Why Martin Luther King Should Trouble Us All (And That's Ok): Or, This Is What Theology Looks Like.
The Good News does not hide from our brokenness or hide our brokenness from us: the gospel deals with broken people and fallen conditions, and it addresses those human conditions by proclaiming Christ’s transformative power.
Martin Luther King Jr., much like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is a
man easy to idolize. But to do so is
ironically not to respect him, but to distort his reality. In fact both men, like so many great men and
women, are idolized in such a way that our memory of them often suits who we
wanted them to be. Each is placed on
high pedestals of our choosing. As
Eberhard Jüngel once wrote of Bonhoeffer “a clear distinction must be made between
the special intellectual achievement of Bonhoeffer and the thoughts of those
who appeal to him.”[2] In this way we get Eric Metaxas’ recent
biography of Bonhoeffer Pastor, Martyr,
Prophet, Spy, that is for its part well written, but white-washed to make
Bonhoeffer appeal to the white Evangelical middle-class that is Metaxas’ audience. Much better, to my mind, is Charles Marsh’s A Strange Glory, which represents
Bonhoeffer the man in all his brilliance and all his flaws.
Yet the same distortions happen with King. In fact, as we reflect on Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, I
would argue that his importance lay not just in what we often unreflectively
celebrate him for however awe-inspiring and laudable this is. Just as important is the fact that Martin
Luther King Jr. is flawed—and that’s precisely the point. He is a figure that—like all intellectually
powerful and charismatic figures—is not an idea floating listlessly through the
halls of the academy or facebook statuses, but a philosophy entwined in flesh
and bone; a walking, talking theology.
His power resides not just in the mesmerizing speeches that we can all
get behind, but also in the sense that as a complex figure he cuts across all
of us in one way or another.
Much like Jesus was, King is not easy to domesticate. His power, as it were, lay precisely in the
fact that he should make each and every one of us uncomfortable in some way
even as we generally agree with him. For
all of us who want to celebrate his accomplishments, we must be at unease by
the fact that, if King were alive, how dismayed he would be that racial issues
have not disappeared, they have merely transformed, gone underground,
evolved. As Paul Metzger writes, “the
more people ignore racialization or think that it is behind them, the further
entrenched it becomes.”[3]
Or, for Conservative Christians—so eager now to take King on
board—should nonetheless be given pause that King was a self-described
“Liberal” theologian. His legacy should
give pause to anyone who wants to dismiss racial issues as simple “Race
baiting.” In fact the conservative
Christian history (from which I come, and with which I still, in part,
identify), though filled with many grand things, is here blemished by the
notable irony that though King is now upheld in all sorts of conservative
hagiography, both Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson vehemently opposed a national
holiday in honor of King. King's Christian pacifism and anti-Vietnam stance alone is enough to today make him an enemy of Fox News.
Nor is King a frictionless addition to the Liberal theological
pantheon. Though he found much to
criticize in Karl Barth for example, he ends his essay “Karl Barth’s Conception
of God,”[4] on
a high note, asking rhetorically if Barth will “serve as a necessary corrective
for a liberalism that at time becomes all too shallow?” (The picture heading this post is in fact of King and Barth). And indeed, though Gay Rights is often,
rightly or wrongly, compared to the Civil Rights movement, King’s own views on
homosexuality are only given in a single instance. King responded to an
anonymous letter in an advice column asking about their homosexual desire, that
“you are already on the right road toward a solution, since you honestly
recognize the problem [attraction to other men] and desire to solve it.” And indeed in both Liberal and Conservative
churches, it seems segregation in the pews is still so prevalent that “Eleven
o’clock on Sunday morning is still the most segregated and divisive hour of the
week.”[5]
Nor can he so readily be made to fit the mores of secular
humanism, or the narrative of its triumph over Christian religion. In one of the stranger turns in an already
strange book, Christopher Hitchens in God
is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything makes the astounding remark:
“In no real, as opposed to nominal, sense, then, was [Martin Luther King] a
Christian.”[6] The illogic here is astounding: Hitchen’s
comes to this conclusion because King preaches peace, forgiveness, and love of
enemies, while Hitchen’s says the Bible is violent from cover to cover, marked
by a petty, jealous, and vengeful God.
