William Stringfellow wrote a lot about hope. But he did it in a way that confronted things head on. He took sides. In a sense, he was an Ed Murrow of American Protestantism. The likes of him are few and far between, something for which I suspect some quietly give thanks.
The world he was engaged with when he wrote is not so different from ours; the actors have changed (particularly those in the White House) but the stories remain reasonably extremity among them. Preoccupations haven’t changed that much either. The things that endlessly preoccupy and consume us, and the violence which systemically upholds them, seem at times to enclose the very life and imagination of our church and world. It is these preoccupations, and the “vocation of the church” with which Stringfellow was most concerned, that mark the four volumes that form the aptly named “Foundational Quartet”: A Public and Private Faith, Free in Obedience, Count It All Joy, Imposters of God.
We could look in many directions for examples of these preoccupations, but as these four volumes are concerned primarily with the church, we might look no further than theological education, sexuality, church growth, worship,
Stringfellow named those preoccupations biblically as the idols they are. He asserted the biblical proclamation that to live in ways that are fundamentally not preoccupied with God, but with other things, is to live idolatrously. It’s easy to see why at times his was the loneliest of lives.
Through his voice of dissent and discontent he also exposed a hope for a world that literally, by virtue of the Gospel, was and could be more than it seemed to be. And he did this in every situation, with everyone: left and right, liberal and conservative. There was simply no ideological position that Stringfellow would himself call home. This, coupled with his resonance and fundamentally authentic engagement with his context, with the Bible, and with the Word of God militant in the world, helps to make him “probably the most creative and disturbing Anglican theologian” of the twentieth-century (Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams).
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