Bonhoeffer and King by Jenkins Willis

Author:Jenkins, Willis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fortress Press

“Standing by the Best in an Evil Time”

Borrowing the title from a sermon preached by Harry Emerson Fosdick of New York’s Riverside Church, Martin Luther King Jr. once preached a sermon, at his own Ebenezer Baptist Church, entitled, “Standing by the Best in an Evil Time.”3 Preached near the end of his life, it was a sermon steeped in his concern over America’s misguided and escalating war in Vietnam. As he saw it, the continuation of the war was indicative of a sickness in a nation whose misplaced priorities had made it “the greatest actual purveyor of violence in the world today.”4 Moreover, he drew deep moral connections between this war against the poor of Vietnam and the nation’s failure of will to wage a valiant war against poverty at home. His sermon suggested that a distorted domestic social policy and a dangerous foreign policy were part and parcel of the same moral problem: the fallacious view that self-preservation rather than other-preservation is “the first law of life.”5

Amidst America’s “evil times … with the sickness all around,” the true vocation of the church, King argued, was to stand by the best.6 Making deft use of a Lukan christological moment in which Jesus, who is now headed to Calvary, says to his disciples that “it is you who have stood by me through my trials,” King suggests that it is the vocation of the church to stand by the truth, especially when truth is on trial. The preacher intones, “I’m going to stand by my convictions. I’m going to stand by the principle that the spirit is mightier than the sword.”7 In practice, that means “… I ain’t going to kill nobody in Mississippi and I don’t plan to kill anybody in Vietnam, and I ain’t going to study war no more.”8

Given the political climate, it was bold preaching indeed! In essence, King was asking why many of his “friends,” who supported nonviolence as a viable and appropriate method for African Americans seeking their freedom and who also criticized the countervailing position of self-defense taken by Black Power advocates, did not level the same moral critique against American imperialism, in general, and its engagement of the Viet Cong, in particular. Authentic Christian witness required deep social consciousness and broad moral continuity, even if it meant the questioning of his patriotism and the alienating of a civil rights president. In this way, King’s ministry of preaching and prophetic witness underscored the complex connections between what he often described as the triplet evils of racism, poverty, and war and the ways in which the church must be vocal and vigilant on all fronts if it would bear faithful witness to the truth of the gospel.

Just as King’s preaching was shaped by and addressed to an evil time characterized by ethnic and racial bigotry and war, notwithstanding important differences, the same can be said of Bonhoeffer. For in 1933 and just three months before Bonhoeffer delivered his Christologie lectures (which are, in my judgment, the key to much of his theological thought), Hitler had become chancellor.

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