The Martin Luther in Martin Luther King: Why We Need Them Both
When my children were small, they attended a Lutheran church and a public school, with Reformation Day in one and an MLK holiday in the other. More than once they came home with furrowed little brows and asked, “Who do we follow? Is it Martin Luther or Martin Luther King?” For all they knew, they might be the same guy. I usually said, “Ask your mother,” but the questions persisted: Martin Luther or Martin Luther King? Finally, I settled on “Both.” Now in the 89th year of Martin Luther King and the 500th of the Lutheran Reformation, I will try to say why.
This is a topic full of pitfalls, the main one being the incommensurability of two historical and theological epochs. For example, how does one address issues of church and state in the 16th and the 21st centuries? Or speak of revolution and defiance of the state in an era before the Age of Revolution? How does one compare the life-or-death theological controversies of one epoch with indifference to the same in another? For example, it’s hard for us to imagine a theological showdown over the freedom of the will much less a learned discussion of it without the input of neuroscience and psychology. It’s equally difficult to imagine how the divine composition of the bread and wine in the Eucharist might have once held geo-political significance in the shaping of Christendom.
Despite the distance, however, we are the inheritors of two massive traditions, each with continuing theological significance. For lack of more precise language, we may call them personal faith and political freedom. For many Americans they are conjured by the names Martin Luther and Martin Luther King. What do they have to do with each other? Is there a meeting place? If so, where?
Surely, they must have more in common than their names. They do, but let’s begin with the name. At birth in 1929, King was not named Martin but Michael after his father Michael King. In the Sweet Auburn neighborhood of Atlanta where King grew up, they would always be known as Big Mike and Little Mike. Later, however, when his birth certificate was officially recorded, a neat line has been drawn through Michael and replaced in pen by “Martin Luther, Jr.” In 1934 the senior King had attended a Baptist World Alliance meeting in Germany where, as the story goes, he was so impressed by the spirit of Luther that when he returned to Atlanta he changed both his name and his son’s. Martin Jr. himself would speak surprisingly little of his namesake. As a graduate student at the liberal Boston University he was predictably critical of Luther’s theology for its denial of human agency in the work of salvation. In Letter from Birmingham Jail he gives a shout-out to Luther as a positive example of nonconformity. Toward the end of his life, the younger King assumed the persona of his namesake and in a street-performance taped a series of demands on the door of City Hall in Chicago, presumably with Mayor Richard Daley in the role of Pope Leo X.
Luther, too, may have glimpsed the significance of his own name. Born Martin Luder, in 1517 he followed the custom of affecting the classical equivalent of his Germanic name and began answering to Luther, suggested perhaps by the Greek word eleutherios, “one who is free.”
More significant than the names they shared, both Martin Luthers were preachers of the gospel. This is a genuine point of contact. For despite five centuries of change, the molecular structure of preaching remains intact. All the molecules are present: speaker, pulpit, biblical text, and congregation—not to mention the preacher of every age’s stigmatic confidence in the spoken word to melt hearts of stone. Luther famously said that the word of God is a Taet Wort a “deed word” with the power to reshape reality. The church is not a Federhaus, a pen house, he said dismissively, but a Mundhaus, a “mouth house.” Likewise King once said, “I am a preacher. That means I’m in the heart changing business.” If they had lived in the Information Age each would have said, ‘Humankind does not live by information alone. There is no Christian life without testimony. No life without “Here I Stand” or “I Have a Dream.”
In an early chapter of Moby Dick Melville describes the pulpit in the Whaler’s Chapel. It is shaped like the prow of a ship, which leads him to conclude, “Yes, the world is a ship on its passage out and not a voyage complete and the pulpit is its prow.” That sounds hyperbolic in our own day, when the pulpit is too often the dinghy tied to the stern picking up the flotsam and jetsam of culture, but for the two Martin Luthers the metaphor is apt. For their proclamation spearheaded the religious and social movements they led, to which each brought a distinctive voice.
Both men spoke with uncommon urgency, for both believed the End was bearing down on them. Luther felt that preaching the true gospel was itself an eschatological activity and that his proclamation might easily be interrupted by the final consummation. Although King did not share Luther’s eschatological perspective on the gospel, he did have a sense that he was offering America’s its last chance. His movement was the last before the nation would be embroiled in the disorder that Luther once feared. He also labored in the expectation that his life would end suddenly while speaking or preaching. Any word might be his last. Both men’s sermons were postcards from the edge.
Both Luther and King found the necessity of preaching to be a insuperable burden. Luther grew weary of Wittenberg. Since Wittenberg was the laboratory for the gospel, Luther seems to have believed that Wittenbergers would stop sinning. Fed up, on one occasion he simply quit preaching. He said, “I would rather be stretched upon a wheel or carry stones than preach one sermon. It is a rotten office.” And King, suffering similar discouragement and pulpit fatigue, complained, “The calling to speak is a vocation of agony.” And yet, they lived for the spoken word; it made them who they were, and they deployed their words with uncommon beauty and grace. Hence it was fitting that on April 5, 1968 the New York Times’ led off its obituary for King with the words, “Martin Luther King was a preacher, a man from Georgia.”
Both preached continuously, Luther sometimes daily at one of two churches in Wittenberg or in his house. During Passiontide in 1529 he preached 18 times in 11 days. It’s that grind-it-out, stick-to-the cross discipline that characterizes Lutheran preaching. Such a hard but joyful narrowing of grace does not allow for grandiosity, self-importance, or Lutheran princes of the pulpit.
In King’s thirteen-year public ministry preaching was never a peripheral or exotic activity. For the language of his sermons often found its way into his civic addresses. At a minimum, his sermons were the first draft of his message to America. No church was too small and no town too insignificant that he would not bring the word. Like Luther, he believed that if they would only listen—and that was the problem—the word of God would work its holy magic. Like no American before him, he took that word out from under the sacred canopy and injected it into the realm of social conflict, politics, and public policy.
When a Negro church was firebombed, say in Terrell County, Georgia—and scores were—King and his associates would rush to the scene of the crime, King in his black preacher suit, white shirt, and dark tie with his KJV under his arm, would stride into the still-smoldering foundation, and there in the ashes he would not hold a press conference or tweet but preach a sermon. He would perform his own version of “Here I Stand,” symbolizing the triumph of the word of God over every attempt to destroy it.
Preaching and theology go hand in hand. At its best, preaching is the public or projective expression of the church’s theological convictions. Those of us who call ourselves Lutheran have been formed by Luther’s rediscovery of Paul’s gospel, the glowing center of which is Romans 3: “We hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by law.” To the extent to which we understand ourselves as made whole by God’s grace without any contributing goodness on our part and experience our lives as a divine gift, we have been formed and are sustained by the theology of Martin Luther.
The year before he died, Luther published a mini-memoir of his conversion. In it he remembers how he beat upon the word of God until it yielded a new understanding of the righteousness of God. Eventually, the word broke through and he realized that the righteousness of God is not a code of restrictions but an open table covered with gifts for all who trust in Christ. That’s what makes God good. It is not in God’s nature to hoard the divine purity but to give it away in the form of grace. Luther writes, “Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.” (Preface to Latin Writings, 1545).
The experience of God’s grace is followed by a giddy sense of freedom. Eleutheria! One can pen learned theological treatises, but freedom is a cry. It is the primal scream of the captive set free. Somebody’s got to shout, “Free at last! Thank God almighty, I’m free at last.” For Luther it meant freedom from paralyzing guilt and the fear of death and hell. It was freedom from the freefall into the abyss of God’s wrath.
Luther’s conversion to grace was personal, which is not the same as private. That is, it was not achieved apart from the community of believers in the church. In the moment, however, it was as personal as the perennial Lutheran question, “How can I find a gracious God?” which is a quest deeply rooted in personal anxiety. It is as personal as John Bunyan’s and the Puritans besetting question, “How do I know I am elected?” It was and is a matter of the heart. In one of his sermons Luther says, “The human heart is a ship on a raging sea.” William Faulkner’s dictum, “The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself,” accurately describes the young Martin Luther.
Before Martin Luther King could ask his followers to put their lives on the line for the sake of freedom he had to experience the giddiness of freedom himself. He too underwent a personal conversion. Paradoxically it was the theologian King, who as a graduate student was no great fan of Martin Luther, who gave his life trying to create a new society inspired by the principles of God’s expansive generosity. King’s Truth, which was his passion for justice, originated in Luther’s Truth, that is, in his own trust in the faithfulness of God come what may.
If Luther’s discovery took place in a tower, King’s occurred in a kitchen. During the bus boycott, he was serving as pastor in Montgomery, Alabama. It was about midnight and he had just received one of the several daily threatening telephone calls, this one threatening the life of his wife and child. He thought about running back to Daddy in Atlanta. At his wits end, he went into the parsonage kitchen and made a cup of coffee; he sat down at the table bowed his head and asked God for strength. What he received, he says, was a promise of God’s abiding presence. He says, “It seems that I could hear a voice saying, ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness; stand up for justice,’” and I will be with you forever. King often told this story not only to prove to his Baptist brethren that he had finally gotten the soul-shaking call that qualifies one to preach, but, more importantly, to explain why he wasn’t afraid and why they didn’t have to be afraid either.
Personal conversion can lead to spiritual claustrophobia in which everything is solved by accepting Jesus as “your personal savior.” The corrective is the cross. The cross is the closest thing to a selfie God has given us. We may look for God in nature, philosophy or in our own introspective spirituality. But it’s a fuzzy picture at best. The photograph only comes into focus when you look at the cross, for in it we see God’s redemptive love for all people—not just me. For Luther and King the cross of Christ opens a passage-way from my personal problems to the suffering of others. It takes us away from the unfeeling, dispassionate of god of stoicism to a God-in-Jesus who was subjected to unjust laws, publicly shamed, tortured, and put to death.
King came to the cross late. He was trained in liberal theology with an emphasis on the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. The young King preached sermons with such titles as “Discerning the Signs of History,” “Rediscovering Lost Values,” “Mastering our Fears.” and his early flagship sermon, “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life,” in which he offers a psychological interpretation of the dimensions of the heavenly city as found in the book of Revelation. But later things got real. What followed was the failed implementation of his victory in Selma and a growing white backlash. Then came the rise of black nationalism and the rising specter of violence. Then came Watts, Newark, Detroit, and four consecutive summers of insurrection in 150 American cities. Then came his lonely opposition to the war in Vietnam and his condemnation by every major news outlet, including the New York Times, and every civil rights organization in the US except his own. Then came the demon of depression and a growing sense of his own marginalization within the movement.
He came to the cross not by way of books but life. The early sermons in which he speaks of the utopian Beloved Community give way to his proclamation of the Kingdom of God. The inclusive “we” of his early sermons is replaced by the fierce “I” of his later speeches. Late in his life when they demanded he stop marching, he replied not in consensus but testimony: “I don’t march because I like it/ I march because I must/ and because I am a man/ and because I am a child of God.” By the end of his life he is all but incapable of speaking about his mission and his hope without dwelling on the cross of Jesus Christ, about which he reminds his hearers, “The cross is not a piece of jewelry but something you die on.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer repeatedly asked the question “Who is Jesus Christ for us today?” If Luther found him in Romans 3 in Paul’s exposition of grace, King found him in Luke 4 in the synagogue at Nazareth. For King, finally, it was not so much a matter of the experience of grace as its deployment. King did not retrace Paul’s careful argument in Romans 3 but rather identified with the preacher in Luke 4: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” In other words, King’s gospel was a gospel of Jesus’ vocation—and his own. That the same Spirit who anointed Jesus “comes upon” the followers of Jesus and entrusts to us the divine mission is itself good news. It is the gospel.
Whereas for Luther the word is an “acoustical affair,” King believes the prophet is given the gift of exceptional sight. The oldtime black preacher recreates a scene from the Bible by envisioning it. “It seems to me I can see . . . ,” he says, and then proceeds to “tell the vision,” for the prophet is a Seer, a “See-er,” one to whom it has been given to see things the rest of us can’t quite make out. At the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 King was addressing a still segregated America. Under the conceit of a dream he says in effect, ‘It seems to me I can see little black children and little white children playing together. I can see black people and white people sitting at table together and treating one another as kin,’ because the prophet can see that they really are kin. And this is why good, Bible-toting segregationists were frightened by King: They knew that when a prophet tells a vision, it comes to pass.
When Martin Luther King was 26 years old, he gave his first public speech in defense of freedom. He was the new pastor in town with a fancy Ph.D. The date was December 5, 1955, and the Montgomery bus boycott was only 3 days old. 2,000 people had filled the cavernous Holt St. Baptist Church. Hundreds more stood across the street listening to make-shift loud speakers. The tension in the air was not purely local. Over in Mississippi in place called Money, a 14-year old youngster named Emmett Till had been brutally murdered. His mother Mamie Till had courageously chosen an open casket for her son, mutilated as he was, in order to show the whole world the hideous badges of racism. Young King didn’t know it at the time, but he was about to give his first Black Lives Matter speech. Because Emmett Till’s life mattered.
The organizers of the gathering wanted to sustain the bus boycott. What they expected from the young pastor was a motivational speech. Stay off the busses! King gave them much more. He gave an identity speech instead, dominated by what the ancients called ethos or character. He began with observations on the character of Mrs. Rosa Parks and the members of his vast audience. In such a moment an audience can become a congregation. The assembly yearns to know who it is in the eyes of God and history, and to this need Pastor King obliged with an answer. In his first speech he makes no mention of Gandhi, Plato, or any of the other names with which he would decorate later orations. He tells them only this: We are followers of Jesus Christ. That’s who we are. Because of who we are, we will be free because freedom is the essence of the gospel. But we will not achieve our freedom by means of hatred or violence. He goes on to say that no white man will be dragged out of his bed in the middle of the night (as Emmett Till had been), taken down some lonely road and lynched. That night the Preacher King became a public man. Eventually, he would to what every true leader is called to do: he would tell us who we are as a people. To those of us who resisted (and there would be many), he told us who we might become.
The prophet sees, then tries to tell what he sees, even when he or she doesn’t fully understand it. Prophecy comes by metaphor. Toward the end of the speech, King crafts the perfect metaphor with which to crack open the moment in order to make it visible to all. Where many of us might move straight to exhortation, “People, this is an important opportunity; let’s make the most of it,” King tells his audience that together they stand “at the daybreak of freedom.” For Martin Luther it was the gates opening to paradise. For King it was the faint glow of a new day.
Since sermons are given to people who live in the polis, or city, preaching is inescapably political. Both Luther and King were preachers up to their ears in politics. The historian Hans Hillerbrand points out that Luther’s social and political thought was constantly evolving (“Christ Has Nothing to Do with Politics,” in Encounters with Luther, eds., Kirsi Stjerna and Brooks Schramm, 209-10). He wrote extensively on usury and a host of social issues, including the reform of universities, common care for the poor, vocational training and the like—always with the general presupposition that 1) the polis cannot be governed directly from the Bible, but 2) political activities should be guided by Christian principles. He was not timid about telling princes and rulers how they ought to govern because in his world, they were the ones to whom God had given that responsibility. By contemporary standards, his political speech is never muted but often misdirected. Instead of speaking politically to the peasants, for example, he spoke to the nobility about the peasants—with disastrous results.
His speech was always marked by rhetorical passion—which on occasion turned to rhetorical violence. If Martin King always took the rhetorical high road, Luther was no stranger to the low. He was initially sympathetic to the plight of the peasants but when they turned to violence he wrote equally violent pamphlets advocating their physical suppression in the most intemperate terms imaginable. While he condemned revolutionary violence he sanctioned state violence because, he said, the state is established by God. Paul writes in Romans 13, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities . . . . Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed . . . .” Luther offered what Hillerbrand calls “the most rigid exegesis of Romans 13 in Christian history” ( 215).
In the judgment of historian Scott Hendrix, the name “Luther” is forever associated with political and religious violence (see his compelling biography, Martin Luther: Visionary Reformer). It was aimed not at the peasants only but also the Jews whose expulsion from Saxony—and much, much worse—he supported in scurrilous language and for which the Lutheran church continues to apologize. Indeed, by contemporary standards, his hateful rhetoric would bar him from ”naming rights” for a new church. With such baggage, Lutheranism has not been successful in finding a Christian language, that is, a language commensurate with the gospel, with which to address radical social change. In our theology we have not found an effective method of critiquing or defying secular authority. Luther knew how to defy an all-powerful church but not an all-powerful state.
The danger of Luther’s two kingdoms theory, that is, the notion that God indwells believers through the gospel and rules civic society by means of appointed authorities and laws—true as it may be—is that it appears to provide a rationale for the absolute separation of private faith and public commitments. Two rationales, really. One is quietism, the other is cynicism. Over the past several months, I’ve heard many people say, “I’m no longer reading the newspaper or following the news. I’m going cold turkey on Anderson Cooper. I’m going to live my own life, find my own happiness, and tend my own garden.”
On the other hand, cynicism says, “I believe in certain religious teaching, such as the divinity of Jesus and the superiority of Christians above other religious people. With my brand of orthodoxy intact, I can support any political option.” It was Martin Luther (not Martin Luther King) who once said, no doubt after a couple tankards of ale, “Christ has nothing to do with politics” (Christus kuemmert sich nicht um die Politie” (Hillerbrand, 207 n.). If post-election statistics are accurate, the majority of white Christians in America appear to have agreed with Luther’s remark. For they/we voted against our own religious instincts by declaring them N/A, that is, Not Applicable to public life. In doing so we echoed the divided mind of Martin Luther, who sometimes yearned for a truly Christian prince but was forced to admit that unbelieving politicians often do a better job.
