The Death of William Sloan Coffin Jr.

Bill Coffin has died at age eighty-one. It was front-page news, and deservedly so. As much or more than any religious figure, Bill represented the turning of the mainline-oldline establishment toward “prophetic” activism and against the Brahmin hegemony to which it had historically been chaplain. To the end, Bill was not comfortable in the circles of radical anti-Americanism by which he was lionized. He always, and I believe sincerely, insisted that his was a “lover’s quarrel” with America. He understood himself to be a patriot, and his protest was, he said, the “higher patriotism.” It is the way many of us spoke at the time. Bill was a dear friend. There was a sharp parting of the ways and years of silence, but I am grateful for our friendly correspondence in the months before his death.

Bill Coffin has to have a major part in any history of American religion, culture, and public life from the late 1950s through the 1980s. As chaplain of Yale, he was among the Freedom Riders in the early efforts to desegregate the South. I came to know him well when, in the mid-1960s, Father Daniel Berrigan, the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and I established what came to be known as Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam (CALCAV), and we invited Bill to speak at one of our early meetings in New York. In the years following, Bill was probably the most prominent religious protestor against the Vietnam war, at least until Martin Luther King Jr. joined the campaign at a CALCAV-sponsored event at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before he was assassinated.

I now find it exhausting to remember the torrent of meetings, demonstrations, manifestos, and arguments during the halcyon days of what then was simply called “The Movement.” But there were also a lot of good times just hanging out. I recall with particular fondness Bill’s visits to St John the Evangelist, the very poor and very black parish I pastored in Brooklyn. We had in the rectory a rickety old square grand piano, and Bill was a fine pianist and a powerful baritone. He had once aspired to a career as a concert artist. One night, with the help of good whisky and cigars, we went through all the golden oldies of The Lutheran Hymnal until the early hours. I can hear now the virile seventeenth-century Norwegian hymn “Behold, A Host Arrayed in White” with multiple musical improvisations by Bill. He was great company.

Bill was what used to be called a manly man before that phrase fell into disfavor. I see that one obituary deplores the fact that Bill was initially unsupportive of the gay-rights movement but then, as it is nicely put, “he finally came around.” The Left is notoriously intolerant of deviations, including deviations on deviancy. Three marriages and much tumult notwithstanding, Bill adamantly declared that he was always a moral traditionalist, as he was always a patriot. At least in the realm of intentionality, he was both.

Coffins went back to the Mayflower, some of them commanding the great pulpits of early America. His uncle, Henry Sloane Coffin, was president of Union Theological Seminary and was influential in Bill’s becoming a Presbyterian minister. The places of power and privilege came naturally to Bill. A few years with the Central Intelligence Agency, then chaplaincies at Andover, Williams, and Yale, followed by a troubled term as pastor of Riverside Church, the huge gothic monument that John D. Rockefeller had built for Harry Emerson Fosdick, the prince of Protestant liberalism in his time. When he had to be absent, Bill would ask me to fill in for him at Yale, which I was glad to do, although I knew that I or anyone else was viewed as a poor substitute for the pulpit master. Bill’s style was very different: tough, humorous, sardonic, and marked by memorable one-liners. He cultivated a posture of prophetic defiance made possible by the security of privilege.

Coffin thrived on the constancy of crisis, and there were meetings without end on matters thought to be of national import. I recall a summer evening when Rabbi Balfour Brickner of Stephen Wise Reform Synagogue in New York and I were walking through the hallowed precincts of Yale and Balfour remarked that a generation earlier we—a Jew and Missouri Synod Lutheran from nondescript backgrounds—would not have been at home in such councils. “It’s a change for the better,” he said, “but sometimes I wonder if the WASPS are just weary of running things.”

I, too, sometimes wondered that. It is hard to remember now the ways of the old establishments, before their institutions came under assault from what we loosely call the sixties. In those days, for instance, the National Council of Churches was a national pillar comparable to, say, the American Medical Association. We, the young radicals, were on fire with anti-establishment rhetoric, and I was rather taken aback when the establishment evidenced such eagerness to be part of the movement against itself. As in the universities, there was a great fear of being out of step with the young and their putative revolution. Eugene Carson Blake of the National Council of Churches, featured on the cover of Time as “Mr. Protestant,” John Bennett, president of Union Seminary, and so many others happily signed up with “The Movement,” and I wondered what was going to happen to the institutions that they headed—the institutions that I had thought were running the world. Now we know.

None of the obituaries I saw mentioned Bill Coffin’s part in the 1975 Hartford Appeal for Theological Affirmation. That was a project that Peter Berger—then at Rutgers, now at Boston University—and I initiated in order to counter the then fashionable “secular Christianity” and “death of God” thinkers. As Bill always insisted that he was a patriot, so also he was uneasy with the casual jettisoning of Christian orthodoxy by so many of the brightest and best of the time. He was at heart, he assured me on many occasions, a Calvinist, convinced of human depravity and the indispensability of the blood-bought atonement of the cross, along with the hope of glory. (To the consternation of many allies, he was also not a pacifist.) Bill, it must be admitted, was neither a theologian nor an intellectual, but he readily accepted my invitation to be part of the Hartford project.

