William Stringfellow
| William Stringfellow | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Frank William Stringfellow April 28, 1928 Johnston, Rhode Island, United States |
| Died | March 2, 1985 (aged 56) Block Island, Rhode Island, United States |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Neo-orthodoxy |
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Frank William Stringfellow (April 26, 1928 – March 2, 1985) was an American lay theologian, lawyer and social activist. He was active mostly during the 1960s and 1970s.
Born in Johnston, Rhode Island,he grew up In Northampton, Massachusetts and graduated from Northampton High School in 1945. He managed to obtain several scholarships and entered Bates College in Lewiston, Maine at the age of fifteen. He later earned a scholarship to the London School of Economics and served in the U.S. 2nd Armored Division. Stringfellow then attended Harvard Law School. After his graduation, he moved to a slum tenement in Harlem, New York City to work among poor African-Americans and Hispanics.
His career of activism can be traced to his junior year at Bates, when he organized a sit-in at a local Maine restaurant that refused to serve people of color. It was his first foray into social activism, and he never looked back. Just a few years later, Stringfellow gained a reputation as a strident critic of the social, military and economic policies of the U.S. and as a tireless advocate for racial and social justice. That justice, he declared, could be realized only if it were pursued according to a serious understanding of the Bible and the Christian faith. He was particularly active in the Civil Rights Movement and has spoken extensively about civil disobedience through nonviolence and integration, particularly in an interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?.
As a Christian, he viewed his vocation as a commitment, bestowed upon him in baptism, to a lifelong struggle against the "powers and principalities," as systemic evil is sometimes called in the New Testament, or "Power of Death." He proclaimed that being a faithful follower of Jesus means to declare oneself free from all spiritual forces of death and destruction and to submit oneself single-heartedly to the power of life. In contrast to most younger liberal Protestant theologians of his time, Stringfellow insisted on the primacy of the Bible for Christians as they undertook such precarious and inherently dangerous work. This placed him not within the camp of Evangelicalism, but that of neo-orthodoxy, particularly the part of that school influenced by the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth, who made a rare compliment to Stringfellow on one of his visits to the U.S. Yet others might classify him as a harbinger of the later liberation theology during the 1970s and 1980s. Although, to be clear, Stringfellow himself was ultimately critical of any self-described political theology that would allow itself to function as a closed ideology. During his lifetime, similar ideas to Stringfellow's could be found in the writings of the French critic Jacques Ellul.
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