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The Word That Moves: The Preaching of Marting Luther King, Jr.
By Richard Lischer

"The beautiful thing about Movement preaching was that every sermon presented the possibility of a focused response. Because every sermon was an expression of God's solidarity with the Movement, there was always something its hearers could do, hope, or suffer in harmony with this new Way God had unleashed in the South. "

IN September 1954, Martin Luther King, Jr. arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, to assume the pastorate of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He brought with him a small cache of sermons which he had already preached in his father's church in Atlanta and in the pulpits of black congregations in the greater Boston area while a graduate student at Boston University. In Montgomery, he polished these sermons and, by several accounts, worked very hard at producing and memorizing new manuscripts, which he preached to an appreciative if not enthusiastic church that was usually about one-half to two-thirds filled. The word around Montgomery on the young Reverend King was that he was a "good but not great" preacher.¹

Within a year, Martin Luther King, Jr. was the recognized leader of one of the most creative local black protests of the twentieth century and within another year an international celebrity and the subject of a cover story in Time magazine. Everything in his life had changed dramatically save one thing: he continued to preach in local churches. The sermons that originated in his own pulpit he repeated hundreds of times in churches all over the land. Much of the material in his sermons he transposed to addresses and mass-meeting speeches, which he considered an extension of his pulpit ministry. King was a parish pastor who, like all preachers, worried about where his next sermon was coming from as he sought to evangelize the members of his own congregation; and he was a preacher to the nation, whose one unceasing, peripatetic sermon reawakened a people to its own identity and ultimately transformed the consciousness and the socio-political structures of America.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a product of the black church and

Richard Lischer is Professor of Homiletics at Duke University Divinity School. He has written widely on preaching, theology, and ministry. His most recent book is Theories of Preaching., Selected Readings in the Homiletical Tradition (I 987). A full-length work on the preaching of Martin Luther King, Jr. is currently in preparation.

¹ Interview with Rev. J. T. Porter, March 7, 1988.

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maintained a pastorate throughout his adult life. He increasingly came to explain his public positions and actions as those of a "Baptist preacher in the black church." Between his fourteen years of service in the black pulpit and the larger drama in which he was the chief actor, he forged a deep connection. Traditional homiletics focuses on the discovery and arrangement of effective arguments, often at the expense of the more holistic view. In the Book of Acts, the preaching of the word is a movement with its own community and momentum. King's preaching was a movement, too, a movement that participated in a still larger movement, the Civil Rights Movement and black church life in America.

I

The conventional inquiry into the religious motive of King's actions portrays him as a theological thinker decisively shaped by his seminary and graduate school professors. It traces the development of his thought from Rauschenbusch by way of Hegel, Marx, and Tillich, through the Niebuhrian corrective, inspired by Gandhi, Jesus, and Thoreau (in that order), until it reaches its synthetic climax at the Lincoln Memorial. If the black gospel tradition is mentioned, it is only as one of many ingredients in the recipe.² Not only does this intellectualized account fail to make sense of the brokenness and tragedy of King's life; it creates a fictional world of ideas with a realm of its own apart from events and actions. Although King made superficial references to the talismen of modern thought, he critically engaged none of them, not Hegel, Marx, Thoreau, even Gandhi, and allowed none of them a singularly formative influence in the revolution he pursued. The figures and ideas he engaged in his graduate study gave him a vocabulary with which he rationalized a more original black response to the events of his day.

King's habit of alluding to notable philosophers and psychologists (Adler, Horney, Fromm, etc.) creates a misleading self-portrait of one who first learned his theories in the academy and then set about to practice them. But black-church preachers do not operate that way, and King was no exception. Life and language are so mixed together that it is impossible to describe how one emerges from the other. It is enough to say that for the black preacher the word does not function as a theoretical base for action. Rather, the word is a kind of action that cannot legitimately be separated from the struggles, temptations, suffering, and hopes of the people who live by the word. The community is carried forward by this word. It is the soul of the church's body.

² See John J. Ansbro, Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Making of a Mind (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1982); Kenneth L. Smith and Ira G. Zepp, Search for the Beloved Community The Thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1974), make King's race and his education at a black institution, Morehouse College, incidental to his development. The first major study to recognize the importance of the black church in King's career is Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1988). See also, James H. Cone, "Martin Luther King, Jr., Black Theology-Black Church," THEOLOGY TODAY 40 (January, 1984) 4, pp. 409-20.

