MLK's Social Gospel

As a white pastor of a majority Black congregation, I work hard to listen to voices of color and incorporate them into my teaching, preaching, and ministry. Every year, I also preach one of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermons or write something concerning his reflections on our scriptures. Through this experience, I have found tremendous depth and wisdom to his theology and his anthropology. I have come to know him as a great theologian. I recently said this in a group of pastors, and one emailed me saying that he may be a great man, but a great theologian he was not. He sent me the video, The Truth Behind MLK's Social Gospel, on G3 Ministries’ YouTube page (you can find the written paper with references here) to highlight some of the main problems with Dr. King’s theology and asked me to respond. What follows is a list of the claims the video makes as well as my response to those claims.

Before addressing the concerns, bear with me and remember the last time you wrote papers for a class – high school, college, or otherwise. Many times, you are asked to write papers as a student that engage with material without editorial comment. In other words, you write without interjecting your opinion. In much of what you read on websites and hear on television today, you cannot escape someone’s opinion. However, in good classes, you are meant to take a position and write about whether or not you hold that position. For instance, you may be asked to take the position of Lennie Small from John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and describe his dream of living off the land. Or you may be asked to take the position of a worker in the industrial revolution and describe your working conditions and your political options to fix them.

This is important, because many of the quotes used by the opponents of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. use his papers from Crozer Seminary, where MLK became Dr. King.

RESPONSE: The video references a paper, The Humanity and Divinity of Jesus Christ, that Dr. King wrote for a class taught by George Davis at Crozer Seminary.

In the paper referenced, Dr. King writes:

"The orthodox attempt to explain the divinity of Jesus in terms of an inherent metaphysical substance within him seems to me quite inadequate. To say that the Christ, whose example of living we are bid to follow, is divine in an ontological sense is actually harmful and detrimental. To invest this Christ with such supernatural qualities makes the rejoinder: 'Oh, well, he had a better chance for that kind of life than we can possible have.' In other words, one could easily use this as a means to hide behind his failures. So that the orthodox view of the divinity of Christ is in my mind quite readily denied. The true significance of the divinity of Christ lies in the fact that his achievement is prophetic and promissory for every other true son of man who is willing to submit his will to the will and spirit of God. Christ was to be only the prototype of one among many brothers."

The bold above is what was removed from the quote. As you can see, the quote from the article (and video) eclipsed the full meaning of King's words. When restored, the bold words suggest two things:

(1) King didn't like that the divinity of Christ was being used to suggest that only he could live the kind of life we are called to live.

(2) King goes on to say, "the true significance of the divinity of Christ," which suggests there is a divinity of Christ from which to draw significance.

RESPONSE: The video references this paper from the same class to make the claim.

The quote isn't eclipsed, but truncated. I included the rest of the line as well as the reference #6 in Dr. King's paper:

"This doctrine, upon which the Easter Faith rests, symbolizes the ultimate Christian conviction: that Christ conquered death. From a literary, historical, and philosophical point of view this doctrine raises many questions.6 In fact the external evidence for the authenticity of this doctrine is found wanting. But here again the external evidence is not the most important thing, for it in itself fails to tell us precisely the thing we most want to know: What experiences of early Christians lead to the formulation of the doctrine?"

Here's the reference in his paper, reference number 6, Hedley, Symbol of the Faith, p. 75:

“Easter symbolizes the ultimate Christian conviction. The Easter message is that he who was born of a woman, he who died on Calvary, became the conqueror of death: … When, however, we enquire into the documentary evidence for the resurrection faith, we are beset at once by intricate literary, historical, and philosophical problems.”

When the fullness of the context is restored, two things can be said:

(1) The quote is clearly saying that the external evidence isn't the point of the paper, which is titled, "What Experiences of Christians Living in the Early Christian Century Led to the Christian Doctrines of the Divine Sonship of Jesus, the Virgin Birth, and the Bodily Resurrection". King isn't arguing for or against the reality of the resurrection. Instead, he asks what experiences led to the doctrine now held – the goal of the assignment.

(2) Reference #6 suggests that he's having to use resources from the class at his institution to write this paper. Hedley, whom the reference quotes, is required reading for that class. So, upon close reading, I think the burden of whether this was King's belief or not has not been shown. We've all written things in classes to get the class done - even things we don't rightly know or even believe. This isn't dishonesty. It's using the class readings and rubrics.

