William Stringfellow: no distant prophet

I discovered accounts of, and later the writings of, William Stringfellow, rather late in the day. Somehow I had never heard of him - not in discussion, sermons or my theological education. I post this brief summary in the hope that others might also encounter him.

William Stringfellow (1928 - 1985) was born in Johnston, Rhode Island USA. His family not well off. But he was clever, and obtained  scholarships which paid for college and, later, a spell at the London School of Economics. After service in the US Army he attended Harvard Law School, and after his graduation, moved to a slum tenement in Harlem, New York City to work as a lawyer among poor African-Americans and Hispanics. He was a lifelong Anglican (Episcopalian as they say in the USA).  He was a prolific writer, though most of his books fell off the publisher’s lists after he died (of diabetes in 1985).

In summary –

• William was radicalised as a teenager by observing a local Maine restaurant that refused to serve people of colour
• He gained a reputation as a strident critic of the social, military and economic policies of the US and as a tireless advocate for racial and social justice
• He viewed the Christian call to be one of a lifelong struggle against the "powers and principalities" (as systemic evil is sometimes called in the New Testament)
• He insisted that being a follower of Jesus means to declare oneself free from all spiritual forces of death and destruction and to submit oneself whole-heartedly to the power of life
• In short, the Christian vocation is ‘to be human’
• He insisted on the primacy of the Bible for Christians as they undertook this precarious and inherently dangerous work, but was not a supporter of evangelicalism but of neo-orthodoxy
• He made pointed criticisms of theological training & seminaries: theologically shallow, their curriculum and ethos a mixture of "poetic recitations...social analysis, gimmicks, solicitations, sentimentalities, and corn."
• He was suspicious of religious liberalism and authoritarian dogmatism
• William Stringfellow's most significant contribution: to see "images, ideologies, and institutions" as the primary contemporary manifestations of the demonic powers and principalities spoken of in the Bible. This outlook made him categorically suspicious of the activities of governments, corporations, and other organizations, including the institutional churches; a viewpoint that placed him at odds with the nearly-ubiquitous "progressive" sentiments of the mid-20th century
• He shared his later years with the poet Anthony Towne. William suffered ill health and through his many experiences, came to denounce modern commercially-driven technocratic medicine. 

Some of what he says to me:

• you can be Biblical without being fundamentalist (indeed, we should be Biblical but not fundamentalist)
• the ‘powers and principalities’ are not ‘back then’ but ‘here, now’
• Christian faith concerned only with the personal and pastoral is deficient
• Christ’s resurrection means we are freed from the fear of death
• prayer as commonly understood and practiced, publicly and privately, is often drivel and ‘magic’
• the Incarnation makes our personal biographies/lives significant
• we are idolaters:  we make idols of  work, status, money, race, beauty (so called), power, corporations, institutions, the church…(“We are used to blaming ourselves for many sins of commission and omission, but not for worshipping idols.” Imposters of God: inquiries into favourite idols)
• we should be vulnerable to the world and to God, and to be obedient to the call to authenticity just where we are
• Everyone should work to develop critical faculties: try to see through the smoke and mirrors of ‘the normal’ even though this may lead to a certain kind of (occasional) loneliness
  

Works
A Public and Private Faith, 1962
Instead of Death, 1963
My People Is the Enemy, 1964
Free in Obedience, 1964
Dissenter in a Great Society, 1966
(with Anthony Towne) The Bishop Pike Affair, 1967
Count It All Joy, 1967
Imposters of God: Inquiries into Favourite Idols, 1969
A Second Birthday, 1970
Suspect Tenderness: The Ethics of the Berrigan Witness, 1971
An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, 1973
(with Anthony Towne) The Death and Life of Bishop Pike, 1976
Instead of Death, 1976
Conscience and Obedience, 1977
A Simplicity of Faith: My Experience in Mourning, 1982
The Politics of Spirituality, 1984
 

William Stringfellow: career vs. vocation
 
“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 favour 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.”

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

Icon showing Stringfellow as ‘keeper of the Word’. It was commissioned by Daniel Berrigan SJ.

“William Stringfellow’s theological writing is pervaded by the conviction that the resurrection of Jesus frees us from the dominion of death. The world is ruled by principalities – by suprahuman, suprapersonal institutional powers which bind human life to the service of death. But the gospel sets us free to live and work within these institutions as servants of Christ; we are freed from the dominion of the principalities, since the resurrection of Christ frees us from the fear of death. Since death is the only power with which the principalities can threaten us, we have nothing whatsoever to fear! This, for Stringfellow, is the gospel; this is the Christian life. “
Faith and theology blog, 2009