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§2. Introduction & Salutation, 1:1-5 (session 5, part 2)—Paul’s Letter to the Galatians: A Presbyterian Adult Spiritual Formation Series

2025-06-23T07:48:00.003-05:00

[The series continues and now concludes the fifth in-person session. Find the last post here.]

Continuing comment on Galatians 1:1—“who raised him from the dead.”

Luther tackles this phrase about resurrection, and—interestingly—he wants to interpret what Paul says here about resurrection from the dead as a gloss on God’s righteousness.[1] He thinks that Paul is talking about the righteousness of God in that Christ rose to justify and save us, underscoring that we’re justified by Christ's righteousness and not by anything we do. This is passive righteousness. For Luther, our justification happens in the resurrection because we see there the righteousness of God that saves us.

For Luther, we’re going to be resurrected with Christ literally in the last days. More recently, Rudolph Bultmann reframed things to suggest that we’re resurrected from the dead spiritually whenever any of us come to faith. We participate in Christ’s resurrection as we are resurrected in faith. You can then apply this to Easter by talking about how Jesus is resurrected into our hearts. This line of thinking takes that next step from Luther to think about how it is that the righteousness of God that occurs in Christ’s resurrection connects with us in our lives today.

Bedford points out that this is the only mention of the resurrection in all of Galatians.[2] This is the sort of thing you notice only when you stop and think about it. But this is odd because Paul makes such a big deal about the resurrection in 1^st Corinthians, like when he says in 15:17—“If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins.” Paul then gives this whole explanation about the resurrection and the centrality of the resurrection for what it is that he thinks God is up to in Jesus. Reading that in 1^st Corinthians, you get the idea that the resurrection is really important to him. But he only mentions it once in Galatians. It seems a little odd that it wouldn’t play a larger role. Bedford says that the presence of resurrection here at the start of the letter underscores the framework that Paul brings to understanding the meaningfulness of Jesus. This is everything we've talked about already with apocalyptic. The idea that there’s a cosmic war going on between spiritual forces and that somehow Jesus is the beginning of God’s victory in this cosmic battle—and, more specifically, the Christ’s resurrection is the flashpoint.

So, even if Paul is not going to spend a lot of time talking about resurrection, he still throws this in to remind people about the big picture that he would have explained to them very thoroughly when he was with them. He’s saying: “Remember the resurrection! That's the context of everything we’re up to here—this apocalyptic change that’s happened, this changing of the ages.” We’ll see some of that language coming in in a few verses as well. Paul wants to make sure they know what time it is, in the cosmic grand scheme of things, so that they can understand what it means to live in this time and what God needs from us in this time. Specifically, the question is whether God needs Gentiles to become Jews in this time or whether they need to stay Gentiles. Paul throws the resurrection in here to gesture toward that framework, that bigger picture informing the kinds of arguments he’s going to be make.

Paul’s teaching emphasizes that the resurrection is God’s victory, or the beginning of God’s victory over the forces, as Luther would put it, of sin, death, and the devil. That’s a favorite phrase of Luther’s. The resurrection is a victory over death and all its forces, which is the root of everything that oppresses life and keeps life from flourishing and human beings from living in God’s peace—which is the hugely robust concept in the Jewish tradition of shalom. This is not just peace as an absence of conflict but peace as the flourishing of life. Death, and all the forces associated with the evil side in this apocalyptic imagery, gets in the way of that peace. By mentioning it here, even though he’s not going to talk about it a lot, perhaps Paul is saying, “look, this is the big picture, but I’m not going to focus on explaining to you what the gospel is.” Paul’s already done that. They’ve already accepted it. This isn’t like his letter to the Romans where he’s writing to people he hasn’t talked to yet and so he needs to explain what he thinks the gospel is. He’s writing to people whom he's taught and who’ve accepted his version of the gospel. The question seems to be: “how do we live out the gospel right now? What difference does it make for how we practice our relationship with God as Gentile-Jesus followers?” Remember the framework. This is the gospel. But Paul’s letter to the Galatians is going to focus on the practical application side of things.

