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The thought of William Stringfellow is a major re-source for unmasking the powers.
Walter Wink
William Stringfellow: Theologian of
the Next MillenniumA Review Essay
Keeper of the Word: Selected Writings of William Stringfellow edited with an introduction by Bill Wylie Kellermann. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994. 434 pp.$22.95 (paper).
A growing number of us are prepared to proclaim the writings oflawyer/theologian William Stringfellow to be the germinal articula
tion of the theology of the third millennium. This brilliant anthology
now makes Stringfellow freshly available, and in a systematic manner
that greatly simplifies penetrating to the heart of his project. In addi
tion, a Festschrift has just appeared, edited by Andrew W. McThenia,
Jr. entitled Radical Christian and Exemplary Lawyer. Soon there will be
an autobiography of Stringfellow by Wylie-Kellermann. With all these
pieces in place, we can anticipate a renaissance of Stringfellow studies.
The Principalities and Powers
I first met Bill Stringfellow when I worked in the East Harlem Prot
estant Par ish while a student at Union Seminary in 1956. But my first
introduction to his writings was in 1964, when the Christian Century
WALTER WINK is professor of biblical interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City and author of Engaging the Powers (Fortress Press, 1992).His review-essay is adapted from "Stringfellow on the Powers" in Radical Chris-tian and Exemplary Lawyer, ed. Andrew W. McThenia, Jr., 1995, with permissionfrom William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
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asked me to review two of his books, Free in Obedience and My People
is the Enemy. Chapter three of Free in Obedience changed my life.
I had read studies on the Powers by Heinrich Schlier {Principalities
and Powers in the New Testament, 1961) and Hendrick Berkhof {Christ and
the Powers, 1962) while still in graduate school, and had already sensed
the remarkable fertility of this neglected concept for the development
of a Christian social ethic. It was a truism of New Testament studies
in that era that the New Testament possessed only an individualistic
ethic. Anyone in search of a social ethic would have to consult the Ex
odus narratives or the prophets. Neither Schlier nor Berkhof was able
to step firmly on the ground of the twentieth century and confess the
relevance of the Powers for life today. They both did so only by allu
sion, illustration, or cryptic association. They were themselves caught
in the principality of New Testament criticism, which had become as
dogmatic and stultified as the religious orthodoxy it had been invented
to overthrow.
What Stringfellow did in Free in Obedience was to demythologize the
Powers into three contemporary socio-political categories: ideologies,
institutions, and images. That he was not engaged in a systematic en
deavor is shown by the rank proliferation of terms that sedimented
around these key categories, many of which cannot be subsumed underany of them: money, folk heroes, sex, fashion, sports, motherhood,
patriotism, religion, race, class, nation, family, profession, Stalinism,
Marxism, Nazism, careerism, illness, denominationalism, the American
way of life (these he cites in Free in Obedience ), and war, violence, "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 orthe Olympics or the Methodist Church or the Teamsters Union are allprincipalities. So are capitalism, Maoism, humanism, Mormonism, astrology, the Puritan work ethic, science and scientism, white supremacy,patriotism {78)
In short, all of social, political, and corporate reality, both in its vis
ible and invisible manifestations. The list runs the danger, however, of
including everything and therefore denoting nothing. Stringfellow him
self provides greater precision by the pungent examples he uses, so the
notion never empties into abstraction or becomes vapid. Still, his treat
ment of the powers cried out for systematic reflection, especially at the
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level of the New Testament language for power, and I tried to provide
that in the first volume of my trilogy on the principalities and powers,
Naming the Powers (Fortress, 1984).I had hoped to get Bill's comments on the manuscripts as they
emerged, but he was only able to scan volume one before he died. As
I look back over that completed project (which includes Unmasking the
Powers, 1986, and Engaging the Powers, 1992, both from Fortress), and
having now reread most of his opus (and a few of his books for the first
time), I am able to see how very deeply I owe the strengths of my se
ries on the Powers to him, and how its weaknesses reveal my failure to
take him more seriously. (I also realize how much of his thought I had
internalized without giving him sufficient credit.)The Dominion of Death
Though he generally wrote for lay people and was widely read by
them, Stringfellow's writing is thought to be dense and difficult go
ing. Not that he cluttered his work with theological jargon; there is an
almost total absence of that. The difficulty was in part the concentrated-
ness of his style, wherein a paragraph might comprise a string of clauses
punctuated with semicolons, compacting into one thought what most of
us would have spread over a chapter.But the difficulty in reading Stringfellow goes far deeper. I suspect
that it has something to do with the fundamental structure of his theo
logical method. My own natural tendency (against which I have striven
mightily but with limited success) has always been to seek the via media.
