Rekindling King’s Vision of a ‘Beloved Community’

He is celebrated as a civil rights leader, a social reformer and a great orator, a towering figure representing 20th century pacifism and political leadership.

But the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. also was a theologian, a title often overlooked each Jan. 15, on the anniversary of his birth.

Yet it was King’s theology--especially a path-breaking concept he called the “beloved community”--that shaped his life and made him one of the prophetic voices of his age.

Nearly three decades after King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, scholars say the nation needs to embrace his theological ideas if it is to overcome the social and racial ills that continue to plague it.

“It’s a very xenophobic, mean-spirited time,” said the Rev. Calvin S. Morris, academic dean of the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta.

“Dr. King’s theology talks about inclusion, not exclusion,” added Morris, former executive director of the King Center, an Atlanta organization that works for nonviolent social change. “It talks about welcoming the stranger, not turning and shutting the door on the stranger.”

King’s “beloved community”--the idea that all people are inherently good and equally deserving of justice and peace--was a unique synthesis of Christian ideals and civil rights principles, set against an emerging cultural backdrop of religious ecumenism and globalization.

“We have inherited a large house, a great ‘world house,’ in which we have to live together--black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, [Muslim] and Hindu--a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest,” King wrote in 1967.

King drew his “beloved community” from the classical Christian concept of the Kingdom of God, in which all of the created world dwells together in peace and harmony, and refashioned the concept into the notion that a personal God cares for and directs the creation, and that Christian love, including the love of enemies, binds all peoples together.

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Most important, however, King believed that the “beloved community” was achievable through the power of redemptive suffering, exemplified in Jesus’ death on the cross, and carried out in the nonviolent struggles against poverty and racism.

King’s theology was forged in an era of sharp racial and religious divisions, and sprang as much from his experiences as a civil rights leader and minister as from his academic studies at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa., and Boston University School of Theology.

“Theology occurs where people are in struggle,” Bishop John Hurst Adams, senior bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, said in an interview. “We were schoolmates for three years at Boston University, so we did some theological study together, but that was not where his theology happened.”

King’s theology was the foundation for his civil rights activism, as he organized nonviolent protests against the legally--and often violently--enforced racial segregation of the South. Homes and churches were being bombed and civil rights workers were murdered. More generally, America’s ethnic and religious communities lived with little interaction.

Noel Erskine, associate professor of theology and ethics at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta and author of “King Among the Theologians,” said King’s theology stressed the need to relate Christian faith to concrete action.

King believed that a theologian “must be committed to struggle to change the world as well as willing to lay down his or her life in the quest for justice for the oppressed,” Erskine said.

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That means, Erskine added, “that issues of economics, justice . . . poverty--these issues must be brought from the periphery to the center of theological attention. If you love each other and respect each other, then this has to be translated into economic terms. . . . We can’t have islands of poverty in an ocean of plenty.”

King used to say he could see glimpses of the “beloved community” in the integrated mass protests that he led.

But in the years after his death, King’s theology was largely eclipsed by court rulings that failed to advance the cause of school desegregation, political attacks on affirmative action and erosion in commitments to integration among whites, coupled with the rise in the Black Power movement of the 1970s and renewed black nationalism.

Now, scholars and friends of King say his theology must be renewed as the nation deals with a new generation of racial and social issues.

“When we think of the violence that’s threatening everything we hold dear, his nonviolence approach, which emerges out of respect even for the enemy--I think we will have to turn to that,” said Erskine, who has taught a course on King’s theology with the civil rights leader’s widow, Coretta Scott King.

In some quarters, King’s ideas already are being rekindled.

For example, the Congress of National Black Churches plans to call for a day of reflection and prayer on the anniversary of King’s assassination April 4. The coalition of eight historically black denominations will issue an “inclusive religious community appeal for nonviolence and peace and justice in our society,” said Adams, the founder of the coalition.

And Morris pointed to a new ecumenical effort titled “Call for Renewal” as a latter-day manifestation of King’s ideals. Led by evangelicals, Catholics, black church members and mainline Protestants, the initiative seeks to promote what it calls “biblical virtues of justice and righteousness.”

“These are people who both are concerned about personal salvation and personal renewal, but they’re also concerned about societal . . . renewal,” said Morris, “and that’s certainly a part of Dr. King’s philosophy.”