But, now let’s turn this into a question. Who raised him, Jesus, from the dead? In the text, we answered the question of who raised Jesus from the dead by reference to God the Father, which comes right beforehand in the verse. Bedford emphasizes that this reference to God the Father refers to the Christian God. She writes that this is,

“the God who raised Jesus from the dead and who is not to be thought of or worshipped in isolation, but whose very mention is intertwined with the life, death, resurrection, and liberating work of Jesus Christ.”[3]

Her point is that Christians must always think of God through Jesus Christ and remember that God is no other God than the one who raised Jesus from the dead. When we use the word “God,” and we hear other people use that word, we have to keep in mind that—according to Paul in Galatians—the only right way to define this God is by pointing to Jesus and saying that God is the one who raised Jesus from the dead. Remember that the act of raising Jesus from the dead is the beginning of victory in the cosmic battle against the forces of death and everything that oppresses life. It is a liberating and flourishing event. Consequently, the God who raises Jesus from the dead is the God who is committed to human liberation and the flourishing of all creation. This pattern of thought helps us identify what God is like in some very specific ways.

I once saw a great bit by a comedian, and I can’t remember who it was, set in the British Empire. There are these British guys in India, when India was part of the British Empire, coming across these folks in India and saying to them, “We British bring you civilization and advancement in the name of God.” Well, the folks from India look at them for a moment and then ask: “You say you bring us these things in the name of God, but which one is it?” In religious studies there’s a humorous truism that Hinduism has 33,000 different gods. This is probably an exaggeration, and some Hindus claim that they are all manifestations of a singular Divine. But, no matter how you slice it, that’s a lot of gods or manifestations. Hence the question: which one?

Situated as we are in the West, our religious instincts are all shaped by what we in religious studies call the Abrahamic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All of these traditions claim to be serving and following the same God. In that context, we all take for granted what God is and which god we’re talking about. But as the world becomes more religiously diverse, it becomes more important to stop and ask what someone means when they use the word “God.” If they can’t give a good answer to that question, then ask them what the god they’re talking about is like. The only Christian answer to that questions is to say that we’re talking about the God who raised Jesus from the dead, who is committed to the liberation of the oppressed and the flourishing of human life.

It’s also really important to have this kind of mental and historical framework when we think about the doctrine of the Trinity. Christians claim that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We might learn different creedal formulations about what that means, but it all tends to be very conceptual and abstract. We think about triangles and arrows pointing in different directions. Have we seen these drawings? We think of three-leaf clovers and explanations of how they relate to each other. But all of these things ultimately break down and it stays conceptual and abstract. When we talk about the God who raised Jesus from the dead, however, things have suddenly become very specific. You can turn to very specific parts of your Bible and read those stories, and those stories ground our theological imaginations in important ways.

There's a theologian named Robert Jensen, who died a few years ago in 2017. He wrote one of the greatest theological sentences I’ve ever read. He goes even farther than Paul here to tie the way we think about God back not only to Jesus but to the fact that Jesus was a Jew. Jensen wrote,

“God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt.”[4]

I love this because it destroys vague language about God or gods, and takes a completely opposite approach. We’re not talking about “the divine” in general here, or some kind of general idea of “God” that may or may not have anything to do with the Christian God—and, frankly, probably doesn’t have anything to do with it. We’re talking about this specific history and these specific stories.

What’s more, I love how he says God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead. He doesn’t say God is the one who raised Jesus from the dead. He says God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead. If you say God is the one who X, you ultimately think you know who God is. If I say Connor is the one who washed the dishes, it’s clear that I think I know something about Connor. But if I come into my house and I don’t know Connor or who did the dishes, and somebody tells me Connor is whoever did the dishes, then that’s literally all I know about him. Jensen’s point is that all we know about God is that God is the one who raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel out of Egypt. Anything else we might think we know about God is fake news. We aren’t talking about general notions of what it means to be all-powerful, or omnipotent. We aren’t talking about general notions of what it means to be all knowing, or omniscient. Instead, we must focus on defining God and understanding God as whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt. God, in the Christian tradition, is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Full stop.

