The thought of William Stringfellow is a major resource for unmasking the powers.

Walter Wink

William Stringfellow: Theologian of the Next Millennium A 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 of lawyer/theologian William Stringfellow to be the germinal articulation 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 addition, 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 Protestant Parish 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 Christian and Exemplary Lawyer, ed. Andrew W. McThenia, Jr., 1995, with permission from 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 Exodus 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 allusion, 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 endeavor is shown by the rank proliferation of terms that sedimented around these key categories, many of which cannot be subsumed under any 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 or the Olympics or the Methodist Church or the Teamsters Union are all principalities. 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 visible and invisible manifestations. The list runs the danger, however, of including everything and therefore denoting nothing. Stringfellow himself provides greater precision by the pungent examples he uses, so the notion never empties into abstraction or becomes vapid. Still, his treatment 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 series 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 going. Not that he cluttered his work with theological jargon; there is an almost total absence of that. The difficulty was in part the concentratedness 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 theological 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 approach was 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 impotent 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 Philadelphia 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 statement, in almost syllogistic form that illustrates the paradoxical quality of his thought: Loneliness is the most caustic, drastic, and fundamental repudiation of God Loneliness is the most elementary expression of original sin There is 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 entire 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 208

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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 of original sin. All of us are implicated in the fallenness of politics. There is no political situation that cannot be redeemed, even though it is a redemption that takes place within a fallen order and therefore will inevitably 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 pessimists underestimate the power of the Holy Spirit. (Though I cannot escape the feeling that Stringfellow would have phrased that last sentence, "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 simultaneously 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 conditions 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 message of 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 death 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 redress 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 pervasiveness, affecting everyone in every time equally, but he has the effrontery to extend the fall to cover everything, including nonhuman beings, 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 relationships in the totality of creation, concerning identity, place, connection, purpose, vocation. The subject of the fall is not only the personal realm, in the sense of you or me, but the whole of creation and each and every item of created 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. Institutions and systems are not mere human contrivances; they are a part of God's creative providence. They are indispensable to life. The Powers are created in, through, and for the humanizing purposes of God in Christ (Col. 1:15-20). No human 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 least some institutions are benign and viable and within human direction or can be rendered so by discipline or reform or revolution or displacement. The principalities are, it is supposed, capable of being altered so as to respect and serve human life, instead of demeaning and dominating human life, provided there is a sufficient human will to accomplish this. {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 equivalent to 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, fleetingly 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 damaged or diminished or twisted or broken, in a way which is open to transcendence 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 without vainglory understood to be his life's task, entails sensitivity to the Word of God indwelling all Creation and transfiguring common history, 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 resurrection 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 renders 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 locate it, not in the occasional aberration of a system or the poor administration 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 unflinching 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 recognize 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 is equally stringent in his ascription of all judgment to God. God's judgment 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 protect 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 regards as 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. Society 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 assertion 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 before 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 or preempt 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, an exercise of conscience transient and fragile Moreover, it is the dignity of this ethical posture which frees human beings, in their decisions and 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 assertions 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 posturing of pacifists who claimed to know the will of God that he spent most of his ammunition attacking pacifist presumption rather than affirming nonviolence. Consequently, his treatment of violence tends to waffle; I miss here the rigor of the paradox. There is no unequivocal condemnation followed 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 h a n d . . . but on the other" kind of thinking). Thus he devotes a section of An Ethic to what he calls "The Bonhoeffer Dilemma." Stringfellow begins his argument by alluding to the purported advocacy of violent tactics by some early Christians in support 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 supposition 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 attempt to 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 judge a 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-style that dares in each and every event to trust the grace of God. No decision, no deed, either violent or nonviolent, is capable of being confidently rationalized 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 thinking 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 legitimated 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 avoid committing 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 human beings, become participants in specific violence they do so confessionally, acknowledging throughout the sin of it. I suggest Christians do not, thereby, engage in violence casually or without aforethought or as a first resort rather than last. (Admittedly, multitudes of professing Christians have become soldiers in practically every army without so much as a pause. Moreover, they have done so with the same kind of selfrighteousness that, as I have just complained, often afflicts ideological pacifists.) Christians become implicated in violence without any excuses for the 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, without ridiculing 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 Christians 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 cannot 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 rulers, who squandered opportunities to 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 methods. On purely pragmatic grounds, nonviolence commends itself as more likely to succeed than violence, with less casualties, and with better prospects for the future (especially in a country where both victors and 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 principled 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, then revolution no matter how idealistic, how necessary, or how seemingly glorious is basically without viable hope even if it were to prevail empirically In such circumstances, though we are not ideological pacifists or, for that matter, ideologues of any species, we are persuaded, as are the Berrigans, that recourse to violence, whether to threaten or topple the 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 only way 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, demanding as tribute every living thing, and now even the very earth itself. No thinker of the twentieth century understood better the depth of that assault, or saw more unflinchingly the gospel's relevance and urgency. 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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^ s
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