Category Archives: William Stringfellow

To become and to be a Christian

Posted by on November 4, 2011 3 comments

To become and to be a Christian is not at all an escape from the world as it is, nor is it a wistful longing for a “better” world, nor a commitment to generous charity, nor fondness for “moral and spiritual values” (whatever that may mean), nor self- serving positive thoughts, nor persuasion to splendid abstractions about God. It is, instead, the knowledge that there is no pain or privation, no humiliation or disaster, no scourge or distress or destitution or hunger, no striving or temptation, no wile or sickness or suffering or poverty which God has not known and borne for [humanity] in Jesus Christ. He has borne death itself on behalf of [humanity], and in that event he has broken the power of death once and for all.

That is the event which Christians confess and celebrate and witness in their daily work and worship for the sake of all [humanity].

To become to be a Christian is, therefore, to have the extraordinary freedom to share the burdens of the daily, common, ambiguous, transient, perishing existence of [humans beings], even to the point of actually taking the place of another [person], whether he be powerful or weak, in health or in sickness, clothed or naked, educated or illiterate, secure or persecuted, complacent or despondent, proud or forgotten, housed or homeless, fed or hungry, at liberty or in prison, young or old, white or Negro, rich or poor.

For a Christian to be poor and to work among the poor is not a conventional charity, but a use of the freedom for which Christ has set [humanity] free.

~ William Stringfellow, My People is the Enemy, 32.

Stringfellow Discussion Group

Posted by on July 29, 2009 9 comments

As some of you know, I’m a big fan of William Stringfellow, as are a number of my publishing cohorts. Currently we publish all of Stringfellow’s works and we’re getting more and more secondary works on him in print as well. Anthony Dancer’s forthcoming book, An Alien in a Strange Land: Theology in the Life of William Stringfellow will be coming out in the next couple of months and will be a great addition to the line of works on and by Stringfellow.

Currently Myles Werntz is looking into putting together a discussion group on the work of Stringfellow, and more importantly, the directions his work suggests for those of us seeking to be theological engaged in the complexities of the contemporary world. Anyone interested in this imporant opportunity should email him.

The Hatred of the Cross

Posted by on April 10, 2009 3 comments

Dan posted one of my favorite Stringfellow quotes for Holy Week. It is utterly appropriate:

“Many do not believe. Many men hate the Cross because it means a salvation not of their own choosing or making, but rather of God’s grace and his mercy. Men hate the Cross because it means a salvation which is unearned, undeserved, unmerited. Men would much prefer God to punish them than to forgive them because that would mean that God is dependent upon men and needed their obedience to be their God. Then God would be in fact no different from an idol of race, nation, family, or whatever, and a man would feel justified either by his obedience to the idol or the the punishment of his disobedience.”

~ William Stringfellow, Free in Obedience.

Quote of the Day: The Impotence of Revolution

Posted by on March 20, 2009 2 comments

Revolutionary sanctions of death cannot overcome the social purpose of death in any status quo. In any revolution, the means of death cannot transcend death, much less defeat or destroy death. At the most, it can alter the guise of death or make death appear more attractive. This remains the reality even though a revolution is represented in the loftiest human idealism, or where the provocations to revolt have become humanly intolerable and revolution seems the only recourse, or where the cause is humanly just, informed by worthy intentions and sensible precautions against corruption, abuse, and scandal.

The issue here is the vitality of the moral power of death in the origins of revolution, and not merely one of distortion or abandonment or compromise of initial revolutionary aims, nor one of subsequent counterrevolutionary events undoing a splendid revolutionary charter.

William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, 123.

Stringfellow on the Liturgy

Posted by on March 12, 2009 Comments Off

“The liturgy, therefore, wherever it has substance in the Gospel, is a living, political event. The very example of salvation, it is the festival of life which foretells the fulfillment and maturity of all of life for all of time in this time. The liturgy is social action because it is the characteristic style of life for human beings in this world.”

–William Stringfellow, Dissenter in a Great Soceity, 154.

Sentimentality, Blessing, and the Lordship of Christ

Posted by on March 11, 2009 1 comment

Stringfellow nails it in this one. I along with, I suspect, tons of the rest of us are implicated in this. Railing is easier than blessing, but its often the less subversive act.