This has huge implications. My boys are Boy Scouts. Connor, this morning, is with his Troop at a different church for Scout Sunday. We all know the Pledge of Allegiance, right? The Pledge of Allegiance includes the line: “One Nation under God.” By know I hope you know to ask: which one? Which “God” are we talking about? This phrase was added to the Pledge of Allegiance during some of our lifetimes, in the mid-1950s. At that time, there were arguments about exactly what God the Pledge is talking about. For instance: does this include Jewish folks? There wasn’t as much different religious diversity at that time, but the assumption was that it did include Jewish folks. They even had arguments about not talking about a specific God but talking about some kind of general sense of divinity, some idea of transcendent morality that guides what we do. In that sense, what the Pledge is really about is saying that we’re religious—we follow some god or other, which is better than all those godless, immoral, atheist communists who don't. That was the larger geopolitical context of the Pledge. So, when we think about it as Christians and say, “One nation under God,” or when we hear our political leaders say “God bless America,” that’s the perfect time for us to ask which god we’re talking about. Then we look at what this “nation under God” has done and we might wonder if the God that this nation is under is in fact the God of liberation and human flourishing, or whether it’s some other god. The God of American Civil religion that gets mentioned every time we recite the Pledge and who our currency says we trust—is this the Christian God? Robert Jensen says, “God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt.”

For Christians, as we engage in interreligious dialogue and we work in an increasingly religiously diverse world, we should stay focused on who God is in our tradition. But the flip side of that is we should also stay focused on who God is, or the gods are, in other traditions. We can’t just assume that whatever other traditions are calling “God,” the divine, or whatever, is somehow the same thing we’re talking about. There’s a previous generation of religious scholars that used to say all the different religions are just different paths up the same mountain. Instead of that, we must realize that the mountain that they envisioned was defined by Christianity. All they were doing was shoehorning, one way or the other, all these different religious traditions into looking like us. This isn’t fair either to those other traditions or to our Christian tradition. The various religious traditions in the world have their own identity and integrity that we should respect and endeavor to learn from. On the Christian side, we should focus on finding God where Jesus is raised from the dead, where Israel comes out of Egypt, and nowhere else. That’s our focal point.

Karl Barth, the theologian that I study the most, wrote a really memorable few sentences about this nearly a hundred years ago that are still worth hearing today:

“God may speak to the church through Russian communism, a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog. We do well to listen to God, if God really does so, but we shall not be able to say that we are commissioned to spread what we so hear as an independent proclamation.”[5]

We encounter God anywhere and everywhere—in beautiful things, as well as in ugly, repulsive things, in the flowering shrub and the dead dog. Where we expect to find God, like in the church, we don’t necessarily find God. And where we don’t necessarily expect to find God, like—perhaps—in Russian communism, we may surprisingly find God. We can and do encounter God in all these places. But we don’t start proclaiming the gospel of the dead dog.

Our imaginations, our interpretive frameworks, our knowledge of God and understanding of who God is, should be securely grounded in the God who raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel out of Egypt. It’s that God, that whoever, whom we meet elsewhere, if we meet God at all. The same thing goes for all religious traditions. You can meet God at work and speaking through Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and so on. But, as Christians, our task is to recognize the same God—whoever raised Jesus from the dead—at work in those other places.

[1] Pelikan, ed., Luther’s Works, Volume 26: Lectures on Galatians 1535, Chapters 1–4, 21.

[2] Bedford, Galatians, 15.

[3] Bedford, Galatians, 18.

[3] Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997 & 1999), 1:63.

