It is without question that Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the most influential and controversial figures of our time. Born January 15, 1929, the second child of Rev. and Mrs. King would grow into a man whose life would come to represent the ideals of civil rights and equal justice for the poor and oppressed, “regardless of race, creed, or color.” Though he had options to preach or teach in the North, Martin Luther King, Jr. chose to enter into full-time pastoral ministry while completing his doctorate in systematic theology at Boston University. Feeling a moral obligation to return to the South, King accepted a call in 1954 to become pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Less than one year later, Rosa Parks would refuse to give up her seat on a city bus in protest, leading to the young King being thrust into a leadership role which he carried the rest of his life.

Though Martin Luther King, Jr. held many titles – head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (S.C.L.C.), civil rights advocate, orator, and Nobel Peace laureate – the one title or image that best encapsulates his personhood is that of a committed Christian minister. His detractors have said that he perverted the Christian message, but in reality he captured its very essence. In reference to this John Henderson Cartwright says, “Thus it was neither King the humble humanitarian nor King the rootless radical who challenged the status quo of the 1950s and 60s. Rather it was King the committed Christian who, firmly grounded in the tradition, reminded his Christian brothers and sisters that”:

You have a dual citizenry. You live both in time and eternity. Your highest loyalty is to God, and not to the mores or the folkways, the state of the nation, or any man-made institution. If any earthly institution of custom conflicts with God’s will, it is your

Christian duty to oppose it. You must never allow the transitory evanescent demands of man-made institutions to take precedence over the eternal demands of the Almighty God.[1]

Cartwright states, “Likewise the point of departure of King’s social philosophy and vision of the goal of human society was fundamentally religious…Furthermore, despite the degree of influence on him by non-Christian sources – e.g. the classical philosophers, Karl Marx, and especially Gandhi – the fact remains that his “intellectual” categories were drawn almost exclusively from Christian theology and morality.”[2] It might be more appropriate to say King’s “intellectual categories” were not drawn almost exclusively from Christian theology and morality, but that his “intellectual categories” were used to critique, almost exclusively, Christian theology and morality.

Out of this critique the ideal of the Beloved Community would be used to express King’s vision of the human community. This term was not something that was exclusive to King, but was a part of the “popular theological vocabulary” of the Boston University School of Theology during the period when he was in attendance there as a doctoral student (1951-1955).[3] The term is itself can be traced to the philosophical writings of Josiah Royce (1855-1916). Along with his teacher, R.H. Lotze, Royce played a major role in the development of the school of thought that is called “personal idealism” or “personalism.” In all likelihood King would have been well acquainted with Royce, for Boston University was a “center for personalism” and was the home of the leading personalists of that time: Edgar S. Brightman, Peter A. Bertocci, and L. Harold De Wolf. These men were King’s primary instructors, with DeWolf serving as his major professor.[4] The debt to Royce for the term, Beloved Community, and its meaning for King is apparent from this passage in which Royce expresses his idea of the universal community:

All morality namely, is, from this point of view, to be judged by the standards of the BELOVED COMMUNITY, of the ideal Kingdom of Heaven. Concretely stated, this means that you are to test every course of action nor by the question: What can we find in the parables or in the Sermon on the Mount which seems to us more or less directly to bear upon this special matter? The central doctrine of the Master was: ‘So act that the Kingdom of Heaven may come.’ This means: So act as to help, however you can, and whenever you can towards making mankind one loving brotherhood, whose love is not a mere affection for morally detached individuals, but a love of the unity of its own life upon its own divine level, and a love of individuals in so far as they can be raised to communion with this spiritual community itself.[5]

Royce also stresses both loyalty and sacrifice, with loyalty “the Will to believe in something eternal, and to express that belief in the practical life of a human being.” According to Royce sacrifice finds universality in the ideal of the Beloved Community. Royce says, “So the sacrifice of Christ is emulated by the death of each individual man – death to selfishness…the death this died by membership in the ‘Beloved Community,’ means the sacrifice of individual desires in the interest if the ideal of brotherhood of all.”[6] These themes, though central ingredients in King’s conception of the Beloved Community were not exclusive to its development. He cites as the other major influence Walter Rauschenbusch’s interpretation of the Kingdom of God and its relationship to the idea of an inclusive human community. Among the theologians that King studied during his first year at Crozer was Walter Rauschenbusch, a German Lutheran-turned-Baptist who wrote Christianity and the Social Crisis. It is said to be the publication that is generally regarded as the beginning of the Social Gospel movement in American churches. “The book was among the few King would ever cite specifically as an influence on his own religious beliefs.”[7] Rauschenbusch “rejected the usual religious emphasis on matters of piety, metaphysics, and the supernatural, interpreting Christianity instead as a spirit of brotherhood made manifest in social ethics. He saw the Christian ministry as an extension of the Old Testament prophets, who denounced pride, selfishness, and oppression as transgression against the divine historical plan, which was to culminate in the Christian ideal of ‘love perfection’ among all people.”[8] King is thought to have found the theological basis for his social concern in the thought of Rauschenbusch’s “emphasis on Christian social responsibility and his insistence that the gospel at its best deals with the whole man, not only his soul but also his body; not only his spiritual well-being, but his material well-being.”[9] Rauschenbusch acknowledged his debt to Royce’s The Problem With Christianity in aiding him to arrive at a solidaristic view of society and an interpretation of many traditional Christian doctrines in social terms.[10] For Rauschenbusch the central theme was the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom is the social ideal of Christendom and “the first and most essential dogma” of the Christian faith.[11] Accordingly, the Kingdom was both a religious and a social doctrine: religious in that it is “divine in its origin, progress, and consummation, and is the continuous revelation of the power, the righteousness, and the love of God;” social in that the Kingdom is “always both present and future…always coming, always pressing in on the present, always big with possibility, and always inviting immediate action” that promotes the progressive unity of mankind.[12] This doctrine of the Kingdom led Rauschenbusch to conclude that the Christian religion itself is essentially corporate and communal in character. He stated, therefore, that the fundamental purpose of Christianity is “to transform human society into the Kingdom of God by regenerating all human relations and reconstituting them in accordance with the will of God.”[13] Accordingly Cartwright asserts, “Hence the Kingdom is synonymous with a transformed and regenerated society; for, in the words of his classic definition, it is ‘humanity organized according to the will of God’ and ‘the organized fellowship of humanity acting under the impulse of love.’”[14]

King’s concept of the Beloved Community represented a synthesis of the insights of Royce, Rauschenbusch, and several other sources including the Hebrew prophets, the New Testament, the founding fathers, Kant, Hegel, Marx, the existentialists, Nygren, Gandhi, Niebuhr, Ramsey, Thurman, Tillich, and the Personalists, especially DeWolf, Brightman, Muelder, and Davis.[15] King’s vision of Beloved Community reflects that of Royce and Rauschenbusch’s in that members of the Beloved Community would allow the spirit of agape to direct all their individual and social relationships; hence they would manifest a persistent willingness to sacrifice for the good of the community and for their own spiritual and temporal good.[16] For King each person was to be seen as an image of God and heir to rights not apportioned to a person by a state, but from God. His vision of “total interrelatedness” and of the solidarity (Royce and Rauschenbusch) of the human family meant that all people would be aware that what directly affects one person affects all persons indirectly, e.g. “injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere.” Accordingly, they would never reduce persons to mere laws, actions, and attitudes they would never persons to mere means, but always treat them as ends-in-themselves with the right of rational self-determination.[17] His vision saw each person judged not by the color of their skin, but by the “content of their character.” King maintained that such an ideal community not only would exclude all forms of discrimination, but would exemplify full interaction that is “genuine intergroup and interpersonal living.”[18] In this setting every other member in every phase of social life would welcome the participation of every other member in every phase of social life. This interaction would not be due to the enforcement of laws, but based on a commitment to interrelatedness (brotherhood). This interrelatedness would acknowledge and respect the rights of all human relations, both social and economic.[19] Despite the ubiquitous nature of the concept of the Beloved Community, King did allude to the fact that it could be achieved. Though no central place (writings or speeches) clearly delineated or systematized his vision it can be said that for King the Beloved Community would be: 1) the ideal corporate expression of the Christian faith and 2) it is a fully integrated and inclusive community of love and justice and brotherhood.[20] Also noteworthy is the fact that in the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, King would describe the purpose of that organization as one whose “ultimate aim…is to foster and create the ‘beloved community’ in America…S.C.L.C. works for integration.” Though King worked for the “Kingdom to Come” there were elements that kept it from becoming a reality in his time.

First King emphasized in his writings that man is a sinner. He acknowledges Niebuhr’s “realism” for assisting him in recognizing the illusions of a superficial optimism concerning human nature, the dangers of false idealism as well as the becoming more aware of “the glaring reality of collective evil.”[21] King asserted, Man collectivized in the group, the tribe, the race, and the nation often sinks to the levels of barbarity unthinkable even among lower animals.”[22] In maintaining that Niebuhr’s theology “is a persistent reminder of the reality of sin on every level of man’s existence King affirmed:

Evil is with us as a stark, grim, and colossal reality. The Bible affirms the reality of evil in glaring terms. It symbolically pictures it in the work of a serpent which comes to inject a discord into the beautiful, harmonious symphony of life in a garden…The whole history of life is the history of a struggle between good and evil.[23] 

King recognized and stressed the fact that all the great religions have recognized that in the midst of the upward thrust if goodness there is the downward pull of evil. According to King they have discerned a tension at the very core of the universe.[24] Second, though King spoke of the “amazing potential for goodness” of humanity, he accepted a notion developed by Tillich and others which asserts man’s freedom is limited, and that man is a finite child of nature. King recognized that humanity’s finite nature interfered with the higher life of humanity and its ability to commit fully to agape and therefore its ability to realize and sustain the beloved community. Third, King acknowledged that the existentialists and Tillich contributed to our understanding of humanity’s estrangement from its own essential nature and the role of anxiety in the life of humanity. King believed that humanity’s cooperation with divine grace could empower man to deal constructively with this anxiety and self-estrangement, but only if fragmentarily “eliminate these conditions that increase the limitations on man’s freedom and restrict his capacity to love and hence his ability to achieve the perfect actualization of the Beloved Community.”[25] Fourth, King identified with Hegel’s conviction that it belongs to the nature of the human spirit to develop dialectically as it struggles against objective evils. This “grounding” was central to the concept of the Beloved Community being quite removed from the idea of an other-worldly realm, but still a community that was a divine dimension here on earth. Fifth, King also accepted the Personalist view of human nature that emphasized the need for continual progress. This, according to Brightman is “an affirmation of the possibility of infinite progress,” and “a denial that any limit can be set, as long as man is conscious, which would render progress impossible.”[26] Sixth, King also accepted the Personalist law that all persons ought to will the best possible values in every situation. Ansbro quotes Brightman who explained, “The ideal of the best possible is relatively modest in comparison with ideal of absolute and complete perfection.”[27] Seventh, while King stressed that desegregation would only be a partial step toward the goal of “genuine intergroup and interpersonal living.”[28] It was his assertion that desegregation would bring people together physically but not spiritually.

