For some reason I've been thinking today about William Stringfellow. For those of you who don't know, William Stringfellow (1928-1985) was an American lawyer and lay theologian who was a major voice for peace and justice in the US in the 1960s and 1970s. When I was in seminary between 1997 and 2000 several people, some of whom had met Stringfellow, urged me to read his works. What follows here is a paper I wrote on Stringfellow for a class at the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry in late 1999 or early 2000. I believe it is worth reading today when the dynamic of social evil that it describes is more obvious than it has been for a long time. The text here is cut and pasted from that paper. It says that all of Stringfellow's works are out of print. That was true when I wrote the paper, but since then many of them have been republished by Wipf and Stock Publishers in Eugene, Oregon, and are available from that source. The copy of the paper I still have doesn't have a title, so I added one here that probably isn't the title the paper originally had. I have edited the paper for typos and other clerical errors, although I won't be surprised if I missed some. The paper is long for a blog post, but I trust you will find it worth reading. Feel free to quote and use it with attribution to me as its author.
Reflections on William Stringfellow's Theology of the Powers
(c) Thomas C. Sorenson, 2018
For many years now, several
different people whose opinions I respect have told me I need to read the works
of William Stringfellow. Within the past
several months there has been an interesting convergence around this name in
which three different pastors whom I know well (and who know me well) have
mentioned that they either met Stringfellow or at least heard him speak back in
the 1960s or 1970s. It seemed there was
a message trying to get through. Like
me, Stringfellow was a lawyer, and like me, he had a passion for theology. The necessity of writing a paper for this
class presented me with an opportunity at last to take up these repeated
suggestions, to listen to that message, and to look into Stringfellow’s thought. I discovered a powerful theologian and a
stirring voice for social justice whose thought is a major contribution to our
understanding of the nature of social evil in the world. It is the thesis of this paper that
Stringfellow taught a kind of Social Gospel, but one rooted not in Protestant
liberalism but in Neo-Orthodox theology.
This paper will consider primarily
an important aspect of Stringfellow’s thought, namely, his theology of the
“powers and principalities.” Although
all of Stringfellow’s books are now out of print, through his work on this
subject Stringfellow has been a major indirect influence on a great many people
today. Many of us are familiar with the
work of Walter Wink on the subject of powers and principalities.[1] Stringfellow’s earlier work on the subject is
clearly the starting point of Wink’s very influential work in this area.[2] Grounded principally in the writings of St.
Paul and the Book of Revelation, Stringfellow used the concept of powers and
principalities to make sense out of the chaos, violence, and injustice that he
perceived to be rampant in this country in the 1960s and early 1970s, when he
did most of his writing. This concept,
as Stringfellow understood it, is quite foreign to the American mind, as
Stringfellow never tired of saying.
Nonetheless, it is a concept well worth considering as we try to make
sense out of the persistence of social evils in the country and around the
world in our own times. As Stringfellow
also often said, we ignore this understanding of the nature of institutional
sin at our peril.
Stringfellow was a lawyer, a
graduate of Harvard Law School. In
1956, just after graduating from law
school, he began practicing law in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York,[3]
a place he once called “perhaps the most notorious slum in New York City.”[4] Other details of his biography are scarce in
the material available to me. He was a
close friend of Daniel Berrigan[5],
and he was once under federal indictment for harboring a fugitive for giving
Berrigan a place to stay in Stringfellow’s home while Berrigan was eluding the
authorities who were seeking to arrest him.[6] Stringfellow lived for many years with his
“friend and companion” Anthony Towne.[7] He was a frequent lecturer at law schools and
seminaries and was a prolific writer.[8] Stringfellow was an Episcopal laymen; and he
was involved (in ways my materials do not disclose) in the ordination of the
first women as Episcopal priests.[9]
Stringfellow’s theology of the
powers and principalities cannot, I think, be fully understood without keeping in
mind the nature of the times in which he lived.
Of course, those times are not so remote as to be unfamiliar from
personal experience to many of us, myself included. Stringfellow’s active professional years were
the years of the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War and the peace movement
that arose in reaction to it, the assassinations of John Kennedy, Malcolm X,
Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, the killings at Kent State, and
Watergate. It was a time of growing
awareness of the environmental degradation that was threatening all life on our
planet. Toward the end of Stringfellow’s
life, the women’s movement rose to prominence in American public life, and he
was influenced by it.[10] In short, he lived in a time of wide-spread
social change and upheaval, a time when it was easier to see than perhaps it is
today how the powers and principalities, whose hold on American life was
threatened by that upheaval, were fighting back in violent, dehumanizing
ways.
