Original Sin: Final Post, William Stringfellow on Sin & Salvation

Here in my final post about a Malthusian vision of Original Sin I want to conclude with some thoughts about salvation that fit well with the ideas we've been tossing around.

What I want to walk through is William Stringfellow's unique vision of sin and salvation. As I review Stringfellow's ideas, quoting from him extensively, I think you'll find that his view of salvation is remarkably complementary to the Malthusian view of sin I've been working with.

To start, let's review where we are. My argument has been that the human predicament is essentially being trapped in a Malthusian situation. Framed another way, we feel biologically vulnerable in a world governed by death. This vulnerability prompts a variety of "sinful" responses: Acquisitiveness, rivalry, and war, to name a few of the things we've talked about.

In this view, Original Sin is less about human depravity, pride and selfishness than it is about being trapped and pushed around by Malthusian forces: Death shoves around our survival instinct, causing us, in a Malthusian pinch, to put self above others. If this "trap" is the source of sin then what does salvation look like? It's not going to take the form of penal substitutionary atonement, where some human guilt or stain is managed or eliminated. Rather, salvation has to free us, spiritually and psychologically, from the forces of death in this world that tilt our biological natures toward self-interest and self-preservation.

With this review in hand let's turn to the ideas of Stringfellow.

Similar to the view articulated in this series, Stringfellow focuses his attention upon death, and not human depravity, as the major "moral power" to be reckoned with:

Death, after all, is no abstract idea, nor merely a destination in time, nor just an occasional happening, nor only a reality for human beings, but, both biblically and empirically, death names a moral power claiming sovereignty over all people and all things in history. Apart from God, death is a living power greater--because death survives them all--than any other moral power in this world of whatever sort: human beings, nations, corporations, cultures, wealth, knowledge, fame or memory, language, the arts, race, religion. (p. 66)

This emphasis fits my Malthusian model: Death (via Malthusian threats) morally dominates us. We become enslaved to death. We serve death in a foolish attempt to outlast it.

How do we become enslaved to death? To understand this one has to come to grips with Stringfellow's view of the Powers and Principalities. For Stringfellow, a demonic power is any created thing, idea, or image that captivates us and commands serivce and sacrifice from us:

According to the Bible, the principalities are legion in species, number, variety and name. They are designated by such multifarious titles as powers, virtues, thrones, authorities, dominions, demons, princes, strongholds, lords, angels, gods, elements, spirits…

Terms that characterize are frequently used biblically in naming the principalities: “tempter,” “mocker,” “foul spirit,” “destroyer,” “adversary,” “the enemy.” And the privity of the principalities to the power of death incarnate is shown in mention of their agency to Beelzebub or Satan or the Devil or the Antichrist…

And if some of these seem quaint, transposed into contemporary language they lose quaintness and the principalities become recognizable and all too familiar: they include all institutions, all ideologies, all images, all movements, all causes, all corporations, all bureaucracies, all traditions, all methods and routines, all conglomerates, all races, all nations, all idols. Thus, the Pentagon or the Ford Motor Company or Harvard University or the Hudson Institute or Consolidated Edison or the Diners Club or the Olympics or the Methodist Church or the Teamsters Union are principalities. So are capitalism, Maoism, humanism, Mormonism, astrology, the Puritan work ethic, science and scientism, white supremacy, patriotism, plus many, many more—sports, sex, any profession or discipline, technology, money, the family—beyond any prospect of full enumeration. The principalities and powers are legion. (pp. 204-205)

Using the language of the Old and New Testaments, Stringfellow calls the Powers (see his list) "false gods," "demons" and "idols." That is, the Powers demand "sacrifice" from us, leading to a kind of "demonic possession":

People are veritably besieged, on all sides, at every moment simultaneously by these claims and strivings of the various powers each seeking to dominate, usurp, or take a person’s time, attention, abilities, effort; each grasping at life itself; each demanding idolatrous service and loyalty. In such a tumult it becomes very difficult for a human being even to identify the idols that would possess him or her… (p. 211)

But it is important to remember in Stringfellow that sitting behind the Demonic and the Powers is Death. Death is always the the real moral force:

