William Stringfellow

William Stringfellow, Free in Obedience – Part V

The final chapter in Free in Obedience is a reflection on the freedom of God, which the opening paragraph describes thus:

‘The freedom of God in his ruling love for this world in this world is not at all coincident with, contingent upon, nor captive of the Church, much less so of the churches or of individual Christians. If the Church or those within the churches do not see and honor the freedom of God, if they will not thus acknowledge and worship God, if they persist in vain commendations of themselves instead of in gladness in the Word of God, if they indulge in boasting witness to themselves rather than bragging of their weakness to explain and attest God’s grace and strength, if they conceive of salvation as in part attributable to themselves and not wholly the gift of God’s initiative in this world, then God, as has been the case before, in his terrible and magnificent generosity with himself in the world, will simply find his own way of working his will and do without the churchly institutions and those who profess to be Christians and, so to speak, take over wholly himself the ministry of the Church’ (pp. 107–8).

This is a chapter written with Bonhoeffer-like boldness, where the demarcation often made (by pietists and moralists) between ‘being’ and ‘doing’ is erased, as is the case in love. So what then is the believer’s task in the world? It is, Stringfellow contends, ‘to so enjoy the Word in the world as to attest the veracity of the Word of God for all men in any and every event’ (p. 117), it is to witness to the one Word of God in the gospel, an action which is always an ‘inherently sacramental event’ (p. 117) and as such is a ‘festival of the event of reconciliation already taking place in the midst of history’ (p. 118). He warns that where the sacraments fail to represent the unity of being and doing in the Church then they become idols, ‘no different from the other principalities of tradition and institution in the world’ (p. 119) and their use then becomes idolatrous. He also warns that ‘when the forms of the sacraments become idols and the sacraments become radically secularized, the world is misled about the meaning and grandeur of God’s work and bewildered about the scope and substance of the Christian faith’ (p. 119). He writes about church offerings, about the daily work and witness of God’s people in the world, and about how Christian freedom consists of the acceptance of the fact of one’s own justification as the work of divine freedom which relieves believers of the anxieties over how God judges us. The believer can therefore live and act, whatever the circumstances, without fear of, or bondage to, either their own death or the works of death in the world. The believer is both enabled and authorised by the gift of the Spirit in baptism to ‘expose all that death has done and can do, rejoicing in the freedom of God which liberates all men, all principalities, all things from bondage to death’ (p. 128). He continues:

‘That being so, the Christian is free to give his own life to the world, to anybody at all, even to one who does not know about or acknowledge the gift, even to one whom the world would regard as unworthy of the gift. He does so without reserve, compromise, hesitation, or prudence, but with modesty, assurance, truth and serenity. That being so, the Christian is free, within the freedom of God, to be obedient unto his own death’. (p. 128)

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William Stringfellow, Free in Obedience – Part IV

‘The Church is born and lives … in the gift of Pentecost’ (p. 101). It is Pentecost, Stringfellow reminds us in Free in Obedience, that births the Church into the ‘awful freedom’ of Christ’s victory, a freedom from death, a freedom which empowers the people of God to live jubilantly ‘during the remaining time of death’s apparent reign, without escaping or hiding or withdrawing from the full reality of death’s presence … It is the freedom to live anywhere, any day, in such a way as to expose and confound the works of death and at the same time to declare and honor the work of Christ’ (pp. 75–6). This freedom is not given for God’s sake, or for the sake of the Church, but in order that the world may ‘recover wholeness and completion of life’ (p. 76). It represents, therefore, an act of divine generosity which gathers up in its ek-static movement a people called to witness to the grace, truth and power of Christ’s resurrection. Those so gathered are called into an ‘ethics of obedience’ (p. 76), a calling which involves a loosening of the grip on the principalities of race, class, ideology, commerce, status, etc., that hold the Church captive:

‘The principality of the nation is served by the silence of the Church on issues confronting society; the nation willingly tolerates a silent, uncritical, uninterfering Church concerned only with such esoteric things of religion as public worship’. (p. 85)

On the whole, the Church – largely confused about the freedom given in the gospel and ‘in which it was constituted at Pentecost’ (p. 88) – has been a faithful chaplain and ‘handmaiden’ (p. 95) to the State, dutifully blessing the State’s causes and idolatrous claims with a ‘dignity of allegiance that ought to be given only to God’ (p. 86). Those already familiar with Yoder’s and Kerr’s critiques of Constantinianism’s project of the politicisation of the church according to the terms of the state, the civil sovereigns, powers and principalities of this world, will find echoes here in Stringfellow.

