"In the quiet recesses of my heart,” Martin Luther King, Jr. often said, “I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher.’’Thus begins the book and the rest, Lischer says, “may be read as an extended commentary on that confession.”
By the end of this first paragraph, I found myself agreeing with the book’s thesis: King was essentially a Christian, specifically a black Baptist preacher who, although he often used the language of mainline liberal theology, increasingly took on the voice of a Hebrew prophet. That’s about what I’d thought before picking up the book.
But The Preacher King gave my assumptions heft and detail. For example, at the first church he pastored (Dexter Avenue Baptist in Montgomery), King followed one Vernon Johns. Lischer describes Johns as having erudition combined with “militant eccentricity.” Lischer relates this about him:
Sitting on wagons of fresh vegetables and other farm produce was his way of preaching the gospel of black agricultural capitalism. One of his favorite expressions was “If every Negro in the U.S.A. dropped dead today, it would not affect significantly any important business operation.” Toward the white power structure of his city he turned an angry prophetic face. After a lynching he once posted as his sermon topic on the bulletin board outside the church, “It’s Safe to Murder Negroes in Alabama.”The words on that sign stay with me because of their dual import. King stepped into a world in which, more-or-less, it was safe to murder his congregants. And, he stepped into a preaching tradition that – before it was safe or popular -- was bold enough to say so.
Another striking image for me was the seminarian King, together with the few fellow black students at Crozer, gathered at the home of Pius Barbour for the informal training in black preaching they weren’t going to get in class. “Barbour University” was name the students gave to the senior pastor’s parsonage, Lischer tells us. Lischer uses the juxtaposition of King’s two educations in preaching to give a theological account of the intersections of, and distinctions between, liberal and African-American Christianity.
No matter how many times he repeated the liberal platitudes about the laws of human nature, morality, and history, King could not be a liberal because liberalism’s Enlightenment vision of the harmony of human nature, morality and God skips a step that is essential to the development of black identity. It has little experience of the evil and suffering borne by enslaved and segregated people in America. Liberalism is ignorant – even innocent – of matters African-American children understand before their seventh birthday.I’m tempted to quote more in this vein. Lischer is so impressive in giving an intellectual narrative of liberal theology that knocks it off the prized position it seems to hold by contrasting it with the African-American theological tradition, which he seems to give equal if not greater weight. Instead, I simply note there’s an excellent history lesson in American theology in pages 51 to 66.
The final image I carry from the book is King addressing a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church in the early days of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He has recently been elected president of the movement, the Montgomery Improvement Association. He is young (26 years old) and unprepared to give a speech. His preaching to date, Lischer says, had been liberal and philosophical.
But in this speech he invokes the meaning of “history” with a way of knowing, a vision, that can only be called prophetic. “We, the disinherited of this land, we who have been oppressed so long, are tired of going through the long night of captivity. And now we are reaching out for the daybreak of freedom and equality.And thus begins the powerful, lonely, complicated ministry of the Preacher King.
