AN ETHIC FOR CHRISTIANS AND OTHER ALIENS IN A STRANGE LAND

William Stringfellow

First Printing—September 1973

Second Printing—May 1974

First Paperback Edition—May 1976

Second Paperback Edition—February 1978

Third Paperback Edition—June 1979

Copyright © 1973 by Word, Incorporated Waco, Texas 76703 ISBN #0-87680-842-9

For Thomas Merton

An Ethic for Christians & Other Aliens in a Strange Land: Stringfellow’s best book … the most sane … of all the revolutionary manifestos that have recently appeared. … It is like reading the New Testament next to the daily newspaper and knowing positively, without confusion, what is the will of God for modern man.”

Wm. A. Johnson

Canon Theologian

Cathedral Church of St. John

 the Divine, New York City

“. . . An extraordinary book [that identifies America with the biblical metaphor of Babylon and translates this insight] into rigorous theological analysis. All the characteristics of corporate alienation, oppression, and exploitation, summed up in a commitment to Death as the social purpose of the economic and political organization of a world power, are shown in their present manifestation in American reality.”

                        Rosemary Ruether

theologian, lecturer

“It is never easy to read Bill Stringfellow, but it is always heady, stimulating, and relevant. The timeliness of this book’s publication in the light of current events in Washington makes it especially so.”

Bruce Larson

author, lecturer

contents

Psalm 137

Preface on the peculiarity of this book as a tract for these times in America 13

Chapter one The Relevance of Babylon 25

Chapter two The Empirical Integrity of the Biblical Witness 41

chapter three The Moral Reality Named Death 67

chapter four Stratagems of the Demonic Powers 97

chapter five            The Christian in Resistance to Death 117

chapter six            The Efficacy of the Word of God as Hope 137

preface

on the peculiarity of this book as a tract for these times in America

My concern is to understand America biblically. This book—which is, simultaneously, a theological statement and a political argument —implements that concern. 13

The task is to treat the nation within the tradition of other way around, not (to put it in an appropriately awkward way) to construe the Bible Americanly.  There has been much too much of the latter in this country’s public life and religious ethos.  There still is. I expect such indulgences to mutiply reach larger absurdities, to become more scandalous, to increase blasphemously as America’s crisis as a nation distends. To interpret the Bible for the convenience of America, as apropos as that may seem to be to any Americans, represents a radical violence to both the character and content of the biblical message. It fosters a fatal vanity that America is a divinely favored nation and makes of it the credo of a civic religion which is directly threatened by, and, hence, which is anxious and hostile toward the biblical Word.

Biblical politics

This book is necessarily at once theological and political for the good reason that the theology of the Bible concerns politics in its most rudimentary meaning and in its most auspicious connotations.

The biblical topic is politics. The Bible is about the politics of fallen creation and the politics of redemption; the politics of the nations, institutions, ideologies, and causes of this world and the politics of the Kingdom of God; the politics of Babylon and the politics of Jerusalem; the politics of the Antichrist and the politics of Jesus Christ; the politics of the demonic powers and principalities and the politics of the timely judgment of God as sovereign; the politics of death and the politics of life; apocalyptic politics and eschatological politics. 15

The principalities and powers

In the Babylon passages in Revelation, which this book particularly invokes, emphasis is focused on the nation as a principality and, indeed, as the archetypal principality. The principalities and powers have received little attention in American Christendom. In that context the customary propositions of moral theology concern individual decision and action and the supposed efficacy of the conviction of the  individual for social renewal and societal change. To speak in a general way, in what has come to be called “the social gospel,” as well as in evangelical pietism—though these have commonly represented antagonistic sides of the political and social spectrum and though each symbolizes and embraces many particular versions and factions—the view prevails that society is transformed by means of the persuasion or conversion of individuals and by the accumulative impact or geometric progression of the commitment and involvement of individuals. This is really a social ethic of osmosis. It has been dominant throughout the American churches, despite the widely divergent opinions concerning specific political issues or social policies among so-called activists on one hand, or among assorted pietists on the other. 17  

What is most crucial about this situation, biblically speaking, is the failure of moral theology, in the American context, to confront the principalities—the institutions, systems, ideologies, and other political and social creatures powers—as militant, aggressive, and immensely influential creatures in this world as it is. Any ethic of social renewal, any effort in social regeneration—regardless of what it concretely projects for human life in society—is certain to be perpetually frustrated unless account is taken of these realities named principalities and their identities and how they operate vis-à-vis one another and in relation to human beings. 17

…… Yet to be ignorant or gullible or ingenuous about the demons, to underestimate the inherent capacities of the principalities, to fail to notice the autonomy of these powers as creatures abets their usurpation of human life and their domination of human beings.