Living in this environment, Stringfellow
developed a powerfully bleak view of American life. Writing in 1973, at the very end of the
Vietnam War, he stated:
The people have been existing under a
state of such interminable warfare that it seems normative. There is little resistance to the official
Orwellian designation of war as peace….Racial conflict has been suppressed by
an elaborate apartheid; products which supposedly mean abundance or convenience
turn out to contaminate or jeopardize life; the environment itself is rendered
hostile; there is pervasive babel (sic); privacy is a memory because
surveillance is ubiquitous; institutional coercion of human beings has
proliferated relentlessly. Whatever must
be said of earlier times, America has become a technological totalitarianism in
which hope, in its ordinary human connotations, is being annihilated.[11]
Stringfellow’s view of American life during his most
productive years was very bleak indeed.
His theology of the powers and principalities can best be understood, I
think, as an attempt to make theological sense out of the bleak state of the
world in which he lived.
Stringfellow must also be
understood in light of his experience living and working in East Harlem.[12] Space and time limitations prevent me from
going into this experience in detail.
Suffice it to quote Stringfellow’s own summary of the impact that
experience had on him:
Slowly I learned something that folk
indigenous to the ghetto know: namely,
that the power and purpose of death are incarnated in institutions and
structures, procedures and regimes--Consolidated Edison or the Department of
Welfare, the Mafia, or the police, the Housing Authority or the social work
bureaucracy, the hospital system or the banks, liberal philanthropy or
corporate real estate speculation. In
the wisdom of the people of the East Harlem neighborhood, such principalities
are identified as demonic powers because of the relentless and ruthless
dehumanization that they cause.[13]
In his experience in East Harlem, Stringfellow thus
experienced firsthand the effects of institutionalized sin on human
beings. When he wrote about the powers
and principalities, he was writing from intense personal experience. Stringfellow was an “Anglo-Saxon white man.”[14] He grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts,
which he describes as “radically different” from East Harlem.[15] It seems likely, therefore, that in East
Harlem he had a new kind of experience of injustice in American life, the kind
of experience so many of us white, relatively well-off Americans never have. His theology of the powers and principalities
grew largely out of this experience.
The
Biblical roots of the concept of powers and principalities lie primarily in the
letter of Paul. The word
“principalities” comes from the King James Version, and the word “powers” is
found both there and in more modern translations such as the NRSV. Thus, in
Romans 8:38 Paul lists “powers” among the things that cannot separate us from
the love of God in Christ. At Ephesians
6:12 Paul says: “For our struggle is not against
enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities,
against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual
forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
Although probably not written by Paul himself, the pseudo-Pauline Letter
to the Colossians, referring of course to Christ, states: “He is the image of the invisible God, the
firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were
created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers
or powers—all things have been created through him and for him.” Col. 1:15-16
One commentator, referring specifically to the passage in Ephesians,
says this about Paul’s meaning when he uses this term:
Rather than
imposing a mythological or demonic worldview upon the readers, the author of
Ephesians probably means by these terms biological and psychological, social
and political, cultural and religious forces that are unseen and yet
encountered in human existence (cf. Romans
8.38–39; also Colossians and Revelation).
Ephesians intends to assure the tempted, suffering, and desperate among
humankind that God has made his own cause not only the suffering that must be
endured, but also the resistance, combat, and victory over the superhuman
ruling powers.[16]
Markus
Barth’s attempt here to portray this worldview as neither mythological nor
demonic is less than convincing, but his main point is well taken. Stringfellow would certainly agree that the
powers and principalities are unseen forces of this sort encountered in human
existence. He would probably even agree
that they are “superhuman ruling powers;” and he would certainly agree, as we
shall see, that God has made resistance to them God’s own cause. Clearly Stringfellow is using concepts with a
solid Biblical foundation in the writings of St. Paul.
Just what did Stringfellow think the
powers and principalities are? The
answer seems to be that they are anything other than an individual person that
exerts a power over human life. He wrote
that they include
all institutions, all ideologies, all images, all
movements, all causes, all corporations, all bureaucracies, all traditions, all
methods and routines, all conglomerates, all races, all nations, all
idols. Thus, the Pentagon or the Ford
Motor Company or Harvard University or the Hudson Institute or Consolidated
Edison or the Diners Club or the Olympics or the Methodist Church or the
Teamsters Union are all principalities.
So are capitalism, Maoism, humanism, Mormonism, astrology, the Puritan
work ethic, science and scientism, white supremacy, patriotism, plus many, many
more--sports, sex, any profession or discipline, technology, money, the
family--beyond any prospect of full enumeration. The principalities and powers are legion. [17]
Thus,
we are daily surrounded by principalities.
