A Parable of Integrity

I spend most of my life now with the Bible, reading or, more precisely, listening. My mundane involvements—practicing law, being attentive to the news of the moment, lecturing around the country, free-lance pastoral counseling, writing, activity in church politics, maintaining my medical regime, doing chores around my home on Block Island—have become more and more intertwined with this major preoccupation of mine, so that I can no longer readily separate the one from the others.

This merging for me of almost everything into a biblical scheme of living occurs because the data of the Bible and one's existence in common history is characteristically similar. One comes, after a while, to live in a continuing biblical context and so is spared both an artificial compartmentalization of one's person and a false pietism in living.

—Instead of Death

On the altar with the elements of the Eucharist that celebrated his death and life, Bill Stringfellow's New Testament was carefully placed. In the course of that service of memory on Block Island, it had been brought forward by a friend at the offering of gifts.

Many people would smile to recognize the well-worn, by all appearances fragile, book held together by assorted layers of red plastic tape. All who had studied or reflected or listened with him to the scriptures in years past, and smiled to recognize the Word of God, were now invoked like a community with the communion of saints at that sacramental meal.

Stringfellow had traveled far with the Bible. This one, in particular, was a gift in 1946 "from Aunt Polly and Uncle George," and he once confided that it was this Bible that he read and reread "in order to keep my sanity" while a supply sergeant on duty with U.S. NATO forces in Europe during the early '50s. "Reading it effectively prompted my conversion."

It was a remarkable thing to say because he had already been in the years previous something of a "boy theologian," traveling widely as a leader in the international and ecumenical student movement. A photo from that period—incongruous and paradoxical to friends—that hung above his "legal desk" on the island showed him meeting as a student leader with President Harry Truman.

In retrospect, however, he regarded himself in those years as a "professional Christian." "I was," as he put it, "becoming a pharisee." He might have persevered with a churchly career, but, he wrote in A Second Birthday:

Instead I had been converted, if that word can here be used without its corny and profane connotations. I forebear describing that ordeal, for now, except to say that, along the way I had entered into the reading of the Bible—a bizarre thing for an Episcopalian to do, I know, and a traumatic exploit for anybody. There is, simply, this danger in reading the Bible that one may be emancipated from the jargon, stereotypes, fables, and similar encumbrances of church tradition and hear the Word of God. Well, I was being (l am being) regularly devastated in the privacy of my encounter with the biblical Word and that kept challenging the propriety of my ecclesiastical activities.

I believe I know where he got the bizarre idea. In those travels through postwar Europe as a student, Stringfellow had occasion to become acquainted with individuals from the anti-Nazi resistance movement, including many from the Confessing Church. He was, at first, bemused and startled, then gradually sobered to hear again and again the strong emphasis placed on Bible study among certain segments of the movement.

In this dimension of the Resistance, the Bible became alive as a means of nurture and communication: recourse to the Bible was in itself a primary, practical, and essential tactic of resistance. In Bible study within the anti-Nazi Resistance there was an edification of the new, or renewed, life to which human beings are incessantly called by God—or, if you wish to put it differently, by the event of their own humanity in this world—and there was, thus, a witness which is incorporated into the original biblical witness.

—An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land

To put it more plainly, Bill would say, "Serious attention to the Bible is itself a witness in keeping with the biblical testimony." All in all, it is no wonder that he regarded study of the Bible, side by side with a congregation's liturgical and sacramental ministry, to be the necessary heart of its life together. Preaching, albeit good biblical preaching, which he thought rare, was entirely secondary. Even the importance of liturgy was sanctioned, as he saw it, by its scriptural integrity.

He was stunned, and said so repeatedly, by the "biblical illiteracy" of the churches, not to mention the clergy. Twenty years ago he wrote in Count It All Joy, "The weirdest corruption of the contemporary American Protestantism is its virtual abandonment of the Word of God in the Bible. That is ironic because access to the Bible and devotion to the Word of God in the Bible was that out of which authentic Protestantism came into being."

Stringfellow saw the neglect of Bible study in the churches as implying nothing less than the denigration of the laity. Their discernment and gifts were not esteemed. They were reduced to spectators in the worship and life of a congregation. And it fostered, in turn, a professionalization of the clergy—who learned about the Bible in seminary and then set out to preach and apply it (as though it represented some static body of theory) bereft of any living, day-to-day recourse in community to the Word.

