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

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

Though the indictment, clearly a political charge, was eventually quashed, this was a momentous event in Stringfellow's life. It was the first time he had personally suffered so bluntly the aggressions of the principalities. Given his state of health, it was indeed a bodily assault threatening death. But it was also his first experience of being victimized by the legal principalities which he bad fought so vigorously on behalf of others, in East Harlem for example. In many respects the event seeded the energy of An Ethic. As it happened, Bill and Dan had sat at the dining room table discussing the biblical bases of that book (the Babylon texts of Revelation) while in all likelihood the FBI listened in by high-powered directional microphone. Then came the indictment, a provocation further illuminating the texts, clarifying the mind. If the principalities and powers had known what they were doing, they would have let it slide. That book effected their complete exposure (becoming something of a theological handbook for the American resistance movement). Stringfellow claimed yet again the grace and freedom he commended. Legally and politically he was unintimidated, standing instead by his friendship with Berrigan.

Another influence on An Ethic which must be mentioned, perhaps at some length, is Jacques Ellul, the French social historian and theologian. The Meaning of the City26 had only just been published in English. Stringfellow wrote to Ellul concerning the indictment against himself and Towne:

it is difficult to put succinctly in a letter all that has happened and its background, growing out of the past several years in which this society has so much constricted and in which opposition to the regime has provoked a repression more serious and extensive than most people realize.... There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that charges were brought against us because we have openly expressed our opposition to the barbarism in Indochina and the threatening totalitarianism in America. One might even say that we are attacked by the government because we are Christians, although I would not want to put it that way without a more complete designation of what that means.27

Given the times, Stringfellow went on to press again his longstanding (and eternally pending) invitation that Ellul come to the States, though now with a more strenuous political urgency.

Such a trip had been arranged more than once. The two of them pursued for some thirty years a personal correspondence, though Stringfellow attributes to the Holy Spirit the coincidence that they would find themselves writing on similar biblical texts or with common reference to particular powers, since their letters never discussed what each would be working on next.

Consider these excerpts from an earlier letter of Ellul to Stringfellow:

Bien Cher: I have just finished your book . . . with great emotion-the description you give of the current development of the USA is almost unbelievable. In Europe, no one pays attention at all to this reality... I often ask myself which is easier-on the one hand, to live, like me, in a country radically non-Christian, where the invocation of the Gospel means nothing to "the person on the street"-or, on the other hand, like you to speak in an officially Christian country, to have the facility that the message of the Gospel is normally well received, but where it's a matter of breaking through the misunderstandings, the hypocrisies, and giving the Gospel its revolutionary power. I was terribly pleased with your last chapter. You and I are trying to transmit an insupportable truth-and I sense in your pages the same urgency, the same passion that I feel in myself. I don't know how to tell you how near I am to you, how much it consoles me to know that there is, over there, a person chosen by God to carry on this combat which sometimes seems desperate to me. 28