So, You Want to Read William Stringfellow?

"Statue of Justicia (Justice), by Walter Seymour Allward,
outside Supreme Court of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario
Photo by D. Gordon E. Robertson, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

William Stringfellow – the incisive, trenchant, and often quirky lawyer, activist, and Episcopal theologian – died 40 years ago this weekend (on March 2, 1985) in a Rhode Island hospital. Though death claimed him at age 56, after two decades suffering from chronic disease, it never defeated him. By the accounts of people close to him, he lived in the radical freedom of his calling in the Word of God. Indeed, one might profitably read his 15 books (including three co-written with his lover and partner, the poet Anthony Towne) as one sustained broadside against the rule of Death (the capitalization seems apropos to me) – that mysterious, penultimate, all-pervasive moral power reigning in a fallen cosmos, in society, in politics, and in our very bodies. The academic theology and ethics guilds have been slow to acknowledge, receive, and critically assess Stringfellow’s work, especially its signature contribution – his profound retrieval of NT “principalities and powers” language as a key heuristic tool for discerning the signs of our times. I do see signs, though, of a rekindled interest (for example, Mac Loftin’s recent on-point essay in The Christian Century).

We need this body of work, desperately, in these fraught and perilous times in our nation and world. But if you haven’t read Stringfellow, or if you’re interested in going deeper, then Tolle et lege! – and see for yourself what apocalyptic light might help illuminate our dark collective moment. Happily, Wipf & Stock has reprinted his books and a few works by related authors. But where to start? Here are a few modest suggestions for navigating the terrain.

Unmasking Imperial Hermeneutics – Two Anthologies
For my money, the best interpreter of Stringfellow’s life and work, hands down, is his friend and mentee, the Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellermann, a Methodist pastor-activist and holy agitator hailing from Detroit. To see the salutary, subversive uses to which Stringfellow’s work might be deployed in current social justice struggles – the fight for clean water, for instance – check out Wylie-Kellerman’s Powers in Particular: A Practical Theology of the Powers that Be (Fortress, 2017). The best entree to Stringfellow is the anthology Wylie-Kellermann edited, William Stringfellow: Essential Writings (Orbis, 2013). His introduction to the volume is the best essay on Stringfellow I’ve read to date. Readings are organized topically, and a glossary helps unpack Stringfellow’s often idiosyncratic use of theological terms. Then, if you can get a hold of it, read Wylie-Kellerman’s earlier (and much longer) anthology, A Keeper of the Word: Selected Writings of William Stringfellow (Eerdmans, 1994) – sad to say, no longer in print. A deeper dive than the Orbis volume, the selections in this book are organized according to a more biographical and contextual logic. Many DET readers, especially, will be thrilled to read excerpts from the young lawyer’s 1962 tete-a-tete with the great Karl Barth, who admonished a stunned audience at the University of Chicago to “listen to this man.”

Biography as Theology – A Unique Trilogy
Stringfellow was neither ordained nor an academic: His theology was born and ripened in his struggles, his (often intense) relationships, and especially in his concrete praxis of legal, political, and ecclesiastical advocacy. His books are contextual – or incarnational, as he would have put it – often stitching together previous articles and talks and rich in personal anecdotes and social commentary. Naturally, then, neophytes might want to move on to three explicitly autobiographical works, each of which hinges upon key crises and turning points in his vocational journey. My People Is the Enemy, a manifesto that reportedly garnered the attention of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, recounts his years, after graduating from Harvard Law School, practicing “street law” among the poor and marginalized in East Harlem, where he lived from 1956-1962. His accounts of the squalor on the streets and in the tenements of what was one of the most densely packed neighborhoods in the U.S., of the venality of Tammany Hall politicians who put their ambitions above the needs of citizens (sound familiar?), and everyday acts of courage and humanity should continue to shock and inspire a new generation of readers. As early as his college days, Stringfellow was all in for the struggle for racial justice (though Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr., in the Slocum volume listed below, criticizes Stringfellow’s own sometimes patronizing attitudes and racial blindspots). A Second Birthday, set a decade later, recounts Stringfellow’s struggle with a life-threatening illness and his (astonishing) survival of a radical surgery that removed most of his pancreas, rendering him permanently diabetic and dependent upon a rigorous dietary regime. Fast forward to the early 1980s. In A Simplicity of Faith: My Experience in Mourning – my favorite of his books – Stringfellow recounts the sudden death of his partner Anthony Towne and his ensuing process of working through grief and into a new way of life. It is one of the most stunning books on death and mourning I’ve read, and, as a bonus, also includes winsome stories relating community life and politics on Block Island, where he and Towne had moved years before to get some respite from the stresses of city life.