It was precisely this issue, as he recounts it, that led to his resignation from the East Harlem Protestant Parish only 15 months after coming to join them in that neighborhood. As he tells it in My People Is the Enemy (the first of what came to be an autobiographical trilogy), "The neglect, and in some cases outright suppression of the Bible as mediator of the Word of God" went to the heart of his disagreement, even with some he loved and respected dearly, about the nature of the church. There, as much as anywhere else, among those so involved in service in and to the world, he witnessed the irony of an isolated, professional clergy.

MY OWN FIRST encounter with Bill bears a close relationship to this point. It was in 1973 that we met in connection with "the underground seminary." This was an idea conceived by him and Dan Berrigan in the late '60s with an eye to Bonhoeffer and the community of seminarians at Finkenwald. In consequence of Bill's first serious hospitalization and Berrigan's imprisonment for the Catonsville action, the project had been temporarily set aside. I suspect Bill would say it wasn't tabled at all, but actualized within the confines of Danbury prison, where the seed of a U.S. confessing movement was nurtured in Bible study with convicts and a handful of bright young draft resisters.

In any event, a group of us, then students at a New York seminary, were delighted to be invited when the proposal was revived. We were interested in Bonhoeffer and just then being drawn into active resistance and civil disobedience. We came to the meeting in New York with our heads eagerly full of plans: location, faculty, finances, accreditation? So we were utterly dumbfounded, and gradually edified, when the entire day was dedicated to Bible study, in this case 2 Thessalonians 2.

There is a saying that goes, "To plan a party, have a party," and that applied, we were learning, to underground seminaries as well.

The next go-round of the "seminary" was planned by us. A farm in the Berkshires was secured. A call letter was sent out to assorted contacts provided by Bill, and a week-long gathering was convened, with one Volkswagen-load of seminarians driving cross-country all the way from Berkeley, California. Stringfellow arrived late, on account of his father's illness.

The book of Acts was our designated topic, and at the suggestion of some, it was determined that we should read large chunks in the manner of a story. By the time of Bill's arrival, we had already progressed to Paul's conversion in chapter nine. When this was explained to him en route from the bus station, he retorted that he thought us unduly precocious. "The only other time I studied the book of Acts with a group, it took us 10 weeks to get through the first two chapters. But that was a group of 12-year-olds, and they are much more attentive than seminarians." As I remember it, we returned to chapter one and attended thereafter to the "politics of the Ascension."

At the close of the week, a flurry of talk ensued about the next meeting and what the ongoing structure of the seminary should look like. Stringfellow promptly foreclosed all of that by suggesting we "indulged in premature nostalgia." The matter was abruptly dropped. The only planning undertaken that week was for some to conspire an action for the fall at Pratt and Whitney in Connecticut, a manufacturer of fighter planes then in their heyday of employ in Vietnam.

It was clear that if there were to be further gatherings, these would be occasional, sporadic, and improvisational. They were. Sometimes even haphazard. Many had no explicit connection with this "underground seminary" idea, but in all of them study of the Bible remained central.

BILL'S PERSONAL EXPERIENCE of scripture, as in his conversion testimony or in the countless occasions of group study, was reflected most explicitly in his writing.

In A Second Birthday he describes the process of preparing a speech (in this case for a denomination's national convention) by reading the Bible. At the time he had just suffered a blow, a public rebuff from his own denomination, the Episcopal Church. In consequence, he was at a loss regarding how to address the church in its institutional aspect. The difficulty, he reports, was not that he denigrated institutionalism as such in the church. Indeed, Stringfellow was of the remarkable view that the church's secular vocation is to be the exemplary institution, the redeemed principality, the one disabused of its own survival—free to die.

However, just then buffeted by the blow, his distress in a Kansas City hotel room hours before the address was this: "What the hell am I doing here? This is not the church. This is some American aberration of the church." He cursed and prayed. His solution, if it can be called that, was manifestly simple: he read the letter to the Ephesians. And he found his speech.

The entire corpus of his writings bears the same mark—an immersion in the Bible. Virtually every book is focused and rubricked with scripture. None could properly be called commentaries, though any number of them explicate the issues of a specific book: Hebrews, say, or James, or Corinthians, or Revelation. It should be noticed that those books that were written in the deepest pain and distress find their roots and schema in the Psalms, which he discovered to be his consolation and prayer. Stringfellow prayed, as Bonhoeffer urged, from within the scriptures.

A word about his Bible study method: the simpler the better. He welcomed scholarly, exegetical, historical, structural, literary contributions as an aid to Bible study, not as a substitute. In group study he ridiculed gimmicks and manipulations and advocated simple reading, silence, and discussion.

