Journal of European Baptist Studies, Volume 9, Number 2, January 2009

l practices, of distorting the kingdom vision by not relying solely on the kind of power that is (in the words of John Howard Yoder) ‘in conformity with the victory of the 27 McClendon, Ethics, p. 30. McClendon’s use of the lower case ‘b’ in baptist, rather than the upper case ‘B’, is quite deliberate. McClendon wants to emphasise that the vision which he advocates is not confined to a specific ‘Baptist’ denomination, but encompasses a whole range of expressions of Christianity, associated with the tradition of the Radical Reformation. See, McClendon, Ethics, pp. 26-34. 28 Ibid., p. 32 (emphasis added). 29 Ibid., p. 31. 30 Ibid., pp. 172-191; Doctrine, pp. 132-133. 31 Ethics, p. 168. 32 For an account of the application of Aristotelian virtue theory to social ethics, see Tammy Williams’ article, ‘After Racism’, in. Virtues and Practices in the Christian Tradition, N. Murphy, B. Kallenberg and M. Nation (eds.) (Harrisburg: Trinity Press, 1997), pp. 278-279. 33 For a succinct account of McClendon’s holistic vision, see McClendon, Biography as Theology, pp. 1- 23. 34 Ibid., p. 178. Is the Sermon on the Mount too unrealistic to serve as a resource for Christian 45 Discipleship and Spiritual Formation? Lamb’. 35 In order to avoid such distortion, the kind of practices that Jesus describes in the Sermon on the Mount are those which conform to what Q /T McClendon calls ‘the character of the expected realm’. This new reign of God ‘was to be a new order of interactive love - God’s love to people, and people’s love one to another, even to enemies’. 37 The power of McClendon’s baptist vision lies in the notion that these characteristics of the kingdom vision as described by Jesus are embodied in the life of the faith community today which lives in obedience to the kinds of practices that Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount. According to McClendon’s baptist vision, therefore, the Sermon on the Mount can be read as a cluster of practices (such as forgiveness 38 and peacemaking 39 ) which together constitute a vision of life in the kingdom of God. It is here that McClendon’s vision can be used to complement something that is not quite clear from Stassen’s analysis - a vision of how the separate transforming practices outlined in the Sermon on the Mount can be brought together into a coherent vision of spiritual growth in terms of participation in the life of the present reality of the kingdom of God. Whereas Stassen begins with a description of the actual practices that characterise the vision of the kingdom, he does not seek to provide such a vision into which these separate practices could cohere. McClendon’s baptist vision supplies this deficit. By arguing for the continuity of the experience of the early church with that of the present church, McClendon maintains that the disciples of Jesus’ time are today’s disciples. 40 With this narrative understanding of the kingdom vision, McClendon assert