Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. published five books in his lifetime; a sixth was released after he was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, at the age of 39. They are all seminal works for American Christians. Stride Toward Freedom (1958) tells the story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The Measure of a Man (1959) is a slim volume explaining the theological and philosophical roots of nonviolent activism. Why We Can’t Wait (1964) is a history of the civil rights movement in general, and the 1963 Birmingham Campaign in particular. This book includes his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which was addressed to eight clergymen and urged the church to join the struggle for racial justice. King’s 1967 book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? is a clear-eyed look at the state of race relations at a moment when the civil rights movement was in disarray. The book also makes a provocative connection between the bankrupt ideology of systemic discrimination, and the literal impoverishment of millions of Americans, white and black. The five speeches that make up The Trumpet of Conscience, published posthumously in 1968, link the evils of poverty, militarism and racism, and call for nothing less than a nonviolent revolution.
However, the book we'll focus on here is Strength to Love, a collection of King’s sermons first published in 1963. Reverend Dr. King liked to say that he was, above all else, a clergyman. Everything else he was—civil rights leader, antiwar activist, labor activist, advocate for the poor, writer, public intellectual and Nobel Laureate—flowed from his primary vocation as a Baptist preacher, the son, grandson and great-grandson of Baptist preachers.
The first thing that will strike you about these sermons is the context in which they were first delivered. King says in the book’s introduction that the sermons were written for particular congregations: Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery and Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. They were all preached during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It’s also impossible to ignore the context in which Strength to Love was published: King had been imprisoned 12 times, his family was receiving near-constant death threats, his home had been bombed twice and he had been stabbed nearly to death. Incredibly, three sermons in this collection were written in Georgia jails, including one sermon on Luke 23:34 (“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing”) and another on loving your enemies (Matthew 5:43-45).
The second thing to notice is how fresh the book feels some 50 years after it first appeared in print. Nearly every topic King addresses in these sermons is as critical in our time as it was in his. The tension between science and religion, for example, and the pressure placed on morality by rapidly advancing technology. The worship of “jumboism” and the limits of capitalism. The enormous temptation to conform with society. The myth of inevitable human progress. Church unity and racial prejudice.
Despite real advances in the area of integration, King’s famous lament that the church is the most segregated major institution in the country is still essentially true. According to scholar Curtiss Paul DeYoung, only 5 percent of Christian churches in the United States are “interracial.” There are, however, some exciting exceptions, as Edward Gilbreath points out in his excellent book, Reconciliation Blues: A Black Evangelical’s Inside View of White Christianity.
Strength to Love is both practical and evangelical. King was not a theorist. Developing a framework for understanding nonviolence is only helpful if it leads to nonviolent living. Abstract notions about justice are useless (if not dangerous) if they don’t lead to its pursuit. These sermons are messages from a shepherd to his flock. King took seriously the demands of the Gospel on the soul and society, which is to say he took Jesus at His word when He said, in King James English, “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” And, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven.”
Richard Lischer has shown that most of the sermons in this collection would have ended with an altar call. If the altar calls didn’t make it into the text, we still reach a moment of decision. The question King asked explicitly four years later in a different book is the same facing every person who has an authentic encounter with Dr. King: Where do we go from here?
John Pattison is the co-author of Besides the Bible: 100 Books that Have, Should or Will Create Christian Culture, from which this article is adapted, and the co-author of the forthcoming book Slow Church (InterVarsity Press). He blogs at SlowChurch.com.