Jesus is not a Democrat or a Republican, but he does have a coherent platform, and it‘s been published! Alasdair MacIntyre reminds us that before we make a decision we have to ask what story we inhabit. The story of Jesus possesses both narrative and theological consistency. Nowhere does it draw from political or military power or feed on self-aggrandizement. The religion of the cross is not about winning. It begins with sacrificial love—Christ’s love for all people—and includes welcoming the outsider, caring for the sick, forgiving offenses, rejecting hate, forgoing violence, upholding life, and glorifying God in all that we do. These are integral and not optional to the plot. They are matters of identity—the Lord’s identity and ours. For when we confess Christ we are also confessing our identity in him. When we were baptized we received a name that would appear on countless credit cards and government forms, to be sure, but also a name in relation to another name. Our name is safely hidden in the name of the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit. It’s an identity thing.
King read the Exodus and the ministry and crucifixion of Jesus as revealing something about God’s character. As Richard Allen said long ago, God was “the first pleader” for the cause of slaves. King’s God actually participates in quests for justice, even those like the Civil Rights Movement, that challenged the state. King came into prominence at a time when most of the nation—with the exception of the Black Church—did not have the religious resources with which to imagine such a notion or to challenge “the way things are.” The political writer Frantz Fanon insisted that a successful revolution must create its own language. But King took what he received from Ebenezer Baptist Church and deployed it in a new way. He acted as a jeweler or a gemologist who takes a precious stone and rotates it in the light until the religion of pacification yielded the religion of liberation. For example, he did that with the word “love.” “Luv” is the preacher’s bread and butter. For Christians it’s a ho-hum word. King succeeded in making love controversial by transposing it from its natural habitat and injecting it into the realm of social conflict and public policy.
Young Pastor King introduced a strange expression into the religious lexicon, one for which he was criticized by an unusual coalition of black militants and white mainline theologians. He spoke of combating evil with “the weapon of love.” What’s love got to do with it? the militants asked. It was the white preachers taught us to love. How can love be a weapon? the theologians asked. A gun is a weapon. A fist is a weapon. Love cannot be an instrument of social change.
King’s theological critics included Reinhold Niebuhr and others, who supported his goals but criticized his theological rationale for achieving them. King’s critics offered him a familiar lesson in theology. Dr. King, you’ve got it backwards. First comes the law, then the gospel. First you knock a few heads together to establish justice and only then, at the end, will there be time to cultivate isolated pockets and communities of love. What his critics forgot was that God’s method of redeeming the world was equally impractical—think Incarnation—unless you consider crucifixion to be a shrewd exercise of political realism.
If Luther was a theological revolutionary, King was a theological innovator. He could only insert love into social conflict because he equated agape with nonviolent social resistance. He began his career practicing pragmatic nonviolence. When you’re outnumbered and outgunned it’s the only thing that works. Somewhere in mid-career he converted from pragmatic to theological nonviolence. In the latter, you don’t start from the contingencies of the situation but from the command of God, which for King was the command of Jesus. King effectively did away with the vexing (Lutheran) interval between faith and works. Nonviolent resistance itself became both an act of faith and an act of love.
Each of these Martin Luthers makes his witness to us, and there is a profound simplicity in what each offers. Despite their deep involvement in Realpolitik, neither was a politician. The two Luthers were Christian language teachers. One taught us the language of faith, the other language of testimony. In a few powerful strokes they taught us what the prophet meant when he said, “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice , love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?” And in so doing, they told us who we are and revealed to us the secrets of our own hearts.
Luther and King faced the perennial dilemma of how to find a home for the gospel in the real world. How would this fragile flower grow amidst the fissures of a changing Europe or the social inequalities and racism of America? How in our day can the gospel be true to itself in a pluralistic society governed by an ungodly prince?
We are in a vulnerable position. Many of us belong to an institution that lacks wealth and social power. Its only real weapon is what our two Martin Luthers revered as the word of God and the weapon of love.
Shortly after King died, his old family friend and mentor J. Pius Barbour said in a sermon, “Mike was a great believer in this, the attitude of Jesus: he believed the power of the spirit could down any power. “ Barbour ended his sermon dramatically: “Can it?”
It is a mark of the preacher King’s abiding influence in our lives that we still ask the question and want to answer, Yes.
Richard Lischer is Professor Emeritus in the Duke Divinity School. He is the author of The Preacher King: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Word that Moved America (Oxford University Press, updated ed. 2020). The lecture was presented at Roanoke College in January 2017 and later printed in Lutheran Forum, Spring 2017.