 | William Sloane Coffin Jr. |
William Sloane Coffin Jr., the Yale chaplain whose preaching inspired a generation of college students and others in the 1960s and 1970s even as its anti-war message rankled the establishment, died on Wednesday, April 12.
The 81-year-old Coffin -- who had been ill for several years -- died at his home in Strafford, Vermont, of a heart attack, according to family members.
Coffin was chaplain at Yale from 1958 until 1975 and then served as senior minister at Riverside Church in New York City from 1977 to 1987. He subsequently became president of the anti-nuclear organization SANE/FREEZE, later known as Peace Action. In recent years Coffin spent much of his time writing, including his 2004 national bestseller "Credo, A Passion for the Possible: A Message to U.S. Churches" and, most recently, "Letters to a Young Doubter."
Born on June 1, 1924, in New York City, Coffin showed early promise as a musician and planned a career as a concert pianist. In 1938 he moved to Paris to study harmony with Nadia Boulanger, but returned to the United States at the outbreak of World Word II. He served during the war in the U.S. Army before earning an undergraduate degree from Yale in 1949. He then spent three years in the Central Intelligence Agency before returning to Yale to obtain a B.D. from the Yale Divinity School in 1956. He was ordained a Presbyterian minister.
Known for having little patience for any religious style that drew strict separations between politics and religion, Coffin was outspoken about what he perceived to be injustices, even at the risk of offending others. This led many to describe his preaching style as "prophetic."
He was among the "Freedom Riders" who rode the interstate buses in the South in the early 1960s to challenge segregation, and during the Vietnam War years he was heavily engaged in protests against the war. He helped organize mobilizations, and supported conscientious objectors and acts of civil disobedience. At an October 1967 protest in Boston, over 1,000 draft resisters turned in their draft cards at a church service led by Coffin, leading to his indictment and conviction on charges of conspiracy to aid draft resisters -- a conviction that was ultimately overturned.
A critic of the Carter administration's economic sanctions against Iran during the hostage crisis at the American embassy in Tehran, he met in 1979 with some of the hostages there.
One of Coffin's last major public appearances was at a celebration of his life and work held at Yale in April 2005 and attended by such noted individuals as football legend Calvin Hill, "Doonesbury" cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and musicians Peter and Paul of Peter, Paul and Mary. Before an audience of about 400 at the Yale Commons, Coffin summoned the energy to rise from his wheelchair and speak for over 20 minutes. He declared, "Clearly, parish clergy could use a little more starch; they are gumption-deficient. But they also need more instruction from their seminaries to face difficult situations that lie ahead."
Coffin cited the treatment of same-sex couples, pollution and nuclear proliferation among those challenges. On issues such as these, he warned, the mainline church community should be prepared to "take on" the religious right.
Despite his public image as a firebrand, those who were closest to Coffin knew him as a man who had a gentle, caring interior, a "pastoral" side to his ministry that balanced the prophetic.
The Reverend Ronald Evans of Darien, Connecticut, who lived with the Coffin family as a seminarian, recalled, "Though Bill's personality easily filled great spaces and important places, he had that rare quality of being every bit as good at the 'up close and personal' as he was in his more widely known pulpit and platform presence. ... He was the kind of preacher who made every sermon not only a call to action, but was heard as a personal pastoral call."
Like many other admirers of Coffin, Evans well remembers the literary bent that separated Coffin from other preachers who may have said the same things but with not nearly as much style. In particular, Evans recalls some "well-crafted turns of phrase" such as "a world not just for some of us, but truly just for all of us," or "God loves us not because we have worth, rather we have worth because God loves us already -- AND so readily," or "I have always thought the term 'controversial Christian' a redundancy."
In March, Joseph C. Hough Jr., president of Union Theological Seminary in New York, called Coffin "one of God's chosen prophets."
"He is a great patriot who loves his country too much to leave it alone," said Hough, a 1959 graduate of Yale Divinity School. "His early and strong leadership in the struggle against segregation and discrimination on the basis of race; his pivotal role in organizing opposition against the war in Vietnam; and his continuing personal investment and national leadership in the campaign to abolish nuclear weapons from an increasingly dangerous world, place him among the most important Christian leaders in American history."
The Reverend Bliss Browne, who earned an undergraduate degree from Yale in 1971 and served as a deacon under Coffin in Battell Chapel, said Coffin taught her about a "love of justice, love of life" and about "living passionately from the inside out."
Coffin's legacy of "prophetic imagination," Browne said, concerns both grief and hope: "We must be willing to name what diminishes and destroys life and willing to name in bold terms the invitation into greater life, to renounce cynicism and choose hope over despair. And we can live in joy, in a way that shows that hope is appropriate and attractive.
"He tuned me irrevocably in to a frequency of hope and justice -- with his passion, tenacity, courage, humor, eloquence, integrity and feistiness," continued Browne. "I always cherished his lover's quarrel with the world."
Out of the Yale celebration last year emerged two developments that promise to extend the Coffin legacy: the establishment of the National Religious Partnership on the Nuclear Weapons Danger and the creation of the William Sloane Coffin Jr. Scholarship Fund at Yale Divinity School.
The stated purpose of the National Religious Partnership is "to work toward the permanent elimination of nuclear weapons by empowering religious communities to take action on a local level."
The William Sloane Coffin Jr. Scholarship Fund will make awards to Divinity School students who share Coffin's "prophetic leadership, passion for justice and critical theological interpretations of the contemporary social and political scene." The fund, initiated by former students who were influenced by Coffin's ministry, has an endowment goal of $1 million, about half of which has been raised to date.
Ironically, in an issue that hit the newsstands just this week, The Nation magazine hailed Coffin's continuing engagement, saying, "When asked who is the contemporary equivalent of Coffin . . . several mainline Christians sighed and said, 'Well, I guess -- Coffin.'"
Plans are underway for a memorial service in Coffin's honor to be held in June during reunion week. As plans are finalized, updates will be posted on the Yale Divinity School website at www.yale.edu/divinity.
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