Winsome Conviction
Winsome Conviction
The Moral Theology of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Today’s episode is a collaborative effort with the Think Biblically podcast, where Scott and Tim speak with Rev. Chris Brooks on the meaning of Dr. King’s legacy and some of its implications for institutions, churches, and individuals today.
Scott Rae:
What's the legacy of the great moral theologian, civil rights leader and orator of Martin Luther King Jr.? Why do you think that the culture sometimes neglects the religious and theological foundations for his work? Are there any racial assumptions that white and Black people make about each other that are inaccurate or helpful?
We answer these questions in a whole lot more with our friend, Reverend Chris Brooks. This is a joint podcast with Think Biblically and Winsome Convictions co-hosted with my colleague in Winsome Convictions, Dr. Tim Muehlhoff.
Chris, it's great to have you with us. Chris is pastor of a Woodside Bible Church in Metro Detroit, 13 campuses, 11,000 people in attendance on a Sunday. He's also the host of a weekly radio program called Equipped with Chris Brooks and the author of a terrific book entitled Urban Apologetics. Chris, great to have you with us. We're really looking forward to this conversation.
Really delighted to have you out here. I think because your daughter's here, this was probably the fastest yes you've said to an invitation in a long time.
Chris Brooks:
Absolutely.
Scott Rae:
So, it's great to have you with us. I know ...
Chris Brooks:
And the fact that it's seven degrees below zero at home doesn't hurt either.
Scott Rae:
Understandable. I know when you spoke in chapel this morning, you helped connect a couple of things. I think maybe most of us haven't thought about.
Chris Brooks:
Yeah. So, obviously, we'll talk about the moral philosophy of Dr. King before it's all said and done. But I don't think that we should quickly overlook the connection between these last several days in the life of our country. Yesterday was the inauguration of the 47th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
And I think that when it comes to the Imago Dei, there is no institution that has greater sway or influence in how that is practically lived out and maybe even thought about in the minds of men and women in our country than our government right now. In the political in particular, the partisan conversations that we're having, we have to acknowledge that.
But yesterday also, I don't think by coincidence is also MLK Day. And the heartbeat of his message moral philosophy is the Imago Dei. But then Sunday was the 41st Sanctity of Life Sunday in reflection of the events of 1973 and the act of SCOTUS to legalize abortion on demand and all that's happened subsequent to that.
And so, I think we need to connect those dots. I think we need to recognize both the Imago Dei and the Missio Dei. What is the natural outflow and expectation of how now shall we live as a result of the Imago Dei? If we really believe and embrace that has been the primary principle of scripture that drives all human dignity, how now should we live in light of that? And I think that's what Dr. King gives us.
Dr. King gives us an embodied ethic of what that looks like, lived out, taking it from the philosophical to the practical, from orthodoxy to orthopraxis. So, to me, it couldn't be a better time to have this conversation than this week.
Tim Muehlhoff:
Well, Chris, thank you so much for being here and diligently praying over the Detroit Lions.
Chris Brooks:
Maybe I shouldn't have did that study on Lamentations before the game, could have been bad timing.
Tim Muehlhoff:
Good thing this isn't visual. Chris, you've said in the past you believe that MLK is the greatest moral philosopher our country has ever produced. But we often overlook that because he was such a great orator. I wonder if you wouldn't, just for a second, because I'm a comm professor, can we just for a second though talk about how powerful he was both in written form. I'm thinking of Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which we read in our rhetoric classes here at Biola.
But also, he moved the needle with words and actions. Can you just comment very quickly on what you take away yourself being a gifted speaker from Martin Luther King Jr.?
Chris Brooks:
There are very few people whose voices cause us to pause, arrest us as soon as we hear it. I guarantee you if we had the ability to do it, to simply play an audio of any of his sermons, that it would capture and captivate the hearts, minds and the imagination of the entire room. He was such a powerful orator that he still remains a dominant influence of African-American preaching to this day.
I think there's so much we could talk about and I recognize we're blending the two podcasts, so I'll just simply say two things here that I think is pretty special about Dr. King. Dr. King had the ability of speaking to two audiences at once and he never forgot both that while he was having an intimate conversation with his immediate audience, he always recognized that the world was listening.
And I think we can easily make the mistake of speaking to one or the other of being so localized that we lose sight of the fact that everyone isn't in our context, but we can also think beyond our context and be of no practical help to the people that God has called us to primarily minister to. So, I appreciate the fact that Dr. King always recognized that the immediate audience was who God called him to speak to, to arouse their moral imaginations, but that there was a broader audience that was always listening and that's why this movement that started in the American South became a movement of global influence.
You could track the movement of independence that even in African nations as a result of what Dr. King and many others contributed to here. The other thing that Dr. King did so masterfully, and this is often overlooked, his primary audience were African-Americans who by and large were in poor communities who by and large didn't have privy to institutions of higher education, but yet he's quoting Plato, Socrates great philosophers as if they knew him.
And he was raising the intellectual bar of the group without belittling, without creating distance. And it's one of the most impressive things of any speaker to be able to do that, to be able to on the one hand be relatable, but on the other hand say things that cause people to go back to read, to grow, to be exposed to something that they wouldn't have otherwise had access to.
Tim Muehlhoff:
Chris, I want to go back to an incident where my middle son was in high school. He was asked to read the Letter from Birmingham Jail as one of his course assignments and I said if I gave him a heads-up, because he told me about the assignments. So, I told him what to look for I said, "Watch out for all of the biblical and theological allusions and references that there are in that letter."
And after he finished the assignment, he came back to me and said, "Dad, I don't know what you were talking about, because there was none of that there." And I'm about to have major egg on my face. So, we went back and looked it up online and read the whole original and discovered that his teacher had edited out all of the theological components. Needless to say, my son was not happy about that.
But I think that reflects a broader trend culturally to minimize the religious component, the religious underpinnings of a lot of his message. Why do you think that is and then how do you, particularly in your position as a pastor, help connect with secular folks on the religious component that so energized his message and his mission?
Chris Brooks:
Well, I think to the first part of your question, I think there is a desire for many people, many groups to want to claim his legacy. But like any other person, Dr. King was complex. He's a person who said so many things that even a secular leader want to affiliate with, but you can't deny his commitment to the local church and the gospel. And so, I would imagine that the answer to why edit, why disassociate him with those things is to be able to claim the portions that we want while denying the others.
I will say though, and we'll come back to this in a moment, but I will say that I do think that it's important to recognize Dr. King spoke to two groups, primarily. He spoke to the local church, he was a churchman, but he also spoke to labor unions, a lot of labor unions. And I think that there are those who will identify with his theology of work and his sensitivities to the poor and classism that are things that want to be picked up on.
You asked the second question of what do I do? I tried to remember one of his statements, he's obviously quotable and each one of us could recite one or more of his quotes. But one of the things that I love the most is a quote and I'll paraphrase, is he says that his first calling was to be a preacher of the gospel and that remained his primary and strongest commitment throughout his entire civil rights journey and that he saw his work in civil rights and human rights as an extension of his ministry and he never forgot that.
As a matter of fact, in my social media, I posted it yesterday that he saw himself first and foremost as Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which obviously would date back to the huge influence of his father who was the one who introduced him to the German monk. Martin Luther, you guys know is he was born as Michael King who later changes his name to Martin Luther King Jr. in identifying with the Reformation period.
So, just remembering how much the Reformation and how much church history and how much theology, I mean he goes to school at Boston University for a degree in systematic theology. So, he was a Christian leader through and through. Not perfect. We can debate some of the theological failings, but certainly deeply committed there.
Tim Muehlhoff:
Chris, I wonder if I could pick up what you said about his sensitivity. A couple years ago you came here and did a chapel talk that was phenomenal and in it you made the comment maybe the best place to start when it comes to the huge body of work of Martin Luther King Jr. is strength to love.
So, I picked up a copy of it and I was really struck where he begins and he begins with hard-heartedness. He says on page six, the hard-hearted person never truly loves, he engages in a crass utilitarianism that values other people mainly according to their usefulness to him. The hard-hearted person lacks the capacity for genuine compassion. He's unmoved by the pains and afflictions of his brothers.
Can you comment a little bit on how maybe hard-heartedness has crept into the church when it comes to race that after a while we just become tired of the race conversation and our work with the Winsome Conviction Project race has really done a number on churches and Christian organizations not being able to resolve that issue or even talk about it. Do you think hard-heartedness is creeping in to the modern church when it comes to race?
Chris Brooks:
Yeah. I think I would describe it as two ways. I would describe it first as exhaustion. I think it was Dr. Tony Evans who says, whenever reconciliation is the primary goal of the conversation, we always miss it. Whenever kingdom advancement is the primary focus of the conversation, then reconciliation inevitably happens because it takes all of us to advance the kingdom of God.
