In this episode, we welcome Virgil Walker, Vice President of Ministry Relations for G3 Ministries, to discuss his article: “The Truth Behind MLK’s Social Gospel”. Virgil takes us through highlights of MLK’s views of essential doctrines of the Christian Faith. What do the primary sources, written by MLK himself, reveal about his views of God, Scripture, Jesus Christ, the Virgin Birth and Resurrection – and Salvation? Given the weight of MLK’s legacy today, how do we affirm the need for racial reconciliation while not compromising on the essentials of the Christian Faith? Virgil also shares with us some of his story, his decision to write on this subject (and the response), and his thoughts on MLK’s true legacy. 

Articles by Virgil: 

“The Truth Behind MLK’s Social Gospel” 

“Deconstructing the MLK Myth” 

“What’s the Truth about Martin Luther King, Jr.?” 

“A Letter to Black Pastors”  

G3 Ministries 

Just Thinking Podcast  

• MLK and the Deity of Christ 
• Freestyle Episode 

Check out Virgil’s recent book, with co-host and co-author Darrell Harrison: A Biblical Theology of Climate Change  

See: Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project

Some highlights from the MLK, Jr. Papers Project:

• "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" (Essay, Crozer, 1949)
• "The Humanity and Divinity of Jesus" (Essay, Crozer, c.1949-50)
• "The Christian Pertinence of Eschatological Hope" (Essay, Crozer, c.1949-50)
• "The Influence of the Mystery Religions on Christianity" (Essay, Crozer, c.1949-50)
• Letter to Coretta Scott ("the gospel that I will preach to the world"; July 18, 1952)
•  Letter to George W. Davis (December 1,1953)
• "My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence" (September 1, 1958)
• "What Happened to Hell?" (Interview, 1961)

The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age by Patrick Parr

Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. by David J. Garrow 

• Speaking of King’s being influenced both by the “social gospel” of Walter Rauschenbusch and the realism of Reinhold Niebuhr: “The arguments of Niebuhr and friendly prodding of [Kenneth] Smith moved King away from his earlier blind attachment to the optimism that pervaded not only Rauschenbusch’s social gospel but indeed all of the evangelical liberalism that George Davis had suffused him with. Looking back, King confessed that he had become ‘absolutely convinced of the natural goodness of man and the natural power of human reason.’ Niebuhr’s more persuasive realism, however, showed him ‘the complexity of human motives and the reality of sin on every level of man’s existence.’ Clearly Christian love alone could not defeat injustice and achieve social change.” (BTC p. 43, see also pp.45-47; e.g. “Although liberalism had failed ‘to realize that many of our present ills result from the sins of men,’ King found in Niebuhr too much of an emphasis upon the sinfulness of man.”) 
• “...King...wrote his former Crozer professor, George W. Davis, ‘When Schleiermacher stressed the primacy of experience over any external authority he was sounding a note that continues to ring in my own experience.” (BTC pg. 639, footnote 31) 
• King preached a sermon titled “Faith in Man”, in which he stated “[m]y faith in man is, at bottom, a faith in God.” (p.67) 
• Notice also King’s education in Boston “Personalism” in BTC p. 44-45; For an analysis of the critique of Personalism by Cornelius Van Til, see lecture "Boston Personalism", lecture delivered March 6,1956 at Boston; also see The Trinitarian Theology of Cornelius Van Til by Lane Tipton, pp. 88-94. Indeed, Dr. Tipton refers to King’s professor, Edgar Sheffield Brightman, as “perhaps the most important personalist in the twentieth century”. 
• A couple of King’s sermons were influenced by Henry Emerson Fosdick. (see chapter one of The Presbyterian Controversy by Bradley Longfield) 

See also these articles by David J. Garrow: 

• “The Intellectual Development of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Influences and Commentaries” 

- “Zepp and Smith give a fair and balanced, if at times incomplete, portrayal of the major intellectual traditions upon which Martin King drew. They rightly suggest that it was King’s three years at Crozer Theological Seminary (1948-1951), much more so than either his undergraduate experience at Morehouse College (1944-1948) or his graduate years at the Boston University School of Theology (1951-1954), that witnessed King’s academic maturation and the development of a first-rate intellectual curiosity and self-testing. Nonetheless, while surveying the contributions that evangelical liberalism and the social gospel, Gandhian nonviolence, Niebuhrian realism and Boston University’s personalism all made to King’s development, Zepp and Smith do not adequately appreciate how King’s evaluation and partial adoptions of different intellectual doctrines were profoundly rooted in his social presuppositions and faith experience. Those presuppositions and experiences were themselves the product of King’s upbringing in a family and a church that inculcated the biblical stories, especially for this son and grandson of preachers, and that fully represented the strong faith heritage of the black southern Baptist church.” 

• “King’s Plagiarism: Imitation, Insecurity, and Transformation”  
• “The troubling legacy of Martin Luther King” 
• “Who was the real Martin Luther King, Jr.” 

Some books that influenced MLK: 

• A Philosophy of Religion by Edgar Sheffield Brightman 
• Moral Man and Immoral Society by Reinhold Niebuhr 
• Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by R. H. Tawney 
• Christianity and the Social Crisis by Walter Rauschenbusch 

American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time by Joshua Mitchell 

From every People and Nation by J. Daniel Hays 

From Shame to Sin by Kyle Harper 

A Stone of Hope by David Chappell 

Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Its Sources by Keith Miller

Search for the Beloved Community: The Thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Kenneth Smith and Ira Zepp, Jr. 

Origins of the Dream: Hughes's Poetry and King's Rhetoric by W. Jason Miller

Doctrine and Race by Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews 

The Social Gospel in American Religion by Christopher Evans 

The Last Segregated Hour: The Memphis Kneel-Ins and the Campaign for Southern Church Desegregation; Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery by Stephen R. Haynes