RESPONSE: The video references the same paper referenced in the last claim to suggest Dr. King did not believe in the virgin birth. To save space, I won’t quote the whole section, but you can look at it yourself. It begins with, “The second doctrine in our discussion posits the virgin birth.” Once you read it, you will see there is very little there to suggest Dr. King is doing anything other than following the readings and rubrics of the class as described in the title of the article.

The video references a different paper to suggest Dr. King did not believe in the second coming of Christ. The paper, titled The Christian Pertinence of Eschatological Hope, is another from George Davis' class at Crozer Theological. As with the other papers of this class, there Dr. King is following the readings and rubrics of the class, which, by now, seem to me to ask students to explain how beliefs that "we enlightened people" (aka liberal protestants of that day) know are absurd have continued to this day. If you read the brief paper, especially the section on The Second Coming of Christ, you will see how it sounds like Dr. King is earning a grade rather than declaring beliefs.

RESPONSE: The video references an interview by Ebony magazine, which quotes King:

"Says the man who has had his share of hell on earth: “I do not believe in hell as a place of a literal burning fire. Hell, to me, is a condition of being out of fellowship with God. It is man's refusal to accept the Grace of God. It is the state in which the individual continues to experience the frustrations, contradictions and agonies of earthly life. Hell is as real as absolute loneliness and isolation.”

Once again, the article quoted does not include the totality of the quote. I find this choice to be most disgraceful. When you read the bolded relevant part, you see that the quote is completely different than what was asserted. King isn't declaring his belief. He is saying that "a man who has an experience we'd call 'hell on earth'" would be totally disinterested in a literal hell as he's suffering already.

RESPONSE: This claim comes from a different source, namely the blog of James Attebury, called “The Theological Beliefs of Martin Luther King Jr.” His blog shares the following quote from Dr. King’s autobiography written in the same class as his other papers in this response:

“The lessons which I was taught in Sunday School were quite in the fundamentalist line. None of my teachers ever doubted the infallibility of the Scriptures. Most of them were unlettered and had never heard of Biblical criticism. Naturally I accepted the teachings as they were being given to me. I never felt any need to doubt them, at least at that time I didn’t. I guess I accepted Biblical studies uncritically until I was about twelve years old. But this uncritical attitude could not last long, for it was contrary to the very nature of my being. I had always been the questioning and precocious type. At the age of 13 I shocked my Sunday School class by denying the bodily resurrection of Jesus. From the age of thirteen on doubts began to spring forth unrelentingly. At the age of fifteen I entered college and more and more could I see a gap between what I had learned in Sunday School and what I was learning in college. This conflict continued until I studied a course in Bible in which I came to see that behind the legends and myths of the Book were many profound truths which one could not escape. . . As stated above, my college training, especially the first two years, brought many doubts into my mind. It was at this period that the shackles of fundamentalism were removed from my body. This is why, when I came to Crozer, I could accept the liberal interpretation with relative ease.”

Fortunately, we have Dr. King’s actual autobiography, in which he discusses his time at Crozer Seminary:

“When I came to Crozer, I could accept the liberal interpretation of Christianity with relative ease. Liberalism provided me with an intellectual satisfaction that I had never found in fundamentalism. I became so enamored of the insights of liberalism that I almost fell into the trap of accepting uncritically every-thing (sic) that came under its name. I was absolutely convinced of the natural goodness of man and the natural power of human reason.

The basic change in my thinking came when I began to question the liberal doctrine of man. My thinking went through a state of transition. At one time I found myself leaning toward a mild neo-orthodox view of man, and at other times I found myself leaning toward a liberal view of man. The former leaning may root back to certain experiences that I had in the South, with its vicious race problem, that made it very difficult for me to believe in the essential goodness of man. The more I observed the tragedies of history and man's shameful inclination to choose the low road, the more I came to see the depths and strength of sin. Liberalism's superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook the fact that reason is darkened by sin. The more I thought about human nature, the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin causes us to use our minds to rationalize our actions. Liberalism failed to see that reason by itself is little more than an instrument to justify man's defensive ways of thinking.

Moreover, I came to recognize the complexity of man's social involvement and the glaring reality of collective evil. I came to feel that liberalism had been all too sentimental concerning human nature and that it leaned toward a false idealism. Reason, devoid of the purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations.

On the other hand, part of my liberal leaning had its source in another branch of the same root. In noticing the gradual improvements of this same race problem, I came to see some noble possibilities in human nature. Also, my liberal leaning may have rooted back to the great imprint that many liberal theologians have left upon me and to my ever-present desire to be optimistic about human nature.

