William Stringfellow

Overview

William Stringfellow (1928-1985) was a practicing attorney and Episcopalian layman. A frequent contributor to legal and theological journals, Stringfellow authored more than a dozen books, including A Private and Public Faith, and An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land. 

A lifelong gadfly in the church he drew on the biblical warnings against "powers and principalities" leveling a prophetic critique against a range of social institutions, including the church, economic structures, and the idolatry of a war-making state. His great theme was the Constantinian compromise, the accommodation of Christianity to the values of the empire and the preservation of the status quo. Chronic ill health fostered a tendency to see the world in the light of Eternity. "My concern," he wrote, "is to understand America biblically," in contrast to the more common tendency to understand the Bible "Americanly."

Bill Wylie-Kellermann is a United Methodist pastor who has served city parishes in Detroit, and as director of graduate theological urban studies for the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education of Chicago, Illinois. A graduate of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, he is the author of Seasons of Faith and Conscience, and the editor of a Keeper of the Word; Selected Writing of William Stringfellow.