We live our lives in them. We are
their agents. There is no way to escape
them. They are everywhere, and their
influence is pervasive in every aspect of our lives.
Although all powers and
principalities share certain characteristics, the most important of which are
discussed below, the principality that Stringfellow on at least one occasion
called “archetypical,”[18] is the nation or the
state. Stringfellow said that the state
“has a particular eminence” among the principalities that derives from “the
jurisdiction asserted by the State over other institutions and powers within a
nation.”[19] It epitomizes those other principalities and
powers and possesses or at least claims “a certain special stature or eminence”
with regard to them.[20] The state exposes the essential
characteristic of all principalities (which as we shall see below Stringfellow
names as death) “with a directness and severity that is not so public or so
obvious in the existence of most other principalities.”[21]
The
powers and principalities were for Stringfellow not human constructs but
divinely generated creatures in the same sense as humans and all other created
entities. They are not biological
creatures as humans are, but they are creatures made by God nonetheless. He called a principality or power “a form of
life, a creaturliness, which is potent and mobile and diverse, not static or
neat or simply defined by what it may now or then be called.”[22] He said that “[w]hat the
Bible calls principalities and powers
are called in contemporary language ideologies,
institutions, and images.”[23] He commented:
A
principality, whatever its particular form and variety, is a living reality,
distinguishable from human and other organic life. It is not made or instituted by human beings,
but as with humans and all creation, made by God for God’s own pleasure.[24]
The powers and principalities were, then, for Stringfellow
creatures originating with God. They do
not have organic bodies, but they are creatures nonetheless.
As
creatures in their own right, powers and principalities are not merely human
creations, nor are they mere collectives of human beings. Stringfellow recognized that this can be a
difficult concept. Indeed, he admitted
he could not fully explain how this fact comes about, given the undeniable
truth that on some level humans indeed create the things that become powers and
principalities. He commented:
The typical version of human reluctance to accord the principalities
their due integrity as creatures is the illusion of human beings that they make
or create and, hence, control institutions and that institutions are no more
than groups of human beings duly organized.
How do these creatures called principalities come into existence? How does an institution originate? Where does tradition come from? When is a nation born? How is an ideology created?
I am frank to admit to no full answers to such queries and further to
confess that I am more or less content to leave these questions
unanswered. The exact origins of the
creatureliness of principalities is a mystery in quite the same sense that the
creaturehood of human beings remains mysterious. Within such mysteries, we are not bereft of
any insight, but what is knowable is partial and ambiguous, limited and
fragile. Thus, we know that human beings
are privy to the public inception and generation of institutions and other
principalities….Yet that human privity seems insufficient to be the whole
truth; something more than the summation of human thought and activity is
involved in the creature identity of principalities.[25]
Stringfellow buttressed his claim that principalities are
creatures by appealing to empirical evidence:
[A]n understanding of the life of
principalities as part of God’s work of creation, and not man’s doing, is the
biblical view confirmed empirically by the most widespread redundant and
cumulative evidence that human beings do not control institutions or any other
principalities.[26]
Thus, while we live under the illusion that we create and
control the non-human forces in our lives, those forces are in fact not under
our control because in the last analysis they are independent creatures
independently and mysteriously created by God.
Stringfellow
makes (but does not stress) the point that because the powers and
principalities are God’s creations they are, like the rest of creation, created
good and initially put under the dominion of humans. He wrote:
“They are given by God into human dominion and are means through which
human beings rejoice in the gift of life by acknowledging and honoring God, who
gives life to all and to the whole of creation.”[27] Thus, God’s original intention in creating
the principalities was good. More
specifically, that intention was to make them servants of humanity to the glory
of God. The initial goodness of the
principalities is not a major theme with Stringfellow, but it is a logically
necessary element of his theology once he has declared them to be creatures of God
and not mere human constructs.
The principalities
were created good but, as we will see in greater detail below, and as has
probably become clear already at least by implication, their effect on humans
in the world is profoundly negative.
Stringfellow explains this paradox by the very traditional Christian
method of emphasizing the reality and the significance of the Fall. The Fall means for Stringfellow “the alienation of the whole of Creation from
God….”[28] As a result of the Fall, all relationships in creation are disordered, including the
relationships of the principalities to God, to humans, and to their own true
nature. All principalities (he here uses
the word institutions but he means the same thing by it)
exist, in time, in a moral state which
is the equivalent of death or which has the meaning of death. Every principality in its fallenness exists
in remarkable confusion as to its own origins, identity, and office. The fallen principalities falsely--and futilely--claim
autonomy from God and dominion over human beings and the rest of creation, thus
disrupting and usurping the godly vocation or blaspheming, while repudiating
their own vocation.[29]
Like all of the rest of creation, the principalities under
conditions of the Fall are not what God created them to be. Rather than being subject to God and to human
dominion, they claim autonomy and supremacy within creation. This is the source of all the trouble they
cause in the world.