Part of the message of the Book of Revelation which is, I believe, empirically verified in the present day as much as in the day Revelation was uttered, is that any social concern of human beings which neglects or refuses to deal with the principalities with due regard for their own dignity is delusive, while any social change predicated upon mere human action—whether prompted by a so-called social gospel or motivated by some pietism—is doomed. 18

In short, to behold America biblically requires comprehension of the powers and principalities as they appear and as they abound in this world, even, alas, in America. The Book of Revelation is pertinent for Americans because it so urgently elucidates the power of death incarnate in the principalities, notably in the nation.

A naivete’ about the Fall

Contending as I do that Americans are, in a rudimentary way, biblically illiterate and that the radical moral confusion within the nation stems from that illiteracy, it is possible to state my concern in different words, and blatantly: most Americans are grossly naïve or remarkably misinformed about the Fall. Even within the American churchly environment, there prevails too mean, too trivial. Churchly environment, there prevails too mean, too trivial, too narrow, too gullible a view of the biblical doctrine and description of the Fall. Especially within the churches there is a discounting of how the reality of  fallenness: of loss of identity and of alienation, of basic disorientation and of death) afflicts the whole of Creation, not human beings alone but also the principalities, the nations included. This book treats the meaning of the Fall as the era in which persons and nations and other creatures exist in profound and poignant and perpetual strife and, thus, as the realm in which ethics are constantly at issue. This book is about the political significance of the Fall. The Fall is where the nation is. 19

Whatever must be said of earlier times, in the past quarter century America has become a technological totalitarianism in which hope, in its ordinary human connotations, is being annihilated. 20

How can human beings live in hope in the presence of the midst of the Fall?

How can human beings live in hope in the presence of the moral reality of death? How can we act humanly in the midst of the Fall? How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?—as the 137th Psalm, which I have used as an introit for this book, cries out. I bear the Book of Revelation as responsive to the question of the psalm.

Chapter two

The Empirical Integrity of the Biblical Witness

He recognition and affirmation of the empirical integrity and vitality of biblical faith will, I trust, readily be recognized as standing within that venerable tradition in Christian confession and belief sometimes named incarnational theology. 

It is the incarnational aspect of biblical faith, with its exemplary affirmations about time and history, and with its radical and preemptive concern for life in this world, from which the viable ethics and political action of the gospel issue.

There are those within Christendom who are inclined to narrowly define or virtually ignore or even deny the meaning of the incarnation in Christ for the whole of existence in this world, while extolling “heaven” or “hereafter.” They are thus challenging not only the first chapter of the Gospel of Saint John, but also the repetitive tenor of the New Testament witness which esteems Christ as embodying, exemplifying, and verifying the Word of God in a way which reveals God’s dominion over, affection for, and vitality in this world. In any sanctuaries—I fear there are many of them—where the preaching and teaching is about a fancied “afterlife” instead of this life; about some indefinite “hereafter” instead of the here and now; about immortality (which is actually an elaborate synonym for memory) instead of resurrection (which means living in emancipation from the power of death); about “heaven”— as if that name designates a destination in outer space— instead of participation in a moral estate or condition; or about “eternal life” as a negation of this life—instead of the temporal fulfillment of life: where these or similar doctrines prevail, there is patent distortion of what the author of Hebrews calls “the elementary doctrines of Christ” (Heb. 6:1-2). In these circumstances, Christ is no longer beheld as the Lord of time and history, as the sovereign of Creation, as the new Adam, as the Redeemer. Rather he is demeaned to become a nebulous, illusive, spiritualized figure, a sacred vagueness severed from his own historic ministry. Separated from human experience and bereft of Having relationship with either history or the God of history, he is levitated out of time—though time be the only context, according to 11 the Bible, in which humans have or have ever had any knowledge whatever of Christ. 43