“The categories of popularity or progress or effectiveness or success are impertinent to the gospel. . . . ‘Bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse them’ (Rom 12:14).  As has been mentioned, this is no adage prompted by sentimentality. It is a statement  of the extraordinary relationship between Christians and the ruling principalities radically constituted in the discernment of the imminence of the judgment of the Word of God in history by which Christians are authorized to recall political authority to the vocation of worship and reclaim dominion over creation for humanity. It is a statement about the implication of the Lordship of Jesus Christ for the rulers of this age. To bless the powers that be, in the midst of persecution, exposes and confounds their blasphemous status  more cogently and more fearlessly than a curse.”

–William Stringfellow, Conscience and Obedience, 110.

Stringfellow, Death, and the Word

Posted by on March 10, 2009 Comments Off

“In the face of death, live humanly. In the middle of chaos, celebrate the Word. Amidst babel, I repeat, speak the truth. Confront the noise and verbiage and falsehood of death with the truth and potency and efficacy of the Word of God. Know the Word, teach the Word, nurture the Word, do the Word, live the Word. And more than that, in the Word of God expose death and all death’s works and wiles, rebuke lies, cast out demons, exorcise, cleanse the possessed, raise those who are dead in mind and conscience.”

– William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, 142-41.

A Week of Stringfellow

Posted by on March 9, 2009 2 comments

Over at Faith and Theology, Ben Myers is planning on doing a week’s worth of posts about the life and theology of William Stringfellow in light of a current discount being run by us at Wipf & Stock. This is sure to be a great week over there and you all should make sure to keep a close eye on these posts. The more I read of Stringfellow, the more I am convinced that he is the prophet of our age. Indeed, what is so striking about Stringfellow is that he blurs the line between prophet and exorcist in a way that can only be described as radically biblical.

Since I think Ben’s idea is such a good one, I believe I will participate in this as well. I may not be able to promise an entire week’s worth of Stringfellow posts, but I plan on making it my emphasis this week as well. But regardless, you should all go over to WS and order at least a few of these. Free in Obedience, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, and Instead of Death are books that everyone should own at the very least.

Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the Church’s Freedom

Posted by on March 5, 2009 1 comment

Stringfellow had this whole apocalyptic ecclesiology thing figured out a long time ago:

“Christ shares the gift of Pentecost, and the Church is born in that sharing of the Holy Spirit.

It is Christ, possessed of the Holy Spirit, who is triumphant in all his encounters with the powers of death, with all the principalities, and, indeed with the presence of death itself. And it is this, concretely, which is the gift which the Risen Christ shares in Pentecost with the Church. The gift of the Holy Spirit is, then, authority and victory over death and over every power of death.

Specifically, that gift, that freedom, lies in the power given to the Church by the service of Christ to discern and identify, and then to expose and exorcise, the powers of death, whatever form they may take, however they may be disguised, whenever they insinuate themselves against the Church, or put forth their false claim to dominate the life of the world or of anybody in it.

The Church, notice, does not, independently of God, have, hold or exercise any strength against the principalities. God, as the world has been shown in Christ, reserves to himself this awesome prerogative. But the Church, in the gratuity of Pentecost, is enabled to witness to God’s authority over the principalities in his victory over death by its knowledge of death, its discernment of the powers of death, and by unveiling and laying bare the works of death in this world.”

~William Stringfellow, Free in Obedience, 102.

The church’s supreme gift, through Christ’s Spirit is to be able to truthfully discern and name the things that make for life and the things that make for death. And the same Spirit makes possible the church’s own life of living free from the powers of death, tasting the power of the age to come, the power of unbounded life. Stringfellow gets it.

More Stringfellow on Poverty

Posted by on March 3, 2009 1 comment

There is a boy in the neighbourhood… whom I have defended in some of his troubles with the law. He used to stop in often on Saturday mornings to shave and wash up, after having spent the week on the streets. He has been addicted for a long time. His father threw him out three years ago . . . He has contrived so many stories to induce clergy and social workers to give him money to support his habit that he is no longer believed when he asks for help . . . He is dirty, ignorant, arrogant, dishonest, unemployable, broken, unreliable, ugly, rejected, alone. And he knows it. He knows that at last he has nothing to commend himself to another human being. He has nothing to offer. There is nothing about him that permits the love of another person for him. He is unlovable. Yet it is exactly in his own confession that he does not deserve the love of another that he represents all the rest of us. For none of us is different from him in this regard. We are all unlovable. More than that, the action of this boy’s life points beyond itself, it points to the gospel, to God who loves us though we hate Him, who loves us though we do not please Him, who loves us not for our sake but for His own sake, who loves us freely, who accepts us through we have nothing acceptable to offer Him. Hidden in the obnoxious existence of this boy is the scandalous secret of the Word of God.

