Final Sunday Sermon with Dr. King #15

Sunday Sermon with Dr. King #15

Pilgrimage to Nonviolence

Education Mosaic has been taking form since I started this blog series. Internet entrepreneurship is filled with lots of bends, turns, and bumps on the road. It’s completely new territory for me but I am steeped in it for the long haul. As today marks the end of this blog series, this week marks the beginning of my first online course launch! I’m excited to be providing English language services in my own online course. Free introductory participation. Flexible scheduling for the weekly live session. Facebook book for self-paced interaction with classmates and me. Pre and post testing to check progress. Fun modules with themes like music, movies, TV, cooking, and news articles/video! I’m excited about the course and my participants who have already signed up! I will also continue to blog on Sundays on different educational topics or sociopolitical topics through an educational or theoretical lens. Segue to this last sermon in Dr. King’s Strength to Love* which is filled with theory! I’ll break down the several theories he refers to as he shares his pilgrimage to nonviolence.

Liberalism (liberal theology) gave Dr. King a sense of satisfaction that he had never felt with fundamentalism. Some of what he loved was “its devotion to the search for truth, its insistence on an open and analytical mind, and its refusal to abandon the best lights of reason” (p. 156). But after delving deeply into the reality of sin on every level of man’s existence, Dr. King realized that liberalism was more of a false idealism and superficial optimism. Liberalism was more of a way to justify man’s defensive way of thinking.

Neo-orthodoxy also made its way into Dr. King’s sphere of theology because he thought it was too pessimistic, stressing that God was hidden and unknown. He thought it to be “antirationalism and semi-fundamentalism, stressing a narrow uncritical Biblicism” (p. 157). However, he did believe that each of these, liberalism and neo-orthodoxy, represented a partial truth. 

Existentialism and its scholars stimulated Dr. King’s thinking because of its focus on how the world is fragmented and man’s existence is filled with anxiety and threatened by meaninglessness. 

Social ethics peaked his interest because his concern for racial injustice began in his early teens. He never accepted how he was treated and segregated because of his race. He also realized that racial injustice and economic injustice were forever entwined. 

Only in theological seminary did Dr. King began to focus on the social gospel and the social responsibility of the church on the physical well being of people in addition to the soul’s well being. “The turn-the-other-cheek and the love-your-enemies philosophies are valid…only when individuals are in conflict with other individuals; when racial groups and nations are in conflict, a more realistic approach is necessary” (p. 159). 

Then came the life and teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, which is based on satyagraha, meaning truth-force or love-force, or the nonviolent resistance. “I came to see for the first time that the Christian doctrine of love, operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence, is one of the most potent weapons available to an oppressed people in their struggle for freedom” (p. 159). The Montgomery boycott illustrated this for him first hand. He also saw the results of Gandhi’s philosophy in India where rather than hatred and bitterness being present after the nonviolent movement, there was a mutual friendship based on complete equality between the Indian and the British. However, Dr. King does share the reality that the nonviolent movement in the U.S. would not create miracles overnight. 

He ends with thoughts of the nonviolent movement working or not working among international conflicts. He believes that war should not exist but is not sure the nonviolent movement would function properly between feuding countries. His personal experiences, threats on his life and his family’s has brought him to a personal level with God and that’s what he always turns to. He was positive about the future where certain systems of oppression had been diminishing.

This collection by Dr. King has been transformative for me both personally and professionally. I am excited about and have been blessed by his readings and teachings. May his truth continue to be shared because it is very different from his mainstream persona.

*King, M. L. (1963). Strength to love. New York: Harper & Row.