Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Gospel for the Whole Person

 

Statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Other 20th Century Martyrs above the West Door of Westminster Abbey, London

(photo: Montrealais; commons.wikimedia.org; licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported)

Over the years, I have found it increasingly important for people like me--middle class white people, especially those of us raised in white evangelicalism, who benefitted from an unacknowledged, and often unrealized, white privilege--to reflect deeply on the work and legacy of Martin Luther, King, Jr. Previously I have written posts about his "I Have a Dream" speech (here), his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (here), and his powerful, prophetic calls for justice and against war (here). Over the weekend, I did some reading on his inspiring ethic of nonresistance, based largely on Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, and came upon an article he wrote in 1960 for The Christian Century entitled "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence."

Early on, while narrating his intellectual journey from an inherited fundamentalism to liberalism to his ultimate synthesis of what he deemed the strengths of both liberalism and neo-orthodoxy, King recounted his effort to "eliminate," as he put it, social evil, and his discovery of the work of Walter Rauschenbusch, the Baptist theologian famous for his advocacy of the so-called "social gospel." In King's words:

Not until I entered theological seminary, however, did I begin a serious intellectual quest for a method to eliminate social evil. I was immediately influenced by the social gospel. In the early '50s I read Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis,a book which left an indelible imprint on my thinking. Of course there were points at which I differed with Rauschenbusch. I felt that he had fallen victim to the 19th-century “cult of inevitable progress,” which led him to an unwarranted optimism concerning human nature. Moreover, he came perilously close to identifying the kingdom of God with a particular social and economic system—a temptation which the church should never give in to. But in spite of these shortcomings Rauschenbusch gave to American Protestantism a sense of social responsibility that it should never lose. The gospel at its best deals with the whole man, not only his soul but his body, not only his spiritual well-being, but his material well-being. Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.

In this little paragraph lies both the power of King's message and a partial explanation--one cannot discount an unexamined racial prejudice in this matter--for why the fundamentalists among whom I was raised were, to put it kindly, underwhelmed by him. For, you, see, despite his clearly articulated theological criticisms of Rauschenbush, he did not repudiate him, but praised him for providing American Protestantism "a sense of social responsibility."

Fundamentalism, and much of what today is called "conservative evangelicalism," rejects the "social gospel" as heretical, believing its emphasis on social concern--articulated in King's quotation of the liberal Baptist preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick above ("The gospel at its best ...")--fatally compromised the "soterian" gospel of Christ's death and resurrection, what I like to summarize as the combination of the doctrines of substitutionary atonement and justification by faith. Adhering to the "social gospel," so the argument goes--in a classic misapplication of Paul the Apostle's dictum found in 1 Corinthians 7:31--substitutes temporal advances in a world which in its present form (to schēma to kosmou toutou) is passing away (paragei) for what "really matters," the eternal destiny of human souls.

Now I firmly confess that "substitutionary atonement" and "justification by faith," rightly understood and nuanced, are indeed elements or implicates of the New Testament gospel. However, as I have previously argued, and hopefully demonstrated, in excruciating detail (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), one cannot legitimately pinch the gospel into such an ideological straightjacket without thereby deforming the full-orbed apostolic message. For the gospel is not simply good news about the future for metaphysical or substance dualists, Christian or not. It is, as Dr. King states, good news for "the whole man." More than that, it is good news in a salvation-historical sense for the whole world. As I wrote years ago, it is nothing less than the good news of the new creation, the announcement of the coming of the promised kingdom of God through the historical events of Christ’s death and resurrection.

On this understanding, the soteriological and social dimensions of the gospel fit hand-in-glove. To put it differently, the soteriological and social dimensions of the gospel are twin elements of the gospel of the Kingdom that, though they may be distinguished notionally, are inextricably bound together. If this is so, those of us who see our vocation in terms of  working for the kingdom--note: not working "to advance/build the kingdom"--to work, as N. T. Wright has so eloquently argued, to implement God's victory won by Jesus in his death and resurrection, must therefore work explicitly to advance the priorities of this kingdom, until that glorious day when God's kingdom comes, on earth as in heaven.

I close with a reminder of these words from Isaiah 61:1-2, read by Jesus in his hometown synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4:18-19) with the claim that they were at that time "fulfilled in [their] hearing (Luke 4:21):"

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

    because he has anointed me

    to preach good news to the poor,

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

    and recovery of sight for the blind,

to released the oppressed,

    to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor