Some of you may remember the book about this groundbreaking, hands-on version of the Christian message back in the 1940s through 1970. A guy named Clarence Jordan started a movement known as the “Koinonia Farm Experiment” in southern Georgia in 1942 during World War Two. He had the radical idea that the faith Jesus was talking about should apply directly to our daily work and lives. The idea caught on and out of those who joined in came a number of programs in the south. Naturally enough such concerns and activities got the group into a whole host of difficulties, especially with the Ku Klux Klan.
The details of how this community worked and what they accomplished are spelled out in the book by Dallas Lee entitled The Cotton Patch Evidence. The New Testament Greek term “Koinonia” means “fellowship” or “community”. The main drive of the movement was to improve and enhance the work of poor farmers in the South, the vast majority of whom were black. The Koinonia folks were themselves almost entirely white, so this mission was hobbled from the out-set by the standard segregation laws of that time. More to the point, the work was downright opposed and undercut by the common values of most southern farmers as well as the Klan itself.
However, there were a number of significant supporters among the white churches, notably Will Campbell and President Jimmie Carter, as well as numerous church groups throughout both the South and the North. In essence, what Clarence Jordan sought to do was to undercut the strangle hold the raciest people en of the south had on the lives and livelihood of black farmers. He and his cohorts continually sought for and applied techniques and programs that fought against the racist policies of Southern cities and states, as well as the Federal government. The evidence was then spirit-filled Government, whenever the racists policies contradicted those of Biblical Christianity.
One of the more well-known quotations from the pen of Clarence Jordan is: “Never did Paul or Peter or Stephen point to an empty tomb as evidence of the resurrection. The evidence was the spirit-filled fellowship.” It would seem clear that Dallas Lee, the writer of the book The Cotton Patch Evidence, used this quotation as the inspiration for the book title. Jordan himself, like many of those who chose to work with him, was something of an academic dropout, after having earned several theological degrees at more than one theological Seminary, several of which were Southern Baptist.
After many tumultuous years the Koinonia movement fell on harder times. It was then that it received a second breath of wind from a Northerner named Millard Fuller. Fuller revitalized the energy of Clarence Jordan and things became alive again. Things for the Community continued on until Clarence Jordan’s death in 1970. Indeed, it even continued on under fresh leadership and continues on still today In Americus, Georgia under various fresh leadership and with increasingly new products.

I ran across Professor Ramsey’s book Religious Language by accident as I perused the latest books on religion in my college’s library back in 1961. I was immediately interested because the book landed right in the center of my current interests then, even though I had not yet heard of this book. I was so taken with the line of argument in the book that I wrote to Professor Ramsey at Oxford to thank him for his insights. I found his approach to religious language to be very creative and sound.
Much to my surprise just a few weeks later I received a letter from Professor Ramsey thanking me for my interest in his book. As it turned out he was then teaching in the Summer Session at the University of Southern California in L.A. and wondered if I could make a visit there from my home base in Seattle, WA. I informed him that I was currently teaching summer school and could not get away. Boldly I invited him to visit me and my family on his way back to England by way of Canada. Surprisingly he was quite delighted with the idea and we set a date a few weeks later.
Because my family and I lived in a very small house we asked our best friends who lived two doors down if we cold spend a couple of nights with them so the Ramseys could have our house to themselves. Then I wrote to a dozen or so of my students who would be taking my course in philosophical theology in the fall in which we would be using Ramsey’s book asking them to show up for a weekend meeting in which to meet him. It was soon all set up and the event went off smoothly. We drove the Ramseys to Vancouver, B.C. a few days later and they returned home from there.
We all spent a delightful evening with Professor Ramsey discussing his book and other related ideas. In the fall our course using his book went very well. Along the way I had asked Professor Ramsey if I might be able to study with him at some point in the near future. He straightway invited me to do so as part of my doctoral studies at Duke University which I was scheduled to begin one year later. So, as it turned out, I went to Oxford to study with Professor Ramsey and also was able to take courses with Professors Gilbert Ryle and Peter Strawson, two other famous Oxford Professors, as well.
The stay at Oxford was wonderful and crucial for my future investigations in the philosophy of religion field. A couple of years later I was able to return to England directing a group of students on a Semester Abroad program and was able to reconnect with Professor Ramsey. Unfortunately, during that semester my friend and mentor died of a heart attack. By then he had been elevated to the post of Bishop of Durham and the extra workload had worn him out.
Ian’s graduate studies had included work in mathematics and the sciences so his insights into how theological language might be better understood were quite fresh and solid. In addition, he had been strongly influenced by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein in the philosophy of language. All of this helped make his understanding of the workings of religious and theological discourse especially rich.
His main idea was that we should be sensitive to the more subtle aspects of religious language, that in expressions like “Heavenly Father”, for instance, while the term ‘father’ might be taken rather straightforwardly analogicaly, the term ‘heavenly’ ought not be taken as such. Rather, it and others like it, might be seen as “logical directives” which are meant to suggest that they are not to be made to “walk on all fours”, but are rather meant to suggest some sort of different, even unique, way to read the expressions involved.
In physics or basketball, for instance, the terms used do not always designate what they might normally, but rather they might suggest yet another, more suggestive, way to interpret them. A “force field” or a “screen pass” respectively, may have to be seen as something of a metaphor rather than as a physical description. Ramsey’s works are full of suggestions for how to read theological language in ways that do not lead to dead-ends religiously speaking. Professor Ian Ramsey was definitely a very creative thinker, as well as a very wonderful person.
In addition to Ramsey’s Religious Language, readers might be interested in my Ian Ramsey: To Speak Responsibly of God.