So let it be plain that, as a biblical term, “heaven”is not a site in the galaxies any more that “hell” is located in the bowels of the earth. Rather it is that estate of self-knowledge and reconciliation and hope—that vocation, really; that blessedness—to which every human being and the whole of creation is called to live here in this world, aspires to live here, and by the virtue of Christ is enabled to enter upon here (Matt. 4:17-25; 5:20; 6:19-21). Similarly, biblically,  “eternal life” means the recognition of time as the redemptive era now, the affirmation of life in time without displacing or distorting the reality of time now, the transcendence of time within the everyday experience of time now (Matt. 27: 34-39; Luke 10:25-27; 18:18-22).

Again, the biblical eschatological references—usually quaint, styled in language and imagery, often in parable, associated with apocalyptic allusions—concern the consummation of this history not as some fantastic disjuncture but as a happening profoundly implicated in the whole of the history of this world (Mark 13:32-37; Luke 21:10-28). The eschatological hope, biblically speaking, anticipates an end of time which is, simultaneously, time’s redemption. That hope neither abolishes time nor repudiates the moral significance of time; on the contrary, the eschaton means the moral completion or perfection of time. Moreover, the biblical hope, eschatologically, is no disembodied abstraction, no ethereal notion, no antiworldly vision, but a hope recurrently foreshadowed and empirically witnessed in events taking place now, and all the time, in the common history of persons and nations in this world.

It is exactly where the gospel is distorted so as to emulate the nonempirical or otherworldly orientations of the pagan alternatives that Christendom is most worldly. The focus of the nonbiblical faiths—or of a corrupted Christianity imitative of religion or ideology or philosophy—upon some ideal, abstraction, or myth categorically severed from time and history and, in principle, denouncing redemptive happenings in this world, represents an abdication of life in this world for persons and principalities to the reign of death. This kind of otherworldliness elevates death to ultimate preeminence as the moral reality of history and time. It excludes God as a living presence (even though still hypothetically entertaining assorted ideas of God) and, indeed negates life altogether. This otherworldliness is, paradoxically, the most worldly way; this otherworldly or a vengeance. And, for professed Christians, it is the most a vengeance. And, for professed Christians, it is the most ignominious possible apostasy.

The empirical distinction of biblical faith, as contrasted with the pagan idolatries, is, no pedantic quibble.  It is the treatment of the biblical witness as if it were like a philosophy, ideology, or religion in the comprehension of this world in relation to the hope for society that has so frequently confounded the ethical wisdom and tactical activity of those persons and institutions professing Christianity. The biblical mind is not philosophic. Even less is it ideological. (If anything, it is antireligious.) But through the centuries there have been repeated temptations to categorize biblical faith in philosophical pigeonholes or to ideologize the gospel or to revert the Bible to mere religion and thus to captivate and conform the biblical witness to the world, that is to say, to the world in which—whether knowingly or not—death has been for a time ceded sovereignty or the place of God.  The gospel accounts attest to this as a troublesome issue among the disciples of Jesus, and remarks of Jesus that his kingship is “not of this world” have concrete meaning in that context (cf. John 6:15; Matt. 26:53). The same became an anguished matter—sometimes inhibiting discernment and action—in the earliest congregations, as the Acts of the Apostles and some Paul’s letters to the Galatians and the Colossians show. It remained a contentious question throughout pre-Constantinian times. The Constantinian Arrangement, which has been the aegis of European and American Christendom ever since, apparently sublimated it but did not resolve it, and, if anything, caused conformance to the world to become an even more solemn problem. 45

Kierkegaard cautioned that the crisis for biblical faith concerning conformity to the world, in one form or another, occurs wherever the anomaly of an established church appears.  In the United States, the Constantinian Accommodation has been marvelously proliferated. Practically all churches and sects are, in effect, established and, in turn, conformed to the dominant social philosophy or secular ideology or civic religion.  Biblical faith, here, in consequence, is strenuously distorted and persistently ridiculed —in the name of God, of course.  46