In their
fallen state, the principalities, every last one of them, have become for
Stringfellow instrumentalities of death.
Death as the moral force operative in the powers and principalities, or
as the consequence of human idolatry of the principalities, is a central
concept for Stringfellow. This notion of
Stringfellow’s is in some ways
difficult, but if we would understand Stringfellow we must attempt to
understand what he means when he says that the principalities are driven by the
principle of death. The following is one
of his better statements of his understanding of principalities as instrumentalities
of death:
Death is the only moral significance
which a principality proffers human beings.
That is to say, whatever intrinsic moral power is embodied in a
principality--for a great corporation, profit, for example, or, for a nation,
hegemony; or, for an ideology, conformity--that is sooner or later suspended by
the greater moral power of death….Death is--apart from God himself--the
greatest moral power in this world, outlasting and subduing all other powers,
no matter how marvelous they may seem to be for a time being. This means, theologically speaking, that the
object of allegiance and servitude, the real idol secreted within all
idolatries, the power above all principalities and powers--the idol of all
idols--is death.[30]
All principalities are, in the last analysis, “agents of
death.”[31]
Stringfellow
here is essentially setting up, if not an ontological dualism of forces of good
and evil, then at least a way of understanding reality in which there are only
two moral forces to which one can owe allegiance, namely, God and death. He wrote:
“After all is said and done, apart from God himself, death is the only extant moral power living in this
world (notice Luke 10:17-20).”[32] Anything that does not owe ultimate
allegiance to God therefore ultimately owes its allegiance to death. Because the principalities are fallen, they
no longer owe their allegiance to God, as they were created to do. Because they do not, they become agents of
death.
Death for
Stringfellow is not merely the physical death of individuals. Rather, it is a pervasive power in the life
of the world. In addition to physical
death it means “death apprehended sociologically and anthropologically,
psychologically and psychically, economically and politically, societally and
institutionally. Death as a moral power
means death as a social purpose.”[33] Death as a social purpose! For Stringfellow, the powers and
principalities are indeed all about producing death because, as fallen, they
are not about fostering life.
Perhaps in
an effort to avoid an ontological dualism in which evil would become a rival
god to the God of creation, Stringfellow denied that the principalities are
evil. He preferred to call them
“demonic.” He wrote:
Like all people and all things, the
angelic powers and principalities are fallen and are become demonic
powers. Demonic does not mean evil; the word refers rather to death, to
fallenness. An angelic power in its
fallen estate is called a demonic power because it is a principality existing
in the present age in a state of alienation from God, cut off from the life
originating in God’s life, separated from its own true life, and thus, being in
a state of death.[34]
By using the term demonic rather than the term evil,
Stringfellow has retained, in a Biblically legitimate way, the ontological
connection between the principalities and God.
Though they are fallen, the principalities are not the creations or the
tools of an evil having ontological standing apart from God.
Rather than labeling the
principalities evil, Stringfellow focuses on the effect they have on human
beings. That effect is, in a word,
dehumanization. Thus, early in An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in
a Strange Land, as part of his analysis of the nature of contemporary
American life from which we quoted above, he wrote:
I refer…not so much to an evil mind as
to a paralyzed conscience; not so much to either personal or corporate
immorality as to a social pathology possessing persons and institutions; not so
much to malevolence, however incarnate, as to the literal dehumanization of human life in society.[35]
The problem is not that people are evil, he says, but that
they “have been dehumanized by the principalities and powers, for which they
are acolytes.”[36] The American middle class, he believed, has
become so demoralized and dehumanized by the powers and principalities that
they have essentially “quit as human beings.”[37] Stringfellow did not at this point explain
what he meant by that striking phrase; but it seems likely that what he had in
mind was the widespread failure of the American public to resist the work of
the principalities in such atrocities as the Vietnam War. This notion is seen in such statements of
Stringfellow’s that only in those who are in conflict with “the established
order” can one identify “maturity, conscience, and paradoxically, freedom…,”[38]
that is to can say, can one identify true humanity.
A major
effect of the Fall with regard to the powers and principalities is that in the
Fall the human dominion over them that God intended was reversed. Under the conditions of the Fall, “the
principalities exert dominion over human beings and claim in their own names
and for themselves idolatrous worship from human beings.”[39] Indeed, the fundamental harm that humans
suffer from the principalities comes for Stringfellow from the function of the
principalities as idols. In our
alienation from God that results from the Fall, humans engage in a “pathetic”
search for a God substitute. We make one
or another principality our idol, our God substitute. Our efforts, however, to replace what we have
lost with an idol is always futile.