When it came to principalities and powers, I was inclined to think that
they are usually bad, but they also do good; therefore they are a mix of
good and evil and need a bit of reform here and a bit of rebuking there,
but they must not be demonized or rendered irremediably evil.
Stringfellow found such thinking reprehensible. His own approachwas paradoxical in the extreme. The Powers are fallen, unequivocally.
While some are less lethal, corrupting and venal than others, all are
equally fallen, all seek their own survival as the highest good, all are
complicit therefore in idolatry, all have thus become demonic. There
is no room here for amelioration, for a continuum between good and
bad. The Powers — all of them, without exception — participate in the
kingdom of death.
And at the same time, these very Powers have been rendered im
potent by the victory of God in the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus Christ"has, holds, and exercises power even over death in this world. And his
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Books by and about Stringfellow
Mentioned in this Essay
Bill Wyhe Kellermann, editor Keeper of the Word Selected Writings of William
Stringfellow Grand Rapids Eerdmans, 1994
Andrew W McThenia, Jr, Editor Radical Christian and Exemplary Lawyer Grand
Rapids Eerdmans, 1995
William Stringfellow An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land
Waco, Tex Word Books, 1973
Free in Obedience New York Seabury Press, 1964
Impostors of God Washington, DC Witness Books, 1969
Instead of Death New York Seabury, 1963, 2nd expanded edition, 1976
My People Is the Enemy New York Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964
The Politics of Spirituality Philadelph ia Westminster, 1984
with Anthony Towne Suspect Tenderness New York, Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1971
promise is that a person may be set free from bondage to death in this
life here and now" {Instead of Death, 22).
That is, death rules the world, and yet death has been shorn of its
power and deprived of its victory by the cross. Those who participate in
that redemptive reality already experience the resurrection life, which
is nothing other than life lived in liberation from the moral power of
death in the present world.
Stringfellow provides, in Instead of Death, one especially precise state
ment, in almost syllogistic form that illustrates the paradoxical quality
of his thought:
Loneliness is the most caustic, drastic, and fundamental repudiation ofGod Loneliness is the most elementary expression of original sin Thereis no one who does not know loneliness Yet there is no one who is alone.
(25)
Pause a moment over the rigor of this dialectic. In it is laid bare,
in breathtaking simplicity, the theoretical structure of Stringfellow's
thought. It is nothing less than Romans made programmatic for an en
tire theology: "For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall
short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift,
through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus" (3:22-24). Loneliness
is a state of sin; we are all lonely (and therefore in a state of sin); no
one is alone. Very few people can live with the tension created by those
three assertions. Our tendency is either to fall into the despair of the
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first two statements, or to embrace a kind of polyannish optimism with
the third. In the unexpected reversal of that final phrase we encounter
the gospel of grace where we least expect it — in a statement of universal culpability. Others have been able to deal eloquently with one side
of the dialectic or the other. I know of no one who was able to hold the
dialectic together so tightly.
The same rigor is apparent in his theological approach to politics:
• There is no politics that is not fallen and exemplary of the fact oforiginal sin.
• All of us are implicated in the fallenness of politics.
• There is no political situation that cannot be redeemed, even though itis a redemption that takes place within a fallen order and therefore willinevitably manifest that fallenness itself.
It is the unexpectedness of redemption in that third term that made
his ethics so unpredictable, because it was premised, not on ideology,
but resurrection. And it was the sobriety of his understanding of sin
that shielded him from optimism about the epiphanies of resurrection
that do take place. Hence he was neither an optimist nor a pessimist.