[5] Barth, Karl. The Church Dogmatics, 4 vols. in 13 parts (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956–75): 1.1, p. 60.

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What Am I Reading? Candida Moss’s “God’s Ghostwriters"

2025-06-09T17:24:00.006-05:00

In God's Ghostwriters, an engagingly written and wide-ranging work, Candida Moss endeavors to bring to the wider reading public something that specialist scholars have known for some time—the people that most folks think wrote the books of the New Testament did not, in fact, write the books of the New Testament. At least not in the way that we tend to think of authorship. Rather than being a solitary labor of individual writers channeling spiritual inspiration into words on a page, the writing of these books was an intensely collaborative process. And very often--and connecting the dots here is, perhaps, Moss's most substantial contribution in this volume--the people collaborating in this process did not necessarily want to collaborate. As Moss sums things up (bold is mine): “Hidden behind these names of sainted individuals are enslaved coauthors and collaborators, almost all of whom go uncredited” (p. 12).

Candida Moss, God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2024).

Furthermore, simply getting the words down on parchment did not end the work of these enslaved collaborators. These writings needed to be carried to their recipients, read—even performed—and interpreted (think of something like a Q&A session) by those carriers, and then they needed to be copied (which also included interpretive work) and distributed by further enslaved collaborators. All of this underscores the important point that the meaning-making that occurred in the earliest strata of what came to be the Christian movement was less about so-called “inspired” texts produced by authoritative authors, and more about the skilled labor of enslaved person to craft and communicate the significance of a story that they may not even have personally found compelling.

Moss lays all this out expertly. I had encountered some of this piecemeal along the way, but Moss’s own authorial gifts (and she does her best to acknowledge all her collaborators) compellingly pulled together substantial amounts of specialist scholarship and presented a textured picture of writing in the ancient Mediterranean world in a way that I had not previously encountered. Although the text is not heavy on textual interpretation, there are several points along the way where Moss takes insights into the writing process and the ancient world’s systems of enslavement to illuminate different New Testament passages.

Just coming to grips with how extensive those systems of enslavement were, how they were built into the social fabric, and how the Jesus story and the New Testament writings emerge out of and are integrated with that social fabric, provides a great deal of food for thought that I’ll be chewing on for quite a while. For example, consider the term kurios, “lord,” which is found throughout the New Testament writings as well as the Septuagint. Moss notes: “The word kurios or ‘lord’ was used for enslavers, as a title for Jesus in the New Testament, and as a name for God in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible: (p. 116). What does it mean for how we think and speak about God that one of the key biblical terms used of God and Jesus is also a term for enslavers?

I’ll end with some of Moss’s own reflections on this lager question of enslavement in the Christian texts and traditions (bold is mine):

“The point of centering enslavement and enslaved workers should not be to fix the problems that interpreters currently have when they read the Bible, nor should it be about the explanatory power that enslavement has when it comes to narrating the history of Christianity. Centering enslavement is about doing justice, sharing credit, and recognizing harms. As the idea of Christ followers as part of the body of Christ reveals, the same passage can be used either to foster equality or to enforce hierarchy and oppression. Even benign metaphors can be harmful if we are not attentive to how they work and how they have been used. Reparative work in this case involves excising the explicit violence from, and acknowledging the power embedded in, cherished concepts and ideas about Christianity. It may not be Paul’s fault that subsequent generations of others have used his work to enslave and oppress, but it is ours if we do not notice the opportunities for abuse that his words have afforded them.” (p. 265–66)

*Note: to read about my co-authored article that Moss's work inspired, follow this link: Ghostwriters Then and Now: Biblical Scribes, Generative AI, and Collaborative Authorship.

