Today our nation celebrates the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. While King's legacy is greatly disputed in many sectors of society today, his writings continue to hold great value for a culture that has discarded absolutes.
While reading through (with new eyes I might add), King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail, I was blown away by the force of his polemic against segregation and for absolutes. For years, I have scanned the usual reviews of this letter but never actually took the time to read it myself. It is one of the most, if not the most, powerful and eloquent pieces of persuasive writing I have ever digested. His breadth of knowledge was vast; he quotes Augustine in one breath and the Apostle Paul in another; invokes Luther, Bunyan, and Jefferson then moves seamlessly between Niebuhr and Tillich. It is simply a masterpiece. If you have not read it, take the time to do so and read it to your family, as Chuck Colson suggested, as a civics lesson like few others.
(Here is Colson's review of the letter:http://www.breakpoint.org/bpcommentaries/entry/13/16206)
Of particular importance to me, King saved some of his harshest ctiticism for those ministers who sat on the sidelines and used the excuse that social issues should be divorced from the preaching of the gospel. Here is his response:
I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: "Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother." In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: "Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern." And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.
How ironic it is today that most who invoke the legacy of King, the left-leaning media, various civil rights coalitions, and leftists in academia, want the fruit of King's legacy but reject the worldview that undergirded it. In the name of tolerance, they reject absolutes and dismiss the grounding of law in God's moral, transcendent order. Without realizing the folly of their thinking, they do, as C.S. Lewis said, ""make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise, laugh at honor and [then] are shocked to find traitors in our midst, castrate and then bid the geldings to be fruitful."
0 comments:
Post a Comment