It has become our tradition at Sojourners to focus each December on someone who has taught us the meaning of the incarnation. We have remembered Dorothy Day's stubborn faithfulness and Fannie Lou Hamer's strength against all odds. Clarence Jordan's Cotton Patch gospel and Thomas Merton's monastic radicalism have been gratefully recalled.
One year we profiled Karl Barth, who shocked German liberalism with the reintroduction of a genuine biblical theology. Barth, with his faith solidly grounded in the Bible, became the author of the Barmen Declaration, a manifesto of the Confessing Church's resistance to Nazism.
It was on Karl Barth's famous trip to the United States that he noticed a young attorney from New York's Harlem. "This is the man America should be listening to," said Barth. The man who most impressed Karl Barth on his U.S. visit was William Stringfellow. Karl Barth was certainly not the only one on whom Bill Stringfellow made a lasting impression.
I met Bill at a conference at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1971. The conference organizers had invited both of us to speak and wanted us to meet. Our little group of seminary students in Chicago had just begun publishing the Post-American, the forerunner of Sojourners. I'll never forget that first time I heard Bill speak.
He talked very quietly, and, at times, I had to strain to hear him. And yet there was a force and power in his words, an authority I had never encountered in anyone before. He always spoke from the Bible, and, from my first hearing of William Stringfellow, I felt that the Word of God was being opened up to me. The way he explicated the scriptures caused a deep excitement within me.
After an evening session, he invited me to go for a walk. A long, late stroll across the Princeton campus was the beginning of a friendship that lasted 14 years, until William Stringfellow died on March 2, 1985.
This month we focus on the life of William Stringfellow, a man who taught us the meaning of the Word of God and showed us the possibilities of living with the incarnation at the center of faith.
WILLIAM STRINGFELLOW WAS a theologian. In my opinion, he was the most significant U.S. theologian of the last three decades. His own modest definition of a theologian was anyone who reflected on the meaning of the Word of God for their lives and their history. Bill spent his whole life doing just that and doing it better than anyone else I know.
In response to government surveillance, he once said he humbly hoped that the official scrutiny of his life, or the life of any Christian, would just further expose the Word of God. On another occasion he told me that when he knew his phone conversations were being listened to by the FBI, he would make calls and read long passages from the Bible. "I think they need to hear it," he would say.
William Stringfellow was radically rooted in the Bible. That is what gave his social commentary and political dissent such insight and power. Bill never would have regarded himself as a pioneer. Yet, in so many things, he was the first to see something, to take action, to make a crucial connection, to provide the clarifying word.
Long before poverty law practice or Christian ministry to the inner city were much discussed, William Stringfellow was doing both in Harlem. His was one of the first voices to cry out the agony of the city, to speak truthfully about white racism, and to warn of the judgment to come.
Bill was an early critic of the war in Vietnam, exposing its criminality and hypocrisy. He had a unique capacity to go to the root of things and draw out their biblical significance. Behind the war he saw a growing tendency in the United States toward what he called lawless authority taking over the society's leading institutions while usurping both law and conscience. He attributed the nuclear threat to the ascendancy of technology over all of human life.
All of these developments Bill related to the biblical description of the principalities and powers, which had been all but forgotten and dismissed in the seminaries and churches. Not only did he renew our understanding of such doctrines as the powers and the Fall, but he gave us a more comprehensive biblical description of the United States than anyone else even attempted. While liberals ignored the Bible and evangelicals fought over the various theories of its inspiration, William Stringfellow applied the biblical Word to our lives and times like no other contemporary Christian.
Racism, poverty, civil rights, Vietnam, women's equality, nuclear weapons, abusive political and ecclesial authority, the exercise of conscience—all these issues and more William Stringfellow insisted be brought into the heart of the church's life and examined with biblical scrutiny.
At his memorial service, Bill's old and well-used New Testament was brought forward and placed on the altar with these words: "No one in our time was a more perspicacious student of the Word of God in scripture than Bill. This is his Bible, most unsanctimoniously weathered, rumpled, underlined, cryptically annotated. We offer it among the gifts of bread and wine, as truly a medium of grace and life to the world. But now who will open it for us as he did?"
Bill loved the the church, but it was the kind of love that called the best out of the church while refusing to be silent in the face of its accommodations and cowardice. He cared enough about the church to call it to account by its own scriptures and traditions.
Time magazine once referred to Bill as "one of the most persuasive of Christianity's critics-from-within." When the church ignored its country's racism and its own, Bill brought it out into the light. When the church sanctified war, nationalism, and official deception, Bill was the first to say it was wrong. When his own church attacked women seeking ordination, Bill was the attorney for the defense.
I was at the Washington Cathedral in Washington, D.C., in 1976 when Bill Stringfellow defended Rev. William Wendt in an ecclesiastical trial. Wendt had invited Allison Cheek, one of the first Episcopal women to be ordained to the priesthood, to celebrate the Eucharist at his church. The women's ordination had been deemed "irregular" and had not yet been officially accepted by the Episcopal Church.