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The world of thought and language most intimately related to King's life was that of his preaching. King never produced a fully developed theological treatise on liberation or civil disobedience. But this is hardly surprising, since his movement came with a built-in word, preaching, that by its very nature transcends any theories or ideologies which are isolated from the daily suffering of the people.

King did not choose preaching as the crucible of his theology; it was that from the beginning. He did not learn to preach in the black church, he was formed by preaching in the, black church of Atlanta's "Sweet Auburn." Before beginning his formal theological training, he was licensed to preach, ordained, and installed as associate minister in his father's church, He had taken this step not on the basis of any single experience he could label a "call," but as the result of a growing awareness of the importance of the ministry in the black community and of his own gifts of religious expression. How could it have been otherwise for the gifted son of a powerful father? As a little boy, he had performed solos in the church choir, creating a sensation with his rendition of "I Want to be More and More Like Jesus." He had taken a second in the Elks Club oratory contest and, in general, had borne well the peculiar burdens and privileges of being a "PK" on thriving Auburn Avenue.

What he absorbed from his grandfather, A. D. Williams, and his father, Martin Luther King, Sr., was not a particular style-indeed, his father was rough, unpredictable, and unrestrained in ways Martin Jr. never was-but a composite impression of the enormous authority of the pulpit. Later, refining influences on his style would come from Benjamin Mays, Gardner Taylor, Pius Barber, and Howard Thurman. But the influence of the pulpit already ran up and down the Avenue, from Big Bethel A. M. E. where at the turn of the century Bishop Henry McNeal Turner had preached black nationalism, to the Wheat Street Baptist Church whose pastor, William Holmes Borders, had combined scholarly learning, high-steeple churchmanship, and an innovative ministry to vagrants and ex-convicts. During Grandfather Williams' tenure, the grand old man of Ebenezer was seen to sit on a chair in front of his church to keep an eye on his parishioners.³ By the time his grandson assumed the pastorate of Dexter Avenue Baptist in Montgomery, he had a settled opinion of the preacher's authority to rule from the pulpit. In his first pronouncement on the subject, the young minister informed his congregation that authority in the church does not arise from the pew but descends from the pulpit.⁴

³ Borders was credited for having "changed the ideal of worship on Auburn Avenue." See Alexa Henderson and Eugene Walker, Sweet Auburn. The Thriving Hub of Black Atlanta 1900-1960, U. S. Department of the Interior/National Park Service, n.d., p. 23; and James W. English, The Prophet of Wheat Street (Elgin, Ill.: David C. Cook).
⁴ Dexter Avenue Baptist Church Annual Report, Pastor's Recommendations, 1954-1955, MLK, Boston. The abbreviations "MLK, Atlanta" and "MLK, Boston" refer to unpublished manuscripts in the Archives of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta and the Special Collections of the Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University, respectively.

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There are many ways black preachers establish their authority in the church, and we shall return to the complex question of King's authority when we discuss his impact on the nation. The preacher may have organizational skills in the parish and an impeccable record of activism in the community. He may be well-connected to the most influential members of the congregation or neighborhood. But ultimately, the minister can only claim and exercise that authority on the basis of the effectiveness of the preached word. God is working in the preacher to the extent that the sermon is moving the congregation. King understood that.

II

It is the power of the spoken word that is so notably absent from King's published works, including his sermons in Strength to Love. King's published works were carefully edited to put the Movement in the best possible light and to reflect the values of a potentially supportive reading audience. In the press of schedule, coworkers such as Stanley Levison and Bayard Rustin drafted speeches and whole chapters of his books. Several years ago, King's biographer, David Garrow, warned scholars that they were proceeding down an error-strewn path by seeking to explain King on the basis of his published works.⁵