For optimists cannot admit that things are as bad as they are, and pes
simists underestimate the power of the Holy Spirit. (Though I cannotescape the feeling that Stringfellow would have phrased that last sen
tence, "Pessimists just don't realize how bad things are; optimists just
can't imagine how good things will be.")
The rigor of his dialectic made Stringfellow's message simultane
ously one of judgment and of grace. The good news to the world is
that we can stop living in thrall to the Powers now, even under the con
ditions of death. The gospel is that God sets us free from the dread
of death, the cajolery of death, and the seductiveness of death, even
though we are complicit with death's power. It is precisely the messageof this sovereign freedom from the moral power of death that identifies
Stringfellow as a theologian of hope despite the despair that surrounds
a world locked in the power of death.
The Ubiquity of the Fall
Second in importance only to the category of dea th for Stringfellow's
thought is his notion of the fall. In a decade which has been happily
pursuing Matthew Fox's rejection of fall language in an attempt to re
dress an overemphasis on sin and redemption in Christian tradition(a correction which I support), Stringfellow's realism about the fall is
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scarcely ingratiating. Not only is he adamant about the fall's utter per
vasiveness, affecting everyone in every time equally, but he has the
effrontery to extend the fall to cover everything, including nonhumanbeings, the entire created order, even structures and ideologies and roles
and institutions and nations. Nothing escapes the power of death as it
is manifested in the fall.
The fall refers to the profound disorientation, affecting all relationshipsin the totality of creation, concerning identity, place, connection, purpose,vocation. The subject of the fall is not only the personal realm, in thesense of you or me, but the whole of creation and each and every item ofcreated life. The fall means the reign of chaos throughout creation now,so that even that which is ordained by the ruling powers as "order" is,
in truth, chaotic. {The Politics of Spirituality, 38)It is part of the hubris of human sin that we humans believe ourselves
to be the sole cause of the fall. But the Powers, too, are fallen. Institu
tions and systems are not mere human contrivances; they are a part
of God's creative providence. They are indispensable to life. The Pow
ers are created in, through, and for the humanizing purposes of God
in Christ (Col. 1:15-20). No huma n being can exist in isolation from
or prior to social structures. But they, too, are fallen. Not just some, or
sometimes, but all, always.
Americans particularly persevere in belaboring the illusion that at leastsome institutions are benign and viable and within human direction orcan be rendered so by discipline or reform or revolution or displacement. The principalities are, it is supposed, capable of being altered soas to respect and serve human life, instead of demeaning and dominating human life, provided there is a sufficient human will to accomplishthis. {An Ethic for Christians, 83-84)
Stringfellow finds this view virtually incredible. "It really asserts that
the principalities are only somewhat or sometimes fallen and that the
Fall is not an essential condition of disorientation, morally equivalentto the estate of death, affecting the whole of Creation in time" (ibid.).
This dreadful conclusion is only one side of the paradox, however,
and if allowed to stand alone, would devastate all hope and initiatives
for justice. The other side of the paradox is that these very Powers are
capable of being reminded of their vocations and of manifesting, fleet-
ingly and partially, the presence of God's divine reign. "To put the same
differently, biblical spirituality concerns living in the midst of the era of
the Fall, wherein all relationships whatsoever have been lost or dam
aged or diminished or twisted or broken, in a way which is open totranscendence of the fallenness of each and every relationship and in
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which these very relationships are recovered or rendered new" {Suspect
Tenderness, 20).
Prophetic discernment, which Stringfellow consciously but withoutvainglory understood to be his life's task, entails sensitivity to the
Word of God indwelling all Creation and transfiguring common his
tory, while remaining radically realistic about death's vitality in all that
happens. "The discernment of spirits refers to the talent to recognize
the Word of God in this world in principalities and persons despite the
distortion of fallenness... [it means] transcending the moral reality of
death permeating everything" {Ethic for Christians, 139).
This sovereign transcendence of death is not just an eschatological
possibility, however, that will ultimately come upon us as a final vindication of God. It is a victory already won, in the death and resurrect ion
of Jesus. "Biblical living is watchful for that consummation but does
not strive to undo the power of death, knowing that death is already
undone and is in no way whatever to be feared and worshiped" (153).