After a discussion on the legitimacy and necessity of civil disobedience (though the Church is never to engage in civil disobedience as anarchists but only in order to affirm the nation’s true vocation), Stringfellow brilliantly outlines the proper relation between church and state (neither of which are ‘exempt from the fall’ (p. 98)) under God’s authority. He argues that ‘the Church vis a vis the nation is always in the position of standing against the nation in the nation’s bondage to death; at the same time, the Church is always in the position of standing for the nation in a most profound way that recalls the vocation for the nation in the service of God … The Church reminds the nation, as it is does any other principality, of the origin of its life, of the service it owes to God, and of the accountability of the nation to God in ruling the common life of men in society’ (pp. 92, 93). He also identifies the void in Protestant moral theology which fails to account for the way that those church bureaucrats who think that they control the institution are themselves slaves to the principalities of death.

‘This does not mean that Christians should be loath to work in churchly institutions, but it does mean that those who do should be aware of the reality which confronts them and should not be romantic about it because the principality bears the name “church.” Above all, they should be prepared to stomach the conflict which will surely accompany their use of the freedom from idolatry of even churchly principalities which Christ himself has secured’. (p. 99)

Stringfellow then engages with a wonderfully-helpful reflection of the ongoing power and significance of Pentecost (and of the authority present in Christian baptism) for shaping and determining Christian witness in a world in which King Jesus, possessed of the Holy Spirit, triumphantly encounters the powers and principalities of death – and death itself. ‘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’ (p. 102).

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William Stringfellow, Free in Obedience – Part III

In his chapter, ‘Christ and the powers of death’, Stringfellow continues to identify and speak to the principalities and powers, what moderns call ‘ideologies’, ‘institutions’ and ‘images’, the latter  being a variety of angelic power manifest in the cultus of celebrity and exists independently of actual persons . So when someone like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean or Adolph Hitler dies, the image does not die but goes on to ‘a new and, some would say, more vigorous life’ (p. 53), and those who pay homage to the image are literally possessed by it.

The principalities of institution – corporations, government agencies, ecclesiastical organisations, unions and universities – demand uncompromised worship no less than do the images: ‘Everything else must finally be sacrificed to the cause of preserving the institution, and it is demanded of everyone who lives within its sphere of influence … that they commit themselves to the service of that end, the survival of the institution’ (p. 56). The principalities of institution offer invitations to bondage.

Having named the idolatrous powers of personality cult and principalities, Stringfellow then turns to the ideologies – totalitarian, democratic and capitalistic – all of which are given to nation-survival at all cost, all of which claim a person’s ‘loyalty, service and worship’ (p. 60), and all of which live in conflict not only with one another but as enemies of human being and flourishing. Indeed, ‘the separation from life, the bondage to death, the alienation from God which the fall designates’ (p. 62) is manifest in humanity’s bondage to the principalities and turn to them for salvation:

‘When a principality claims moral pre-eminence in history or over a man’s life, it represents an aspiration for salvation from death and a hope that service to the idol will give existence a meaning somehow transcending death’ (p. 64).

These are the very principalities and powers – ‘the awesome and manifold powers of death’ (p. 71) – that are confronted and overcome by Jesus Christ in his resurrection victory, ‘not for himself, but for us … His resurrection means the possibility of living in this life, in the very midst of death’s works, safe and free from death’ (p. 72). In his cross, Jesus bears the full brunt of the hostility of the principalities and powers towards him, submitting to their condemnation, accepting their committal of himself to death, and, in his resurrection, exposing, undoing and bringing to nought the false lords of history and the powers they represent.

Don’t forget Wipf & Stock’s offer to readers of Per Crucem ad Lucem of 40% off the retail price of any of the Stringfellow volumes. To obtain the 40% discount, just include the coupon code STRINGFELLOW with your order.

William Stringfellow, Free in Obedience – Part II

Stringfellow continues to expose the deathliness of the principalities and powers in his second study, ‘The Scandal of Palm Sunday’, which is based on Hebrews 2:18.