Even the sermons in Strength to Love, which assuredly were not drafted by Levison or Rustin but grew out of embryonic forms preached during his student days, do not give an accurate portrait of King the preacher. Many of them are polished versions of the sermons King brought with him from graduate school, which he preached to an undemonstrative congregation before the civil-rights battle had been fully joined. Even the sermons of later origin have been so decontextualized they might have been written by any one of a number of popular liberal preachers of the 1950s. The sermons in Strength to Love contain no intimate reports of the battle raging over integration, no trace of weariness, defiance, or disillusionment. They do not convey the extemporized celebrations of the gospel or the formulaic altar calls characteristic of King's later preaching at Ebenezer and of black preaching in general. They do not get down or soar to an ecstatic climax. The printed sermons offer no access to the oral event whose power is real and felt but unrepeatable. They contain scarcely a memory of his voice. ,

To hear the voice, it is necessary to turn to tape recordings and unedited transcripts of King's sermons. Interviews with former colleagues and parishioners are also helpful in fleshing out a portrait of the preacher. These sources portray a weary, sometimes depressed soldier coming home from the front to absorb as much love and encouragement

⁵ Reported in Frederick L. Downing, To See The Promised Land (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1986), P. 21. On King's ghostwriters, see David J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), pp. 26-27, and Garrow, Bearing the Cross (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1986), pp. 92-93, 102, and index, "Stanley Levison."

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as possible before heading back to Albany, Birmingham, Selma, Chicago, or Memphis. In his own pulpit, King was surrounded by his family, parishioners whom he had married and whose children he had baptized, and the religious symbols of his youth. It would be hard to disagree with James Cone who insists that only in the pulpit is the real King accessible to the scholar, for only there did he lay bare the religious grounds of his hope and action.⁶

Listen to a typical King sermon preached at Ebenezer and you will first be touched by the obvious fatigue under which the speaker is laboring. He is so familiar with the congregation he is not ashamed to let the weariness show, though he will rarely mention it. The sermon proceeds like Ravel's Bolero, with a relentless monotony, until the preacher is awakened to the urgency of his own message. The pace quickens, the diction becomes more effusive, images begin to flower, and suddenly Bolero becomes one of the most exciting compositions you have ever heard. King works his magic with his voice and imagery, not with his argument. Another essay might explore the sources and deep structures of his argument, but they are less important and less interesting than the phenomenon of his style.

III

"Style is the regard that what pays to how," says E. L. Epstein.⁷ Classical rhetoric identified style as one of the five phases of public speaking, insisting on a fixed distinction between what and how. In much of black preaching, the distinction all but disappears. In King's preaching, the style is the message. What Epstein says about human nature in general is poignantly true of the Movement's dependence upon King's style: "A juggler, using immense skill to construct a wheel of objects in the air, is an image of the human being at his typical work; if the skill or will, the how, falters, the what disintegrates, and chaos is immediate and irretrievable.⁸

Thus, much more is at work in King's conflation of how and what than his obvious delight in words. He did have a fondness for the latinate phrase that fills up a room, such as his description of faith, hope, and love as "that magnificent trilogy of durability,⁹ or the rhythm he establishes with three rhymed phrases of equal syllabic length-humiliating oppression, the ungodly exploitation, the crushing domination"-by which he evoked the Pharaohs of Egypt and Alabama.¹⁰ One senses in King a calculated fascination with the beauty of words that is traceable or at least attributable to the slave preacher whose mastery of words

⁶ Downing, p. 21.
⁷ E. L. Epstein, Language and Style (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1978), p. 1.
⁸ Epstein, p. 80.
⁹ The Meaning of Hope," Sermon, MLK, Atlanta.
¹⁰ Hortense J. Spillers, "Martin Luther King and the Style of the Black Sermon," The Black Scholar 3 (September 1971) 1, p. 19.

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filled his illiterate hearers with a sense of wonder.¹¹ The first lesson to the hearer who perhaps doesn't understand the what of all the words lies in the gestalt created by its style. The reality of another's personhood depends on the juggler's precarious art.