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Ghostwriters Then and Now: Biblical Scribes, Generative AI, and Collaborative Authorship

2025-04-21T21:43:00.005-05:00

There I was—up at some ungodly hour to walk on my treadmill. I was listening to a podcast (I think it was this one) featuring Candida Moss and discussing her recent book, God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible (more from me on this book at some point in the future). It’s a good episode, and the book is a good read, and they—podcast and book—were a pair of experiences that covered things I knew in an abstract sense but made it all a lot more specific and interesting.

But, I digress. The point is that I was walking on the treadmill and engaging with this interesting content, when the thought hit me: “Mon Dieu!…,” (yes, for the purpose of this blog post, my subconscious sometimes speaks French), “…Mediated authorship in the form of enslaved and lower-class persons in antiquity seems a lot like how authorship with generative artificial intelligence is working right now!”

Later—I don’t recall whether it was later that day, or later that week, or even later—I connected with my colleague, James Hutson, who is an expert on all things Generative AI, to talk about the idea. And he found it as interesting as I did. So, we did what any self-respective academics would do: we wrote it up and published it.

James Hutson and Travis McMaken, “Dictating the Divine: Revisiting Authorship, Intention, and Authority from Sacred Texts to Generative AI,” ISAR Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences 3.4 (2025): 21–29.

Our article builds upon established scholarship by historians like Moss to explore the parallels between historical practices of mediated authorship and today's AI-generated content. As scholars have long recognized, ancient religious texts rarely emerged from a single author but instead developed through collaborative processes between supposedly authoritative figures, scribes and messengers who interpreted and expanded upon their dictated messages, as well as the shaping and editing of texts through processes of historical transmission down to the present day. We articulate how this historical practice mirrors contemporary interactions with large language models, where human prompts guide AI systems to produce outputs that blend original directives with computational interpretation. Both scenarios challenge traditional notions of sole authorship, revealing what textual scholars have emphasized for decades: that creation has always been an inherently collaborative process.

This comparison matters because it challenges our deeply held assumptions about originality, intention, and authority in both religious and digital contexts. By recognizing that mediated authorship has been integral to the creation of culturally significant texts for millennia, we can better understand and navigate current anxieties surrounding AI-generated content. Rather than seeing AI as a radical break from traditional authorship, our article suggests we're witnessing the latest evolution in a long history of collaborative creation. These insights don't just inform academic discussions about biblical texts or technological ethics. They invite us to reconsider fundamental questions about creativity, ownership, and meaning-making in our increasingly algorithm-mediated world.

In any case, I hope you'll take the time to look at the article and see what you make of it all. And we'll see what random thoughts I have next while on the treadmill...

P.S. Yes, I made that picture using Generative AI.

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Prometheus’s Three Challenges to Christian Theology According to Jan Milíč Lochman

2025-03-30T14:24:00.003-05:00

One of the recurrent points of discussion during the 20th century conversations between Marxists and Christians in German-speaking Europe had to do with the character of Prometheus – the titan from Greek mythology who stole fire from Zeus and the Olympian gods in order to give it to humanity. Within Marxist thought, Prometheus came to represent the Marxist criticism of religion and the conviction that humanity must reject religious authority and deity since it served only to keep humanity in servitude. Prometheus became the hero of human actualization and freedom.

It isn’t hard to see how Prometheus would become a focal point when Marxist and Christian theologians got together to chat.

Jan Milíč Lochman was a Czech theologian who, after 1968, taught at the University of Basel. He was active in the late heady days of Marxist/Christian dialogue in the 1960s. The engagement was driven, in no small part, by interpersonal and intellectual encounter in Czechoslovakia, which came to an abrupt halt when Warsaw Pact troops invaded in August 1968 to abort the Prague Spring. Much like Helmut Gollwitzer with reference to the Marxist criticism of religion in general, Lochman believed that Christians—and Christian theology—had something to learn from the Marxist Prometheus.