Idolatry is invariable worship of death.
Stringfellow states: “The
principalities are themselves consigned to death just as much as the people who
worship them. Thus, the idolatry of the
demonic powers by humans turns out always to be a worship of death.”[40] The principalities constantly assail
humans with “the claim…for an idolatry
that, in spite of all disguises, really surrenders to death as the reigning presence
in the world.”[41] We can perhaps summarize Stringfellow here by
saying that for him the central dynamic of human life under the conditions of
the Fall is a continual falling into an idolatry to the principalities that
inevitably becomes a worship of death.[42]
It would be
harder to imagine a bleaker evaluation of American life, or a bleaker analysis
of the dynamics of all human life, than Stringfellow gives in his theology of
the powers and principalities. Again and
again in his writing one encounters striking, even shocking condemnations of
America and of American life. He did not
consider America morally superior in any way to the Nazis. Rather he wrote that after World War II
American was taken over by the spirit of Nazism:
That is to say, the ethos of Nazism,
the mentality of Nazism, the social ethos of Nazism, survives, prospers, and
more and more prevails in specific American versions…which can be symbolized
and summarized in three words: war, racism, and genocide.[43]
The American church did not escape
Stringfellow’s searing criticism. He
wrote extensively on the church, but space and time limitations prevent me from
going into that part of his thought.
Suffice it to say that in Ethic,
which is not primarily about the church at all, he identified the American
churches as “the most venial, manipulated, and degraded vassals of the power of
death.”[44] He saw nothing but captivity by death even in
the law, his chosen area of professional life.[45] One is left with the burning question: Is there no hope?
Perhaps
surprisingly Stringfellow’s answer was:
Yes! Hope is possible because of
the action of God in Christ and the presence of God in the world.[46] We noted above that the concept of the Fall
was central for Stringfellow’s understanding of the powers and
principalities. He understood the result
of the Fall, as we have seen, as being alienation of humans, and of the
principalities for that matter, from God, each other, and their own true
nature. That alienation, that is, the
Fall itself, is overcome for Stringfellow (as for St. Paul) in Christ. He wrote:
In Jesus Christ there is no chasm
between God and the world…. Jesus Christ means that God comes extremely,
decisively, inclusively, immediately for the ordinary, transient, proud,
wonderful, besetting, profane, frivolous, heroic, lusty things of men. The reconciliation of God and the world in
Jesus Christ means that in Christ there is a radical and integral relationship
of all men and of all things. In Him all
things are held together….Existentially and empirically the reconciliation of
the world with God in Jesus Christ establishes a man in unity with both God and
the whole world.[47]
In language Karl Barth would have
loved, Stringfellow says that our knowledge of the power of death in our lives
leads us into a crisis,[48]
and that it is this crisis that makes us Christians. He wrote:
The event of becoming a Christian is
that event in which a man confronts and confesses the presence and power of
death in his own life--in every facet and detail of his own personality…while
in the same event he is exposed to and beholds the power and presence of God
which is greater than death.[49]
When we experience this crisis, we at the same time become
aware of “the power and the truth of the Resurrection: this presence of God in history which is
greater than any of death’s threats or temptations and more potent and which
endures forever.”[50] God participates in this crisis with us. Indeed, God even participates in death with
us, and it is this divine participation in every aspect of our lives that
renders the Christian safe.[51] In his or her knowledge of the truth of the
Resurrection and of God’s enduring presence in all aspects of our lives, the
Christian is free; free, that is, “to give his present life away, since his
life is secure in the life of God.”[52]
The
Christian’s knowledge of the saving presence of God in the world carries with
it an obligation to be fully engaged in the world for the sake of the
world. “The Christian is committed
permanently to radical protest in society,”
Stringfellow wrote.[53] Every Christian is responsible for the
“stewardship of the Gospel in his daily life and work.”[54] Part of that stewardship is what Stringfellow
calls “moral theology, that is, the interpretation and articulation, from time
to time, of the significance of the Word of God in social conflict and change.”[55] That work requires that the Christian be
engaged in “a full involvement in secular affairs….”[56] Stringfellow wrote:
The Christian social witness is
achieved only insofar as Christians are deeply implicated in the real life of
society--in unions and political clubs and citizen groups and the like; it is
not made by Christian people gathering off by themselves in a parish house to
study and discuss social issues. Witness
becomes possible only when the Christian is on the actual scent where the
conflict is taking place, the decision is being made, the legislation is being
enacted.[57]
Thus, for Stringfellow, Christians are called into to
witness for the Word of God in the world.
