Out in front: the radical witness of Bill Coffin

Christian Century, June 29, 2004 by Harvey Gallagher Cox

That was, as she put it, "bullshit," but she also knew what Coffin the preacher sensed--that the best way to deal with his grief was to write and deliver a sermon about it. He did. Titled simply "Alex's Death," it is the most requested of all his hundreds of sermons. Commenting later, he said that what had really infuriated him at this time was the well-meaning people who reassured him that what had happened to his son was "God's will." It was certainly not, he said. "My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God's heart was the first of all our hearts to break." He also took comfort from some lines of Emily Dickinson: "By a departing light / we see acuter, quite, / than by a wick that stays."

One wonders why Goldstein, who was a student at Yale during Coffin's tenure as chaplain, seems to shortchange his long and productive pastorate at Riverside Church. A writer who began with an excellent book on baseball, Goldstein has captured the zestful image of Coffin as a popular cultural hero. But Coffin was first and foremost a churchman and a preacher, and one of the most important facets of his immense legacy is the impact he had on two generations of churches and churchpeople. At the very time when some observers contended that the "mainline churches" were stagnating while the more conservative ones were growing, the man who occupied the most visible Protestant pulpit in America showed, Sunday after Sunday, that the mainline had not become a sideline. In addition to Riverside's large multiracial congregation, some of its pews were always filled by visiting church folk from around the country.

COFFIN HAS NEVER been one to sign on to new theological trends. His underlying perspective, mainly forged at Yale, was that era broadly ecumenical Presbyterian. He added flesh to those bones during the Riverside years, and he demonstrated convincingly that this theology could be related to a host of social issues. But it always remained possible to think of him as "neo-orthodox," an heir of Barth, Tillich and the Niebuhrs.

A few years ago when I was teaching a course on Protestant theology in the 20th century I invited Coffin to talk to the class so they could get a taste of what was once a sturdy theological movement. As the class discussion went on I became aware that Coffin's theological posture, though the core of a robust political ethic, was not fully connecting with the new generation of theological students. It did not seem to them to allow much room for interfaith enrichment or enlargement.

Coffin's main expansion in that direction arose, characteristically, from personal encounters and had more to do with solidarity than with metaphysics. It grew out of his deep fondness for Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, with whom he marched in demonstrations. His interest in Asian traditions was largely restricted to the Buddhist monks, like Thich Nhat Hanh, who made such an invaluable contribution to the peace movement. Coffin could spot authenticity (and phoniness) whatever vestment it wore, and he was eager to work with anyone who shared his burning vision of a--at least somewhat--better world.