There is yet more at work in King's preaching than the arousal of an audience's inchoate sense of its own worth. The wordplays, antitheses, sententiae, epithets, formula metonymies, repetitions, and gospel climax improvisations, along with the controlled power of his high baritone and the creative response of his audience-all contribute to a theological and cultic truth hidden beneath the circumstances in which the sermon is given. In one of his set pieces, King tells his congregation at Ebenezer how it will be when God judges the world:

Oh there will be a day. The question won't be how many awards did you get in life. Not that day. It won't be how popular were ya in your social setting. That won't be the question that day. It will not ask how many degrees you've been able to get. The question that day will not be concerned whether you are a Ph.D. or a No.D, will not be concerned whether you went to Morehouse or... No House.... On that day the question will be what did you do for others. Now I can hear somebody saying, "Lord, uh, I did a lot of things in life. I did my job well... I did a lot of things Lord, I went to school and studied hard. I accumulated a lot of money, Lord, that's what I did." Seems as if I can hear the Lord of Light saying, "But I was hungry, and you fed me not. I was sick and ye visited me not. I was neck-id in the cold, and I was in prison and you weren't concerned about me, so get out of my face!"¹²

Now, the congregation loves the playfulness and cleverness of the language, the drama of what the preacher "hears" (because he is hearing on our behalf), and the dysphemistic shocker at the end of the piece, "Get out of my face," for its reflection of the unexpected judgment of God (who sits high but looks low). The style is a vehicle for conveying the cleverness of God who, after all, has chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise. God is playing by a secret set of rules known only to this preacher here, and, thanks to him, now also to us.

The preacher and the congregation are in on something. Therefore, the congregation acknowledges the open secret and helps the preacher make it plain. In the black congregation, the sermon features a moment of climax when the preacher, with the congregation's help, breaks through the suffering, sin, and uncertainty of the present moment to the joy of that which is to be revealed. This breakthrough is the preacher's and congregation's moment of triumph.

¹¹ I saw something of this in one of his Crozer class notebooks. When he should have been taking notes on Augustine or Aquinas, the young King was doodling pretty sentences on the inside cover of the notebook, e.g., "We are experiencing cold and whistling winds of despair in a world sparked by turbulance," etc. MLK, Boston.

In a sermon on the Greeks who wanted to visit with Jesus, King thoroughly enjoys rolling out the names Aristophanes, Euripides, Thucydides, Demosthenes and other "brilliant minds" that "came up around Greece." In "We would see Jesus," MLK, Atlanta.
¹² The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life," Sermon, MLK, Atlanta. Used by permission of Joan Daves.

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One December evening in Albany, Georgia, King was invited to preach in the Shiloh Baptist Church, where a great throng was gathered in preparation for a demonstration. A reporter named Pat Watters remembers that as King's sermon reached its crescendo an old man punctuated each of his remarks with a blood-curdling "GOD ALMIGHTY!"

"How long will we have to suffer injustices?" "GOD ALMIGHTY!"
"How long will justice be crucified and truth buried?" "GOD ALMIGHTY!..."
"But we shall overcome."
"SHALL OVERCOME," the crowd chorused back.

His voice, full of emotion that flowed into the crowd which poured it back to him, almost broke, shouting: "Don't stop now. Keep moving, Walk together, children. Don't you get weary. There's a great camp meeting coming...."¹³

In such a moment, the Kingdom takes a language-form, as preacher and congregation experience something of the hope and ecstasy of God's promised triumph over evil. And style-style is not an escape from reality, but a means of enduring it and triumphing over it.

Like most accomplished preachers, King had a tremendous reserve of homiletical commonplaces, brief rhetorical formulas and longer set pieces which he could insert into any sermon or speech. Many he developed out of years of experience and his native love of language, many he borrowed from other preachers such as Phillips Brooks, Harry Emerson Fosdick, George Buttrick, Benjamin Mays, Wallace Hamilton, and Howard Thurman. Some are as brief as his familiar evocation of the slave's life, "the rows of cotton, the sizzling heat, the riding overseer with his rawhide whip," borrowed from Thurman's Deep River. Others are longer assemblages of lines from Carlyle, William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell, Donne, Shakespeare, Paul Dunbar, the occasional Spiritual, and many more. Still others are gospel climax formulas, such as his improvisations on "Amazing Grace" or "Come home America," with which he concludes the sermon."¹⁴ While these formulas bear the marks of tradition, they are also original and quintessentially King.