It was the first church trial and display of canonical law I had ever witnessed, and the drama was very high. I watched Bill as he rose to make his closing argument. He was a brilliant lawyer and a powerful speaker, and his command of the legal issues at stake was absolutely masterful. But after he made the compelling legal case on behalf of his defendant, he turned to the gospel. Bill looked at Bishop Creighton, the presiding officer of the court and said:
Perchance, there is another way altogether to act today, albeit more audacious, which would redeem this day, a way more suitable to your capacity as pastor pastorem; I would like to think more compatible with your spontaneous inclinations as a human being.
In a moment good Father Wendt will stand before you to be sentenced. In the name of Christ, whom, even now, we await eagerly as the Judge of the living and dead, will you say this to him? "William Wendt, the ecclesiastical courts of this diocese have found that you have offended my authority as your bishop. If that be so, I forgive you."
The entire assembly was stunned and silent.
On another occasion Bill was invited to speak at Trinity Parish on Wall Street in New York. It is said to be the richest church in the United States, with an annual budget of more than $200 million. Bill was always one for noting the significance of the day, liturgically or otherwise. He kept, by his dining room table, little books with holy days, saints' birthdays, and other memorable events to help celebrate each day. The day William Stringfellow was invited to preach at the richest church in the United States was both auspicious and ironic, albeit unbeknownst to his church hosts; he preached his sermon that day on the occasion of Karl Marx's birthday.
To his own Episcopal Church and to all the churches of his day, William Stringfellow was both a prophet and a priest, though he always cherished his status as a layman. He was always the thorn in the side and the voice of conscience. The church hierarchies rarely received Bill very well in his life, but, a few months after his death, the Episcopal Church, gathered in national assembly, made the following resolution: "This 68th General Convention gives thanks to God for the life, witness, and ministry of William Stringfellow."
I HAD MET BILL after he left New York for health reasons and moved to Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island. The island became a place of refuge, retreat, and reflection for me—the only such place I have ever really known. I made the pilgrimage many times over the course of the last decade and a half, taking either the one-hour-and-15-minute ferry ride or a short flight on a small, single-engine plane from the mainland.
I remember vividly my first visit. It was at the end of a long and busy speaking tour, and I was still running in high gear. The pace at the island house was so peaceful and contemplative that I had to consciously slow myself down in order to fit in. The house was like a monastery—but one with the radio news on most of the time.
The word "discernment" best fits what seemed to be going on all the time as the most natural activity in the home that was named Eschaton. While serious issues of faith, politics, life, and death seemed to pervade the place, the atmosphere was never heavy or overwhelming. Rather, the house literally abounded with humor, hospitality, and very human relationships.
I confess that I was in awe of the place and of William Stringfellow in particular at my first meal there. I expected an evening of very weighty conversation, in which I might find answers to most of my theological and political questions. Bill began to offer a prayer before the meal. As I waited to hear something quite profound, Bill prayed for healing for one of his dogs who was sick! From that moment on, I was always struck by how merely and marvelously human everything seemed to be at Block Island and how much more human I felt when I was there.
My favorite place was around Bill's big dining room table in front of the large window with a magnificent view of the Old Harbor. Countless hours were spent around that table in listening, talking, laughing, praying, and enjoying some of the best meals of my life (Bill was an exemplary cook and host). Bill's table was where all of us congregated who made regular pilgrimages to Block Island. It became a place of nourishment, companionship, and spiritual formation.
I've often said that I learned more good theology around Bill's table than around any seminary. On my last trip to the island, I loaded that old table into the back of my car and brought it back to Washington, where it now sits in my apartment and where I am writing this article.
The truth is that I learned more from listening to Bill Stringfellow, from watching him, and from just being around him than I have from anyone else. He was a man who genuinely knew how to live life, perhaps because he understood death so much better than the rest of us.
I'll always remember him waiting for me at the boat dock or the little Block Island airport in one of his many circus hats, or endlessly waving good-bye until my ferry or plane was completely out of sight. I can still picture Bill at the Block Island beach with his little body and littler bathing suit, all tanned and looking like Mahatma Gandhi, reading his New York Times or working on a book manuscript over the picnic table and eating hot dogs for lunch.
Bill lived with constant pain during most of his last years. He died at the young age of 56 and, even then, lived longer than many expected him to. But his mind was always razor sharp, his heart full of passion, and his spirit indomitable. He was always full of surprises.
A few days after Bill died, I was sitting in his study and spotted a magazine ad recently cut out and placed by the telephone. It read: "NEED ACROBATIC PEOPLE FOR RIDING ACT--For 1985 Season--Good Opportunity--Send Resume and Photos to Circus Vargas, North Hollywood, California." It seems Bill was contemplating a second vocation.
WILLIAM STRINGFELLOW was a mentor and spiritual father to me. He treated me like an adopted son. For many of us, he was our most formative theological influence. Daniel Berrigan spoke for us all when he said at Bill's funeral, "For thousands of us, he became the honored keeper and guardian of the Word of God."
At that service I led the intercessory prayer for Bill. In part the prayer said,
O Lord, thank you for William Stringfellow, who was a Christian among us and in the world.
Of all the souls we have known, Bill Stringfellow was one of the most truly human. That was his great blessing to us, his friends, and his great threat to the rulers and powers of this age.
In his vocation and by his example, he opened up to us the Word of God.
We pray now, not only for Bill, but for ourselves in his absence from us.
May we always remember William Stringfellow, and may his memory make us strong and faithful.
May we know that he is and always will be with us. Amen.
Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.
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