"Engagement in specific and incessant struggle against death's rule ren
ders us human. Resistance to death is the only way to live humanly in
the midst of the Fall" (138).
At the heart of this paradox of grace-despite-death is the recognition
that we are able to look at evil steadily, and to name it, and to locateit, not in the occasional aberration of a system or the poor administra
tion of an institution, but in the very ubiquity of death's reign in the
world. And the more steadily we gaze on evil, the more we are able
to affirm God's grace as having already overcome the moral power of
death in the world. What our generation needs to learn from this un
flinching seer is that the doctrine of the fall is a blessed relief and, far
from depressing, is the sole foundation for affirming the transforming
power of God in the one and only real world. A truly radical notion
of the fall is only a consequence, after all, of a truly radical experience of grace. Only as we are delivered from the power of death —
including not only our own self-destructive behavior, or egocentricity,
or alienation from God, but also our complicity with the Powers, our
collusion in injustice and our blind acquiescence in delusion — are we
able for the first time to recognize the depth of our previous bondage.
The radicality of sin is known only in retrospect, from the vantage point
of faith. Only after we have been delivered from bondage do we rec
ognize how pervasive and utter the bondage has been. Stringfellow's
doctrine of the Fall is an outgrowth of the experience of grace, not its
presupposition.
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The Exclusivity of God's Judgment
If Stringfellow is adamant on the pervasiveness of the fall, he isequally stringent in his ascription of all judgment to God. God's judg
ment is a corollary of the doctrine of sin. If no creature is free of the
effects of the fall, if all, then, are sinners, and our sin lies precisely
in our acquiescence in the morality of a fallen estate, then who are we
to judge what is sinful and what is not? Traditional Christianity is
premised on obedience to laws which are primarily formulated to pro
tect the privileges of the powerful. Our very ideas of morality are often
artifacts of an alienating socialization.
Thus he can assert, "None of the acts of sex which society regardsas criminal or antisocial should necessarily be regarded as sin. On the
other hand, those forms of conduct that do not fall under the legal or
moral censure of society should not be considered free of sin. Soci
ety is not the judge of anyone's sin" {Instead of Death, 52). Again, the
evenhanded paradox.
Sin is not what certain societies or religions declare sin to be. It is
bondage to the power of death. The public designation of certain kinds
of conduct as sin is, in fact, a usurpation of God's prerogative to judge
all human decisions and actions. And God's judgment is in no way mitigated, altered, or influenced by the opinions of people or the policy of
society. "To put it a bit differently, the Christian knows and confesses
that in all things — in every act and decision — humans are sinners
and in no way, by any ingenuity, piety, sanction, or social conformity,
may a person escape from the full burden of the power of sin over his
or her whole existence" (52-53). That might appear depressing at first
sight, but it is in fact liberation from the illusion that by being a little
bit better than you, I have an edge with God.
Far from being a negative evaluation of all human actions, this as
sertion of the sole prerogative of God in judgment is the basis for
utter freedom from all attempts at self-justification. If we can never
second guess the will of God, if we are simply left by God with the
moral responsibility of trying to live humanly in the world, then we
can scarcely declare what we do to be right or just or divinely willed.
Whether society dubs us saints or sinners, the truth of our standing be
fore God is that we have no standing whatever, that God alone is judge.
Since we cannot know where we stand, God has provided a standpoint:Jesus' self-offering on the cross. In Christ , God declares us beloved,
regardless
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The ethical wisdom of human beings cannot, and need not, imitate orpreempt or displace the will of God, but is magnificently, unabashedly,and merely human. The ethical discernment of humans cannot anticipate
and must not usurp the judgment of God, but is an existential event, anexercise of conscience — transient and fragile Moreover, it is the dignity of this ethical posture which frees human beings, in their decisionsand tactics, to summon the powers and principalities, and similar creatures, to their vocation — the enhancement of human life in society. {Ethic
for Christians, 57)
Again, the taut paradox: it is precisely because only God is judge that
we can live free of a constant sense of being under judgment.