‘Men live in the city of death. All the cities and societies of the world are places of death’ (p. 31). The temptation that death holds out to us, Stringfellow avers, is to save us from death: ‘that is how cruel and vain and filled with guile death is’ (p. 31). Plato, Constantine, Rousseau, Jefferson and Marx are all authors of societal forms by which we are solicited, enticed and/or coerced into death’s service. But God is about planting and building a free society, and God does so among the dead. The foundation of this society can only rest on one who exercises freedom and authority over the machinery of death; namely Jesus Christ, who forgives the idolators of death, and who in his cross makes us members of his body. But,

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 by the punishment of his disobedience. (p. 33)

Stringfellow believes that Palm Sunday is not a day of triumph but of dramatic temptation for Christ, and ‘profound frustration’ for the disciples. Moreover, it is for us moderns a ‘symbol of the terrific confusion which burdens the Church as to the meaning and manner of the Christian witness in society … If only Palm Sunday were the outcome of Christ’s ministry, Christians would be rid of the gospel and free from all that distinguishes them as Christians from the rest of the world’ (p. 34). If Christ’s ministry ended here among palm branches and civic celebration, we could be spared the embarrassment of Judas’ betrayal, the apathy and cowardice of the remaining eleven, the mystery of the Last Supper, Gethsemane’s sweat and agony, the accusations of the authorities, the ridicule of the crowd, the cross and the descent into hell, the embarrassment of the resurrection and the ‘awful gift of Pentecost’ (p. 35).

But here the wilderness tempter enters the city to tempt Christ, the embodiment of Israel in one person, with the same offer of worldly power, only this time he uses Messiah’s disciples to do the work. And again, Jesus is victorious over the temptations of death. ‘Palm Sunday is no day of triumph; for Christians it is a day of profound humiliation’ (p. 37).

Stringfellow believes that Palm Sunday represents an invitation to the Church to enter into the depths of the world’s existence with nothing to offer but their own lives. We can be so given to the world that we are, in Christ, secure from every threat that death may make. This givenness is the exercise of our ultimate freedom, and represents a sacramental rather than a moralistic witness. It means the Church’s involvement rather than distance, realism rather than withdrawal, knowledge rather than ignorance: ‘The ethics of witness to redemption are sacramental ethics of grace, rather than of prudence or of law’ (p. 39). This calls for being at the full disposal of the world with no strings attached and empirically free from the threat of death.

That is where the irony and confusion of so much of what is asserted to be Christian witness in society nowadays comes in. The mission to the city and specifically to the slums, the decrepit and depressed regions of the city, has been engineered by bodies, councils, committees, and commission who neither individually nor corporately are seriously or radically involved, and certainly not to the point of risking possession or reputations, much less death itself. Instead these ecclesiastical engineers ponder statistics of urban development, of the migration of races and nationalities, of the topography of the churches of the city; then they decide that a church building is needed here or a settlement house must be constructed there (p. 40).

I lost count of how many times Stringfellow talks in this chapter about ‘the ethics of witness’, but his point is in your face, and deserves to be.

Don’t forget Wipf & Stock’s offer to readers of Per Crucem ad Lucem of 40% off the retail price of any of the Stringfellow volumes. To obtain the 40% discount, just include the coupon code STRINGFELLOW with your order.

William Stringfellow, Free in Obedience – Part I

I like how Anthony Dancer describes reading Stringfellow:

Despite the polemic and rhetoric, Stringfellow’s writing is neither a fanciful manual nor some early type of Google search engine for the Christian life. Instead he rewards sustained and quiet engagement, offering us an ethic that is at once simple but never easy; he reminds us of the need to be vulnerable to the world and God, and to be obedient to the call to authenticity just where we are. He reminds us of the politically and totally transformative significance of the fact that the reign of the power of Death is over, and that we are no longer bound by fear, but can once again live truly, and wondrously, in freedom. In short, he reminds us who and where, in the Word of God, we are called to be. (Free in Obedience, xiii).

