Martin Luther King Jr. Heretic!

[Albion]

This brings to mind my visit to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1973. Among its many architectural splendors is a set of nineteen statues near the chancel, each representing the model Christian of each century of Christian history...I have not had the opportunity to return to see what, if any, statue has been installed for the twentieth century. However, I see on the internet that they decided on not one, not two, not three, but four eminent figures standing in a sort of group hug.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Albert Einstein, Susan B. Anthony, and Mahatma Gandhi

Should we be relieved to learn that half anyway of the "model Christians" were Christians.

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[bbbbbbb]

Should we be relieved to learn that half anyway of the "model Christians" were Christians.

[/QUOTE]

Yes, that thought also occurred to me. I wonder what Gandhi would have thought since he most adamantly rejected Christianity.

 

[Blade]

Through what are you looking at this man? And then what moment in time are we looking at? God sees the heart..so.. have to take that into account. And the heart of which we can not see.. again we have to take that into account. Did he confess Yeshua as lord?

Jesus said He was the way the truth and the life. We believe Jesus came in the flesh.. died on the cross rose the 3rd day and is the only way to the Father. Those that do not believe this are not His..are not saved.

There is no exception to this. No matter what wonderful work on this earth one may do. It wil not get you every lasting life. All ANYONE has to do is repent. Since I cant see the heart..

 

[bbbbbbb]

Through what are you looking at this man? And then what moment in time are we looking at? God sees the heart..so.. have to take that into account. And the heart of which we can not see.. again we have to take that into account. Did he confess Yeshua as lord?

Jesus said He was the way the truth and the life. We believe Jesus came in the flesh.. died on the cross rose the 3rd day and is the only way to the Father. Those that do not believe this are not His..are not saved.

There is no exception to this. No matter what wonderful work on this earth one may do. It wil not get you every lasting life. All ANYONE has to do is repent. Since I cant see the heart..

It would help everyone concerned if you would quote the post to which you are responding. If you are responding to my post concerning Gandhi I stand by his own confession where he clearly rejected Jesus Christ and all of Christianity.

 

[Dale]

Martin Luther King Jr. was an apostate. This is clearly revealed in a paper entitled, ‘What Experiences of Christians Living in the Early Christian Century Led to the Christian Doctrines of the Divine Sonship of Jesus, the Virgin Birth, and the Bodily Resurrection’.

In King's theology regarding the divine Sonship of Jesus, “Jesus went through a great process of development. It seems quite evident that the early followers of Jesus in Palestine were well aware of his genuine humanity. Even the synoptic gospels picture Jesus as a victim of human experiences. Such human experiences as growth, learning, prayer, and defeat are not at all uncommon in the life of Jesus.” His desire here was to stress the point that Jesus was merely human.

How then did the idea of the divinity of Christ develop? “We may find a partial clue to the actual rise of this doctrine in the spreading of Christianity into the Greco-Roman world. I need not elaborate on the fact that the Greeks were very philosophical minded people. Through philosophical thinking the Greeks came to the point of subordinating, distrusting, and even minimizing anything physical. Anything that possessed flesh was always underminded (sic) in Greek thought. And so in order to receive inspiration from Jesus the Greeks had to apotheosize him.” (Apotheosize is to elevate to the rank of a god). King emphasizes this with a quote from another source; “the church had found God in Jesus, and so it called Jesus the Christ; and later under the influence of Greek thought-forms, the only begotten Son of God.” (George Pearce Hedley).

As for the virgin birth is concerned King believed that “the evidence for the tenability of this doctrine is too shallow to convince any objective thinker. To begin with, the earliest written documents in the New Testament make no mention of the virgin birth. Moreover, the Gospel of Mark, the most primitive and authentic of the four, gives not the slightest suggestion of the virgin birth. The effort to justify this doctrine on the grounds that it was predicted by the prophet Isaiah is immediately eliminated, for all New Testament scholars agree that the word virgin is not found in the Hebrew original, but only in the Greek text which is a mistranslation of the Hebrew word for ‘young woman’.”

As for how this doctrine developed King thought that a “clue to this inquiry may be found in a sentence from St. Justin's First Apology. Here Justin states that the birth of Jesus is quite similar to the birth of the sons of Zeus. It was believed in Greek thought that an extraordinary person could only be explained by saying that he had a father who was more than human. It is probable that this Greek idea influenced Christian thought.”

He goes on to state that “a more adequate explanation for the rise of this doctrine is found in the experience which the early Christians had with Jesus. The people saw within Jesus such a uniqueness of quality and spirit that to explain him in terms of ordinary background was to them quite inadequate. For his early followers this spiritual uniqueness could only by accounted for in terms of biological uniqueness. They were not unscientific in their approach because they had no knowledge of the scientific. They could only express themselves in terms of the pre-scientific thought patterns of their day.”

On the question of resurrection King stated that “this doctrine, upon which the Easter Faith rests, symbolizes the ultimate Christian conviction: that Christ conquered death. From a literary, historical, and philosophical point of view this doctrine raises many questions. In fact, the external evidence for the authenticity of this doctrine is found wanting. But here again the external evidence is not the most important thing, for it in itself fails to tell us precisely the thing we most want to know: What experiences of early Christians lead to the formulation of the doctrine? The root of our inquiry is found in the fact that the early Christians had lived with Jesus. They had been captivated by the magnetic power of his personality. This basic experience led to the faith that he could never die. And so in the pre-scientific thought pattern of the first century, this inner faith took outward form.”

How can anyone be a Christian and deny the divinity, virgin birth and bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ?

If you take away Christ’s divinity you deny His perfection and, as a result, have no ‘Lamb without blemish’ to be sacrificed for your sins. Also, you place yourself under the sentence of death that Jesus declared for such people (see John 8:24 where the ‘I am’ is, in the Greek, ego eimi, the same divine title of Exodus 3:14).

If you take away the virgin birth you say that Jesus was conceived as the sinful seed of Adam (through Joseph – Psalms 51:5 and Psalms 58:3), rather than by the Holy Spirit. Thus He was in need of a Savior himself.

If you take away the resurrection you say that God did not approve of Jesus as the Christ for that event proved that Jesus had not sinned (death could hold Him as it does sinners) and was the satisfactory sacrifice for sin. It further shows that Jesus was acceptable to God as undergoing the death that sinners deserve, and on their behalf, thus nullifying the death penalty against those who have faith in Christ (Acts 17:31, Romans 4:24-25).

King was also heretical on other issues as an honest search of the documentation will make plain. While he could legitimately represent himself as a Civil Rights worker, and leader, he was utterly deceptive in passing himself off as a Christian and, what’s worse, as a Pastor of God’s flock.

Whether MLK played a constructive role in society during his lifetime and whether he was a Christian are two separate questions.

I've read that MLK went to a Unitarian seminary but after graduation decided that the job market for black Unitarian ministers was too limited. He became a Baptist. There is no sign that his theology changed when he became a Baptist or after heading a large Baptist church for years.

 

[FireDragon76]

Yes, that thought also occurred to me. I wonder what Gandhi would have thought since he most adamantly rejected Christianity.

In a way, this is "cultural appropriation", since Gandhi was a hindu. Yes, it honors him but it honors him in a way that is false to who he was.

 

[FireDragon76]

Whether MLK played a constructive role in society during his lifetime and whether he was a Christian are two separate questions.

I've read that MLK went to a Unitarian seminary but after graduation decided that the job market for black Unitarian ministers was too limited. He became a Baptist. There is no sign that his theology changed when he became a Baptist or after heading a large Baptist church for years.

This is untrue. King went to Crozer, in Upland, Pennsylvania, which was a multi-denominational seminary. King's theology was neo-orthodox, he was critical of theological liberalism. In fact his doctoral thesis repudiated Process conceptualizations of God in favor of theistic personalism and a more traditional Christian conceptualization of God.

 

[SolomonVII]

What is most apparent about Martin Luther King Jr is that for him the Bible was alive. He made it come alive to his situation, and the situation that America found itself living in in the mid twentieth century. The Moses of MLKjr was more real than the Moses of any historian, or Biblical literalist who never much gets past the minutiae of the Mosaic law code. The Moses of Martin Luther King came alive in the person of MLK, the redeemer. Jesus himself came alive in the ideals that he inspired in Martin Luther King, in the power of the word in a world ruled by the power of the sword, in his spirit of forgiveness over retribution.
He did not come to rewrite the Bible, or establish a new dogma. He came to live out the Bible, to live out the life of Christ in his acts and his words and his deeds, to believe in Christ in the most essential way that anyone can believe in Christ, and that is to live out Christ in everything he says, and everything he does.
"Apostate" really is a term that is more suited to someone whose goal is to change the teachings of the church and the Bible into ideals that are suited to their own propaganda purposes. They teach a new gospel, teach a new Christ that serves to justify their own agenda.
There is nothing new about the Moses that Martin Luther King portrayed to America, nothing new about the Christ that lived through him. Belief is judged by the fruit, by one's actions, and not by one's attempts to try to privately come to terms with the great unknowns of the Mystery who is Christ.