Clearly for Stringfellow, that meant being present with the poor and the
oppressed. That’s where he spent much of
his professional life as a lawyer.
Clearly it meant engaging in that “radical protest” to which he refers
in the quote above. Stringfellow did
that in his own life. It meant giving
one’s life away, or at least being willing to do so, in the freedom we have in
Christ from death and the fear of death.
Here is a sound theological basis for a life of Christian commitment to
justice and social change.
Yet it is a
very different basis for such a life than most liberal Christians usually think
of. It is commonplace in liberal
denominations, like my own United Church of Christ, to take mission work to
mean providing social services and working for peace and against
oppression. To the very limited extent
that Evangelization is considered at all, the assumption is that some people
may be moved to inquire into why these Christians do these things, and some may
wish to join a faith that moves people to such work. There is also a widespread assumption that
God’s Kingdom can come about only through our own efforts, since God has no
other way to work in the world. These assumptions
are grounded in considerable part in the Social Gospel traditionally
understood.
Stringfellow
would have none of it. To him, the
Social Gospel traditionally understood is a form of agnosticism.[58] This form of Protestantism, he said,
expects that fortunate concurrence of
circumstances in which men master history and build themselves a city of
salvation. For such Protestants
sacramental worship seems an indecisive, historically insignificant and archaic
exercise. And why shouldn’t it if, from
their vantage point, the saving work of God in Jesus Christ is incomplete and
still contingent upon the work of men, and God is less than God?[59]
In other words, for Stringfellow the bringing about of the
Kingdom of God on earth is the work of God, not the work of human beings, not
even the work of the Church or of Christian people collectively or
individually. We witness to the Word of
God in the world; God builds the Kingdom.
The Christian’s call is only “exposing the Word to others….This is the
only service which Christians owe the world, and all else they do or may do…is
encompassed in this service.”[60] The Christian’s job, then, is to focus on
what is unique to the Christian witness.
Social service work is not unique to Christians. Working for justice and an end of oppression
is not unique to Christians. Opposing
war and working for peace is not unique to Christians. Witnessing to the Word of God in Jesus Christ
is unique to Christians. That is what we are to do, and all else will
follow from the witness.
One of
Stringfellow’s more stirring bits of writing sums up how we are then to live in
the midst of the Fall, amidst the power of death:
In the face of death, live humanly.
In the middle of chaos, celebrate the Word. Amidst babel (sic)…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, preach the Word, defend the Word, incarnate 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.[61]
In other words, he said, live out the gifts of the Holy
Spirit: “The exercise of those gifts constitutes the essential tactic of resistance
to the power of death.”[62]
What then
are we to make of Stringfellow’s
theology of the powers and principalities? It constitutes, I believe, a Neo-Orthodox
Social Gospel. Stringfellow is clearly
Neo-Orthodox. The echoes of Barth, who
was a big fan of his,[63]
are unmistakable in his ideas about the crisis of our awareness of the
prevalence of death leading us to faith in the Resurrection of Christ. Only in
Christ do we have any ability to resist the power of death in the world. Stringfellow is no Christian liberal,
although he may have been a political and social one. He has no faith in the goodness of human
beings apart from their redemption in Christ.
He has no faith in our power to bring about the Kingdom on our own. Indeed, bringing about the Kingdom is not our
job, is not what we are called to attempt to do. Rather, we are called merely to witness to
the power of the Word of God in the world, to witness to the power of Christ to
overcome the power of death. No wonder
Barth was so fond of Stringfellow.
Any
evaluation of Stringfellow must come to terms with, among other things, his
relentlessly bleak view of the nature of social, political, economic, cultural,
educational, religious, and other institutions.
Are they really all about death?
Is there nothing redeeming about them?
We must keep in mind that for Stringfellow anything that does not serve
the Word of God in the world serves death.
These are the only two moral forces available to us. So to some extent, the powers and principalities
serve death by definition, since they do not serve God. Beyond that, we live perhaps in more tranquil
times than those that produced Stringfellow’s view of the principalities
(though many of us lived through those times too); and most of us white, middle
class, well-educated, straight people have not had his immediate experience of
the life of the very poor and oppressed among us. Perhaps for these reasons it is difficult for
me to see such institutions as law and social service agencies in as totally
pessimistic terms as Stringfellow did.
Yet his words are a good reminder to us.
Institutions do have a life of
their own; and that life is almost always their ultimate concern. They can and usually do therefore become
anti-human, that is, they can easily become, if they are not already,
instruments of death. We forget these
truths at our peril.