So it is in the very doctrines most distasteful to the cultural palate
that Stringfellow finds the greatest profundity. Add to these his asser
tions about resurrection, second coming, hell, and his fondness for the
bizarre imagery of the Book of Revelation, and it becomes abundantly
clear why the circle of Stringfellow admirers is so small. And yet many
in that small circle believe that it is on precisely the foundation that
Stringfellow has laid that the theology and praxis of the future is being
built. Those only a little familiar with God's sense of humor must savor
the irony of this slight, acerbic lawyer, ignored by the theologians and
the academy, turning theology on its ear!
I believe we are involved today in the reinvention of Christianity.
We are moving away from a Christianity of individual sins, individual
salvation, and escape from the world into an afterlife, which ignores the
systems and structures and powers of the earth and the earth itself. We
are moving toward a more corporate understanding of the struggle of
Christ with the Powers, and God's victory over them. Forgiveness will
be understood not as our infraction of the Powers' moral commands, but
as release from our collusion with the Powers. Salvation will be seen as
being set free from bondage to the Powers and to death itself, so that
the very Powers themselves can be recalled to their divine vocations
and the earth itself be redeemed.
Well, Yes, Nonviolence
It is in the area of nonviolence that I find Stringfellow's writings most
problematic. The logic of his own understanding of the moral power
of death drove him to question war and violence. He perceived that
"a literally fatal idolatry of violence has been initiated" {Politics, 71).
Those who have once acclaimed violence as their method, he cautioned,
must inexorably choose falsehood as their principle {Ethic for Christians,107). While he affirmed the nonviolence of Martin Luther King and saw
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clearly how black violence was merely the reactive mirroring of white
violence {Imposters of God, 86-87) , he was so sensitive to the postu ring
of pacifists who claimed to know the will of God that he spent most
of his ammuni tion attacking pacifist presumption rather than affirmingnonviolence.
Consequently, his treatment of violence tends to waffle; I miss here
the rigor of the paradox. There is no unequivocal condemnation fol
lowed by the word of grace, not enough gospel over-againstness, no
clean break with the ways of the world (which also evaluates violence
with an "on the one hand... but on the other" kind of thinking).
Thus he devotes a section of An Ethic to what he calls "The Bon-
hoeffer Dilemma." Stringfellow begins his argument by alluding to the
purported advocacy of violent tactics by some early Christians in sup
port of the Zealot revolt against Rome {Ethic for Christians, 132). But there
is not one shred of evidence to support this statement. It is a supposi
tion created out of sheer imagination by S. G. F. Brandon in his brief for
a violent Christianity, Jesus and the Zealots (Scribner's, 1967). What we do
know as incontrovertible fact is that for its first three centuries the early
church stoutly maintained a consistent repudiation of war and violence,
despite recurrent persecution by the Roman empire.
Stringfellow attacks "doctrinaire or pietistic pacifism" for its attemptto ideologize the gospel by trying to ascertain idealistically whether a
projected action approximates the will of God.
It is a query which seeks assurance beforehand of how God will judgea decision or an act. It is a true conundrum which only betrays an unseemly anxiety for justification quite out of step with a biblical life-stylethat dares in each and every event to trust the grace of God. No decision, no deed, either violent or nonviolent, is capable of being confidentlyrationalized as a second-guessing of God's will. {Ethic for Christians, 132)
No doubt this is true. But nowhere does Stringfellow aim a similar
invective at just war thinking. He merely dismisses it out of hand in an
aside. But very few people have held pacifist beliefs; they are scarcely in
danger of overwhelming the Christian church! Whereas just war think
ing has dominated Christian theology ever since Augustine. Two-thirds
of all people ever killed in war were European Christians, mostly in
the act of killing other European Christians. All that carnage was legiti
mated by appeal to just war principles. Advocates of nonviolence are in
no more danger of infringing on the prerogatives of God than any other
person advocating any other ethical position.Bonhoeffer's status as martyr must not prevent sober analysis of his
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position. The death plot, after all, did not succeed. Violence did not
work. All the participants were executed. One can only wonder, had
Bonhoeffer only known that his vain participation in the death plot
would be used by two generations of Christians as an excuse to avoidcommitting themselves to principled nonviolence, whether he would
have acted differently.