~William Stringfellow, My People is the Enemy: An Autobiographical Polemic, 97-98

Stringfellow on Poverty

Posted by on March 2, 2009 Comments Off

Poverty was my very first client in East Harlem—a father whose child died from being bitten by a rat. Poverty is a dope pusher who wanted to learn from me his rights if arrested because he knew that would sooner or later happen. Poverty is a widow on welfare whose landlord cuts the heat knowing that winter will end before the complaint is processed. Poverty is an addict who pawns the jacket off his back to get another “fix.” Poverty is a young couple who married only to obtain public housing but now have no grounds for divorce in New York and are tempted to collusion. Poverty is a boy who wants to be adopted because his mother is alcoholic. Poverty is the payoff to a building inspector not to report violations of the building code. Poverty is the attempted eviction—finally defeated—from a project of a family whose son was thought to be ‘undesirable’ by the project manager. Poverty is the wife of an addict with whom I worked out a budget to manage her while her husband was in prison. Poverty is a Puerto Rican shopkeeper whose store was stoned when he tried to relocate to 96th Street. Poverty is a kid in trouble who comes to my place in the middle of the night because his foster parents have thrown him out. Poverty is the relentless daily attrition of contending with the most primitive issues of human existence: food and cleanliness and clothes and heat and housing and rest. Poverty is an awful vulnerability.

~William Stringfellow,”Christianity, Poverty, and the Practice of the Law.” Harvard Law School Bulletin 10(6) 87

The Ethics of Witness

Posted by on February 18, 2009 8 comments

In his Free in Obedience, William Stringfellow takes up an absolutely vital point regarding the nature of Christian political ethics, what he terms “the ethic of witness”. The ethics of witness “means that the essential and consistent task of Christians is to expose the transience of death’s power in the world.” Herein lies the fundamental vocation of Christian political thought and action: to bear witness to the defeat of death itself through the cross and resurrection of Christ. The point of Christian politics is to point to the defeat of death through resurrection.

What this means, however, is that the Christian can never be satisfied with the political accomplishments of the principalities and powers. Since our purpose is to bear witness to the defeat of death and its power, “the Christian in secular society is always in the position of a radical…in the sense that noting which is achieved in secular life can satisfy the insight which the Christian is given as to what the true consummation of life in society is.” From the stand point of Christian theopolitics, we can never find ourselves fully, or even largely committed to the political accomplishments and movements of our time, given the reliance of the principalities on the power of death.

Thus, “the Christian always complains of the status quo, whatever that happens to be; he always seeks more than that which satisfies even the best ideals of other men.” This is precisely why Christian politics are not, or should not be “useful” to the principalities and powers. The Christian is always seeking to bear witness to the resurrection and the defeat of the powers of death. All the principalities of our world fundamentally operate on the basis of the power of death in order to secure and exercise their authority. Given that the Christian denies the legitimacy of the power of death to order and facilitate human life, the principalities should find no allies among Christians in their pursuits.

To again quote Stringfellow, “Or, to put it differently, the Christian knows that no change, reform, or accomplishment of secular society can modify, threaten, or diminsh the active reign of death in the world. Only Christ can doe that, and now his reign is acknowledged and enjoyed in the society which bears his name and has the task of proclamation in all the world for the sake of that part of the world still consigned to the power of death.”

This puts the Christian in the extremely unpopular position of remaining a critic of all forms of earthly political sovereignty, even (especially?) when they seem to be becoming more morally appealing and worthy. Because the whole logic of the principalities is based on the power of death to order and control human life, no amount of institutional maintenance, reform, or fine-tuning can satisfy the Christian ethic of witness, the call of Christ to live a life free from the powers of death itself, the invitation of resurrection life. What is important to note here is that the inherent antipathy of Christianity towards secular politics is not a negative reaction determined by that which it is against. It is rather the overflow of the abundant gift of life that is wrought by Christ in the resurrection. The issue is not that the world is so evil that Christians must be anti-world. Rather, it is that the resurrection of Christ has actualized the reality of true authentic humanity so utterly that we cannot settle for supporting anything less.