Finally we
must assess Stringfellow’s strong Christocentric view of life and his strong
belief that Christians are called only to witness to the Gospel, not first of
all to do other good works in response to God’s grace. These are challenging words for those of us
who live squarely in the tradition of liberal Protestantism and the Social
Gospel more traditionally understood.
Yet I find them to be an important corrective to some of the more
unfortunate tendencies of my tradition.
Liberal, Social Gospel Protestantism can look very much like liberal
secular humanism with stained glass windows.
The theology, such as it is, of liberal UCC churches can be a kind of
functional Unitarianism that uses Trinitarian language it neither understands
nor believes. It can cease to look much
like Christianity altogether. When it
does, it loses its grounding, its roots.
It becomes cut off from that living faith out of which it originally
grew and which has the ability to nourish it and sustain it in profound and
powerful ways. We would do well to
rediscover Stringfellow and, as Barth said, to listen to him.
Bibliography
Barth,
Markus K., “The Letter of Paul to the Ephesians,” The Oxford Companion to the Bible,, The New Oxford Annotated Biblical Reference Library, CD Rom
version, Oxford University Press, 1996.
Kellermann, Bill Wylie, ed., A Keeper of the Word, Selected Writing of William Stringfellow,
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1994.
Stringfellow, William, Count
It All Joy, Reflections on Faith, Doubt, and Temptation Seen Through the Letter
of James, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan,
1967.
Stringfellow, William, An
Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, Word Books, Waco,
Texas, 1973.
My People Is the Enemy, an
Autobiographical Polemic, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1964.
Stringfellow, William, A
Private and Public Faith, William B.
Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1962
[1] The reference is to Wink’s highly
influential three volume series Naming
the Powers (1984), Unmasking the
Powers (1986), and Engaging the
Powers (1992), all published by Fortress Press, Philadelphia. Because Stringfellow’s works are out of
print, only the few contained in the Seattle University library were available
to me. Most of these are listed in the
bibliography to this paper. Fortunately,
the SU library has a copy of a very useful compilation of selections from
Stringfellow’s writings: Kellermann,
Bill Wylie, ed., A Keeper of the Word,
Selected Writing of William Stringfellow, William B. Eerdmans Publishing
Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1994. This
anthology contains sections of some of Stringfellow’s important works that
would not otherwise have been available to me.
[2] Id., pp. 1-2.
[3] Id., p. 2.
[4] Stringfellow, William, A Private and Public Faith, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand
Rapids, Michigan, 1962, p. 58.
[5] Stringfellow maintained close
friendships with several other prominent people as well, perhaps most notably
with the French writer Jacques Ellul.
[6] Id., p. 13. A little oral
history here: Although Kellermann does
not say so, Rev. Dr. Dennis Hughes, the pastor of Northminster Presbyterian
Church in Seattle, who was an anti-war activist himself during his time at Yale
Divinity School in the late 1960s, has told me that at the time Berrigan was
under indictment for breaking into a draft board office and pouring blood over
the draft records. Stringfellow was very
sympathetic and may even have been involved in that incident himself.
[7] Id., p. 7. Some more oral
history: Rev. Kimbrough Besheer, a local
Episcopal priest and Jungian analyst, who met and spoke with Stringfellow on at
least one occasion in the office of the Episcopal bishop of Rhode Island, has
told me that Stringfellow was gay.
Kellermann does not mention this fact.
Neither does Stringfellow in anything I have seen. If it is true it would add another dimension
to Stringfellow’s personal experience of social oppression by the powers and
principalities, which clearly include prominently in their number heterosexism
and homophobia.
[8] Kellermann’s bibliography of
Stringfellow’s works covers ten pages. Kellermann,
op. cit., pp. 416-426.
[9]
Id., p. 10.
[10] Stringfellow came late to an
understanding of the need for inclusive language. Id. In the quotes that follow, I will not change
Stringfellow’s language for the sake of inclusiveness, as Kellermann has done
to some extent. Any masculine exclusive
language in those quotes is Stringfellow’s.
My decision not to change his words comes from a respect for the
integrity of historical texts as reflecting the culture in which they were
written and in no way reflects a personal endorsement of the use of such
exclusive language. Since Kellermann
made a different decision and changed some of Stringfellow’s language to be
more inclusive, I cannot be sure that all of the language in the passages
quoted from Kellermann are Stringfellow’s original words. You will note in some of those passages, for
example, the frequent use of words like “human beings” or “humans.” Stringfellow’s original wording may well have
been “men” in some of these instances, especially in his earlier works.
[11] Stringfellow, William, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in
a Strange Land, Word Books, Waco, Texas, 1973, p. 20.
[12] Stringfellow recounts the nature
and significance for him of this experience in his book My People Is the Enemy, an Autobiographical Polemic, Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, New York, 1964.
