Saturday, January 20, 2007

ding dong the king is dead

This post is made with great sadness.

Last week I was taking a masters in motion class (take a whole semester and cram it into one week) when we began talking aobut Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I brought up in the converstaion that I had never heard anything but a social or liberation gospel message from him. I added that if this was all he preached than he was failing as a Pastor and as a Christain. The Professor Dr. Thom South commented that when he was completing his doctoral work he had a classmate who's PhD. work was on MLK. His friend told him that in all of his research that he only found one account of a possible salvation experience. the account he found was a testimony of Dr. King relating that when his sister and her friend went to the alter when he was about 9 years old that he went to because he did not want her to get something that he was not. this of course is not a true testimony. Hopefully he did fully retrust Christ. Please no flaming hot emails of anger and hatered. The reason I write this is because of a recent article about Dr. King that is not very flattering.

So I leave you with two quotes from the article to bait you into reading it and the link to find it.



"Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and not
concerned about the city government that damns the soul, the economic conditions
that corrupt the soul, the slum conditions, the social evils that cripple the
soul, is a dry, dead, do-nothing religion in need of new blood," King preached
in 1962 to his congregation at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

King didn't believe the story of Jonah being swallowed by a whale was true, for
example, or that John the Baptist actually met Jesus, according to texts
detailed in the King papers book. King once referred to the Bible as
"mythological" and also doubted whether Jesus was born to a virgin, Carson said.

Writings show King as liberal Christian, rejecting literalism

3 comments:

Byroniac said...

I have an audio CD of several of MLKJr's speeches (not all are full versions). He is an excellent and gifted orator (giving credit where credit is due). But the man's theology was very poor.

Free-At-Last.txt is the famous "I have a Dream" speech. Socially and politically, this is one of the finest speeches given on American soil, in my opinion. Theologically, it is one of the worst, and this from a so-called Baptist preacher. At the end of his speech, I read the words "...we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual..." This is nothing less than the ecumenical and theological neutering of the Gospel for the sake of the socio-economic utopia of racial universalism.

I greatly admire this man as an orator and as one who spoke so eloquently and powerfully against the sin of racism in this country. I believe in giving credit where credit is due, and I believe his good works in this area should be long remembered (and hopefully never forgotten). Having said that, I could not disagree more with him theologically that we (universal generic) are all God's children (requiring a new birth which only has the divine source of the Holy Spirit according to John 3). God's children repent of sin and turn in faith to Christ, or they are illegitimate. I'd probably disappoint Dr. King by saying that good works cannot earn salvation (it is only by repentance and faith). It is only in Christ that all men are truly brothers, that there is no Jew or Gentile, or bond and free, or male and female (Galatians 3:28).

Sorry for the length! But as Dr. King's speech said it, the Bible says it better and more accurately (well, actually Dr. King's version isn't accurate at all). With all due respect to Dr. King, trust the Bible and not the words of men.

Byroniac said...

Oops. I got it wrong. Galatians 3:28 says "Jew and Greek" so I remembered incorrectly (though at least I wasn't using quotes so as to imply a direct and accurate quotation).

Also, I meant to say "But as well as Dr. King's speech said it, the Bible says it better..."

Late night blogging and accuracy seldom mix.

By the way, best wishes to you Chris. I really would like to hear you preach sometime. Perhaps I will have to come to your church some weekend.

Chris Price said...

good to hear from you nad long comments are always welcome. sometimes more welcome than the short snippy ones.