Stringfellow knew, of course, that violence and war were the final
sanctions of death in the world, and that the gospel was their ultimate
repudiation. On one occasion, Stringfellow circumscribes the option of
violence so thoroughly that it becomes all but impossible to choose:
... where Christians, in the same frailty and tension as any other humanbeings, become participants in specific violence they do so confession-ally, acknowledging throughout the sin of it. I suggest Christians donot, thereby, engage in violence casually or without aforethought or as afirst resort rather than last. (Admittedly, multitudes of professing Christians have become soldiers in practically every army without so muchas a pause. Moreover, they have done so with the same kind of self-righteousness that, as I have just complained, often afflicts ideologicalpacifists.)
Christians become implicated in violence without any excuses forthe horror of violence, without any extenuations for the gravity of it,without sublimating the infidelity it symbolizes, without construing violence as justice, without illusions that their violence is less culpable than
that of anyone else, without special pleading, without vainglory, withoutridiculing the grace of God. (133)
What if we substituted for the word "violence" here, the word
"racism"? Would he have countenanced the statement, "I suggest Chris
tians do not, thereby, engage in racism casually or without aforethought
or as a first resort rather than last"? Why, if he is so clear that the cross
has overcome the moral power of death, does he still concede to war
and violence the Bonhoeffer exemption? It is certainly true that we can
not infringe on the sovereignty of God by declaring any particular acts
God's will. But are there not some things which we must condemn in
principle, even if in the moment our actions must remain ambiguous?
Would Stringfellow not agree that genocide, racism, or the slaughter of
children are flat out wrong ? So why is he reluctant to accord to war and
violence the same judgment?
I suspect that it was his profound solidarity with the oppressed that
prevented his condemning their recourse to violence. But there is no
need to condemn them. When the oppressed explode in violence, that is
an apocalyptic judgment on their ruler s, who squandered opportunit iesto redress their grievances. We must always side with the oppressed.
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But that does not mean we must remain silent as to their choice of meth
ods. On purely pragmatic grounds, nonviolence commends itself as
more likely to succeed than violence, with less casualties, and with bet
ter prospects for the future (especially in a country where both victorsand vanquished will continue to have to live together).
From conversations shortly before his death (I was team-teaching a
two-part course with him at Auburn Seminary that was interrupted by
his death) I drew the conclusion that he had moved to a more princi
pled embrace of nonviolence, not as an abstract moral absolute, but as
the unavoidable logic of his own understanding of the dominion and
ubiquity of death. And that is, in fact, the logic of his entire enterprise.
It is a measure of his resiliency as a thinker that he was still growing,
changing, and stretching up to the day of his death.Perhaps he thought he had been clear enough earlier, in Suspect
Tenderness:
Meanwhile, where the ethics of change condone or practice violence, thenrevolution — no matter how idealistic, how necessary, or how seeminglyglorious — is basically without viable hope even if it were to prevailempirically In such circumstances, though we are not ideological pacifists — or, for that matter, ideologues of any species, we are persuaded, asare the Berrigans, that recourse to violence, whether to threaten or topplethe idol of death in the State, is inherently a worship of the self-same idol.
And so we persevere, as Christians, and, simply, as human beings,in nonviolence We do so because nonviolence has become the onlyway in America, today, to express hope for human life in society, and,transcending that, to anticipate an eschatological hope. (Ill)
Stringfellow needs no tributes, no memorials, no markers. Attention
to his writings expresses no sentimentalism or desire to immortalize a
friend. It is the time itself that cries out for his wisdom — a time when
death no longer bothers to mask itself, but meets us everywhere, de
manding as tribute every living thing, and now even the very earth
itself. No thinker of the twentieth century understood better the depthof that assault, or saw more unflinchingly the gospel's relevance and ur
gency. If we wish to recover and press forward Stringfellow's thought,
it is not for his sake that we do so, but for our own.
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