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“Vocation means being a human being: every decision is a vocational event.”
William Stringfellow (1928-1985) was a radical lay theologian and social critic. Drawing on the biblical warnings against “powers and principalities,: he leveled a prophetic critique against a range of institutions–the church, seminaries, economic structures, and the idolatries of the modern war-making state. Trained as a lawyer, he was a lifelong gadfly in the Episcopal church, his chronic ill health fostering his tendency to see the world in the light of Eternity. His great theme was the Constantinian compromise, the accommodation of Christianity to the values of the empire and the preservation of status quo. “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 has served as director of graduate theological urban studies for the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastroal 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.