…history discloses that the actual meaning of such human idolatry of nations, institutions, or other principalities is death. Death is the only moral significance that a principality proffers human beings. That is to say, whatever intrinsic moral power is embodied in a principality—for a great corporation, profit, for example; or for a nation, hegemony; or for an ideology, conformity—that is sooner or later suspended by the greater moral power of death. Corporations die. Nations die. Ideologies die. Death survives them all. Death is—apart from God—the greatest moral power in this world, outlasting and subduing all other powers no matter how marvelous they may seem for the time being. This means, theologically speaking, that the object of allegiance and servitude, the real idol secreted within all idolatries, the power above all principalities and powers—the idol of all idols—is death. (pp. 207-208)

So when we serve a Power we participate in death:

[The Power] is in conflict with the person until the person surrenders life in one fashion or another to the principality. The principality requires not only recognition and adulation as an idol from movie fans or voters or the public, but also demands that the person of the same name give up his or her life as a persons to the service and homage of the image. And when that surrender is made, the person in fact dies, though not yet physically. For at that point one is literally possessed by one's own image. (p. 196)

To summarize, the demonic evil of life is the power of death sitting behind all those things that capture our attention, efforts, and allegiances. Death is the prime moral power.

Given this view, for Stringfellow salvation and resurrection means being set free from the power of death in this life:

Resurrection, however, refers to the transcendence of the power of death and the fear or thrall of the power of death, here and now, in this life, in this world. Resurrection, thus, has to do with life and, indeed, the fulfillment of life before death. (p. 112)

As I mentioned above, Malthusian pressures shove around our survival instincts, causing us to behave immorally. In Stringfellow's view that amounts to demonic possession. Consequently, resurrection implies, as Stringfellow notes, being set free from the fear of death in this life, in this Malthusian world:

[Christ's] power over death is effective not just at the terminal point of a person's life but throughout one's life, during this life in this world, right now. This power is effective in the times and places in the daily lives of human beings when they are so gravely and relentlessly assailed by the claims of principalities for an idolatry that, in spite of all disguises, really surrenders to death as the reigning presence in the life of the world. His resurrection means the possibility of living in this life, in the very midst of death's works, safe and free from death. (p. 202)

How, you might be asking, is this possible? How are we set free from the thrall of death while we move in the midst of death's works? I'll give two examples of an answer from Stringfellow. Both examples illustrate what we've been talking about in this series. That is, our tether to death is our survival instinct. That is death's moral power over us. But the Christian and the church have, and here is the paradoxical part, died to the idea of their own death. Christians are dead to the survival instinct. Christians are to be, to use the death row phrase, "dead men walking." In the words of Jesus, Christians pick up a cross, the symbol of death, to find a new life, a resurrection life. In the words of the Apostle Paul:

We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.

Here is Stringfellow on how this "death to the survival instinct" shapes the church:

Now that mark that verifies the integrity of the church as institution and sets the church apart from other institutions--the state, the university, the Pentagon, General Electric, et al.--as the exemplary or pioneer or holy institution is the freedom of the church from primary and controlling concern about her own survival. Survival of the institution is the operative ethic of all institutions, in their fallenness. The church is called into being in freedom from that ethic of survival and where renewal or reformation in the church happens for real, that very freedom is being exercised and the church is viable and faithful. (p. 147)

This might still seem abstract, being free from death in the midst of death, but Stringfellow gives a wonderful biographical example of how he died to the Power of Career in his early years of education:

I had elected then to pursue no career. To put it theologically, I died to the idea of career and to the whole typical array of mundane calculations, grandiose goals and appropriate schemes to reach them. I renounced, simultaneously, the embellishments--like money, power, success--associated with careers in American culture, along with the ethics requisite to obtaining such condiments. I do not say this haughtily; this was an aspect of my conversion to the gospel… (p. 30)

And this brings me to the conclusion, to Stringfellow's ultimate vision of salvation and resurrection. By being freed from the Malthusian forces, by dying to the Powers of Death, we become free to be truly human. I am no longer a Malthusian animal, a survival machine. I am human:

I believed then, as I do now, that I am called in the Word of God--as is everyone else--to the vocation of being human, nothing more and nothing less. I confessed then, as I do now, that to be a Christian means to be called to be an exemplary human being. And to be a Christian categorically does not mean being religious. Indeed, all religious versions of the gospel are profanities. Within the scope of the calling to be merely, but truly, human, any work, including that of any profession, can be rendered a sacrament of that vocation. (p. 31)



Note: All page numbers refer to:
A Keeper of the Word: Selected Writings of William Stringfellow