So part of my job this summer has been to get through the works of the late James William McClendon (d. 2000) whose theological method is significant at the school where I’m hoping to continue researching over the next decade or so. McClendon wasn’t widely known in the evangelical world (see here for a good bio), but his work was highly respected and admired in academic circles and I suspect that his influence could grow as people become familiar with him (or perhaps if people become familiar with him – his style, while demonstrating the incredible breadth of his knowledge, does not immediately endear him to the first-time reader).
One of the things that McClendon is known for is his description of the subject matter of theology. He argues that Christian theology is not primarily concerned with ‘thoughts about God’ nor even about the task of explaining Christian beliefs. Rather theology is describing, evaluating and perhaps revising ‘convictions’.
Convictions are, for McClendon, more than ‘beliefs’ because they include all the ’subjectivities’ that make up the very human process of knowing. This is a much riskier way of defining what theology is about because it doesn’t just require the discussion of ideas, it requires that we put ourselves on the table as well. I like the way McClendon puts it in the following quote:
“It may be that the strongest tension with which we must struggle is between recognition of the full range of our human wants, fears, hopes, faith, doubts, and commitments on the one hand, and our drive to purely rational understanding of these phenomena on the other. And we must confront this inner tension in a world convictionally divided, so that there is no easy division between our own inner conflicts and our conflicts with outsiders.”
So this is the tension, the struggle, that characterizes theology (and, in my opinion, most other fields of inquiry). We are trying to understand our beliefs but we find, if we are honest, that we cannot take ourselves out of the equation. Nor can we ignore the fact that others disagree with us. This internal and external division must be understood and named in order for the theological task to rightly begin.
I appreciate McClendon’s honesty here. It certainly introduces a lot more ambiguity into the process but it seems to me that most of the questions that matter are deeply self-involving and require the kind of risk and commitment (or perhaps faith?) that is widely ignored by adherents of purely rational epistemologies.
Gil, I think you have identified the heart of McClendon’s convictional theology – self engagement in the task of theology. Theology cannot be limited to external propositional statements, which remain at arms length. Rather convictions reflect our commitments, our stayed beliefs, and our actions that live out our loyalties. What I’m wrestling with is how can we articulate our core convictions and how can we consistently live out the implications of what we say are our convictions.
I can appreciate how that would be the next challenge. If convictions are as deeply rooted as McClendon says (and I think they are) then many of them are likely unstated. They are ‘what we think before we’re thinking’. If I read McClendon right, we live out our convictions by default since practice and convictions are so closely linked. If we say we believe one thing and do another then it becomes obvious what our conviction really is. That’s the really unsettling aspect of his theology for me.
Unsettling yes, but that is also the Anabaptist (baptistic) impulse underlying McClendon’s work, where he seeks to integrate what we say we believe and how we live. Others call it radical discipleship. The challenge is to help students and the church develop a greater awareness of their convictions. By naming our convictions we then have the opportunity to examine them and test their validity.
I really like this because this notion of convictions and the personal aspect to theological understanding seems to support the claim that Christianity is not just an idea… that it actually makes no sense unless lived; unless it finds physical presence and form.