In the introduction to Count It All Joy, he wrote:

I am no Biblical scholar; I have neither competence or temperament to be one. The ordinary Christian, layperson or clergy, does not need to be a scholar to have recourse to the Bible and, indeed, to live within the Word of God in the Bible in this world. What the ordinary Christian is called to do is to open the Bible and listen to the Word.

Listening is a rare happening among human beings ... [It] is a primitive act of love, in which a person gives himself to another's word, making himself accessible and vulnerable to that word.

In the same book he tells in great detail the story of a class on Romans he taught in his New York City days to a group of black and Puerto Rican high school students. The situation seemed ludicrous and the method, at first blush, dreadful. They were compelled to attend in order to gain recreational access to a gymnasium and pool of the well-appointed congregation just on the edge of the Harlem neighborhood.

Bill had taken the class reluctantly, thought the enterprise absurd, but acceded to the arrangement. To get things going he took up a practice—which will never make it in the Sunday school pedagogy hall of fame—of reading each week, out loud and in its entirety, the book of Romans. Most absurd of all, it worked. It gradually dawned on the class that Bill was quite serious in thinking there was something worthwhile in listening to Romans. That meant, also, and they equally understood this, that he took them quite seriously. The upshot was finally that they purchased their own Bibles and went through the book sentence by sentence asking one another: "What does this say? What is this word?" By the next semester, the class had grown.

STRINGFELLOW TOOK the Bible seriously, and he took people seriously. He listened to both. He heard the Word of God.

He credited the people of Harlem, for example, with first cluing him in to the biblical import of the principalities. On the street he heard folks speak of the gas company, the lords of slum real estate, the social bureaucracies, the city administration, the Mafia, and police agencies as though they were creaturely predators, arrayed against the neighborhood and human beings. His writings have since become notorious, among other things, for explicating a biblical doctrine of the powers as precisely that: fallen and predatory creatures, acting with an independent life of their own.

His view, in turn, is getting some credence and wider circulation in scholarly circles. That was not always so. He loved to tell of an early presentation on the principalities and powers. Bill had gone to Boston with appearances scheduled to speak the same day at Harvard Business School and a seminary there. He debated with himself about excising, from the business school version, any explicit biblical reference or language but decided in the end to let it stand intact. The business students, it turned out, engaged him thoroughly, bending his ear long past the hour appointed, with examples from their own experience of corporate dominance and possession by the commercial powers. Like the neighborhood folks, their experience exposed the biblical truth.

Later at the seminary, with the same talk, Bill found himself ridiculed and written off. Ruling authorities, principalities, world rulers of the present darkness! Come now! These were but the incidental vestige of a quaint and archaic language, an esoteric cosmology now obsolete that has no meaning in history or the life of human beings! So much, in that instance, for biblical literacy.

PERHAPS A YEAR or less prior, in April of 1962, Stringfellow sat on the panel that questioned Karl Barth after his series of lectures in Chicago. Would Dr. Barth comment, Stringfellow asked, on "the bearing of Romans 13 to the relationship of church and state in Germany and the United States? And further, what are the principalities and powers, and what is Christian freedom in relation to them? (Stringfellow's queries were, in fact, prefaced and long. Their articulation presaged much of Bill's work in the years to come.)

Barth liked the questions, but he was conspicuously intent to lay low in commenting or intruding on the U.S. political scene. Drawn out by Bill, however (their exchange was the liveliest and most pointed of the evening), he stressed that submission to authority meant not passive obedience but a wider responsibility. When he acknowledged that the freedom of Jesus before Pilate and in the crucifixion was just such a submission, Stringfellow commended the reply as encouragement to the freedom riders of the U.S. civil rights movement.

Perhaps because of the evident kinship of those exchanges, or because of certain laudatory remarks Karl Barth later made about him, Stringfellow was often accused of being a "Barthian." It was a label he repudiated (as Barth himself did), insisting that he had read remarkably little of the great theologian's work.

However, in A Second Birthday Bill tells of how in the course of their conversations he confessed to Barth that throughout their days together he felt perpetually as though he knew what Barth was going to say when he made a point. This was not some spooky feeling of precognition, but a matter-of-fact familiarity, a simple recognition he enjoyed. Barth's reply was quick and spontaneous: "How could it be otherwise? We read the same Bible, don't we?"

This was not to suggest, both would be adamant to the contrary, that the Bible furnishes "right" answers to any given question. Categorically not, Stringfellow would say. The Bible testifies to a living Word. It is exemplary, not legislative in any directive sense.

The ethics of Biblical politics offer no basis for divining specific, unambiguous, narrow, or ordained solutions for any social issue. Biblical theology does not deduce "the will of God" for political involvement or social action. The Bible—if it is esteemed for its own genius—does not yield "right" or "good" or "true" or "ultimate" answers.

