasmuch as the entire New Testament is written from the perspective of the resurrection and invested with eschatological language, the characteristic language of strand 3. So this strand does not supersede 2 any more than 2 supersedes 1—rather each provides a way of taking the other strands, a style of approach to the whole. Thus the resurrection of Christ does not liberate us from the way of the cross; it liberates us to become disciples of the cross.*

At least, this is the way matters appear when seen from within. But what about their appearance to non-Christian outsiders—to a Jew of Tarsus or to Dionysus and Damaris of Athens or to Theophilus of Rome, or to a twentieth-century cultured or cultureless despiser of this way, not to omit ourselves so far as we have divided loyalties and double vision? I said above that according to the prophets it was not the beauty of Israel that attracted her divine lover. No strand 1 delight is the basis of Israel’s election. But the delightfulness of the covenanted way, the way of the law (his delight is in the law of the Lord [Ps 1:2]), the very beauty of the way of agape upon this earth, might indeed offer strand 1 reasons for some outsider to enter Israel; similarly, the way of the early Christians might intrigue as well as offend the Tarsus Pharisee. As it turned out, it was the truth of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, a strand 3 consideration, that finally overcame Paul, and it was that resurrection with which he confronted his Gentile Dionysuses and Damarises (see Acts 17; cf. 1 Cor 15). Yet the longer missionary experience showed that strategy not to be sufficient, indispensable though it was.²² So it was the context of strand 2 that became the focus of Paul’s mission to the Gentiles (we preach Christ crucified [1 Cor 1:23]) and, as the canonical Gospels show, the focus of gospel proclamation in the whole movement. That this was a perilous choice for early Christianity is demonstrated by the disheartening lapses into legalism and orthodox rigidity in the postapostolic period. But every historic option carries (and partly conceals) its own risks.

To summarize the theoretical point, biblical strand 2 receives its theological legitimation or justification from the divine action celebrated in strand 3; but from the standpoint of an outsider, considerations internal to 2 and 3 cannot seem self-authenticating. However, this does not defeat the gospel as good news to outsiders (hard perspectivism is not true),²³ for they may be attracted by an intrinsic beauty in strands 2 and 3 when considered from some strand 1 perspective, or when seen from the perspective of some alternative strand 2, such as the morality of classical antiquity.†

III. Ethics Strand by Strand?

A difficulty felt by anyone who has so far attended the argument may be a sense of the distance between the moral-theological task here described and the occupation of many recent ethicists with the search for principles (and metaprinciples), or perhaps with the application of these to concrete moral problems in the areas of social order, economics, and so on. I hope partly to close that gap in this section, but two concessions must be made to the majority at the outset. The first is that our Enlightenment heritage of moral philosophy has developed in us expectations of a different sort from the picture being sketched here. Consider the role played by Kant. Personally, Kant had been more than a little involved with the story-dominated Christian community—a divinity student, son of pietist parents, grandson of Scottish emigrants. But with an acute sense of the demand of (eighteenth-century) modernity, Kant abstracted from that community the idea of duty and universalized it into a categorical imperative. (This is, of course, my account of what happened, not Kant’s.) He retained the idea of God as a postulate of the practical reason, yet God was shorn of the familial, timely qualities he possessed in Christian strand 2, while duty was set in stern opposition to all communal and erotic delight. Thus Kantian ethics can be understood in present terms as a sublimation of a pietistic form of strand 2—a sublimation that as distilled may seem ever farther from the living forms from which it arose.

Or consider Bentham. Confronted by the tangle of eighteenth-century common and case law, the young law graduate, possessed of a mind more logical or orderly than typically English, sought a principle that could supplant that tangle and devised the hedonic calculus of pain, pleasure, and utility. From this calculus all law could be constructed afresh. In our terms, this was to propose a revision of the strand 2 of English public life (a strand at least marginally Christian) by the systematic introduction of a device (the calculus) refined from a version of strand 1—largely ignoring the question whether even strand 1 could be so neatly rendered.

