Martin Luther King Jr. and the Parables (part 2)

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Here are some excerpts and comments about Dr. King's sermon on the parable of the Rich Fool in Chicago (August 27, 1967):

Although the rich man in the parable, King says, was successful “by all modern standards” and “would abound with social prestige and community respectability,” Jesus, a Galilean peasant, had the audacity to call him a fool. The man was foolish, King argues, because his economic well-being absorbed all of his thoughts, and he ignored what was most important:

We have both a privilege and a duty to seek the basic material necessities of life. Only an irrelevant religion fails to be concerned about man's economic well-being. Religion at its best realizes that the soul is crushed as long as the body is tortured with hunger pangs and harrowed with the need for shelter. Jesus realized that we need food, clothing, shelter, and economic security . . . . But Jesus knew that man was more than a dog to be satisfied by a few economic bones. He realized that the internal of a man's life is as significant as the external. So he added, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you."  The tragedy of the rich man was that he sought the means first, and in the process the ends were swallowed in the means.  The richer this man became materially the poorer he became intellectually and spiritually (http://saintjohnorthodox.org/The%20Rich%20Fool%20in%20html.htm). 

As the man’s self-centered soliloquy demonstrates—where he uses the first-person pronoun twelve times—the rich man also was foolish because he failed to realize his dependence upon others. He does not realize that other human beings contributed to his material wealth. King then applies the parable to the wealthy United States and uses the Sheep and Goats parable as a prescription for how such a wealthy nation should use its resources in an interdependent world, and it echoes the words of Theophylact (I'll write some posts about him later) about the best “storehouses” for the excess food:

When an individual or a nation overlooks this interdependence, we find a tragic foolishness. We can clearly see the meaning of this parable for the present world crisis. Our nation's productive machinery constantly brings forth such an abundance of food that we must build larger barns and spend more than a million dollars daily to store our surplus. Year after year we ask, "What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?" I have seen an answer in the faces of millions of poverty-stricken men and women in Asia, Africa, and South America. I have seen an answer in the appalling poverty on the Mississippi Delta and the tragic insecurity of the unemployed in large industrial cities of the North. What can we do? The answer is simple: feed the poor, clothe the naked, and heal the sick. Where can we store our goods? Again the answer is simple: we can store our surplus food free of charge in the shriveled stomachs of the millions of God's children who go to bed hungry at night. We can use our vast resources of wealth to wipe poverty from the earth. 

The rich man was also foolish, however, because he did not realize that his wealth was also ultimately dependent upon God:

Jesus called the rich man a fool because he failed to realize his dependence on God. He talked as though he unfolded the seasons and provided the fertility of the soil, controlled the rising and the setting of the sun, and regulated the natural processes that produce the rain and the dew. He had an unconscious feeling that he was the Creator, not a creature. 

Such foolishness in modern times, King observes, results in materialism or replacing faith in God with faith in science. The foolishness of expecting science to usher in a better world disappeared, however, in “the explosion of this myth” in the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Physical power, unless it is controlled by spiritual power, will lead to our doom, just like the rich fool: “Without dependence on God our efforts turn to ashes and our sunrises into darkest night.” Unfortunately, King notes, the rich man was foolishly unaware of this dependence on God and on others, and:

May it not be that the "certain rich man" is Western civilization?  Rich in goods and material resources, our standards of success are almost inextricably bound to the lust for acquisition. The means by which we live are marvelous indeed.  And yet something is missing. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers. Our abundance has brought us neither peace of mind nor serenity of spirit.

King closes the sermon by paraphrasing a question asked by Jesus: “What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world of externals—airplanes, electric lights, automobiles, and color television—and lose the internal—his own soul?”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) and the Parables

The three photos in this post are ones I took at the Dr. King memorial on my last trip to Washington, DC. It's well worth the visit.

Emory/Oxford responsibilities have prevented me from beginning the series on Dr. King and the parables, but today I'll sneak a note in during lunch. 

My Introduction to Religion class spent last week working through numerous speeches and sermons of Dr. King (from the book, I have a Dream), exploring them through the lens of historical Christianity. It is important for students (all of us, really) to read Dr. King in his own words, especially since the radicalness of his message is often "domesticated." See, for example, the book edited by Cornel West, The Radical King, or the helpful short book by Jennifer Yanco, Misremembering Dr. King.

This section of my own book was another one that initially ran more than 4000 words and needed to be cut to 2000 or so. I will include the sections that I cut on my blog so they are not lost. 

Dr. King's many uses of the parables are memorable, such as his continuing and developing use of the Good Samaritan parable.

First, a little background:

Martin Luther King, Jr. was the son and grandson of prominent pastors of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, GA. King graduated from Morehouse College at the age of fifteen; Crozer Seminary, in 1951, where he was first in his class; and Boston University, where he earned a PhD in Systematic Theology in 1955. In 1954, King became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He became the leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association and thus the primary leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began after Rosa Parks’s arrest. In 1957, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was formed with King elected as president and, in 1959, King returned to Atlanta, where he became co-pastor along with his father of Ebenezer Baptist Church.

During his years as a leader in the Civil Rights Movement, King published many important works, including Letter from the Birmingham Jail (1963), Strength to Love (1963), Why We can’t Wait (1964), and Where Do We Go from Here? (1967). King also was awarded the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize when he was only thirty-five. His emphases also included basic human rights and economic justice for all people, not just African-Americans. King created, for example, the “Poor People’s Campaign in November, 1967, which focused on jobs (full employment), unemployment insurance, low-income housing, and raising the minimum wage. As part of those efforts, he went to Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking sanitation workers. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968, as he stood on the second-story balcony at the Lorraine Hotel.

In 1966 King began working for economic equality in Chicago, Illinois, with the Chicago Freedom Movement, an organization that advocated for fair housing for all people, community development, quality education for all, fair wages and employment, and a number of other issues. King’s sermon on the Rich Fool parable, “Why Jesus Called A Man A Fool,” delivered at Mount Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church, Chicago, Illinois, on August 27, 1967, should be seen in the context of his efforts in Chicago—which were met with vitriolic racism even worse than he found in the South—to promote socio-economic equality.

The summer King preached this sermon in the heart of the Chicago slums where King had lived and worked just a year earlier, race riots had occurred in Newark, Cleveland, Detroit, and other cities. Although King opposed this violence, he argued that white society bore ultimate responsibility for the racism and oppression that led to this rage, and he urged President Johnson to focus on the underlying problem: unemployment. King’s biblical text was the parable of the Rich Fool; the sermon focused on the evils of materialism, and it stressed human dependence upon God and interdependence with other human beings (Burns 2004: 352).

I'll write about that exposition in my next post.

Bible Odyssey: Parable of the Sower

The Parable of the Sower (St. James the Less Church, London)

The Society of Biblical Literature has an excellent "public scholarship" website, and I am happy to report that it just posted a page on the parable of the Sower that I contributed to the project.

The short essay hits a few major points about the parable as it is found in Mark 4:1-20, but it also includes some reception history elements, such as a note about John Chrysostom's interpretation of the parable.

The post also includes some of my pictures, such as the sculpture of the Sower parable from the St. James the Less church in London that I talk about in four blog posts last year: one, two, three, and four.

I am extremely grateful to the Managing Editor of Bible Odyssey, Moira Bucciarelli. Developing essays for Bible Odyssey is much more complicated than it appears, and she shepherded the piece from the beginning to the end, including peer reviews, copy edits, and so forth, even doing things that others may overlook (e.g., creating the links to explain words, send readers to primary texts, etc.--and others whose names I don't know also assisted in the project). She did a masterful job, and it was a pleasure to work with her.

Even if you don't go to my essay, the Bible Odyssey website is well worth a look; it is an important resource. Also recently posted, for example, is a piece entitled, "What is Reception History" by Brennan Breed.

Go take a look at the SBL's Bible Odyssey web site.

Up next: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Parables

The Class of '65

My Introduction to Religion class is reading the collection of sermons and speeches by Dr. King in the book, I have a Dream. In that light, I think I will begin a few posts about Dr. King's use of the parables in his sermons and speeches. 

On a related topic: This week Oxford College's Chaplain, Lyn Pace, brought to campus Jim Auchmutey, the author of The Class of '65, and Greg Wittkamper, the main subject of the book. Greg lived at Koinonia Farm during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and his story of civil rights, persecution, and ultimate reconciliation with some of those who persecuted him is a powerful one. I recommend the book, and you can read about their visit to Oxford College here.

You can read about Koinonia Farm here.

Update and trivia

Those of you who have been following the blog for a while know that the book project has been way over the word limit for a long time and that I have been working since early summer (going through the manuscript several times) to get the manuscript closer to the appropriate word count. Getting each of the five main chapters at or under 20,000 words has been the main goal.

While on my writing retreat in Chicago, I was able to get both chapters 1 and 2 to ~19,700 words. 

Today I am pleased to report that I have revised chapter 3 again and that it is now ~19,400 words. 

Now on to chapter 4, which currently is 20,438 (chapter 5, though, is still close to 23,000).

Also, some trivia: Today I checked to see from which countries the most visits to this blog come. Here is the top seven (all time) since I began the blog in December 2013:

1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Ukraine
4. France
5. Russia
6. China
7. Germany

Canada just missed the cut, with Poland sneaking up as well.

Roger Williams, Religious Liberty, and the Parables (part 5): The Debate with John Cotton (conclusion)

Roger Williams

In addition to his arguments using the parable of the Wheat and the Tares, Williams cites the parable of the Sower, just previous to this parable. That parable includes four varieties of ground upon which the true messengers of Jesus sow their message of the kingdom. He argues that the four types of ground (symbolizing various “hearts of men”) also represent people in the entire world, not just inside the church. The good soil represents people in the church, and the

proper work of the church concerns the flourishing and prosperity of this sort of ground, and not the other unconverted three sorts; who, it may be, seldom or never come near the church, unless they be forced by civil sword, which the pattern of the first sower never used (Chapter 22).

Thus the parable of the Sower similarly demonstrates that Jesus commands the church to tolerate unbelievers and not to use coercion against them. This toleration does not mean approval or acceptance of their errors, however:

The Lord Jesus, therefore, gives direction concerning these tares, that unto the end of the world, successively in all the sorts and generations of them, they must be (not approved or countenanced, but) let alone, or permitted in the world (Chapter 22).

Offenders against “the civil state and common welfare” certainly should be punished by the state (Williams includes adultery with offences “against the civil state”: “robbery, murder, adultery, oppression, sedition, and mutiny”), but Jesus’ command, “Let them alone,” means that ministers of the gospel should have no civil power or authority, and civil authorities should not be permitted to punish religious dissenters or offenders (Chapter 27).

Yet, Williams argues, the church should not be passive against these tares, such as the ones who “with perverse and evil doctrines labor spiritually to devour the flock, and to draw away disciples after them” (Chapter 19). Williams agrees that their “mouths must be stopped” but stipulates that, as Jesus taught, “no carnal force and weapon to be used against them; but their mischief to be resisted with those might weapons of the holy armory of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Until Jesus returns at the end times, all such (evil) people must be tolerated, as Jesus commands: “Let them alone until the harvest.”

Williams’s treatment of the Society of Friends (Quakers) demonstrates his commitment to religious liberty. Although he emphatically denounces them (e.g., his last published work, the 1676 George Fox Digg’d Out of His Burrowes), Williams adamantly rejected requests to help “stamp out” this new religious movement. Unlike neighboring Massachusetts or Connecticut, Williams permitted no Quaker to be fined, whipped, disfigured, burned, hanged, or otherwise punished by the government in Rhode Island (Gaustad 2005: 60, 107-108).

The implications are dramatic and shocking to Puritans like Cotton: there are no “holy commonwealths” like Puritans in Massachusetts sought to create; there are only “holy churches.” Jesus’ parable of the Wheat and Tares actually undermines the Puritan use of Scripture to create a godly society or “New Israel” (Byrd 2002: 113). Against the commonly held view that a state-sponsored church is necessary to promote an orderly society, Williams proclaims that freedom of religion and the separation of church and state are necessary to promote order, peace, and a just society: “obedience to the command of Christ to let the tares alone will prove the only means to preserve their civil peace, and that without obedience to this command of Christ, it is impossible . . . to preserve the civil peace (Chapter 26). Christians should not promote or support or even acquiesce to religious persecution; they should instead speak fervently and prophetically against all such religious coercion.

Roger Williams, Religious Liberty, and the Parables (part 4): The Debate with John Cotton (cont.)

The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution . . . .

Williams responds to Cotton’s argument that tares are so similar to wheat in appearance that they must designate hypocrites within the church by examining the Greek text of the parable. The word for tare (zizania) designates all sorts of weeds, so the term signifies people who are “manifestly different from, and opposite to, the true worshippers of God.” In addition, in the parable, the servants easily recognize the difference between the wheat and the tares very early in their development (Chapter 20), and Williams later insinuates that Cotton, ensconced in his “soft and rich saddle” of the city life in Boston, may not be the best judge of agricultural practices (Williams 1963: 304).

The church, Williams argues, is a beautiful garden within the sinful world but distinguishable from it. The garden of the church should remain pure with its righteous wheat, but the field of the world in which it finds itself includes sinful tares. The parable demonstrates that Christian rulers and ministers should not confuse the garden of the church with the field of the world. Constantine, the first Roman emperor to be identified as a Christian, began this horrible confusion within the history of Christendom with terrible results:

Doubtless these holy men, emperors and bishops, intended and aimed right to exalt Christ; but not attending to the command of Christ Jesus, to permit the tares to grow in the field of the world, they made the garden of the church and the field of the world to be all one; and might not only sometimes, in their zealous mistakes, persecute good wheat instead of tares, but also pluck up thousands of those precious stalks by commotions and combustions about religion . . . wrought by such wars . . . (Chapter 64).

Jesus uses the field to symbolize the entire world, not just the church, because the world is an extremely wicked place. The problem is that as soon as:

the Lord Jesus had sown the good seed, the children of the kingdom, true Christianity, or the true church, the enemy, Satan, presently, in the night of security, ignorance, and error, while men slept, sowed also the tares which are anti-Christians, or false Christians.

People like Cotton incorrectly desire to call down fiery judgments upon these people:

and to pluck them by the roots out of the world. But the Son of man, the meek Lamb of God—for the elect’s sake which must be gathered out of Jew and Gentile, pagan, anti-Christian—commands a permission of them in the world until the time of the end of the world, when the goats and sheep, the tares and wheat, shall be eternally separated from each other” (Chapter 21).

In the next post, I will discuss how Williams connects the parable of the Sower to this argument.