Howard Thurman and the Quest for Community: From Prodigals to Compassionate Samaritans (Quotes from chapter 1)

 

Howard Thurman and the Quest for Community: 

From Prodigals to Compassionate Samaritans

As noted yesterday, Howard Thurman's insights could benefit current discussions about what to do in the face of the injustices that so many people face today. The depth of community, the rejection of hatred and violence, and the dedication to making "Good Trouble, Necessary Trouble," in what Thurman called a (peaceful) "shock to the system, are among the things we should embrace.

So here are some quotes from the book that are found in the study guide for chapter 1 of the book (Howard Thurman and the Quest for Community: From Prodigals to Compassionate Samaritans):

I'll start with direct quotes from Thurman:

In a religion such as Christianity, the image of God in the mind of many Christians is that of a kindly, benevolent, bewhiskered white man, seated on a white throne, surrounded by blond and brunette angels who stand ready to serve Him in praises or as messengers. The Devil, on the other hand, is the Prince of Darkness while the imps of the Devil are black.…Now this is strong medicine even for the pure in heart. What a vote of confidence it must have been to a white person to feel that the Creator of the Universe was made in his image. Of course, there is nothing unusual about the notion that God is imaged in accordance with the ideal of the beholder. The advantage is obvious (The Luminous Darkness, 60). 

If a Roman soldier kicked Jesus into a Galilean ravine, he was merely a poor Jew in a ravine. In that context, Jesus offers to other poor disinherited Jews ‘a technique of survival for a disinherited minority.’ Jesus’s message assures the disinherited that they are children of God and therefore they should believe in their inherent worth and that of all other human beings, who are also children of God (JATD)

Here are some quotes from my book that I offer up for discussion in the study guide: 

“The teachings of Jesus, Thurman argues, provide a creative solution to a disinherited minority struggling to survive, but Christianity became an imperial world religion much different from the religion of Jesus, the Galilean teacher and prophet. As a result, the disinherited minority in the United States of which Thurman was a member should be dedicated to the teachings of Jesus, which are ‘on the side of freedom, liberty, and justice for all people.’” 

“Thurman argues that the logic behind Jesus’s love-ethic is that hatred ‘destroys finally the core of the life of the hater. While it lasts, burning in white heat, its effect seems positive and dynamic. But at last it turns to ash, for it guarantees a final isolation from one’s fellows. It blinds the individual to all values of worth, even as they apply to himself and his fellows. Hatred bears deadly and bitter fruit.’” 

“The religion of Jesus…centralizes the love-ethic in Jewish law: The love of God and the love of neighbor as oneself are the two greatest commandments. This love-ethic extends to all people by responding ‘directly to human need across the barriers of class, race, and condition.’ Jesus thus stood firmly within Judaism and envisioned himself a ‘creative vehicle’ for its ‘authentic genius.’” 

To make the book more affordable, I had to cut tons of material. Some of that information I included in the study guide as context for the leaders of any discussion about the book. Here are a few from chapter 1's study guide:

• Thurman continually challenged himself to succeed. While a student at Morehouse College, for example, Thurman claimed that he and his friend James Nabrit Jr. read every book in the Morehouse library. 
• When Thurman lived in Rochester, a member of the Ku Klux Klan showed him a notebook in which the man had recorded almost all the places Thurman had spoken, the subjects of his talks, and the number of people who attended.
• Thurman joined Boston University when Martin Luther King Jr. was finishing his doctoral course work. King attended some chapel services that year—his last year at Boston—and was deeply impressed by Thurman’s sermons.
• Thurman wrote, “The core of my preaching has always concerned itself with the development of inner resources needed for the creation of a friendly world of friendly men.…It was my conviction and determination that the church would be a resource for activists.…To me it was important that individuals who were in the thick of the struggle for social change would be able to find renewal and fresh courage in the spiritual resources of the church” (WHAH, 160). 
• One example of Thurman’s experiences with possible violence took place in 1947 at State College in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Thurman arrived late on the day before he was to give the commencement address. For two days the threat of a violent, white mob had caused men with rifles to guard the campus, including Thurman’s host in the house in which he stayed. The man asked Thurman to relieve him on the armed vigil, and later that night Thurman, a lifelong pacifist, found himself for the first time since he was a boy holding a gun. He sat at a window, deliberating over what he would do if an armed mob attacked: he would either (a) return their fire or (b) lay down the gun, walk outside, and be willing to sacrifice his life. That moment never came, but, as Thurman noted in 1978, the “ultimate logic of social action may be some form of martyrdom.” See “Mysticism and Social Action,” HTC Box 8, Folder 39, pp. 22–23. 
• Some of Thurman’s descriptions of first-century Jewish groups (e.g., Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, and Zealots; JATD, 1–25) are outdated because of advances in scholarship (e.g., the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947), but his study of such works as Louis Finkelstein’s The Pharisees led him to reject uninformed (Christian) scholarship about Judaism. Note his comments about “the genius of the Pharisaic movement in Israel” and rejecting the “judgmental attitude” and “prejudice” against them in his 1951 sermon, “On Forgiveness” (see chapter 2 below).