"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 slo...
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Thanks for the post.
In point 3 you might go even further and say exactly the same terminology can convey material differences, especially if we are using terminology to express a divine truth. God is free to use the same words to reveal his truth or to withhold it, don't you think? Human language is inadequate, but what choice do we have?
I think you meant this for a different post, but that's OK. I think you're point is important to remember, but let's not sell short the incarnation. The incarnation establishes the ability of our theological language to refer accurately, if by no means exhaustively, to God. Now, the question of our doing so in a way that is effective witness to the Gospel falls, I think, much more under the heading of your point.