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Systematic Theology, Vol. 2: Doctrine
Christian doctrine, McClendon tells us, is no laundry list of propositions to be believed, but is rather an essential practice of the church. Doctrines are those shared convictions which the church must teach and live out if it is to be the church. The author rejects the prevailing assumptions stemming from the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and redefines theology as a discipline within the context of particular religious beliefs and practices of concrete believing communities. McClendon ties the reading of Scripture to the community's understanding of itself and its own mission.
- GenresTheology
540 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2010
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December 12, 2023
McClendon is a creative theologian and you see it come to the forefront in this book. This is shown in his use of picture theory of Wittgenstein for the scenes in revelation and instead of two natures, he goes for two stories of humanity and God converging in Christ. Both of these views were illuminating, and gave fresh insights on the topic of eschatology and christology. I have found myself often agreeing with McClendon, he loses me a bit in his low regard of tradition and his low regard of penal substitution.
July 3, 2021
I just finished "Doctrine: Systematic Theology, Volume Two," by James Wm. McClendon, jr.
Just to note: Mcclendon was one of the pioneers of narrative theology and much of his work is approached from this perspective.
He begins with the question "what must a church teach of she is to be the church here and now?" I appreciate the "here and now" part because there are many true things she could teach but revelant true things are more important usually.
His ST proper begins -- like Thomas Finger -- at the end: eschatology. The longer I think about this, our proper focus to life, the more I agree with this approach. Not for a view of how we will be in eternity, but rather our view now of the Kingdom and what that means for us now. A correct view of the Kingdom points to eternity and at the same time it points to now. The Kingdom begins for us when we enter it, when we become an apprentice of Jesus, and it never ends. It, for us, is slightly interrupted by death, when we rejoin it it will be fully a manifested reign of God.
He then goes into salvation and sin. The connection here has to be reframed to see how it being placed after eschatology is actually a glove fit. If eschatology is the manifest reign of God then salvation has to be seen as ones submission to God, ones entry into this Kingdom or nation. To put it crudely, one walks to the dart board seeing the goal of the throw before the throw is made.
In dealing with the Christian life I like how he list as the fourth and final step "soaring" (sanctification) which has often been called perfect love (Wesley), the second blessing (Keswick), speaking in tongues (some but not all Charismatic circles [other Charismatics place tongues as a necessary component of the conversation experience]). The main part here is accepting that this can and does often look different, but however it looks go for it and fall as deeply in love with Jesus as possible; and live like it.
He then moves to creation, which should not be seen antithetical to eschatology. The last things are the fulfillment of the first things. Or, I believe, in the eschaton we can say "we were made (created) for this." The eschaton is not Gods eraser of creation, rather the eschaton is the completion of the picture that began at creation. He seems to be one to "push" the immenance of God, which I agree with. When we speak about only the transcendence of God, for the most part, we are speaking only from speculation. But Emmanuel, God with us, is someone I can speak to. And the main point of creation is to be Gods people with God, under the rule of God, in the Kingdom of God. This is how creation, via the Kingdom, points to the Kingdom in eschatology.
I'm glad to see the writer deny divine impassablity. He does so on the grounds that a loving, suffering God must feel pain: "[N]ot only can Christians believe in a passionate and suffering Deity; they must do so. Must, if they are to be truly Christian in thought as well as life," p 171.
Next is Christology, specifically he begins with the atonement. He begins by quoting Gustaf Aulen, I think I know where he is going. I guess my question at this point would be if he holds to Christus Victor how can he have such a low view of the personification of evil? That's my guess at least because of him stating that the powers are more socially constructed (economical etc.) Evils rather than the demonic as distinct persons.
Interestingly, while going over the ancient concept of Christus Victor and ransom he states how the post Constantinian church no longer "saw" the state as the power of evil it is and therefore began to move away from the need to be ransomed. Also, when Aulen's Christus Victor book, published just before the rise of Hitler (1931) this model of the atonement once more resonated with people who looked to the state and saw evil. So the context drove the applicability of the doctrine.