¹³ Pat Watters, Down to Now (New York: Pantheon Books, 197 1), p. 14.
¹⁴ For a negative assessment of King's borrowings, see Keith D. Miller, "Martin Luther King, Jr. Borrows a Revolution: Argument, Audience, and Implications of a Secondhand Universe," College English 48 (February 1986) 2, pp. 249-65. On King's use of Thurman, see "Shattered Dreams" in Strength to Love (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963, 198 1), p. 92, and Howard Thurman, Deep River (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945, 1955), p. 35. King's manipulation of formulas is analogous to the method of the folk preacher, with important differences. King's sermons were not spontaneously created; their themes are not governed by metrical concerns; and, although his style exhibits musical qualities, King did not chant his sermons. On folk preaching, see Bruce Rosenberg, Can Those Bones Live? The Art of the American Folk Preacher, rev. ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), and Gerald L. Davis, I got the word in me and I can sing it, you know: A Study of the Performed African-American Sermon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).

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The intertextual quality of King's preaching offends English composition teachers who are wary of plagiarism and weary of cliches. Yet, in King, we have one of the great orators in American history who ignited a social revolution with so many cliches that the audiences broke into cheers when he would begin one of his set-pieces, because they knew it so well. Homer might have gotten a D in English 101 for his unnecessary repetition of "clever Odysseus" or "wine-dark sea," as would have King for his formulaic description of the stars as "the swinging lanterns of eternity" or the Alabama State Police as "the iron feet of oppression." Such criticism, however, overlooks the unique needs of preaching as a movement that gathers momentum and creates unity by means of repetition. It fails to appreciate the living voice that puts its print on all received traditions. King's set pieces, whether borrowed or original, are like the lyrics to the Spirituals and freedom songs that were repeated as circumstances demanded in church after church.

IV

King's use of the Bible in preaching was also consistent with the needs of the black church and the logic of the Civil Rights Movement. He overlooked a good deal of the higher criticism he learned in seminary, which is concerned with the passage's original historical circumstances and meaning, and instead used the Bible inclusively according to its medieval function as a mirror. The Bible mirrors or contains all of life, and life mirrors or replicates the personages and stories of the Bible. Paul Ricoeur writes, "Scripture appears here as an inexhaustible treasure which stimulates thought about everything.... In this way, the understanding of Scripture somehow enrolls all the instruments of culture-literary and rhetorical, philosophical and mystical. To interpret Scripture is at the same time to amplify its meaning as sacred meaning and to incorporate the remains of secular culture in this understanding."¹⁵ King reads the pain of the black experience into the text and interprets that experience by means of the text. This symbiosis in interpretation leads to a corresponding symbiosis in articulation.

When the community's experience is crucial to understanding the text, the community will also help in the delivery of the text via the sermon. As I listened to tapes of King's sermons at Ebenezer, I began hearing the same voice, that of an older man, speaking from the congregation. In those places in the sermon where King is analyzing contemporary problems in the light of the Bible, the man regularly intones, "Make it plain"-which is good hermeneutical advice. Tell our story. Make the connection. In such an atmosphere, one can only attribute "meaning" to the completed cycle of the sermon's delivery and reception.

In the communal hermeneutic, certain passages and themes encode an

¹⁵ Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 385.

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instant meaning, one that is signaled by the congregation's audible response (this is true of Ebenezer, but never of the more reserved Dexter Avenue church). Because of the black church's heritage of mistreatment, King or any black preacher will set off a sure response with an allusion to Galatians 6:7: "Be not deceived. God is not mocked. For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." One investigator of rural black preaching in Macon County, Georgia makes an observation that is equally true of King. When the preacher cries, "How long..." (e.g. Psalm 13:1: "How long wilt thou forget me, OLord, forever?"), it is like tossing a match to gasoline. ¹⁶

The communal hermeneutic is perhaps best illustrated by a story from the Montgomery days. The bus boycott had lasted some 380 days, during which time the black community suffered great hardships. Through the long boycott, the black clergy of Montgomery led twice weekly services of praise and preaching in various churches throughout the city. The night after the victory was finally won, it happened that a young Lutheran minister-the only white preacher in town to join the protest-was leading the assembly in a reading of I Corinthians 13. When he came to the words, "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish things," the entire congregation spontaneously arose and began to cheer. ¹⁷ The community had recognized in the text its own experience of coming to maturity.

Using the Book and life as a two-way mirror, however, sometimes led King to a moralizing or spiritualizing of the Bible. For example, following Phillips Brooks' "The Symmetry of Life," King transposes the dimensions of the heavenly Jerusalem given in Revelation 21 into a moralistic rendition of "The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life." Or, to cite another example, an incidental sentence from Luke 12, "A man out of the crowd said to him... "' becomes the occasion for a topical sermon on "Interruptions." ¹⁸

Several hermeneutal keys enabled King to avoid disorder in his preaching. David Kelsey reminds us that the interpreter always works with "a logically prior imaginative judgment about how best to construe the mode of God's presence."¹⁹ For King, the master key is found in no one biblical story or motif, not the Exodus or the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Rather, the master story is the saga of the enslavement of black people in North America, their continued oppression

¹⁶ William H. Pipes, Say Amen, Brother! (New York: The William-Frederick Press, 195 1), p. 42.
¹⁷ Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), p. 161.
¹⁸ Compare Brooks' "The Symmetry of Life" in Selected Sermons (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1949), pp. 195-206, with "The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life," MLK, Atlanta. King borrows the dubious idea of spiritualizing the incidentals of an apocalyptic text and the bare essentials of an outline (length, breadth, height) but little more. For "Interruptions," see MLK, Atlanta.
¹⁹ David H. Kelsey, The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), p. 166.

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and humiliation, and now the stirrings of freedom at work among them. This story has unfolded in a universe governed by God who is grieved by the suffering of the people and whose will it is that they should ultimately triumph. The deliverance of black people will occur only if its vehicle, the Movement, is perfectly aligned with the agapistic nature of Christ's ministry and the redemptive character of his death. Every sermon turns on these principles, and every piece of moralizing or spiritualizing exegesis, however remote from these themes, eventually fits into this scheme of exposition.

In the mirror of the Bible, King discovered not only the historical experience of blacks in America but also the archetypical truths of philosophy and psychology. There was a time in his life when King was embarrassed by the "fundamentalism" of black Baptist religion as he had known it.²⁰ At Crozer Seminary and later at Boston University, he was introduced to more sophisticated resources for making the same historic black claims about freedom, but on the level of principle rather than story or experience. In the Boston Personalism of his teachers, Edgar Brightman, Walter Muelder, and Harold DeWolf, he discovered the philosophical rationale for the freedom and absolute worth of the human person he had absorbed in the black church. Personalist themes, when combined with his pre-critical interpretation of the Bible, lend to his sermons a certain amplitude or capaciousness not generally characteristic of black preaching. The downside of Personalism is its tendency to relativize biblical claims by understanding them as symbols of more profound, universal laws. If what the preacher is advocating is a law of the universe, the hearer can choose whether to act boldly in concert with such a law or to relax in its inevitability.

More original to the black religious tradition than Personalism is an equally unbiblical yet near-universal expression of the black Christian's hope in America: civil religion. By civil religion I mean the diffused and perhaps unreflecting acceptance of the philosophical and theological principles that underlie the foundational and pivotal documents in American history. These principles not only function as the ideology (or theology) of the republic, but they also invest the nation with transcendent meaning and purpose. For an oppressed people, the principles embedded in the Declaration and the Constitution, as well as the mythology surrounding Abraham Lincoln, function as a religio-political sanction which transcends the bigotry of local, state, and even national administrations. For blacks, civil religion and Christian doctrine had this in common: they were both a promise of things unseen. Unlike many Christian theologians, King did not publicly criticize civil religion as a dilution of biblical doctrine. His earliest sermons and speeches indicate that he believed in it and brilliantly exploited it. In his very first rhetorical triumph, at the packed meeting in the Holt Street Baptist Church at the beginning of the bus boycott in Montgomery, the

²⁰ "An Autobiography of Religious Development," MLK, Boston.

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twenty-six year old King drew on biblical themes supported by the promise of civil religion: "This is the glory of our democracy.... If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong." ²¹ As late as 1966, in a sermon on the Georgia State Legislature's refusal to seat antiwar activist Julian Bond, King dramatically appeals to Lincoln, Jefferson, and John Kennedy ("Come here, brother Kennedy") and asks for their witness to this "moral issue, as old as the Bible, and as modern as the Constitution." ²² Along with Personalist laws, civil religion lent universal validity to the specific demands of Jesus and the prophets.

V

Because his sermons eventually found many audiences, the question of their effect is a complex one. The first suspicion to be dispelled is that he radically altered his message according to the racial make-up of his congregation. James Baldwin's claim that King was the first black leader in recent memory to say the same things to white audiences as he did to black, while not absolutely accurate, has much more truth than falsity to it. ²³ To black and white audiences alike, King preached a black gospel of liberation laced with the vocabulary of Personalism, popular psychology, nineteenth-century poetry, and civil religion. In some sermons, he caps off moral or psychological advice with nothing less than an offer of salvation and an evangelical altar call. "This is your great opportunity," he would cry out to those packed into the balcony and basement of Ebenezer. "It's terrible to be lost out there. Come on home." In other sermons, he combines the optimistic religion of the republic with warnings about sinful "habits" that lead to death. To any congregation, he was capable of preaching Jesus the universal redemptive principle and, in the same sermon, Jesus our personal savior from sin.

Yet, the audience did make a difference to King. He drew inexhaustible energy from black audiences and in turn energized them in a special way. In the black church-and he preached mostly in black churches the primary response was the sense of triumph to which we alluded earlier. In the many Shilohs, Friendships, Zion Hills, and Victory Baptists, he managed to break free of the moral heaviness of his manuscript and to preach the gospel of God's deliverance. He would come up, rise, soar, and hit the highest imaginable peaks of defiance, only to rise even higher to an extemporized exhaltation of God's greatness and faithfulness, accompanied all the way by an ecstatic response so perfectly timed to the preacher's cries that one would imagine it rehearsed. On these occasions, he would burn up the church. To predominantly white audiences, he preached the very same manuscripts, but by the book and without the fire.

²¹ Boycott Address, MLK, Atlanta.
²² "Nonconformist-J. Bond," Sermon, MLK, Atlanta.
²³ "James Baldwin, "The Highroad to Destiny," in C. Eric Lincoln, ed., Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Profile (New York: Hill and Wang, rev. ed., 1984), p. 91.

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The beautiful thing about Movement preaching was that every sermon presented the possibility of a focused response. Because every sermon was an expression of God's solidarity with the Movement, there was always something its hearers could do, hope, or suffer in harmony with this new Way God had unleashed in the South. Sometimes, King and his associates were literally "preaching the people into the streets," as C. T. Vivian remembers it, ²⁴ but usually King's sermons were reshaping the consciousness and changing the attitudes of black folk in America. Among black Christians, King managed to identify the suffering and rage of his people as few had done in recent years. If you make a pittance as a domestic, live in substandard housing, send your kids to the worst schools in town, rest your weary bones in the back of the bus, and a young preacher takes all that in and says, "We're tah-erd," you will say, "Yessir." King's preaching filled his black audience with courage and self-respect, and King himself modeled a new role for the black preacher and a new militancy for the black church in the South.

When it comes to his effect on white audiences, King is usually credited with identifying the consensus-ideals of America and packaging them with a familiar and moving form of religious rhetoric. By means of a wealth of literary, biblical, and philosophical allusions, King assured his hearers that history and universal moral law are aligned with the black quest for freedom in America. He preached this consensus in such a way that even when God was not mentioned, the audience was left with no doubt that history is guided, to paraphrase Matthew Arnold, by an enduring Power not ourselves that makes for freedom. "The moral arc of the universe is long," King never tired of saying, "but it bends toward justice." These and like sentiments found their way from his Sunday sermons into the lectures, public addresses, and mass-meeting speeches of his public career.

No doubt King wanted Americans to recognize the best of their religious and political ideals in the mirror of his message. ²⁵ He was trumpeting the same values they had heard from their white Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian pulpits, but they had never seen a black man with such eloquent "white" words coming from his mouth. King was not unaware of his unique position and consciously fashioned an image of himself as one whose learning, sentiments, equilibrium, and integrity are unassailable. So when a Bull Connor or Jim Clark lets loose the dogs, what they are attacking is not a bunch of rabble-rousers but our own most cherished ideals. According to his self-designed job description, King would draw to a head all the racism in society so that it could be exposed and eliminated. He actually uses the same figure employed by another great preacher, Jonathan Edwards, who two centuries earlier had said that it is the preacher's task to lance the boil.