I intend to get further into Lochman directly in time, but I’m drawing here on the excellent work of James Bentley in Between Marx and Christ: The Dialogue in German-Speaking Europe, 1870–1970 (London: Version and NLB, 1982). In the following passage from Bentley, quotes are from Lochman, italics are in the original, and bold is mine:

[Lochman] insisted that Christian theology could not simply note the pace of Prometheus and leave it at that. “In the mirror the Marxist holds in front of us, we see repeatedly that the Promethean elements—better, the dynamic aspects of our own radical inheritance—have been continually pushed aside and rejected.” Even though the great theological pioneers of our century (Barth, Bonhoeffer, Niebuhr, and Hromadka, as listed by Lochman) had brought to light neglected parts of this legacy, Prometheus remained a challenge to Christians. Lochman cited three such challenges. First, Prometheus challenged authoritarian notions of God, the idea that God is “an inhuman structure imposed upon mankind,” rather than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who is also Father of Jesus Christ. In the sight of the true God, Lochman argued, there is a place for Prometheus, for this God is not affronted by man’s emancipation; it is part of his own revealed concern. Second, Prometheus challenged the doctrine that sees sin simply as an act of hubris. “In the light of Christ,” Lochman wrote, “sin is revealed not only in the ‘eritis sicut deus’ … but also in the opposite temptation, the denial of the liberating engagement of God in history and the refusal to co-operate in the liberation. Inactivity is as basic a form of sin as hubris. Third, Prometheus challenged an inadequate understanding of grace and justification. The doctrine of grace is suspect in Marxism, since it readily degenerates into an ideology of quietism, leading to the notion that one’s own work and actions are not important. Lochman argued that in the biblical understanding of grace, human activity is neither excluded nor devalued, for the effect of grace is to open new and unexpected possibilities of action in human history; grace mobilizes man’s creative powers; it may even be said to stimulate human beings to “Promethean existence.”

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So, You Want to Read William Stringfellow?

2025-02-28T19:17:00.000-06:00

"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 slow to acknowledge, receive, and critically assess Stringfellow’s work, especially its signature contribution – his profound retrieval of NT “principalities and powers” language as a key heuristic tool for discerning the signs of our times. I do see signs, though, of a rekindled interest (for example, Mac Loftin’s recent on-point essay in The Christian Century).

We need this body of work, desperately, in these fraught and perilous times in our nation and world. But if you haven’t read Stringfellow, or if you’re interested in going deeper, then Tolle et lege! – and see for yourself what apocalyptic light might help illuminate our dark collective moment. Happily, Wipf & Stock has reprinted his books and a few works by related authors. But where to start? Here are a few modest suggestions for navigating the terrain.

Unmasking Imperial Hermeneutics – Two Anthologies
For my money, the best interpreter of Stringfellow’s life and work, hands down, is his friend and mentee, the Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellermann, a Methodist pastor-activist and holy agitator hailing from Detroit. To see the salutary, subversive uses to which Stringfellow’s work might be deployed in current social justice struggles – the fight for clean water, for instance – check out Wylie-Kellerman’s Powers in Particular: A Practical Theology of the Powers that Be (Fortress, 2017). The best entree to Stringfellow is the anthology Wylie-Kellermann edited, William Stringfellow: Essential Writings (Orbis, 2013). His introduction to the volume is the best essay on Stringfellow I’ve read to date. Readings are organized topically, and a glossary helps unpack Stringfellow’s often idiosyncratic use of theological terms. Then, if you can get a hold of it, read Wylie-Kellerman’s earlier (and much longer) anthology, A Keeper of the Word: Selected Writings of William Stringfellow (Eerdmans, 1994) – sad to say, no longer in print. A deeper dive than the Orbis volume, the selections in this book are organized according to a more biographical and contextual logic. Many DET readers, especially, will be thrilled to read excerpts from the young lawyer’s 1962 tete-a-tete with the great Karl Barth, who admonished a stunned audience at the University of Chicago to “listen to this man.”