Of course, there is one phase of liberalism that I hope to cherish always:

I think you can see here two things.

(1) Dr. King wrestled with what he called liberal and neo-orthodox doctrines and beliefs. If you read the full quote above, it very much sounds like he’s swinging on a pendulum at Crozer and trying to find his footing.

(2) In the last paragraph, Dr. King seems to reject the conclusions of liberalism but values the academic processes maintain – not the theology it believes. Ultimately, I do not see in the fullest context from his autobiography anything that suggests a general declaration or specific adherence of liberalism or its doctrines.

RESPONSE: It is true that Dr. King focused much of his work on the social gospel. To deny this would be disingenuous and foolish.

The video quotes Dr. King in his letter to Coretta Scott:

“Let us continue to hope, work, and pray that in the future we will live to see a warless world, a better distribution of wealth, and a brotherhood that transcends race or color. This is the gospel that I will preach to the world.”

As he writes here and here, Dr. King’s theology was concerned “with the whole man, not only his soul but his body, not only his spiritual well-being, but his material well-being.”

The problem comes when the video claims, “King’s gospel is not the gospel preached by the Apostle Paul in his letter to the church at Corinth” and “the absence of any reference to the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins raises the question of why it was omitted.”

However, it is disingenuous to say this totalizes Dr. King’s view on the gospel. In fact, the video either showed its ignorance or its desire to deceive through omission. Dr. King does, in fact, believe in the evil of sin and the fullness of God’s grace. In his sermon, Man's Sin and God's Grace, he says:

“We face the new psychology, and it furnished us with a lot of words and a lot of phrases to explain certain weaknesses of human nature, and so we very easily dismiss the word 'sin.' And we start talking about phobias and inhibitions, and we reached over to Freudian psychology and said that it’s a conflict between the id and the superego.

But when man got through talking in terms of all of his bombastic psychological phrases, he discovered that, at bottom, he was still a sinner before the Almighty God and that, at bottom, the conflict is not between the id and the superego but the conflict is between God and man. And the universe stands with that glaring picture of the reality of life—that man is a sinner; man is a sinner in need of God’s redemptive power. We can never escape this fact…

…There’s no point in pushing it out here, saying, “Well, I don’t fit into that category,” for sin takes so many areas. It not only, you see, we often see these things that are so glaring and we think they are the only sins—you know, getting drunk, or indulging in tragic lust, or going downtown robbing a bank and stealing a lot of money. That’s not the only sin. I’ve seen people who would never rob a bank, but how many people have they robbed of their good names? I’ve seen people who were so good that they would never do anything in terms of stealing from their neighbors of material goods, but they’ll get on the telephone and gossip about them and spread evil rumors about them. All of that’s sin. I’ve seen people who would say they, 'I don’t do anything. I don’t drink. I don’t do this. I don’t do that,' and then they end up their lives bogged down in a negative because the Christian ethic is never a bundle of do-nots but it’s a bushel of dos. Whenever I hear people talking about what they don’t do, I wonder what do they do. It’s always an affirmative. And there is never a time when the individual, even in his moment of highest ethical achievement, doesn’t experience this disintegration, this tragic alienation from God. Every man experiences it. And that is why the saint always recognizes that he’s a sinner, and the worst sinner in the world is the man who feels that he isn’t a sinner. That is the point at which he’s the greatest sinner. So that in our own personal lives, as we look at ourselves, as we look at the personal dimensions of our everyday living, we discover this dimension of sin. And there is something about it that causes us to know that as we look down into the deepest resources of our souls that we are in eternal revolt against God…

…Now, that looks kind of bad, and I’m about to conclude now. I know you say, 'Now you stand there on a somber note. You’ve said to us that we are sinners; we are caught in the clutches of sin in our personal lives and in our social lives.' And yes, if we stop there, I assure you that we would be in a pretty tragic predicament, that man’s life would be a life of nothingness, a life of endless pessimism. So that we can’t stop there. And that’s something of the beauty of the Christian faith, that it says that in the midst of man’s tragic predicament, in the midst of his awful inclination towards sin, God has come into the picture and has done something about it. That’s the beauty of our faith. It says that standing over against the tragic dimensions of man’s sin is the glorious dimensions of God’s grace. Where sin abounded, grace abounded even more exceedingly. That’s the Christian faith. On the one hand it is the most pessimistic religion in the world, for it recognizes the tragic and awful dimensions of man’s sin. But on the other hand it is the most optimistic religion in the world, for it recognizes the heightening dimensions of God’s grace and how God’s grace can come in and pick up. So that over against man’s sin stands God’s grace. Christianity, therefore, becomes the greatest pessimistic optimistic religion in the world. It’s a combination of a pessimistic optimism, it sees over against man’s sinfulness, man’s tragic state, the graciousness of God’s mercy, and His love and His forgiving power.