Free in Obedience, which takes its theme from the Letter to the Hebrews, began life as a book for Lenten study. Importantly for his presentation, Stringfellow discerns no real distance between the original recipients of the letter and the church today – ‘the Christians today are the Hebrews’ (p. 7). And just like the original recipients,

The modern churches and the present-day Christians must, if they are to qualify to address and act in this world amid all the technologies, institutional powers, dehumanizing threats, frightful dangers of extermination, and ruthless idols which encompass men, trust the gospel. They must trust it enough to rely upon the discernment of those of the people of God who in preceding ages spoke and acted in their times and in the world as they knew it in the confidence that the Word which they heard and celebrated is the same Word present, uttered, and received in the world as it is now. (p. 8)

That ‘Christ is crucified in the freedom of the resurrection’ (p. 15) means that ‘the people and the things with which an ordinary Christian comes into contact from day to day are the primary and most profound issues of his faith and practice’ (p. 16). Stringfellow charges that the reason that moderns do not appear to pay attention to the Christian faith or to take the Church seriously is because churches have too often given men and women the impression that ‘they do not care about [people] or the world. They have misled [people] into supposing that the Christian faith has nothing to do with the ordinary issues of daily life’ (p. 18). They have, as Nathan Kerr too observes, missed the fact that God’s interruption of history in Jesus Christ is unintelligible apart from its operativity within the ongoing contingencies and complexities of history, that the lived embodiment of Christ’s lordship as a sign of the Spirit’s ongoing conversion of history to God’s coming reign involves, in the freedom of the missio dei, the creation of ecclesial witness to the centres of earthly power. And they have, Stringfellow insists, escaped the reality and decadence of the cities and ‘moved to the suburbs – only to find out that the same problem of the mission of the Church still plagues them, since the suburbs are satellites of the city’ (p. 20). Those who have remained in the city have been hiding out. Clearly, it is the missio ecclesiae for which this Harlem-based lawyer concerned about the immobility of the city’s poor confined to their ghettos – existing in ‘subjection to the principalities that rule the city’ (p. 24) – is troubled by here:

The rudiment of mission is knowledge of the city because the truth and grace of the Incarnation encompasses in God’s care all that is the city. Mission in the city for the Church, and hence for Christians, means a radical intimacy with every corner and every echelon of the city’s actual life in order to represent and honor God’s concern for each fragment of the city’ (p. 22)

Stringfellow suffers from no illusion that the modern cities which have emerged from industrialization and urbanisation are places neither of freedom nor of society. Rather than being cities of salvation, they are places where feudalism survives, kept alive by the propaganda machines of industrial and commercial powers, and by the moral theologies of Protestantism. ‘Medieval demons are not dead … They were not exorcised in the building of the city. They still exist there. The city is their present realm and their plunder’ (p. 26).

This is the situation that the Church must weigh accurately, and not suppress or flinch at, if it is to cease its blushing and turn towards the city in love that risks all reputation and possession. In order to do so, it must make the traumatic move of getting out bed with the heretical ideology of the industrial revolution (which supposes that we might save ourselves) and into bed with the gospel. Here Stringfellow is calling for ‘the renewal of the sacramental integrity of the churches’ (p. 29).

Don’t forget Wipf & Stock’s offer to readers of Per Crucem ad Lucem of 40% off the retail price of any of the Stringfellow volumes. To obtain the 40% discount, just include the coupon code STRINGFELLOW with your order.

Reading William Stringfellow

When someone of Rowan Williams’ calibre (and there are few of those) describes one of his contemporaries as ‘probably the most creative and disturbing Anglican theologian’ of the twentieth-century, we ought to sit up and take notice. Williams was talking about William Stringfellow, the exposer of our culture’s idols.

Over the next month or so, I hope to make my way through Stringfellow’s work (some of which I’ve read before, and some of which will be new), and to post some of my scribbles along the way. My agenda is two-fold: (i) to introduce you to the thought of a brilliant though still-too-under-appreciated twentieth-century theologian; (ii) to encourage you to pick up and read his work for yourself, whether on your own or – as may well be preferable – in small groups. But if the latter, you ought to heed Mary Perkins Ryan’s warning (in her ‘Introduction’ to Imposters of God) about Stringfellow and group reading: ‘no group, young or old, that [reads Stringfellow] as the basis for discussion will find its meetings dull. They might even become too exciting for comfort – and so might the lives of those who take seriously what this book has to say’.

Our friends over at Wipf & Stock have republished most of Stringfellow’s published material, an act for which we can be deeply grateful. They have kindly offered readers of Per Crucem ad Lucem 40% off the retail price of any of the Stringfellow volumes. This represents a fantastic opportunity to avail yourself of some of the most perceptive theological literature of the twentieth century, and all at a great price. To claim the 40% discount, just include the coupon code STRINGFELLOW with your order.

Here’s a list of the available Stringfellow titles: