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From "Strive Toward Freedom":
"Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social advance rolls in on wheels of inevitability. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals. Without persistent effort, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social destruction. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action."
Not just inevitable, but necessary
Moves society forward
"King saw the cross as a source of strength and courage, the ultimate expression of God's love for humanity. The more he suffered, the more he turned his eyes to Golgotha, the place of the skull, where Rome executed slaves, unsurrectionists, and bandits. 'Down at the cross' is where King experienced a divine affirmation of his ministry and of God's love..." (86)
George Frederick Wilhem Hegel:
Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis
"While the cross symbolized God's surpreme love for human life, the lynching tree was the most terrifying symbol of hate in America. King held these symbols together in a Hegelian dialectic..." (70)
"In contrast to Niebuhr, King never spoke about proximate justice or about what was practically possible to achieve..." (72)
Edgar Sheffield Brightman:
Personalism: God is personal and cares
for each individual person.
"'God's gonna take care of you'--it was an eschatological promise Martin Luther King, Jr. never forgot." (78) see text.
vs. God's Omnipotence
Free-will an extension of God's love
"Niebuhr's focus on realism ("facts of experience")
and the cross (tragedy) should have turned his gaze to
the lynching tree, but he did not look there...Why did Niebuhr fail to connect Jesus' cross to the most obvious
cross bearers in American society?"
-"Niebuhr knew that denying [church] membership
to persons merely on the basis of race was also a
denial of the church's Christian identity...yet he knew that
white churches were not prepared to include blacks.
-"The Negroes...will have to exercise patience and be
sustained by a robust faith that history will gradually
fulfill the logic of justice.
How does the Emmett Till lynching resonate with you?
What is it about this event, that it becomes the "breaking point" or "turning point" that inspires the civil rights movement?
"one of the most brutal and inhuman crimes in the 20th century"
Where are modern examples of struggle?
What are they saying about human/divine cooperation?
"The cross is a paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world's value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last"
How do you resonate (or are you challenged by?)
King's notion of "matchless power"?
"Both the cross and the lynching tree represented the worst in human beings and at the same time 'an unquenchable ontological thirst' for life that refuses to let the worst determine our final meaning"
Do you believe there is virtue in struggle?
"It was Jesus' cross that sent people protesting in the streets, seeking to change the social structures of racial oppression."
"If the God of Jesus' cross is found among the least, the crucified people of the world, then God is also found
among those lynched in American history."