Suspect Friendships – On Harboring Fellow Travellers
Also in an autobiographical vein, I mention Suspect Tenderness: The Ethics of the Berrigan Witness, which Stringfellow and Towne co-authored: This volume celebrates the prophetic vocation of their close friend, the Jesuit poet and peace activist Daniel Berrigan, who, at the time of writing, had been recently convicted for his role in the 1968 liturgical protest in Catonsville, Maryland, in which Berrigan and eight others burned draft records with homemade napalm. The fugitive priest, temporarily evading capture by federal agents for his imminent incarceration, sought refuge at “Eschaton,” Stringfellow and Towne’s quasi-monastic home on Block Island, where Berrigan was eventually apprehended. With the Berrigan witness in view, Stringfellow preached on “Jesus as a Criminal” (reprinted in this volume) at Cornell University, where Berrigan worked as chaplain. The two other books Stringfellow and Towne co-authored – The Bishop Pike Affair and The Death and Life of Bishop Pike – grew out of their close friendship with and support for the incendiary bishop, who was accused of heresy by his fellow prelates and tried and acquitted in an Episcopal Church court. Their warm ties to the bishop, though, don’t necessarily mean they endorsed all his teachings. Pike, who died in the desert near Qumran while researching the life of Jesus, lived a colorful, intense, and tumultuous life, to be sure. Both books are almost excruciatingly detailed. The biography is long and only loosely organized, but if you’re interested in learning about the time a British medium channeled the ghost of Paul Tillich in a seance while Pike desperately sought to contact his deceased son, this might be the book for you.

Speaking of Faith, Public and Private – Shorter Works
For an alternative point of entry, check out several deceptively short volumes that help flesh out the range of Stringfellow’s concerns and commitments. A Private and Public Faith, Stringfellow’s first book, is a polemical tract calling out the post-war-era smugness and pietistic individualism of both evangelical revivalists and liberal Protestants. (He lands some good hits, I think, though I’m not sure he’s always fair to his targets.) The theme of hypocrisy emerges again in his trenchant Dissenter in a Great Society, which calls out President Johnson’s domestic agenda as a cynical, half-hearted, and woefully inadequate effort to avoid truly confronting the realities of poverty and racism. Count it All Joy wrestles with questions of doubt and faith – very topical for theologies of the 1960s – while Imposters of God: Inquiries into Favorite Idols unmasks the idolatrous loyalties rendered, in North American consumerist culture, to such phenomena as work, money, patriotism, and even church. Free in Obedience, a retrieval of the politics of Holy Week for the modern context, is the first book to sketch explicitly the theology of the powers that would permeate his later works. Instead of Death, originally a catechetical tract for teenagers struggling existentially with questions of identity, loneliness, and sexuality, was later revised and republished with added material urging resistance to the forces of technocratic totalitarianism!

Jerusalem vs. Babylon – A “Trilogy” in Theo-Political Ethics
Most of Stringfellow’s writings are occasional rather than systematic. An exception (somewhat) is his magnum opus, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land. This project, supported by a grant for him to write a moral theology, draws upon the “Babylon” passages in Revelation to confront the machinations and deceptions of empire manifest during the Nixon regime. A fervent call to live humanly and speak truth to power in a decadent age, this text became a handbook for antiwar activists of the era, celebrating the kairotic emergence of authentic community in episodic “Jerusalem” moments. A second work, Conscience and Obedience, which juxtaposes the visions of the “beast” in Rev. 13 with St. Paul’s (ostensible?) admonition to submit to worldly rulers in Rom. 13, discloses the problematic and ambiguous character of political authority and legitimacy. Stringfellow argues there is no timeless, abstract answer to the question of how believers should respond to the importunities of incumbent regimes, except to say that true followers of Jesus are never to shack up with and rest too easily with any status quo. Though he hoped to round out the trilogy with a work on the charismatic gifts that foster human freedom, the volume remained unfinished at his death. Instead, following a suggestion by Wylie-Kellerman, I would propose that his final book, The Politics of Spirituality, nicely fills that gap, tying together the themes of his moral theology. Stringfellow’s blistering critique of esoteric, privatized spiritualities that would hive off religious experience from the demands of real-world existence forms an apt bookend to his work, recapitulating his first book, published more than two decades earlier. Such commodified and privatized spiritualities are easy prey to cynical manipulation by political regimes (President Reagan’s appropriation of civil religion is in view here).

Other Voices in the Wilderness – Secondary Works
To date, no critical biography of Stringfellow exists. Still, An Alien in a Strange Land: Theology in the Life of William Stringfellow by Anthony Dancer situates, in fascinating ways, the lawyer-theologian’s “life-work” amid the concerns and struggles that stirred up U.S. society in the decades after World War II – especially ecumenism, the Civil Rights movement, and the (early) gay rights movement. Particularly valuable is Dancer’s account of Stringfellow’s student years, including detailed commentary on early papers that were never published or are not easily accessible today. Given its relative sparsity, such secondary work on Stringfellow exists is all the more valuable. Unfortunately, Dancer’s edited volume, William Stringfellow in Anglo-American Perspective, is out of print. Radical Christian & Exemplary Lawyer: Honoring William Stringfellow, edited by Anthony W. McThenia, Jr., includes invaluable remembrances and reflections, especially from scholars and activists who knew him, including the late Walter Wink of Auburn Seminary, Jim Wallis of Sojourners, and Elizabeth McAllister from the Jonah House community in Baltimore. A later volume, Prophet of Justice, Prophet of Life: Essays on William Stringfellow, edited by Robert Boak Slocum, includes notable essays, for example, that address Stringfellow’s compelling proposals for rescuing the legal profession from its servitude to issues of process, so that lawyers might be freed to pursue actual justice for their clients.

The (ahem…) halcyon days of theo-blogging a few years ago generated numerous excellent, short engagements with Stringfellow’s work. Notable contributions came, for example, from Richard Beck, Jason Garoncy, and Ben Myers. And I’ve stumbled through my own attempts to engage Stringfellow as well. But stay tuned: More may be on the way!

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