—An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land

STRINGFELLOW "ESCHEWED," as he commonly put it, proof texting as a practice that renders both the Bible and history abstract, flat, and dead. He liked to recount an exchange he once had with a student at a southern evangelical seminary. Following Bill's talk the student rose to ask, "How then, do you answer (let's say) 1 Peter 2:17?" Whatever the text, the questioner thereby displayed a certain knowledge and begged Bill to inquire what the passage might be. Instead, Stringfellow declined and replied simply, "Why, I answer that with James 6:4." The seminarian, not about to betray ignorance, thanked him and sat down apparently content. If anyone looked up the citation later, they would have been either nonplussed or edified: there is no such passage.

Stringfellow often spoke of the integrity of the biblical witness. This was not to be confused with consistency, which, he never tired of saying, might be a virtue for Greeks, but was the hobgoblin of theological minds seeking to narrow, reduce, and conform. Consistency was, in his mind, no biblical virtue. The freedom of the Word of God, the vitality and irony and paradox of the Word was not to be so hemmed in and circumscribed.

By way of illustration, he made a comparison in Count It All Joy to the identity and relationship of persons. He had just then returned from traveling in Australia and speaking in a diversity of situations and communities. He hoped if all the assorted folks he spoke with were gathered in one room to compare notes that while their experience of him might vary in many ways, they would find themselves speaking recognizably of a single person with discernible integrity.

I remember Bill speaking a number of years ago at the 10th anniversary of the first Vietnam teach-in at Ann Arbor, Michigan. Several days of high-powered politicos preceded the concluding evening, in which Stringfellow was to share the podium with Herbert Marcuse, a reigning left-wing intellectual of the time.

But Marcuse took sick and did not appear. I was worried. A disappointed audience wishing you were someone else is no fun to address. It was not a religious group, so I cringed further when Stringfellow asked if he might begin by reading a text from 2 Corinthians 2. Thereafter he launched forth in a scathing assault on technocracy, surveillance, constitutional subversion, and the bomb. He concluded, "What I have been telling, here, is the biblical doctrine of the Fall." He commended the audience to resistance as the only way to live humanly, transcending the reality of death in this world, and stated, "It is that which is the whole concern of the gospel of Jesus Christ."

The audience stood. They applauded. They rushed up on the stage and mobbed him. He was almost physically beset by their questions and thanks. He had been fully and freely and unapologetically himself. Nobody was put off. And nobody, I noticed, missed Herbert Marcuse.

JUST MONTHS BEFORE his death, while discussing holiness and identity with a group in New York, Bill spoke of his own vocation. At a certain point, he seemed to rise from the chair in which he was seated and raised his voice, uncharacteristically, almost shouting for emphasis, to say: "I am called in the Word of God to be no one else but William Stringfellow, nothing more and nothing less." He sat back down and the silence sunk in.

I have not strayed from the point. The integrity of the Word of God in the Bible and the vocational integrity of human identity are intimately related. When Bill, along with Anthony Towne, was indicted by the federal government for "harboring the fugitive Daniel Berrigan," I believe he was nearly delighted. If he was to be prosecuted, it would be for living the simple Christian virtues of faithful friendship and hospitality.

In the days after Dan's arrest, on the edge of the property, a small platform was discovered, suitable for mounting a directional microphone aimed at the wide dining room window. Again, Bill was tickled to imagine the confusion that might be prompted by overhearing the long and involved conversations on ensuing nights around the dinner table about recipes, the circus, and especially the Babylon parables in the late chapters of the book of Revelation. I believe he hoped, in all humility, that the closer the powers looked at his life, the, more the Word of God would be exposed.

Stringfellow thought the same could be said of any person's life. In Simplicity of Faith he writes:

The theological exploration of biography ... is congruent with the definitive New Testament insight and instruction: the Incarnation. Biblical faith is distinguished from all religions, all philosophies, and all ideologies by its redundant insistence upon the presence of the Word of God in common history ... So, I believe, biography (and history), any biography and every biography, is inherently theological, in the sense that it contains already—literally by virtue of the Incarnation—the news of the gospel whether or not anyone discerns that. We are each one of us parables.

When I tremble and hunger for the last day, when all our lives will stand exposed in the Word of God, I smile to imagine that the parable which is William Stringfellow will be found faithful and true. One already written in the Book of Life.

Bill Kellermann is a Sojourners contributing editor. He was a United Methodist pastor in Detroit, Michigan at the time this article appeared.