Stringfellow on the Resurrection

Posted by on February 16, 2009 2 comments

“Christ’s resurrection is for men and for the whole of creation, including the principalities of this world. Through the encounters between Christ and the principalities and between Christ and death, the power of death is exhausted. The reign of death and, within that, the pretensions sovereignty over history of the principalities is brought to an end in Christ’s resurrection. He bears the fullness of their hostility toward him; he submits to their condemnation; he accepts their committal of himself to death, and in his resurrection he ends their power and the power they represent. Yet the end of the claims of the principalities to sovereignty is also the way in which these very claims are fulfilled in Christ himself. The claim of a nation, ideology, or other principality to rule history, though phony and futile, is at the same time an aspiration for salvation, a longing for the reality which does indeed rule history. In the same event in which the pretension of the principality is exposed and undone, how and in whom salvation is wrought and disclosed and demonstrated. In Christ the false lords of history, the principalities, are shown to be false; at the same time, in Christ the true Lord of history is made known. In Christ is both the end and fulfillment for all principalities, for all men, and for all things.”

– William Stringfellow, Free in Obedience (Euegene, OR: Cascade Books, 2006, 73)

Reading William Stringfellow

Posted by on January 29, 2009 17 comments

I’ve appreciated Stringfellow’s work in An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land for as long as I can remember, but only recently have I started acquiring his works on a larger scale and devoting myself to reading them. Stringfellow, is, for my money the greatest lay-theologian to come out of the 1960s-70s upheaval in the United States. His level of perception and theological acumen, combined with a very profound sort of situatedness in the realities of his time make him utterly unique. One possible analogy I might make is that Stringfellow is an urban sort of Wendell Berry, though a good bit more polemical.

For those interested in reading Stringfellow, one helpful thing to keep in mind is that among his 15-odd books there are two unofficial “trilogies” that really encapsulate Stringfellow’s life and though. The first of thes consists of An Ethic for Christian and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, Concience and Obedience, and Instead of Death. These three books serve as a statement of Stringfellow’s theology as a whole and present his attempt to deal faithfully and biblically with the realities of America in the twentieth century from the perspective of a proper theology of the principalities and powers. They also reflect his distinctly sacramental and incarnational theology of the word and his perspective on the theological meaning of freedom. All of it superb stuff.

His second trilogy consists of My People is the Enemy, A Second Birthday, and A Simplicity of Faith. This is his “autobiographical” trilogy if you will. The books respectively chronicle his own dealings in his life with the issues of work, illness, and death. My People is the Enemy in particular presents Stringfellow’s own life and work in the tenements of Harlem in the 60s. Never have I read more a more moving and theologically sensitive form of autobiography. It is animated throughout with humility and a form of fragile tenderness that can only be described as true strength. For anyone interested in reading Stringfellow either of these two trilogies are great places to start. That’s where I’m starting anyway.

Also, I should add that all of these books are available from Wipf & Stock Publishers.

Stringfellow on Vocation

Posted by on December 4, 2008 6 comments

stringfellowBen has posted a quotation from William Stringfellow that is just too good not to reproduce here. This reminds me of how much I love Stringfellow’s work and life story, and hopefully will impel me to take up reading him more regularly again.

“I had elected then [in my early student years] to pursue no career. To put it theologically, I died to the idea of career and to the whole typical array of mundane calculations, grandiose goals and appropriate schemes to reach them…. I do not say this haughtily; this was an aspect of my conversion to the gospel….

“[Later] my renunciation of ambition in favor of vocation became resolute; I suppose some would think, eccentric. When I began law studies, I consider that I had few, if any, romantic illusions about becoming a lawyer, and I most certainly did not indulge any fantasies that God had called me, by some specific instruction, to be an attorney or, for that matter, to be a member of any profession or any occupation. I had come to understand the meaning of vocation more simply and quite differently.

“I believed then, as I do now, that I am called in the Word of God … to the vocation of being human, nothing more and nothing less…. Within the scope of the calling to be merely but truly human, any work, including that of any profession, can be rendered a sacrament of that vocation. On the other hand, no profession, discipline or employment, as such, is a vocation.”

—William Stringfellow, A Keeper of the Word: Selected Writings of William Stringfellow (Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 30-31.

This strikes a particular chord with me in regard to the issue of vocation as it bears on my own life. I remember clearly (because it was not too long ago!) the agony of learning to die to certain aspirations of career, status, and prestige. Not that I mean to commend my own path as exemplary–everything about my life-form I owe to the gifts I have been given through my church. But, I am certain that these sorts of ruminations on vocation are exactly what our culture, a culture of almost unquestioned prioritzing of carerr over all other ties, needs.

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