William Stringfellow: Essential Writings

William Stringfellow (1928-1985) was a radical lay theologian and social critic. Drawing on the biblical warnings against “powers and principalities,” he leveled a prophetic critique against a range of institutions—the church, seminaries, economic structures, and the idolatries of the modern war-making state. Trained as a lawyer, he was a lifelong gadfly in the Episcopal church, his chronic ill health fostering his tendency to see the world in the light of Eternity. His great theme was the Constantinian compromise, the accommodation of Christianity to the values of the empire and the preservation of the status quo. “My concern,” he wrote, “is to understand America biblically,”—in contrast to the more common tendency, to understand the Bible “Americanly.”