Not vice versa. Reading the powers biblically: Stringfellow, hermeneutics, and the principalities

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 1999 by Wylie-Kellermann, Bill

Not only are the powers a question of hermeneutics; for William Stringfellow, hermeneutics are a question of the powers.

It is almost as though American empire, sensing its exposure in the biblical Word, engages a preemptive literary strike, claiming, possessing and interpreting the Bible in its own guise, for its own convenience, justifying itself as the divinely favored nation. Stringfellow calls this violence-and it is a violence virtually synonymous with the Native American genocide or the racism of American chattel slavery or the nuclear arsenal or the pyrotechnics of the Gulf War and the slow continuing siege of Iraq.

No doubt those on British soil will recognize the ways in which the Bible is read Englishly or United Kingdomly-also suitably awkward terms. That was surely most prominent and exaggerated at the height of the colonial empire when imperial expansion and the Kingdom of God were most conspicuously confused, but it may also be as current as the civil liturgies of recent election campaigns.

That is to say, this powerly intervention is not a new or uniquely American process. In fact, for most of its history, the gods of this world have blinded the Church to its own scriptures with respect to the "principalities and powers." in the hermeneutical history these terms have been excised, suppressed and obscured. One analysis ties the effectual disappearance and demise of the powers in Protestant theology to Luther and Calvin at the very beginning of the Reformation.9 Stringfellow, however, locates that dissipation at an earlier juncture, with the "Constantinian Arrangement" of the fourth century. Beginning with that time, Christians had "forgotten or forsaken a worldview or, more precisely, doctrines of creation and fallen creation, similar to Paul's, in which political authority encompasses and conjoins the angelic powers and incumbent rulers."10 Walter Wink, the New Testament scholar whose stunning trilogy on the powers was seeded by Stringfellow's work and who has thereby become the primary and practical American spokesperson on the theology of the principalities, concurs. The Church

soon found itself the darling of Constantine. Called on to legitimate the empire, the church abandoned much of its social critique. The Powers were soon divorced from political affairs and made airy spirits who preyed only on individuals. The state was thus freed of one of the most powerful brakes against idolatry.... 11

Rome was effectively preempting its own exposure by and vulnerability in the Word of God. The New Testament was being read Romanly as it were, the substance of the powers written into the oblivion of spiritual individualism.

When Stringfellow first began to speak and write on the powers in the early sixties, he went on the road stumping in colleges and universities. He identified the powers with institutions, images, and ideologies as creatures before God having an independent life and integrity of their own, whose vocation is to praise God and serve human life. In the estate of the fall, however, they are seen to be demonic powers. Their vocation is lost and distorted, in fact inverted: instead of praising God and serving human life they pretend to the place of God and enslave human life. This exposition, which became chapter three of Free in Obedience (1964), met a strange mix of fascination and rebuff. He loved to tell the story of an early presentation, in fact two of them, given in Boston. Scheduled for similar talks the same day at Harvard Business School and at the Divinity School, 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 school students, it turned out, engaged him thoroughly, bending his ear long past the hour appointed, with numerous examples from their own experience of dominance and possession with respect to corporations and the commercial powers. Their experiences verified his own observations.