MCKENZIE, JOHN LAWRENCE

Scripture scholar, author, teacher, lecturer; b. Brazil, Indiana, Oct. 9, 1910; d. Claremont, California, March 2, 1991. The son of Harry and Myra McKenzie, John McKenzie entered the Society of Jesus after high school in 1928 and was ordained a priest in 1939. He received an M.A. in philosophy from Saint Louis University in 1934 and an S.T.L. from Saint Mary's College, Kansas, in 1940. His superiors wished him to earn an S.S.D. at the Pontifical Biblical Institute after his tertianship year, but, unable to go to Rome because of the war, he studied for an S.T.D. at Weston College, Weston, Massachusetts, 1941–42, learning Semitic languages on his own and preparing himself for biblical research through a rigorous and systematic study of the history, art, and literature of the ancient Near East.

McKenzie served as book review editor of The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 1953–54, was associate editor from 1955 to 1971, and was a member of the monograph series board from 1976 to 1984. He was president of the Catholic Biblical Association of America 1963–64, and in 1966 he became the first Roman Catholic scholar to be elected president of the Society of Biblical Literature.

He was in the forefront of American Catholic biblical scholarship once Pius XII's encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu (1943) allowed Catholics to apply the tools of language, history, archaeology, and literary criticism to the study of the Bible. McKenzie's first book, The Two-Edged Sword: An Interpretation of the Old Testament (1956), held up by Jesuit censors for more than three years, presented the fruits of recent scientific techniques in Old Testament research to the general Catholic reading public. Nine years later he published a companion volume on the New Testament, The Power and the Wisdom: An Interpretation of the New Testament (1965). In between, he produced singlehandedly his monumental 954-page Dictionary of the Bible, which for years remained a standard reference work of the field. Three more books appeared in 1966, including Authority in the Church, in which he argued that service of the people of God rather than approaches found in secular governments underlies Church authority. Others books followed, including The Roman Catholic Church (1969) and his last, The Civilization of Christianity (1986), in which he argued in light of wars of aggression and widespread moral degeneracy that Christian principles had never permeated Europe during the Middle Ages. In all, he wrote 15 books, 175 articles, and 250 reviews; he also composed countless audio tapes and study aids. McKenzie directed numerous Ignatian retreats, conducted institutes for religious women, taught weekly Bible classes to archdiocesan chancery officials in Chicago, and wrote extensively for newspapers and magazines.

McKenzie was a brilliant and world-renowned biblical scholar who considered it a duty to use his professional skills to bring the religious and spiritual values of the Bible to the ordinary believer. As a teacher he was a mine of information for serious students but unsympathetic to disinterested ones; as a much-sought after lecturer, he was witty, incisive, and trenchant, as well as sharp in his retorts; as an author he was a craftsman of superb prose: lucid, cogent, thought-provoking, and reflective. Through his popular writings, in which he was outspoken and a master of the memorable phrase, he frequently provoked controversy. In the late 1960s he opposed the war in Vietnam because he saw in Jesus' teaching a total repudiation of the use of arms and violence. He viewed current affairs in the light of radical biblical texts, and he felt that the Church had accommodated itself to a way of life that was a compromise between the world and the Gospel. He had a keen sense of the differences between the Church of the New Testament and the contemporary Church, which he perceived to be deficient especially in the areas of peace, poverty, and charity. He consequently encountered some opposition in the Church and in his own order, which he left in 1970, becoming incardinated in the diocese of Madison, Wisconsin. McKenzie's fundamental conviction was that the Gospel lives in the Church or it does not live anywhere.

Bibliography: See especially d. h. wimmer and h. m. culkin, "A Bibliography of the Books, Articles, and Reviews of John L. McKenzie," in j. w. flanagan and a. w. robinson, eds., No Famine in the Land: Studies in Honor of John L. McKenzie (Missoula MT 1975). Further works include: Light on the Epistles: A Reader's Guide (Notre Dame 1975); Light on the Gospels: A Reader's Guide (Notre Dame 1978); The Old Testament without Illusions (Chicago 1979); The New Testament without Illusions (Chicago 1980); How Relevant is the Bible? (Chicago 1981); The Civilization of Christianity (Chicago 1986).

[f. t. gignac]