Yes, but Not Quite by Tunstall Dwayne A.;

Author:Tunstall, Dwayne A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2009-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Nonviolence, when practiced well and sincerely, enables its practitioners to act in agapic love toward other persons, even those persons who have historically oppressed them. Indeed, King’s adherence to nonviolence led him to adopt a second related thesis: we should practice agape in our daily lives and have our nonviolent conduct be an extension of our agapic love toward other persons. On a human level, since this is the only level of reality that we have any chance of describing competently, agape is “the ability to unconditionally love something not for what it currently is (for at a particular moment it might be quite unlovable, like segregationist George Wallace in the early 1960s) but instead for what it could become, a teleological love that recognizes everything as process, not product, and sees beneath the surface to a thing’s potential for positive change.”15 Anyone familiar with the personalistic ethics advanced in Brightman’s Moral Laws 16 and Walter G. Muelder’s Moral Law in Christian Social Ethics 17should recognize the connection King makes between agape and what Brightman calls the “Law of the Ideal of Personality”18 and what Muelder calls “The Law of the Ideal of Community.”19 Living according to agape obligates persons to live such a life where they “take up the materials of their lives and create the plan of a harmonious whole that they aim to realize.”20 But agape is not merely a regulative ideal for us to live by; it is also a part of our concrete reality. Indeed, in a way it is as concrete as any one of us, if not more so. Moreover, it operates as the spiritual “force” enabling those of us willing to live by it to create communities of goodwill and mutual respect with other persons where there were once none.21 Yet, King’s notion of agape is more than something he borrows from Brightman’s and Muelder’s personalistic ethics. It is the result of his creative synthesis of several thinkers’ conception of love, including Paul Tillich, George Davis, L. Harold DeWolf, Howard Thurman, Paul Ramsey, and Anders Nygren.22

What does agape mean for King? First and foremost, agape“is not a sentimental or affectionate emotion,”23 rather it “means understanding, redeeming good will for all men. It is an overflowing love which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless, and creative.”24 At times, agape might require us to perform acts that are contrary to our immediate self-interests since it is unconditionally and universally altruistic. But it is not a vacuous love for an abstraction, for example, “humanity.” It obligates us to respond to the actual physical, psychological, and spiritual needs of our fellow persons—whether they are our neighbors, our colleagues, our acquaintances, our fellow citizens, or citizens of another political state.25

Once King’s recognition of agape led him to regard all life as interrelated, he could not help but recognize that whatever we do affects other persons directly or indirectly, often in unforeseen and detrimental ways. His affirmation of this truth leads him to the third central thesis of his philosophy: the interrelatedness and interdependence of everything in the world.

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