He covers Aulen's book followed by Anselm's Cur Deus Homo and then Abelard's model of subjective Moral influence view, to lay out roughly the three main models of atonement (with a wink and a nod at Grotius' moral governmental model).
He did good, simplistic work going through the historical theology of the atonement. His language was well broken down: Christus Victor had a devil-ward thrust / penal substitution had a God-ward thrust. He seemed to even make understandable objective and subjective thrusts of the different models (which took me a few books to really get).
He runs down a bit of a different path than the above (Christus Victor, satisfaction and moral influence; not to mention Recapitulation of the Orthodox which he covers a bit of) by going back to the gospels and interpreting via narrative. He seems to also lean on the Moltmann (The Crucified God) model of identification.
One quote which I agree with is: "None [models] are ours, since the setting has changed--and all are ours for the light they shed on the one story of Jesus and God," p 232. I fully agree so far. If we lock onto a model so hard that we say "this is that," the sum total of the good news of Jesus, we automatically exclude all others. In honesty a model is an arrow that points up to a reality which surpasses language. I believe that such is true with the atonement. We should be mindful of our audience so that when we tell the good news we are prepared to pick and choose which model would most resonate with that person -- which "arrow" would most appeal to them. This would take a bit of discernment. For instance, would a biker who may have had a negative past experience with the judicial system have a negative or positive response to penal substitution? It depends on the person. What about a former soldier? Maybe Christus Victor; maybe they had a very negative experience in battle and that would be the wrong model to express such a great reality. Most importantly, this discernment means you have a relationship with the person if at all possible so that you can make sure your "arrow" is the correct one.
He runs through the passion narrative style leaning heavily upon (he would hate my applying a model toward his narrative theology of atonement) sacrifice. He also ends by stating that the aforementioned models have baggage. Specifically Christus Victor and the demonic. So I was correct to see this tension in him. He seems to believe that a model working from Anselm's satisfaction model creates tension in its God-ward vector. Me speaking, I believe this tension is obvious theologically because of the nature of God, and Christologically because I believe it introduces Nestorianism into the crucified Christ, which immediately points back up to another theological issue. Finally his appraisal of moral influence takes issue with the subjective/psychological part of the model -- "Christ died for me so I could be inspired but nothing really [objectively] changed?" Which, when thinking about it, I would imagine that this could be seen as uber-Pelagian.
His next chapter is on the resurrection. I think here he is approaching the person of Christ since he just dealt with the work of Christ, and those two are inseparable.
He says that we must dissect the person of Christ by beginning with the question of "who is the resurrected Jesus Christ today for the church?" It is here [experientially] that we can then work backwards to questions such as the preexistance of the Son. He discards working his Christology from either below or above and at the same time, like a good Anabaptist, discards construction via the creeds. His working from church experience is as close to beginning "from ignorance" as one can get, he believes.
He takes the witness of Christ's presence in the church (however that may look to ones tradition) to be a very real thing. Gladly, when speaking to the resurrection he doesnt take (I hope I am using these terms correct) a cosmic but a historical approach: there really, in history, was a dead Theanthropothic Lord, in a very real grave and he very much was raised from a very real death. Not that this symbolically happened "cosmically," though this historic resurrection had very real cosmic implications. Though if he were questioned I would think he would deny the veracity of the harrowing of hell as per 1 Pt. 3 since he seems to take issue with the perceived dualism that a real Satan would present.
In a footnote to Paul saying that the resurrection has made Christ the very Son of God, the writer denies any form of adoptionist Christology (calling it perverse). That leaves two more levels, roughly, where his Christology may land. This will be interesting because as an Anabaptist he isnt bound by the creeds. Let's see if sans Chalcedon he lands at a Kenotic or a Logos Christology.
Ok, I dont think he lands there. The next section goes over "rival Christologies" starting with Logos and then working through the lengthy historical Christologies and their flaws. My guess is that like the atonement and as is his style he works toward a model using narrative theology.