Biography as Theology – A Unique Trilogy
Stringfellow was neither ordained nor an academic: His theology was born and ripened in his struggles, his (often intense) relationships, and especially in his concrete praxis of legal, political, and ecclesiastical advocacy. His books are contextual – or incarnational, as he would have put it – often stitching together previous articles and talks and rich in personal anecdotes and social commentary. Naturally, then, neophytes might want to move on to three explicitly autobiographical works, each of which hinges upon key crises and turning points in his vocational journey. My People Is the Enemy, a manifesto that reportedly garnered the attention of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, recounts his years, after graduating from Harvard Law School, practicing “street law” among the poor and marginalized in East Harlem, where he lived from 1956-1962. His accounts of the squalor on the streets and in the tenements of what was one of the most densely packed neighborhoods in the U.S., of the venality of Tammany Hall politicians who put their ambitions above the needs of citizens (sound familiar?), and everyday acts of courage and humanity should continue to shock and inspire a new generation of readers. As early as his college days, Stringfellow was all in for the struggle for racial justice (though Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr., in the Slocum volume listed below, criticizes Stringfellow’s own sometimes patronizing attitudes and racial blindspots). A Second Birthday, set a decade later, recounts Stringfellow’s struggle with a life-threatening illness and his (astonishing) survival of a radical surgery that removed most of his pancreas, rendering him permanently diabetic and dependent upon a rigorous dietary regime. Fast forward to the early 1980s. In A Simplicity of Faith: My Experience in Mourning – my favorite of his books – Stringfellow recounts the sudden death of his partner Anthony Towne and his ensuing process of working through grief and into a new way of life. It is one of the most stunning books on death and mourning I’ve read, and, as a bonus, also includes winsome stories relating community life and politics on Block Island, where he and Towne had moved years before to get some respite from the stresses of city life.

Suspect Friendships – On Harboring Fellow Travellers
Also in an autobiographical vein, I mention Suspect Tenderness: The Ethics of the Berrigan Witness, which Stringfellow and Towne co-authored: This volume celebrates the prophetic vocation of their close friend, the Jesuit poet and peace activist Daniel Berrigan, who, at the time of writing, had been recently convicted for his role in the 1968 liturgical protest in Catonsville, Maryland, in which Berrigan and eight others burned draft records with homemade napalm. The fugitive priest, temporarily evading capture by federal agents for his imminent incarceration, sought refuge at “Eschaton,” Stringfellow and Towne’s quasi-monastic home on Block Island, where Berrigan was eventually apprehended. With the Berrigan witness in view, Stringfellow preached on “Jesus as a Criminal” (reprinted in this volume) at Cornell University, where Berrigan worked as chaplain. The two other books Stringfellow and Towne co-authored – The Bishop Pike Affair and The Death and Life of Bishop Pike – grew out of their close friendship with and support for the incendiary bishop, who was accused of heresy by his fellow prelates and tried and acquitted in an Episcopal Church court. Their warm ties to the bishop, though, don’t necessarily mean they endorsed all his teachings. Pike, who died in the desert near Qumran while researching the life of Jesus, lived a colorful, intense, and tumultuous life, to be sure. Both books are almost excruciatingly detailed. The biography is long and only loosely organized, but if you’re interested in learning about the time a British medium channeled the ghost of Paul Tillich in a seance while Pike desperately sought to contact his deceased son, this might be the book for you.

Speaking of Faith, Public and Private – Shorter Works
For an alternative point of entry, check out several deceptively short volumes that help flesh out the range of Stringfellow’s concerns and commitments. A Private and Public Faith, Stringfellow’s first book, is a polemical tract calling out the post-war-era smugness and pietistic individualism of both evangelical revivalists and liberal Protestants. (He lands some good hits, I think, though I’m not sure he’s always fair to his targets.) The theme of hypocrisy emerges again in his trenchant Dissenter in a Great Society, which calls out President Johnson’s domestic agenda as a cynical, half-hearted, and woefully inadequate effort to avoid truly confronting the realities of poverty and racism. Count it All Joy wrestles with questions of doubt and faith – very topical for theologies of the 1960s – while Imposters of God: Inquiries into Favorite Idols unmasks the idolatrous loyalties rendered, in North American consumerist culture, to such phenomena as work, money, patriotism, and even church. Free in Obedience, a retrieval of the politics of Holy Week for the modern context, is the first book to sketch explicitly the theology of the powers that would permeate his later works. Instead of Death, originally a catechetical tract for teenagers struggling existentially with questions of identity, loneliness, and sexuality, was later revised and republished with added material urging resistance to the forces of technocratic totalitarianism!