Compare him for example to what came after, to the real Marxist apostasy of Black Liberation Theology, to the violence and race riots that destroyed the core of formerly great American cities, to the white liberal guilt that reduced his message of the character of Black Americans to the stipulations of a welfare handout.
When it comes to apostasy and race in America, there is plenty enough to go around. There was the sense of the heroic and the ultimate in Martin Luther King Junior, and even he would understand that that who was heroic in him, was the Christ.

 

[Dale]

What is most apparent about Martin Luther King Jr is that for him the Bible was alive. He made it come alive to his situation, and the situation that America found itself living in in the mid twentieth century. The Moses of MLKjr was more real than the Moses of any historian, or Biblical literalist who never much gets past the minutiae of the Mosaic law code. The Moses of Martin Luther King came alive in the person of MLK, the redeemer. Jesus himself came alive in the ideals that he inspired in Martin Luther King, in the power of the word in a world ruled by the power of the sword, in his spirit of forgiveness over retribution.
He did not come to rewrite the Bible, or establish a new dogma. He came to live out the Bible, to live out the life of Christ in his acts and his words and his deeds, to believe in Christ in the most essential way that anyone can believe in Christ, and that is to live out Christ in everything he says, and everything he does.
"Apostate" really is a term that is more suited to someone whose goal is to change the teachings of the church and the Bible into ideals that are suited to their own propaganda purposes. They teach a new gospel, teach a new Christ that serves to justify their own agenda.
There is nothing new about the Moses that Martin Luther King portrayed to America, nothing new about the Christ that lived through him. Belief is judged by the fruit, by one's actions, and not by one's attempts to try to privately come to terms with the great unknowns of the Mystery who is Christ.

Compare him for example to what came after, to the real Marxist apostasy of Black Liberation Theology, to the violence and race riots that destroyed the core of formerly great American cities, to the white liberal guilt that reduced his message of the character of Black Americans to the stipulations of a welfare handout.
When it comes to apostasy and race in America, there is plenty enough to go around. There was the sense of the heroic and the ultimate in Martin Luther King Junior, and even he would understand that that who was heroic in him, was the Christ.

I hope there is some truth in that. It is well known that MLK was an adulterer, and that's hard to reconcile with being a strong Christian. The FBI wiretapped MLK, regarding him as a menace, and that is one thing they found out. Rev. Ralph Abernathy has also said that MLK was a notorious adulterer. Abernathy has even said that MLK was engaged in adultery on the very night he was assasinated.

 

[FireDragon76]

I hope there is some truth in that. It is well known that MLK was an adulterer, and that's hard to reconcile with being a strong Christian.

Nobody is saying King is perfect, just that his contributions to humanity came from his Christian convictions.

The FBI organization at the time was racist. I wouldn't take their persecution of King seriously.

 

[SolomonVII]

I hope there is some truth in that. It is well known that MLK was an adulterer, and that's hard to reconcile with being a strong Christian. The FBI wiretapped MLK, regarding him as a menace, and that is one thing they found out. Rev. Ralph Abernathy has also said that MLK was a notorious adulterer. Abernathy has even said that MLK was engaged in adultery on the very night he was assasinated.

One thing that happens to men with power, they tend to sleep around.
His wife forgave him that, and other than that it has nothing to do with me or you. His greatness lies not in his foibles, but in Christ.

And thanks for reminding us of the corruption of the J Edgar Hoover FBI.

 

[Hank77]

Yes, that thought also occurred to me. I wonder what Gandhi would have thought since he most adamantly rejected Christianity.

Those statues are not about being a Christian. I thought something must be being misrepresented here so I did a little research and found this info. on a personal website.

Of all the churches that I have visited, this was the only one where I saw statues of world leaders who had visited the church, on the pulpit walls… Mahatma Gandhi, His holiness Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, Vasco de Gama...
An Unfinished House Of Prayer

 

[Dale]

Nobody is saying King is perfect, just that his contributions to humanity came from his Christian convictions.

The FBI organization at the time was racist. I wouldn't take their persecution of King seriously.

It's not what the FBI thought about MLK, it's what they found in the wiretaps. They thought they might find him colluding with Communists. Instead, they found amorous liaisons.

 

[Dale]

One thing that happens to men with power, they tend to sleep around.
His wife forgave him that, and other than that it has nothing to do with me or you. His greatness lies not in his foibles, but in Christ.

And thanks for reminding us of the corruption of the J Edgar Hoover FBI.

You say that his wife forgave him. While society views adultery as a sin against the spouse, this is not the Biblical view. For one thing, he also dragged down the other women he fooled around with.

 

[SolomonVII]

You say that his wife forgave him. While society views adultery as a sin against the spouse, this is not the Biblical view. For one thing, he also dragged down the other women he fooled around with.

I am not justifying his adultery in any way.
If you prefer to focus on the sinner rather than what people have come to admire about the man, that is your choice.



But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

 

[FireDragon76]

You say that his wife forgave him. While society views adultery as a sin against the spouse, this is not the Biblical view. For one thing, he also dragged down the other women he fooled around with.

Seriously, this seems petty and prudish as a reason to criticize King. You seem to be focused too much on puritanism, in a particularly sexist way. King did not "drag down other women". They were big girls and knew what they were getting into.

 

[Dale]

What is most apparent about Martin Luther King Jr is that for him the Bible was alive. He made it come alive to his situation, and the situation that America found itself living in in the mid twentieth century. The Moses of MLKjr was more real than the Moses of any historian, or Biblical literalist who never much gets past the minutiae of the Mosaic law code. The Moses of Martin Luther King came alive in the person of MLK, the redeemer. Jesus himself came alive in the ideals that he inspired in Martin Luther King, in the power of the word in a world ruled by the power of the sword, in his spirit of forgiveness over retribution.
He did not come to rewrite the Bible, or establish a new dogma. He came to live out the Bible, to live out the life of Christ in his acts and his words and his deeds, to believe in Christ in the most essential way that anyone can believe in Christ, and that is to live out Christ in everything he says, and everything he does.
"Apostate" really is a term that is more suited to someone whose goal is to change the teachings of the church and the Bible into ideals that are suited to their own propaganda purposes. They teach a new gospel, teach a new Christ that serves to justify their own agenda.
There is nothing new about the Moses that Martin Luther King portrayed to America, nothing new about the Christ that lived through him. Belief is judged by the fruit, by one's actions, and not by one's attempts to try to privately come to terms with the great unknowns of the Mystery who is Christ.

Compare him for example to what came after, to the real Marxist apostasy of Black Liberation Theology, to the violence and race riots that destroyed the core of formerly great American cities, to the white liberal guilt that reduced his message of the character of Black Americans to the stipulations of a welfare handout.
When it comes to apostasy and race in America, there is plenty enough to go around. There was the sense of the heroic and the ultimate in Martin Luther King Junior, and even he would understand that that who was heroic in him, was the Christ.

Solomon,

Here is a view of Martin Luther King's theology very different from the one you present.

<< While it is widely believed that Martin Luther King, Jr. was committed to the “Christian religion,” he was far from it. He denied some of the most fundamental components of historic Christianity. He repudiated the doctrine of the deity of Jesus, and he rejected the concept that the Lord was raised bodily from the dead. King disdained the New Testament affirmation of Christ’s virgin birth, asserting that the early Christians devised a mythological story to account for the moral uniqueness of Jesus of Nazareth. >>

Source: Cite this article
Jackson, Wayne. "Book Review: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.." ChristianCourier.com. Access date: February 10, 2018. Book Review: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

[SolomonVII]

Solomon,

Here is a view of Martin Luther King's theology very different from the one you present.

<< While it is widely believed that Martin Luther King, Jr. was committed to the “Christian religion,” he was far from it. He denied some of the most fundamental components of historic Christianity. He repudiated the doctrine of the deity of Jesus, and he rejected the concept that the Lord was raised bodily from the dead. King disdained the New Testament affirmation of Christ’s virgin birth, asserting that the early Christians devised a mythological story to account for the moral uniqueness of Jesus of Nazareth. >>

Source: Cite this article
Jackson, Wayne. "Book Review: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.." ChristianCourier.com. Access date: February 10, 2018. Book Review: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.

I am not disputing that, or even arguing whether or not the personal theology of Martin Luther King Jr was orthodox in any way. I think my argument is more along the lines that it really does only take faith the size of a mustard seed to move a mountain.

Catholics, Baptists, Unitarians, Anglicans, Methodists, and everyone else all have very, very, different theological points of view. But what we do share is a basic knowledge and a common respect for the stories of the Bible. This was even more true of America mid-twentieth century that it is now, as America is following Europe into that biblically illiterate post-modern future. The pea-sized faith of a MLKjr was magnified exponentially because it appealed to the faith of the millions of Americans that recognized God in his word and in his appeal for us to be Christ-like in our attitudes to each other, to the least of our brothers even.
That is much bigger than the personal or theological failings of one man. That is why Marin Luther King has become an American icon, in spite of the fact that he was very much a sinner still, just like the millions of Americans who heard Christ in his speeches were, still are even.

By all means let us acknowledge the truth about Martin Luther King Jr, in all its aspects, just as we would for all great American figures of the past. But in doing so, let us not engage in the post-modernist deconstruction of the culture that far from setting us free, leaves us with a ruined culture where there is nothing left standing to believe in or to inspire us. The truth about the iconoclasts deconstructing American culture, and tearing down its monuments in this age (even the 'monument' that is MLK) is that they are not doing so in the name of Christ. They are not worth following.

Unorthodox theology may well be a shortcoming of MLKjr. That may well be the truth. By all means, lets not cover that aspect of him up. But in our historic judgments of the man, let us go by the standard of 'truth, the full truth, and nothing but the truth' in order to discover the man.

The full truth is that what this man lived for, and died for, and suffered for, and withstood the wrath of the politicized FBI and large swaths of American society for; the full truth that Martin Luther King offered himself as a martyr for, was the truth of Christ, that we are all children of the living God, that there is no Jew or Gentile, black white yellow or red, in the character of Christ. When MLK put on the garments washed clean by the Blood of the Lamb, I am sure even he knew that those garments were covering up a sinner. Nevertheless, it were those garments that shone for America and the world, and revealed to us the whole truth of Christ. That truth is orders of magnitude greater than any other truth about MLKjr.
Let's not deconstruct that too. Let us focus on why MLK is worthy of our admiration, regardless of the theology that we believe in.

 

[FireDragon76]

I believe in judging who is, and is not a Christian, with a generous orthodoxy. I also believe how we live should reflect what we believe. In that sense, I believe King was a Christian in some of the most important ways one can be a Christian.

 

[mark kennedy]

Well there is this:

Others doctrines such as a supernatural plan of salvation, the Trinity, the substitutionary theory of the atonement, and the second coming of Christ are all quite prominent in fundamentalist thinking. Such are the views of the fundamentalist and they reveal that he is opposed to theological adaptation to social and cultural change. He sees a progressive scientific age as a retrogressive spiritual age. Amid change all around he is willing to preserve certain ancient ideas even though they are contrary to science. (The papers of Martin Luther King, Jr)
​

So a supernatural plan of salvation, the Trinity, substitutionary theory of atonement and the second coming is contrary to science? I say so what, science is deliberately focused on natural phenomenon. I see no reason that being a fundamentalist is necessarily opposed to social and cultural change. The last place he made a public speech was in the COGIC Mason Temple, they had been a fellowship of whites and blacks early on but whites left. This was in 1915 at Hot Springs Arkansas and the founder C.H. Mason did not preach social and cultural justice but rather blessed them saying, 'may the waters bring forth abundantly'.

My point, while a bit off topic, is that we can take a lesson from this. Both groups at the split shared the same fundamentalist beliefs, and do to this day. Fundamentalist belief was not the problem, it was the solution and they had it half a century before the civil rights movement. I find this beloved civil rights leaders views disappointing at best, but not heretical. The real question was, you had the answer to the problems, why did those who shared your beliefs walk away when there was no real difference in your doctrines?

Grace and peace,
Mark