The Ubiquity of Christ and the Sites of Redemption: William Stringfellow, Ecclesiology and the Powers

Abstract

AbstractIn current theological discourse, the role of congregations in the struggle against the ‘powers and principalities’ moves in one of two directions: either ‘church’ is treated reductively in terms of what it provides for social gains (and thus not what it provides independently of social activism), or ‘church’ as a particularist space is negated entirely. This article argues that the work of William Stringfellow provides a resource for thinking productively about the role of churches within larger social struggles against what theology has termed ‘the powers and principalities’. In Stringfellow’s work, this article claims, we see a model for how ecclesiastical space and ‘worldly space’ can join together in ways that do not negate the integrity of either ‘church’ or ‘world’, while still making use of the ‘powers’ discourse in theologically productive ways.