So he shoots down what seems every school of Christological thought including the historic school which, once demythologized, made Jesus real cool, but not much else; and Kenotic Christology which he really just dismissed in a sentence without speaking to. He ended up settling for a narrative Christology which, it seems, he is going to construct.
In his construction he begins at the Carmen Christi (Ph. 2: 5-11), "...perhaps the oldest Christological reflection in the New Testament...," p 266. He notes that this hymn from circa 30 - 60 ad is a high Christology. Then he opts for a lower Christology. Which seems odd. I would say, at this point, that his is fully a Spirit Christology. He comes back and acknowledges Forsyth's kenotic concept in that the incarnation was truly a self emptying of God but only that He would thus indwelling a person for the redemption of manking (my interpretation). Rather than Jesus was fully God. I believe this begs so many questions, namely who experienced death to atone for you? You afire a form of identification atonement but staying with a Spirit Christology, who do you identify with? More so, who is it that can identify with your suffering?
I get his aversion to the creeds. But that doesnt mean that if they said a banana were yellow he has to say it is a light shade of orange just because this was so said by a post Constantinian church. Or: not everything one says is false just because of who they were. Hitler, for instance, said something true at some time (not Christological though, I'm sure).
I want to insert here that he is very flexible in how context impacts doctrine. Other generations, he says, will have questions and solutions we have yet to think of.
Moving on, he deals with Ecclesiology. Other than saying that Jews are of the same family salvifically, there wasnt much here that was something to write home about.
Following he writes about worship. Remember that this section is on the Spirit and he has already claimed, basically, any freewill / credobaptist faith as falling under a third non Roman and non Protestant tradition called "baptist." He plainly says that Pentecostals are his folk (my translation).
"Worship, to be Christian practice, must be a prayer for Gods rule on earth," p 374.
In speaking about baptism (and for the most part I'm with him untill...) he denies the common use of "symbol" for the weaker use of "sign" in relation to baptism. I believe much modern use of baptism as symbol is using the word symbol in a Tillichian sense. This use is very powerful and I am a bit perplexed that he would place stress on the weaker -- per Tillich; I agree -- sign. Since he wrote this book some 30 years after Tillich's "Dynamics of Faith" I am surprised he hasn't spoken of signs / symbols in respect to Tillich (which seems to be where many others speak from).
In this third section he speaks to the Spirit and specifically His role in the Church and by extension in missions. Nothing ground breaking though his coverage of Pentecostalism was brief but very good, affirming the gifts.
Just to note: Mcclendon was one of the pioneers of narrative theology and much of his work is approached from this perspective.
He begins with the question "what must a church teach of she is to be the church here and now?" I appreciate the "here and now" part because there are many true things she could teach but revelant true things are more important usually.
His ST proper begins -- like Thomas Finger -- at the end: eschatology. The longer I think about this, our proper focus to life, the more I agree with this approach. Not for a view of how we will be in eternity, but rather our view now of the Kingdom and what that means for us now. A correct view of the Kingdom points to eternity and at the same time it points to now. The Kingdom begins for us when we enter it, when we become an apprentice of Jesus, and it never ends. It, for us, is slightly interrupted by death, when we rejoin it it will be fully a manifested reign of God.
He then goes into salvation and sin. The connection here has to be reframed to see how it being placed after eschatology is actually a glove fit. If eschatology is the manifest reign of God then salvation has to be seen as ones submission to God, ones entry into this Kingdom or nation. To put it crudely, one walks to the dart board seeing the goal of the throw before the throw is made.
In dealing with the Christian life I like how he list as the fourth and final step "soaring" (sanctification) which has often been called perfect love (Wesley), the second blessing (Keswick), speaking in tongues (some but not all Charismatic circles [other Charismatics place tongues as a necessary component of the conversation experience]). The main part here is accepting that this can and does often look different, but however it looks go for it and fall as deeply in love with Jesus as possible; and live like it.