Jerusalem vs. Babylon – A “Trilogy” in Theo-Political Ethics
Most of Stringfellow’s writings are occasional rather than systematic. An exception (somewhat) is his magnum opus, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land. This project, supported by a grant for him to write a moral theology, draws upon the “Babylon” passages in Revelation to confront the machinations and deceptions of empire manifest during the Nixon regime. A fervent call to live humanly and speak truth to power in a decadent age, this text became a handbook for antiwar activists of the era, celebrating the kairotic emergence of authentic community in episodic “Jerusalem” moments. A second work, Conscience and Obedience, which juxtaposes the visions of the “beast” in Rev. 13 with St. Paul’s (ostensible?) admonition to submit to worldly rulers in Rom. 13, discloses the problematic and ambiguous character of political authority and legitimacy. Stringfellow argues there is no timeless, abstract answer to the question of how believers should respond to the importunities of incumbent regimes, except to say that true followers of Jesus are never to shack up with and rest too easily with any status quo. Though he hoped to round out the trilogy with a work on the charismatic gifts that foster human freedom, the volume remained unfinished at his death. Instead, following a suggestion by Wylie-Kellerman, I would propose that his final book, The Politics of Spirituality, nicely fills that gap, tying together the themes of his moral theology. Stringfellow’s blistering critique of esoteric, privatized spiritualities that would hive off religious experience from the demands of real-world existence forms an apt bookend to his work, recapitulating his first book, published more than two decades earlier. Such commodified and privatized spiritualities are easy prey to cynical manipulation by political regimes (President Reagan’s appropriation of civil religion is in view here).

Other Voices in the Wilderness – Secondary Works
To date, no critical biography of Stringfellow exists. Still, An Alien in a Strange Land: Theology in the Life of William Stringfellow by Anthony Dancer situates, in fascinating ways, the lawyer-theologian’s “life-work” amid the concerns and struggles that stirred up U.S. society in the decades after World War II – especially ecumenism, the Civil Rights movement, and the (early) gay rights movement. Particularly valuable is Dancer’s account of Stringfellow’s student years, including detailed commentary on early papers that were never published or are not easily accessible today. Given its relative sparsity, such secondary work on Stringfellow exists is all the more valuable. Unfortunately, Dancer’s edited volume, William Stringfellow in Anglo-American Perspective, is out of print. Radical Christian & Exemplary Lawyer: Honoring William Stringfellow, edited by Anthony W. McThenia, Jr., includes invaluable remembrances and reflections, especially from scholars and activists who knew him, including the late Walter Wink of Auburn Seminary, Jim Wallis of Sojourners, and Elizabeth McAllister from the Jonah House community in Baltimore. A later volume, Prophet of Justice, Prophet of Life: Essays on William Stringfellow, edited by Robert Boak Slocum, includes notable essays, for example, that address Stringfellow’s compelling proposals for rescuing the legal profession from its servitude to issues of process, so that lawyers might be freed to pursue actual justice for their clients.

The (ahem…) halcyon days of theo-blogging a few years ago generated numerous excellent, short engagements with Stringfellow’s work. Notable contributions came, for example, from Richard Beck, Jason Garoncy, and Ben Myers. And I’ve stumbled through my own attempts to engage Stringfellow as well. But stay tuned: More may be on the way!

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