²⁴ Interview with Rev. C. T. Vivian, May 20,1987.
²⁵ See Miller, p. 256; also, C. Eric Lincoln's similar thesis in "Introduction," Martin Luther King, Jr., pp. ix-x.

181 - The Word That Moves: The Preaching of Marting Luther King, Jr.

At first unconsciously and then increasingly consciously, King adopted and combined a variety of religious personae in his self-presentation to America. His supporters routinely introduced him to audiences as "the Moses of the twentieth century" who would deliver his people from segregationist Pharoahs. From the Birmingham Jail, he announced that he was willing to answer any Macedonian call, evoking St. Paul's history of beatings, imprisonments, frequent journeys, sleepless nights, and anxiety for the Movement, and produced, like Paul, a classic piece of prison literature. In Chicago, he was the great reformer Luther, leading a march to City Hall where he posted a new version of the Ninety Five Theses. The final persona was the complex of images associated with the bearer of suffering in the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, the suffering servant, the crucified one. During the Chicago crisis, a weary King concluded a sermon to his Ebenezer congregation, "I choose to live for and with those who find themselves seeing life as a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign. This is the way I'm going. If it means suffering a little bit, I'm going that way. If it means sacrificing, I'm going that way. If it means dying for them, I'm going that way."²⁶

White American liberalism embraced the victim but rejected the prophet. It accepted its own guilt but not the radical changes necessary for its liberation. Black America found it increasingly difficult to identify itself as a vessel of redemptive suffering in this country. Black America embraced the threatening prophet who predicted long hot summers in the ghettos, condemned the war in Vietnam, and demanded a radical restructuring of the economy, but it grew weary with the priestly victim who in his latter years clung ever more tenaciously to suffering and death as the only means of redemption. King had become, in C. Eric Lincoln's suggestive phrase, "the unbearable symbol. ²⁷ The split in King's (and America's) religious consciousness portended the disintegration of the Civil Rights Movement as a Christian phenomenon.

After Selma, King was no longer content to celebrate America's ideals as the nation's foremost black high priest. As his disillusionment with white America grew, he began to question not only America's ability to live up to its credo, but the fundamentals of the credo itself. Spurred by the war in Vietnam, he began reminding audiences that the nation was born in genocide and self-interest and that the problem now was not a system of segregation but the sin of racism. Although he experienced similar disillusionment with the white church, he seems not to have questioned the foundations of the Christian faith but reaffirmed his native appreciation of the black church as a means of vicarious atonement.

During this period of his life, the sermons reflect a gradual relinquishing of Personalist themes, fewer assurances from the old standbys, and

²⁶ "Good Samaritan," Sermon, MLK, Atlanta.
²⁷ "Lincoln, "Introduction," p. vii. Lincoln is not specifically referring to the religious personae adopted by King.

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an outright disgust for the hypocrisy of civil religion. The black gospel tradition reasserts itself as the dominant force in King's preaching and life. In the later sermons, he preaches less about "the moral arc of the universe" and more about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, more on the great themes of his own religious tradition. The "friendly universe" of an earlier sermon is replaced with a vision of a frightful battle at the center of reality. The great hope of a just society, he says in his last sermon preached at Ebenezer, may never come true. ²⁸ There are no assurances. In the end, King throws himself and his life's work upon the mercy of God. To keep on preaching-that is good in itself. Keep on.

King's perseverance as a preacher suggests to my mind a more organic relationship between his preaching and the Civil Rights Movement than is usually appreciated. Whether as a consensus-building high priest or threatening prophet, King was attempting to transfer the congregation's experience of God's victory into the political realm. Although he was a hardnosed social strategist, King also had the preacher's peculiar confidence in words, the Word. He believed that the same dynamic of sin and suffering, redemption and exaltation announced by the preacher and celebrated in little black Baptist churches was supposed to workand ultimately would work-either to redeem the soul of America or to consign it to judgment. By the end of his life, he had ruled out success, but not faithfulness. Salvation in America would not depend on the brilliance of his or anyone else's rhetoric, but on the faithfulness with which the spoken word adheres to God's purposes in history.

28 "Unfulfilled Dreams" is the final, darkly pessimistic version of "Shattered Dreams" in Strength to Love. pp 86-95; cf.MLK, Atlanta.