Kant and Bentham between them invented modern moral philosophy—or would have, if Hume had not already do so.²⁴ Alike, they began from, but not with, structured institutional human community. Each offered a corrective device—in Kant’s case, duty, abstracted from strand 2; in Bentham’s, pleasure or welfare, abstracted from strand 1. Alike they found a language by which a changing eighteenth-century Europe could act out its discontent with the pre-enlightened order and could forge a newer one. Moral philosophy could thereafter debate which was the correct abstraction, Kantian or utilitarian, and could struggle with the difficulties of analyzing a moral language cut loose at its launching from its moorings in the social and religious order. That is our heritage. So it is no wonder if to us heirs the actual shape of Christian morality seems somehow not to fit our received academic tasks.*

The other concession is equally serious. The typology offered here, like all typologies, is inevitably tendentious; it points in a certain direction; it is therefore neither neutral nor all encompassing. It is employed in this essay to say what strands Christian ethics is composed of, but this description is not neutral but normative; it implies a view of what can and cannot be Christian.²⁵ For example, no really comfortable place is provided for modern existentialist ethics. The reason is straightforward: some apparent counterexamples notwithstanding, existentialism cannot harmonize with Christianity as the latter is understood here. This does not mean that Christian theology cannot splice insights from Camus or Heidegger into its own moral strands; it does mean that there is no distinct existentialist strand that must for completeness’ sake be present in a Christian account. The independence of existentialism may be due to its own history of abstracting from (and inverting of) Christian themes; in any case it is an independence modern existentialism itself would strongly insist upon.

So the three strands are not all encompassing. This should warn us against the theological imperialism that claimed in a nineteenth-century version that he who knows this religion knows all religion (Harnack), or in a twentieth-century version that good people everywhere were anonymous Christians (Rahner). Of course we are still free to seek similarities between Christian and other moralities, so analogies to our three strands may appear and reappear. Every organism displays some form of the delights and aversions of strand 1, though not necessarily the same ones; every community, and not just Christian ones, has some form of strand 2 commonality; and while the name "anastatic" may not be appropriate elsewhere (there is only one resurrection of Jesus Christ), certainly others may have moral structures of release and revision analogous to those of Christian strand 3.

This brings vividly to the fore the dilemmas for ethics arising from pluralism and reminds us of H. R. Niebuhr, whose typology in Christ and Culture explored these dilemmas.²⁶ It can be successfully argued that Niebuhr’s typology is deficient. In brief, the argument is that he systematically allowed in Christian ethics an authoritative realm independent of Christ and over against Christ, and thus caricatured every position save the one toward which he finally tilts, in which that original allowance is overcome.²⁷ But it cannot be denied that he correctly points toward a central problem, the confusion of moralities Christians find both around and within themselves. Are we members of the body of Christ? We are also citizens or subjects of Caesar’s state—and belong to the UAW or Rotary. So a crucial test of any Christian ethic will be its rendition of the beauty, rightness, and truth of Christianity (to use the jargon, its employment of splanchnic, somatic, and anastatic strands) so as to take full account of the tensions of pluralism.²⁸ In this connection it is valuable to see what other moralities the world contains and to learn if we can how they are like and unlike our own, but Christian ethicists are under no constraint to furnish the world with a suitably Christ-less morality!²⁹

A proper typology of Christian morals ought not merely help us to see how each of us differs from our opposite number who works across the theological street, but also to see how we are engaged upon related tasks in our several ways. While Christian ethics should display and relate all three strands, for good reasons different ethicists begin with or secure their work to different strands. This can be illustrated from the work of a variety of contemporary theological ethicists. It is easy to find dismal examples of work that not only begins in but confines itself to one strand—some psychotheologians in strand 1, some legalists old and new in strand 2, some religious situationists in strand 3. But I leave that pejorative exercise to kinder hands than my own.*