He then moves to creation, which should not be seen antithetical to eschatology. The last things are the fulfillment of the first things. Or, I believe, in the eschaton we can say "we were made (created) for this." The eschaton is not Gods eraser of creation, rather the eschaton is the completion of the picture that began at creation. He seems to be one to "push" the immenance of God, which I agree with. When we speak about only the transcendence of God, for the most part, we are speaking only from speculation. But Emmanuel, God with us, is someone I can speak to. And the main point of creation is to be Gods people with God, under the rule of God, in the Kingdom of God. This is how creation, via the Kingdom, points to the Kingdom in eschatology.
I'm glad to see the writer deny divine impassablity. He does so on the grounds that a loving, suffering God must feel pain: "[N]ot only can Christians believe in a passionate and suffering Deity; they must do so. Must, if they are to be truly Christian in thought as well as life," p 171.
Next is Christology, specifically he begins with the atonement. He begins by quoting Gustaf Aulen, I think I know where he is going. I guess my question at this point would be if he holds to Christus Victor how can he have such a low view of the personification of evil? That's my guess at least because of him stating that the powers are more socially constructed (economical etc.) Evils rather than the demonic as distinct persons.
Interestingly, while going over the ancient concept of Christus Victor and ransom he states how the post Constantinian church no longer "saw" the state as the power of evil it is and therefore began to move away from the need to be ransomed. Also, when Aulen's Christus Victor book, published just before the rise of Hitler (1931) this model of the atonement once more resonated with people who looked to the state and saw evil. So the context drove the applicability of the doctrine.
He covers Aulen's book followed by Anselm's Cur Deus Homo and then Abelard's model of subjective Moral influence view, to lay out roughly the three main models of atonement (with a wink and a nod at Grotius' moral governmental model).
He did good, simplistic work going through the historical theology of the atonement. His language was well broken down: Christus Victor had a devil-ward thrust / penal substitution had a God-ward thrust. He seemed to even make understandable objective and subjective thrusts of the different models (which took me a few books to really get).
He runs down a bit of a different path than the above (Christus Victor, satisfaction and moral influence; not to mention Recapitulation of the Orthodox which he covers a bit of) by going back to the gospels and interpreting via narrative. He seems to also lean on the Moltmann (The Crucified God) model of identification.
One quote which I agree with is: "None [models] are ours, since the setting has changed--and all are ours for the light they shed on the one story of Jesus and God," p 232. I fully agree so far. If we lock onto a model so hard that we say "this is that," the sum total of the good news of Jesus, we automatically exclude all others. In honesty a model is an arrow that points up to a reality which surpasses language. I believe that such is true with the atonement. We should be mindful of our audience so that when we tell the good news we are prepared to pick and choose which model would most resonate with that person -- which "arrow" would most appeal to them. This would take a bit of discernment. For instance, would a biker who may have had a negative past experience with the judicial system have a negative or positive response to penal substitution? It depends on the person. What about a former soldier? Maybe Christus Victor; maybe they had a very negative experience in battle and that would be the wrong model to express such a great reality. Most importantly, this discernment means you have a relationship with the person if at all possible so that you can make sure your "arrow" is the correct one.
He runs through the passion narrative style leaning heavily upon (he would hate my applying a model toward his narrative theology of atonement) sacrifice. He also ends by stating that the aforementioned models have baggage. Specifically Christus Victor and the demonic. So I was correct to see this tension in him. He seems to believe that a model working from Anselm's satisfaction model creates tension in its God-ward vector. Me speaking, I believe this tension is obvious theologically because of the nature of God, and Christologically because I believe it introduces Nestorianism into the crucified Christ, which immediately points back up to another theological issue. Finally his appraisal of moral influence takes issue with the subjective/psychological part of the model -- "Christ died for me so I could be inspired but nothing really [objectively] changed?" Which, when thinking about it, I would imagine that this could be seen as uber-Pelagian.
His next chapter is on the resurrection. I think here he is approaching the person of Christ since he just dealt with the work of Christ, and those two are inseparable.