[13] Stringfellow, William, Instead of Death, 1967 ed., Seabury
Press, p. 5; quoted in Kellermann, op.
cit., p. 2.
[14] Stringfellow, My People Is the Enemy, supra,
p. 3.
[15] Id., p. 4.
[16] Barth, Markus K., “The Letter of
Paul to the Ephesians,” The Oxford
Companion to the Bible,, The New
Oxford Annotated Biblical Reference Library, CD Rom version, Oxford
University Press, 1996.
[17] Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, supra, p. 78. Kellermann says that this work “articulates
most completely [Stringfellow’s] theology of the powers.” Kellermann, op. cit., p. 3. Many of the
quotes used in this paper are from this work, which for convenience I will
henceforth cite as Stringfellow, Ethic.
[18] Stringfellow, Ethic, p. 110.
[19] Stringfellow, Ethic, p. 109.
[20] Stringfellow, Ethic,, p. 110.
[21] Stringfellow, Ethic, p. 110.
[22] Stringfellow, Ethic, p. 79.
[23] Quoted at Kellermann, op. cit., p. 194, quoting from Stringfellow,
William, Free in Obedience, The Radical Christian Life,, Seabury
Press, 1964. Kellermann calls this work
Stringfellow’s “seminal treatment of the principalities and the ethics of
freedom.” Kellermann, op. cit., p. 2.
[24] Id.
[25] Stringfellow, Ethic, pp. 79-80.
[26] Stringfellow, Ethic, p. 80.
[27] Quoted in Kellermann, op. cit., p. 194, from Freedom in Obedience, supra.
[28] Stringfellow, Ethic, p. 76.
[29] Stringfellow, Ethic, p. 80.
[30] Stringfellow, Ethic, p. 81.
[31] Id.
[32] Stringfellow, Ethic, p. 68. The Gospel
passage Stringfellow cited here is the report of the seventy when they returned
to Jesus of how even demons submitted to them when they ministered in his name.
[33] Stringfellow, Ethic, p. 70.
[34] Kellermann, op. cit., p. 199, quoting from Free
in Obedience, supra.
[35] Stringfellow, Ethic, p. 29.
[36] Stringfellow, Ethic, p. 30.
[37] Stringfellow, Ethic, p. 31.
[38] Id.
[39] Kellermann, op. cit., p. 200, quoting from Freedom
in Obedience, op. cit.
[40] Id.
[41] Id., p. 202.
[42] Although in the analysis below I
stress Stringfellow’s similarity to Barth, his analysis of idolatry has a
distinctly Tillichean ring to it.
[43] Stringfellow, Ethic, p. 125.
[44] Stringfellow, Ethic, p., 121.
[45] I remember reading, but as I write
this cannot find in my notes, a statement in which he rejects the idea that the
law is in some ways beneficent because, in America at least, it acts to some
extent to protect the individual from the power of the state. He rejected that view because, he said, as a
principality the law itself is ultimately an agent of death no better than any
other agent of death. I know few people
as cynical about the American legal system as I am after 18 years of practicing
law in it; yet Stringfellow’s total denial of any positive role for the law in
society goes too far even for me. It’s
bad, but it isn’t as bad as a legal system can be. Certainly the legal system in the old Soviet
Union, which I have studied and about which I once taught at the University of
Washington, was far more in bondage to the powers of death than is the American
legal system. Our system does actually,
on the too rare occasions when it works the way it should, provide significant
protection to individuals from the principalities. Did Stringfellow never see that happening in his work as a lawyer?
[46] Stringfellow had a rather odd
practice of using the phrase “Word of God” when what he actually meant was
simply God. In the quotes that follow,
it will help to understand God when Stringfellow says Word of God.
[47] Stringfellow, William, A Private and Public Faith, supra, p. 40.
[48] Id., p. 65.
[49] Id., p. 64.
[50] Id.
[51] Id., p. 65.
[52] Id., p. 66.
[53] Id., p. 22.
[54] Id., p. 53.
[55] Id.
[56] Id.
[57]
Id., p. 54.
[58] Id., p. 28.
[59] Id., pp. 28-29.
[60] Id., pp. 61-62.
[61] Ethic, pp. 142-143.
[62] Id., p. 145.
[63] Stringfellow had a famous
encounter with Barth at the University of Chicago in 1962. The book jacket to A Private and Public Faith quotes Barth as calling Stringfellow
“the conscientious and thoughtful New York attorney who caught my attention
more than any other person.” Kellermannn
reports that Barth said of Stringfellow:
“You should listen to this man!”
Kellermannn, op. cit., p.
1.