God’s grace stands over man’s sin. Now, the grace of God is not just some passing phrase, not just some old concept that we should be ashamed to use now. It’s not just some mechanical concept that has no deep meaning. Grace has a very vital place in any life. It has a very vital place in understanding the whole predicament of man and the whole predicament of the universe, for you can never understand life until you understand the meaning of the grace of God.

As you can see here, Dr. King doesn’t preach a gospel other than Paul (or Jesus, I might add, even though the video chooses to omit Jesus’ use of gospel).

To drive home the point, let us look at one of his Easter sermons, where Dr. King preaches:

“One of the first questions that we find ourselves raising, Is the life of man immortal? Oh, from time to time we try to get by this question. You see this is, at bottom, the question, If a man dies, shall he live again? This question is as old as the primitive gropings of ancient man and as modern as a morning’s newspaper. “If a man dies, shall he live again?” It is a question of immortality. We try sometimes to be nonchalant about it. Or we might even agree with H. G. Wells that it is an irrelevant question, it is the height of [egotism?] to talk about immortality of the soul. Oh, we try to be agnostic about it sometimes and say we just don’t know, it isn’t important anyway. But then one day, death invades our home and snatches away from us a loving, devoted friend. One day we come to the moment that we see our devoted loved one fade away. As Carlyle said concerning his mother, “Like the last pale circle of the moon fading in the deep seas.” And in that moment, we can’t be nonchalant. In that moment, we are not exactly agnostic. In that moment, we unconsciously cry out for the meaning of this thing. And there is something deep down within our souls that revolts against saying goodbye forever. We begin to ask, Is the ultimate destiny of man a rendezvous with the dust? Is the spirit of man extinguished at death like a candle guttered by a passing wind? We begin to wonder if death is a state of nothingness that leads us finally to a meaningless existence with no reality.

Then comes Easter to answer the question. Easter comes out ringing in terms that we all hear if we seek to hear it, that the soul of man is immortal. Through the resurrection of Jesus Christ we have fit testimony that this earthly life is not the end, that death is just something of a turn in the road, that life moves down a continual moving river, and that death is just a little turn in the river, that this earthly life is merely an embryonic prelude to a new awakening, that death is not a period which ends this great sentence of life but a comma that punctuates it to more loftier significance. That is what it says. That is the meaning of Easter. That is the question that Easter answers—that death is not the end.”

That sounds like both the resurrection of Jesus and our own eternal life in Christ, doesn’t it? The gospel, truly good news, that our death is not the end of existence, that life continues with our God through Christ is proclaimed here.

Conclusion

Many have tried to discredit the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I have not speculated why, but you will probably have your own conclusions. I have, however, shown that Dr. King does not assert the beliefs or positions that many claim he does. At most, he had a period in his life at Crozer Seminary, where he grappled with the claims of “liberal” Christianity. All one needs to do is check sources to see that many of the criticisms levied against Dr. King come from this brief period of his life. When I read the papers as a student, I see in them the assumption students make that the position is true for the sake of the papers in his class.

Either way, his further work, especially in preaching, proclaim both a social gospel that incorporates the transformation of the world through the gospel AND the overflowing grace of God that answers the sin of human beings with the hope of eternal life (as the small selections included here show). I have shown that the conclusion of the video, “Martin Luther King Jr.’s writings, sermons, and speeches reveal a rejection of the tenets of traditional Christian Orthodoxy” is false and maligned.

Unfortunately, this video, and all articles, blogs, and other commentary like it, detracts from the tremendous depth and wisdom found in Dr. King’s theology and anthropology. So, I want to give you resources to show what I have come to know: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a phenomenal theologian, one we need not fit into our own boxes, especially as he writes on the brotherhood, beloved community, and radical love (agape) and nonviolence.

Consider reading more about his beloved community, by reading the following:

"The Birth of a New Nation," Sermon Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church

"Loving Your Enemies," Sermon Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church

Strive Toward Freedom by Martin Luther King Jr.

Strength to Love by Martin Luther King Jr.

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Rev. Nate Whittaker serves as pastor at Good Shepherd Lutheran in Seattle, WA.