He says that we must dissect the person of Christ by beginning with the question of "who is the resurrected Jesus Christ today for the church?" It is here [experientially] that we can then work backwards to questions such as the preexistance of the Son. He discards working his Christology from either below or above and at the same time, like a good Anabaptist, discards construction via the creeds. His working from church experience is as close to beginning "from ignorance" as one can get, he believes.
He takes the witness of Christ's presence in the church (however that may look to ones tradition) to be a very real thing. Gladly, when speaking to the resurrection he doesnt take (I hope I am using these terms correct) a cosmic but a historical approach: there really, in history, was a dead Theanthropothic Lord, in a very real grave and he very much was raised from a very real death. Not that this symbolically happened "cosmically," though this historic resurrection had very real cosmic implications. Though if he were questioned I would think he would deny the veracity of the harrowing of hell as per 1 Pt. 3 since he seems to take issue with the perceived dualism that a real Satan would present.
In a footnote to Paul saying that the resurrection has made Christ the very Son of God, the writer denies any form of adoptionist Christology (calling it perverse). That leaves two more levels, roughly, where his Christology may land. This will be interesting because as an Anabaptist he isnt bound by the creeds. Let's see if sans Chalcedon he lands at a Kenotic or a Logos Christology.
Ok, I dont think he lands there. The next section goes over "rival Christologies" starting with Logos and then working through the lengthy historical Christologies and their flaws. My guess is that like the atonement and as is his style he works toward a model using narrative theology.
So he shoots down what seems every school of Christological thought including the historic school which, once demythologized, made Jesus real cool, but not much else; and Kenotic Christology which he really just dismissed in a sentence without speaking to. He ended up settling for a narrative Christology which, it seems, he is going to construct.
In his construction he begins at the Carmen Christi (Ph. 2: 5-11), "...perhaps the oldest Christological reflection in the New Testament...," p 266. He notes that this hymn from circa 30 - 60 ad is a high Christology. Then he opts for a lower Christology. Which seems odd. I would say, at this point, that his is fully a Spirit Christology. He comes back and acknowledges Forsyth's kenotic concept in that the incarnation was truly a self emptying of God but only that He would thus indwelling a person for the redemption of manking (my interpretation). Rather than Jesus was fully God. I believe this begs so many questions, namely who experienced death to atone for you? You afire a form of identification atonement but staying with a Spirit Christology, who do you identify with? More so, who is it that can identify with your suffering?
I get his aversion to the creeds. But that doesnt mean that if they said a banana were yellow he has to say it is a light shade of orange just because this was so said by a post Constantinian church. Or: not everything one says is false just because of who they were. Hitler, for instance, said something true at some time (not Christological though, I'm sure).
I want to insert here that he is very flexible in how context impacts doctrine. Other generations, he says, will have questions and solutions we have yet to think of.
Moving on, he deals with Ecclesiology. Other than saying that Jews are of the same family salvifically, there wasnt much here that was something to write home about.
Following he writes about worship. Remember that this section is on the Spirit and he has already claimed, basically, any freewill / credobaptist faith as falling under a third non Roman and non Protestant tradition called "baptist." He plainly says that Pentecostals are his folk (my translation).
"Worship, to be Christian practice, must be a prayer for Gods rule on earth," p 374.
In speaking about baptism (and for the most part I'm with him untill...) he denies the common use of "symbol" for the weaker use of "sign" in relation to baptism. I believe much modern use of baptism as symbol is using the word symbol in a Tillichian sense. This use is very powerful and I am a bit perplexed that he would place stress on the weaker -- per Tillich; I agree -- sign. Since he wrote this book some 30 years after Tillich's "Dynamics of Faith" I am surprised he hasn't spoken of signs / symbols in respect to Tillich (which seems to be where many others speak from).
In this third section he speaks to the Spirit and specifically His role in the Church and by extension in missions. Nothing ground breaking though his coverage of Pentecostalism was brief but very good, affirming the gifts.
Read
July 13, 2024Strong moments of clarity. Will read again.
July 31, 2010
My favorite part was the last chapter (on authority), particularly the points about baptism and the problem of inerrancy.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews