God and Human Dignity

Rufus Burrow

Description

Although countless books have been devoted to the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr., few, if any, have focused on King's appropriation of, and contribution to, the intellectual tradition of personalism. Emerging as a philosophical movement in the early 1900s, personalism is a type of philosophical idealism that has a number of affinities with Christianity, such as a focus on a personal God and the sanctity of persons. Burrow points to similarities and dissimilarities between personalism and the social gospel movement with its call to churchgoers to involve themselves in the welfare of both individuals and society. He argues that King's adoption of personalism represented the fusion of his black Christian faith and his commitment not only to the social gospel of Rauschenbusch, but most especially to the social gospelism practiced by his grandfather, father, and black preacher-scholars at Morehouse College. Burrow devotes much-needed attention both to King's conviction that the universe is value-infused and to the implications of this ideology for King's views on human dignity and his concept of the "Beloved Community."

Burrow also sheds light on King’s doctrine of God. He contends that King's view of God has been uncritically and erroneously relegated by black liberation theologians to the general category of "theistic absolutism" and he offers corrections to what he believes are misinterpretations of this and other aspects of King’s thought. He concludes with an application of King’s personalism to present-day social problems, particularly as they pertain to violence in the black community.

This book is a useful and fresh contribution to our understanding of the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. It will be read with interest by ethicists, theologians, philosophers, and social historians.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Éthique et morale
• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Theology
• Civil Rights
• 20th Century
• Modern
• HISTORY
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Universidad de Boston
• Personalism
• Benjamin Mays
• Modern history
• General officer
• Boston University
• Civil and political rights
• Ethics
• General
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Université de Boston

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 31 janvier 1992
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268161019
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

GOD AND HUMAN DIGNITY
God AND HUMAN DIGNITY
The Personalism, Theology, and Ethics of Martin Luther King, Jr.
RUFUS BURROW, JR.
Foreword by Lewis V. Baldwin and Walter G. Muelder
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Copyright 2006 by University of Notre Dame
Published in the United States of America
Reprinted in 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Burrow, Rufus, 1951-
God and human dignity : the personalism, theology, and ethics of Martin Luther King, Jr. / by Rufus Burrow, Jr.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN -13: 978-0-268-02194-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN -10: 0-268-02194-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN -13: 978-0-268-02195-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN -10: 0-268-02195-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Personalism. 2. King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968. I. Title.
B828.5.B86 2006
230 .61092-dc22
2006001562
ISBN 9780268161019
This book is printed on acid-free paper .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
For Sheronn Lynn ( Juris Doctor ), beloved daughter.
In the hope that you will retain your sense of dignity and self as you navigate the boundaries of law, ethics, and religion; and that your decision making, application of the law, and your daily living will always be guided by the highest estimate of the worth of persons as such and the conviction that the universe itself is founded on justice and morality.
C ONTENTS
Foreword by Lewis V. Baldwin and Walter G. Muelder
Acknowledgments
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 . King s Intellectual Odyssey: From Morehouse to Crozer
CHAPTER 2 . Social Gospel and Walter Rauschenbusch
CHAPTER 3 . King and Personalism
CHAPTER 4 . King s Conception of God
CHAPTER 5 . The Dignity of Being and Sexism
CHAPTER 6 . Personal Communitarianism and the Beloved Community
CHAPTER 7 . Objective Moral Order and Moral Laws
CHAPTER 8 . Use of Moral Laws and the Vietnam War
CHAPTER 9 . The Universe Is Friendly: Social-Ethical Implications
Afterword: An Appreciation
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
F OREWORD
To understand Martin Luther King, Jr. s commanding position in American religious, cultural, and intellectual history, it is crucial to recall his influence in the realm of ideas. After all, King was as much a man of ideas as he was a practitioner of creative nonviolent dissent and a crusader for freedom, justice, and equality of opportunity. Moreover, he profoundly influenced the intellectual climate of his times, for he wrote books and essays and inspired academics even as his ideas became the anvil upon which his crusade was shaped and launched. This is the message coursing through Rufus Burrow, Jr. s painstaking, balanced, and probing treatment of King s intellectual sources, categories, and contributions.
Burrow reminds us that King was an intellectual before he was a social activist , a point often overlooked even by the most established King scholars. King s intellectual odyssey, Burrow concludes, began at Atlanta s Morehouse College (1944-48), where he was exposed to black preacher-scholars who combined a deep appreciation for trends in modern thinking with a keen sense of social responsibility, and extended through his years at Crozer Theological Seminary (1948-51) and Boston University (1951-55), where he studied theology, philosophy, and ethics. Burrow s attention to Morehouse is highly commendable, because that historically black institution is too often ignored or slighted in treatments of King s intellectual pilgrimage. Morehouse is rarely mentioned even in the best and most widely read intellectual biographies of King.
Equally praiseworthy is Burrow s insistence that King s pervasive power and influence as a thinker and idealist cannot be explained solely from the standpoint of his studies at Morehouse, Crozer, and Boston-that those institutions merely provided King with an intellectual structure and conceptual framework to articulate ideas that he initially inherited from his family background, church upbringing, and exposure to Jim Crowism. Thus, King s intellectual formation, and indeed his intellectual life as a whole, were complex and many-sided. Aside from the theological liberalism of Benjamin E. Mays, George D. Kelsey, and others at Morehouse, the Christian theology and ethics of George W. Davis and others at Crozer, and the idealistic personalism of Edgar S. Brightman and L. Harold DeWolf at Boston, King had the traditions of his extended family, the inheritance of the black church, and the racial conflicts of the South. Apparently, Burrow has a genuine appreciation for the synthesis that exists in King s thought between his cultural-experiential sources and his academic-intellectual sources, a point that cannot be made regarding other intellectual biographers of King.
Burrow provides a rich and thorough examination of King s philosophical personalism, Christian theology, and ethical system, devoting special attention to his ethic of the beloved community and bringing out emphatically such ideas as: (1) God is personal; (2) freedomism; (3) reverence for persons; and (4) the communal nature of reality. The personalist tradition in philosophy, with which such ideas are largely associated, is the longest-lived school of thought continuously associated with one American university; namely, Boston University. Borden P. Bowne, the founder of Boston personalism, began his career there in 1876, and his influence on King, which was quite indirect, was filtered through subsequent generations of personalist thinkers. The second generation of that philosophy was dominated by Edgar S. Brightman, a prolific writer and lecturer, who became King s first Ph.D. advisor at Boston University.
Brightman died in 1953, and L. Harold DeWolf, one of his students, advised King through the completion of his doctoral work two years later. Burrow s treatment of King in relation to Brightman and DeWolf is quite definitive, covering the range of King s studies and also DeWolf s directorship of King s dissertation, which made a strong personalist critique of Paul Tillich s and Henry N. Wieman s ideas concerning God. Interestingly enough, Burrow has an advantage in dealing with King s personalism, theology, and ethics, in as much as he did his own doctoral studies at Boston University under Peter A. Bertocci and Walter G. Muelder, who belong to the third generation in the Boston personalist tradition. Burrow places himself in the fifth generation of that philosophical tradition, and he brings to his analysis a knowledge of black scholarly leaders who have dealt critically and constructively with the King materials.
While viewing personalism as King s conceptual framework and his way of understanding and relating to God and the universe, Burrow does not mean to suggest that the civil rights leader s prophetic utterances and social protest were rooted in white Western theological, philosophical, and ethical sources. Burrow refers to a homespun Personalism that King learned through his family and church traditions, a phenomenon in which the sacredness of human personality, the reality of the moral order, and the idea of a personal, loving, and rational God have always been affirmed. Also, while acknowledging King s indebtedness to Boston personalists like Bowne, Brightman, and DeWolf, Burrow boldly and rightly contends that King, by taking to the streets and translating personalist ideas into practical action and reality, contributed essentially as much to personalism as personalism gave him. Some King scholars might find this contention problematic. Even so, Burrow substantially builds on the analyses provided by scholars such as John J. Ansbro and Kenneth L. Smith and Ira G. Zepp, Jr., all of whom fail to note in their otherwise rich scholarship the vitality of King s contributions to personalism s deeper meaning and significance. Burrow s point is that when it comes to personalistic thought, King was as much a critical-creative contributor of ideas as he was an uncritical-prosaic recipient of ideas.
Burrow reminds us that during King s years as a leader in the civil rights movement, he matured in his understanding and appreciation of Boston personalism, and particularly the communitarian dimensions of the human person and how this related to his practice of nonviolence as a social ethic. King himself spoke to this in his Stride Toward Freedom (1958), which was written two years after he was catapulted to national and international fame due to his leadership in the Montgomery bus boycott. King wrote:
The next stage of my intellectual pilgrimage to nonviolence came during my doctoral studies at Boston University. Here I had the opportunity to talk to many exponents of nonviolence, both students and visitors to the campus. Boston University, under the influence of Dean Walter Muelder and Professor Allen Knight Chalmers, had a deep sympathy for pacifism. Both Dean Muelder and Dr. Chalmers had a passion for social justice that stemmed not from a superficial optimism, but from a deep faith in the possibilities of human beings when they allowed themselves to become co-workers with God.
Dr. Burrow s analysis of King s adoption of philosophical personalism, his conception of God, his personal communitarianism, his goal of the beloved community, his belief in an objective moral order with moral laws, and his presentation of the socioethical implications of the faith in a universe that is friendly to these values-all demonstrate various dimensions of the nonviolent convictions which King developed.
Burrow s insights concerning King s relationship to the social gospel tradition are equally important. In his estimation, the benefi