It was an impressive group that hammered out the appeal in several days of intense discussion in Connecticut. The final signatories included Fr. Avery Dulles, George Forell, Stanley Hauerwas, Fr. Thomas Hopko, George Lindbeck, Ralph McInerny, Kilmer Myers, then Episcopal Bishop of California, Richard Mouw, Fr. Carl Peter, Fr. Alexander Schmemann, Fr. Gerard Sloyan, Lewis Smedes, Fr. George Tavard, and Robert Louis Wilken.

The Hartford Appeal caused quite a stir at the time. Berger and I edited the book, Against the World for the World: The Hartford Appeal and the Future of American Religion. (I see that Amazon. com says it has new and used copies from $3.75. I can’t imagine it is still in print.) The book contains the appeal and eight explanatory essays by participants. “The renewal of Christian witness and mission,” the appeal began, “requires constant examination of the assumptions shaping the Church’s life. Today an apparent loss of the sense of the transcendent is undermining the Church’s ability to address with clarity and courage the urgent tasks to which God calls it in the world. This loss is manifest in a number of pervasive themes. Many are superficially attractive, but upon closer examination we find these themes false and debilitating to the Church’s life and work.” The signers then set out thirteen pervasive, false, and debilitating themes, following each with a statement of the truth that it undermines.

That was thirty-one years ago, and I recognize that it is just possible that some readers are not familiar with the Hartford Appeal. So here are the themes. How many, do you suppose, are not relevant to our current religious situation?

(1) Modern thought is superior to all past forms of understanding reality, and is therefore normative for Christian faith and life.

(2) Religious statements are totally independent of reasonable discourse.

(3) Religious language refers to human experience and nothing else, God being humanity’s noblest creation.

(4) Jesus can only be understood in terms of contemporary models of humanity.

(5) All religions are equally valid; the choice among them is not a matter of conviction about truth but only of personal preference or lifestyle.

(6) To realize one’s potential and to be true to oneself is the whole meaning of salvation.

(7) Since what is human is good, evil can adequately be understood as failure to realize human potential.

(8) The sole purpose of worship is to promote individual self-realization and human community.

(9) Institutions and historical traditions are oppressive and inimical to our being truly human; liberation from them is required for authentic existence and authentic religion.

(10) The world must set the agenda for the Church. Social, political, and economic programs to improve the quality of life are ultimately normative for the Church’s mission in the world.

(11) An emphasis upon God’s transcendence is at least a hindrance to, and perhaps incompatible with, Christian social concern and action.

(12) The struggle for a better humanity will bring about the Kingdom of God.

(13) The question of hope beyond death is irrelevant or at best marginal to the Christian understanding of human fulfillment.

As I say, the Hartford Appeal caused a ruckus in oldline Protestant and some Catholic circles, and was widely discussed also in the general media. At least Schmemann and Hopko believed the themes were pertinent also to developments in Orthodoxy. Those attacking the appeal claimed that their positions were caricatured, and it is true that we provocatively stated the themes in an unvarnished form. Protests to the contrary, they were themes explicit and implicit in much Christian thought of the time, and are still with us today.

Soon there was a flurry of counter-appeals, notably one by a group of Boston-area theologians, led by Harvey Cox of Secular City fame. In our discussions after the Hartford meeting, Bill Coffin indicated to me his nervousness about the reaction to the appeal’s strictures with respect to social activism. In Against the World for the World, my essay was titled “Calling a Halt to Retreat: Hartford and Social Justice.” Bill said he agreed with the call for a more theologically-grounded understanding of social justice, but he was under strong pressure from others to choose between Hartford and those who understood themselves to be the objects of Hartford’s criticism. He knew, too, that by that time my credentials with the Left were hardly in order, and Bill was, for all his idiosyncrasies, a man of the Left.

Shortly after the appearance of the appeal, the National Council of Churches sponsored a debate about it up at the “Godbox,” 475 Riverside Drive. Bill and I were on one side, with Harvey Cox and, if memory serves, James Armstrong, a United Methodist bishop, on the other. Not surprisingly, my friends thought the argument of the appeal had clearly prevailed, despite the fact that, halfway into the discussion, Bill joined the other side in criticizing Hartford.

Of course, I was disappointed, but we remained friends, for a time. By then I had already distanced myself from “The Movement,” notably over abortion and other counter-cultural liberationisms, while Bill still had years of leadership in the nuclear-freeze cause and sundry other agitations about which he and I strongly disagreed. I suppose, looking back, that the friendship effectively ended that day at 475 Riverside. We saw each other from time to time after that, but it was not the same.

You’ve been very patient in reading these ramblings. But again, the story of Bill Coffin is in significant part the story of a once dominant sector of religion in the public square. In 2004, I reviewed a biography of Bill in these pages. I wrote then: “While Coffin is obviously a hero—indeed a moral and political prophet—to his biographer, the poignant story told here is one of an increasingly disoriented and marginal figure whose great privilege and talent spiral downward into a life and a mission in shambles . . . . Coffin has now found, Goldstein suggests, a measure of wisdom, even of tranquility. He employs a musical trope: ‘As he grows older, Coffin masters less and less; his God plays him more and more.’ William Sloane Coffin, Jr.: A Holy Impatience is very much worth reading to recall the excitements and certitudes of a now debilitated liberal Protestant establishment as that establishment was exemplified in a gifted leader whose like we will almost certainly never see again. Bill Coffin was the last blaze of a religious and cultural world now extinct.”

That’s about right, I think. Maybe I should have said all but extinct. But I’ll stand by what I wrote, only adding that I loved him like a brother, and pray that choirs of angels welcome him on the far side of Jordan.