Conclusion

Contemporary theologians are at work in ethics in ways that can be brought into sharp focus by means of the splanchnic/somatic/anastatic typology. Work undertaken from different strands is not necessarily competitive; different undertakings may be parts of a larger whole—the strands make one rope. So comparison of the worth of different projects may be otiose. Nevertheless, we want some standard by which work can be measured. The image of balance or proportion comes to mind but must be rejected. What would it mean in Christian terms to overemphasize the cross of Christ, or to exaggerate the gospel of the resurrection of the Son of Man? Is not our theological task rather to display the cross in such a way that the denial of the resurrection becomes a denial of the cross as well? So it must be with these three strands of Christian ethics. Begin where one will, if one displays that strand properly, it should be seen to intertwine with the others. It is the rope, not the strands, that can do the work. I sought to show (Strands Unlaid) how this was true of the biblical ethic. That contemporary Christian moral theology might be judged best, then, which laid open any strand in a way that most clearly showed its connection with and need for the other strands.

To end with this judgment might make the entire essay seem trivially scholastic. If, however, moral theology must itself be morally judged, then we can put the matter differently: if that moral theology is best that most faithfully shows the present-day people of this Way (Acts 19:23, etc.) how the shape of our lives, the story of our communities, and the form of our gospel reflect or resist, reflect and resist the gospel of the risen Christ, the story he offers us, the life he gives, then our investigations of freedom, love, obligation, character, and the like, all our strategies regarding violence and the state, the relations of the sexes and of the races, the ways we die and the way we live—all must, for Christ’s sake, come under his judgment. Showing the ways in which this is so is the end of Christian moral theology and the end of this sketch of three strands.

---

* Terrence W. Tilley, The Catholicity of a baptist Theologian, Perspectives in Religious Studies 40, no. 1 (2013): 304.

¹ I am grateful to the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, for the 1977 sabbatical in which most of the work on this paper was accomplished, and to the University of Notre Dame for providing an academic home away from home for that time. I am particularly grateful to my students and colleagues for their challenge and support. Special thanks are due to Stanley Hauerwas, John Cobb, John Yoder, Axel Steuer, Edward Malloy, Elliot Dorff, Robert Cunningham, Martin Krieger, James M. Smith, LeRoy Moore, Terrence Tilley, Richard Bondi, Joseph Blenkinsopp, Charles Primus, John Bogart, and David Burrell, and as so often to my wife Marie. Bobbi Thompson, Steve Sheets, and Sonja Ridenour gave valued technical assistance.

² Gilbert Harman, preface to The Nature of Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (New York: Oxford University, 1977).

³ James Wm. McClendon, Jr., and James M. Smith, Understanding Religious Convictions (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975).

⁴ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations [Philosophische Untersuchungen], trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), sec. 67.

⁵ Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Pessimism, New York Review of Books, January 25, 1973, 26–33.

⁶ Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1966); Alasdair MacIntyre, Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy (New York: Schocken Books, 1971).

⁷ Bernard Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

⁸ Harman, The Nature of Morality.

⁹ This will seem mistaken, even wrongheaded, to Kantians and their kin, but is vigorously defended by the more recent moral philosophers mentioned above. See, for example, The Amoralist, in Williams, Morality, 1–12, where he argues that to be morally uninvolved and human is harder to bring off than most folk imagine. Another way of putting my point to Kantians is to say, These philosophers and the present essay are proposing an analogical stretch in the words ‘moral’ and ‘ethical’ (from your use of them). Go along with us awhile and see if it is worthwhile. If not, your way will still be available.

* In this essay, McClendon refers to strand 1 as the splanchnic strand, of or relating to the viscera or internal organs; strand 2 is named the somatic strand. In Ethics, McClendon abandons splanchnic terminology, instead calling strand 1 the body or organic strand; strand 2 is renamed simply the social strand. See James Wm. McClendon, Jr., Ethics: Systematic Theology, Volume 1, rev. ed. (Nashville: Abingdon, [1996] 2002).

¹⁰ D. Z. Phillips and H. O. Mounce, Moral Practices (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969).

¹¹ John Searle, Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 33–36.

* On McClendon’s own (later) reflections on the concept of a practice, see part 4 of this volume; McClendon also connects strands 1 and 2 via the body of Christ in The Politics of Forgiveness (§19), and refers to the world-constituting nature of practices in Social Ethics for Radical Christians (§14), both in volume 1. All are also recurrent themes in