Ansbro asks, “If King did not expect that humanity could achieve the perfect actualization of the ideal of the beloved community, then what purpose did this ideal serve in his movement?”[29] It can be said here that King clearly understood the finite nature of humanity’s existence and that which can be achieved only fragmentarily as such should not preclude the need to constantly pursue its aim. This is the courage to be:

Although man’s moral pilgrimage may never reach a destination point on earth, his never-ceasing strivings may bring him ever closer to the city or righteousness. And though the Kingdom of God may remain not yet as a universal reality in history, in the present it may exist in such isolated forms as in judgment, in personal devotion, and in some group life.”[30]

Ansbro says, “Though mindful of human limitations, King could still affirm with the Personalists the power of divine grace, the human capacity for agape, and the moral obligation to will the best possible values in every situation.”[31] Accordingly DeWolf indicates that even without believing that the Beloved Community will be perfectly fulfilled in history we can preserve this concept as a very realistic and active goal and use it as a measure of whether or not the community (as a whole) is moving towards the ideal.[32] Echoing this sentiment Brightman states:

This world is such that that in all its history it will never be perfect; yet it is such that the other world, the world of the perfect ideal, will always be at work in it. As surely as there is a world against which we protest, so surely the ideal in the name of which we protest is more potent than the world’s evils.[33]

Accordingly, Gandhi argued that “the fact that the individual cannot reach the perfect state while still in the body allows for the constant striving after the ideal that is the basis of all spiritual progress.” The ideal must remain the goal:

Man will ever remain imperfect, and it will always be his part to try to be perfect; so that perfection in love or non-possession will remain an unattainable ideal as long as we are alive but towards which we must ceaselessly strive[34]

This emphasis also extends to Rauschenbusch who, without promoting any utopian delusion, appealed to faith as a key to the possibility of a new social order:

We know well that there is no perfection for man in this life; there is only growth toward perfection…We make it a duty to seek what is unattainable. We have the same paradox in the perfectibility of society. We shall never have a perfect social life, yet we must seek it with faith.[35]

King emphasized the moral obligation of humanity to struggle against non-being and affirm its capacity to move closer to the ideal of the Beloved Community. In rejecting the “excessive optimism” of liberal theology, which taught that religion and education without social pressure could make the actualization of the ideal inevitable, he also transcended Niebuhr’s pessimism.[36] King was convinced that human nature could be understood within a conflation of the truths of liberalism and neo-orthodoxy. This possibility undergirds King’s view of the Beloved Community being synonymous with the Kingdom of God. It can be said that from this point of view the idea of the Beloved Community becomes the apparatus by which humanity is “organized according to the will of God.” The Beloved Community becomes a “corrective” to the error of “spiritualizing the Kingdom by projecting it into the world-to-come, but also the error of identifying the Kingdom with a particular social or political philosophy.”[37] Here is King’s own description of his vision of the Beloved Community:

The dream is one of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men do not argue that that color of a man’s skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a place where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity…where every man will respect the dignity and worth of all human personality, and men will dare to live together as brothers…Whenever it is fulfilled, we will emerge form the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man into the bright and glowing daybreak of freedom and justice for all of God’s children.

From his central concept of community, King drew two more conclusions which became basic to both his idea of the Beloved Community and to his active ministry. First was the conviction that there cannot be community with social justice. For King, community and justice are welded together and that community with justice is hollow; justice without community is blind. Second was the concept of agape as the only force that can bring community into existence. Of this Cartwright says, “Justice, King would say, may help to form an inclusive neighborhood, but only love can produce an inclusive neighborliness.”[38] It is this concept of agape which allowed King “to make the critical distinction between that which underlies community and that which creates and sustains it.”[39] King defines agape as “…love in action. Agape is love seeking to preserve and create community. It is insistence on community even when one seeks to break it. Agape is willing to sacrifice in the interest of mutuality. Agape is a willingness to go to any length to restore community.”[40]

The most prominent of King’s theological contributions was the remarkably consistent translating of his beliefs into action. In this process he related his theological teachings and beliefs into the various social theories and movements of his time. His theoretical position was the ground upon which all of the aforementioned influences would be tested. In Montgomery, Selma, Birmingham the adequacy of the collective thought displayed in his theological position would find truth in the attempt to realize the Beloved Community.