And when King explicitly appeals to Biblical passages? Well, these are merely appeals to convenient,
commonly known sources of metaphor and allegory![7]
At large, we have grown far too comfortable with the conceit
that morals and values stem naturally from the “purely human,” apart from any
religious commitments. King, in this
instance, can be seen as a grandiose example of human achievement at large. Certainly, he is this, but this both ignores the lengthy theological history of Western value systems (good or ill), and
even more, makes a farce of King’s own conviction that it is the Gospel and his
Black Church heritage that drives his message. James Cone reminds us that
though King’s writing contains a multitude of sources, this should not distract
us from his thought’s heart and engine: “much of king’s writings reflect
theological and philosophical discourse that had little to do with his actual
creative thinking and acting. The source
of the latter is not Ghandi or Bostonian Personalism, despite his implied
claims to the contrary. King’s creative
thought and power were found in his Black Church heritage.”[8]
For those of us tempted toward a theological triumphalism,
however, King too is trouble. He
represents a particular culmination of multiple theological coordinates in
history coming to a head: the identification of Church with (certain forms of) political concern,
the vexing history of Biblical interpretation and slavery,[9]
the theological construction of race,[10]
the pseudo-providential Manifest Destiny of the United States.[11]
And for those of us who would like to think only perfect men
and women can change the world, we must not forget that it appears King cheated
on his wife, and plagiarized portions of his Ph.D. thesis.
So how to view King?
The philosopher and theologian Jean-Luc Marion makes a
useful distinction between what he calls “the Idol,” and “the Icon.” These terms are in some sense already
familiar to us. In America they often
mean much the same: we “idolize” celebrities, who then stand as “icons.” But Marion means something different by
them. He uses them to distinguish two
ways to speak of God: for the Idol, much as when our eyes stare at a real
idol—of stone, or gold—stops our gaze at itself, and gives nothing more. “It freezes in a figure that which vision
aims at in a glance.”[12] We might say (diverging slightly from
Marion’s work) that “to idolize” a figure is to “freeze” them precisely in how
we look at them—to idolize is, as such to “idealize” precisely because it
allows for nothing unexpected.
The icon is the idol’s antithesis. Much like the stained glass windows of a
cathedral the Icon is still an image, but our gaze moves through it via
light. As such the Icon does not stop
our gaze at itself, but through itself draws us in with excess because our gaze
is always first drawn to the portrait precisely by a light that lay beyond it.[13]
I would like to propose that the flaws and complexities in
the lived life of a theologian are icons. As Leonard Cohen wrote, “There’s a crack in
everything, that’s how the light gets through.”
It is King’s flaws that should engage us; it is the weary,
mighty voice booming, groaning from the crag of flesh that was King that should
beckon us back. People are not merely
the sum of their ideas; and our engagement with them—acceptance, rejection,
mediation—cannot be merely on that basis.
King thus represents a good case study of how to engage in theology
today. This is what theology looks like.
Hard fought and bleary hours of struggle through tangled histories and
unknown futures. Fighting for the
forgotten bodies “outside the city gates” like the Crucified Christ. Above all: our theological engagement is not
in comfort, not in ideality, not in total rejection—but in flesh, in
bodies. In the act of breaking bread and
drinking the cup, "taking captivity captive" and setting captives free.
[1] Paul Louis Metzger, Consuming Jesus: Beyond Race and Class Divisions in a Consumer Church (Grand
Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2007), 52.
[2] Eberhard Jüngel, God
as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified
One in the Dispute Between Theism and Atheism (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s
Publishing, 1983), 57.
[3] Metzger, Consuming
Jesus, 41.
[4] Martin Luther King, “Karl Barth’s Conception of God,” available
at http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/karl_barths_conception_of_god/
[5] Consuming Jesus, 140.
[6] Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York:
Hatchett, 2007), 176.
[8] James Cone, God
of the Oppressed, (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 221.
[9] Cf. Mark Noll, The
Civil War as Theological Crisis (North Carolin: University of North
Carolina Press, 2006).
[10] J. Kameron Carter, Race:
A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp.
125-255.
[11] For example cf. Peter J. Thuesen, Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009).
[12] Jean-Luc Marion, God
Without Being (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991), 26.
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