11 quotes
The Bible deals with the sanctification of the actual history of nations and of human beings in this world as it is while that history is being lived.
An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973)
This otherworldliness or antiworldliness is actually conformity to the world with a vengeance. And, for professed Christians, it is the most ignominious possible apostasy.
An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973)
The Christian as revolutionary is constantly welcoming the gift of human life, for himself and for all men, by exposing, opposing, and overturning all that betrays, entraps, or attempts to kill human life.
William Stringfellow: Essential Writings (2013)
In this story, there is no other place actually known to human beings, except this world as it is—the place where life is at once being lived; there are no other places for which to search or yearn or hope—no utopia, no paradise, no otherworldly afterlife.
An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973)
This is the vanity of every principality—and notable for a nation—that the principality is sovereign in history; which is to say, that it presumes it is the power in relation to which the moral significance of everything and everyone else is determined.
An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973)
While Babylon represents the principality in bondage to death in time—and time is actually a form of that bondage—Jerusalem means the emancipation of human life in a society from the rule of death and breaks through time, transcends time, anticipates within time the abolition of time.
An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973)
Christ as King means humanity free from bondage to ideologies and institutions, free from revolutionary causes as well, free from idolatry of Caesar, and, not the least of it, free from religion which tries to disguise such slavery as virtuous.
William Stringfellow: Essential Writings (2013)
The mark of the Christian is, simply, that he is a matured and freed human being. The direct political implication of this risen character of the Christian is that ... the Christian is an incessant revolutionary. He is always, everywhere in revolt—not for himself but for humanity.
William Stringfellow: Essential Writings (2013)
The moral pretenses of Imperial Rome, the millennial claims of Nazism, the arrogance of Marxist dogma, the anxious insistence that America be "number one" among nations are all versions of Babylon's idolatry. All share in this grandiose view of the nation by which the principality assumes the place of God in the world.
An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973)
Babylon's fallenness is expressed consummately in Babylon's delusion that she is, or is becoming, Jerusalem. ... This is the vanity of every principality—and notable for a nation—that the principality is sovereign in history; which is to say, that it presumes it is the power in relation to which the moral significance of everything and everyone else is determined.
An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973)
If a congregation somewhere comes to life as Jerusalem at some hour, that carries no necessary implications for either the past or the future of that congregation. The Jerusalem occurrence is sufficient unto itself. There is—then and there—a transfiguration in which the momentary coincides with the eternal, the innocuous becomes momentous and the great is recognized as trivial, the end of history is revealed as the fulfillment of life here and now, and the whole of creation is beheld as sanctified.
An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973)