So, I think there's an exhaustion that sets in on all sides of this. In particular since we have surrendered so much of the conversation publicly to partisan politics whose goal is driven by something different than our goal as the church. Earthly politics divides in order to get electoral wins. Kingdom politics unites in order to get eternal wins.
And so, we know because of our eschatology, everything is moving towards Revelation 7:9, where people from every tribe and tongue and language will all be gathered together to the glory of God and giving praise to our king. But that's not the motivation of earthly politics. The motivation of earthly politics so often is to be able to animate the worst within groups of people and their thinking suspicions and doubts in order to gain wins, electoral wins. And the sad thing is that it works.
And so, this creates a cycle whose end goal isn't to get to solutions. And so, I'm a big believer that we have to have conversations about the Imago Dei because once we understand what it means for us to bear the image of God and what that really means, again, connected to the mission of God, then that forces us to look for real solutions towards reconciliation that actually causes everyone to be more motivated. But yeah, the embitterment that you realize I think comes from a frustration and a deep suspicion towards one another.
Tim Muehlhoff:
So, my ears perked up when you said we assume the worst. If you go back to the Letter from Birmingham Jail, I reread it for this, I was struck by how we started it.
Chris Brooks:
Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
Tim Muehlhoff:
Remember he says, "listen, I often don't respond to criticisms because my secretaries would be swamped." But then he says this about the ...
Chris Brooks:
I assume the best.
Tim Muehlhoff:
... white clergy who were really asking him, be patient, don't bring your protests here. He said, "Because you're a man of genuine goodwill and I believe that your criticisms are sincere." He believed the absolute best about them and then he gave his classic retort.
Chris Brooks:
I'm so glad you brought that up because I think that that is what allows us to be able to have conversations within the body of Christ that can ultimately benefit the world, is when we recognize that our common goal is the same, the glory of God, the plan of redemption being advanced in our communities. I got a chance to work with a colleague, you talk about two different backgrounds. His grandfather was a Klansman, my dad was a Black Panther, and here we are having conversations week after week after week about how we were raised to see the world.
But what kept us in the conversation with one another is that we were brothers in Christ and even when we vehemently disagreed, we believe the best of one another. But unfortunately, as you know, that is not the present ethos around these conversations.
Scott Rae:
Let me press down on that just a little bit further, Chris. Are there certain racial assumptions that white and Black people make about each other that are either inaccurate?
Chris Brooks:
A few.
Scott Rae:
Or which of these would you say are the most inaccurate or the most unhelpful?
Chris Brooks:
Man, there's so many. I think that probably at the top of my list would be the assumption of difference. I've had the privilege for 20 years. I pastored predominantly Black church. Since 2019, I took a mission to pastor a predominantly white church and some of you'll get that later. But I do believe that what I've noticed is that they're the same fears. My predominantly Black church I got a chance to pastor. Anytime we introduced any song that wasn't sung in the Black tradition or I brought in a speaker that wasn't from an African-American background, there was a suspicion of "Are we going white?"
And same fears in my predominantly white church, when I do the opposite, "Are we going Black?" And so, I think that we fail to recognized how our fears are common. I think there are also assumptions of goals and motives that are very, very false. I'll just simply say this and then we could go deeper, is that somehow what we have to manage to do is to live neither on the extremes of paranoia or naivety. And it's hard.
It's hard to be in cross-cultural settings and not either be paranoid that there is some underlying conspiracy or to be naive to it and pretend like the human heart has not fallen. And so, I think it's both the paranoia and at times naivete that works against us in our dealings with one another. We have to start with a place from a place of we're all fallen, we all have our struggles, and yet Christ redeems and allows us to be able to be one in him.
Tim Muehlhoff:
You're very quick to say that this unity that needs to happen deeply impacts the gospel, and yet we live in a world in which our struggles are there for everybody to read. I mean, we live in, sadly in a post-Ravi Zacharias world that broke the hearts of all of us when that came out. And so, you made the comment, social media gives 24-hour access to our Christian hypocrisy if we're not mindful. So, how do we counter that? When it's out there for everybody to see, what are ways that we can re-instill trust to both those within the church and those outside the church?
Chris Brooks:
Tweet less. I think that it's foolish for us to think that we can have substantive conversations, let alone disagreements on social media. I mean, this is something I've learned in conversation with you. I mean, the challenge of social media, and we've all fallen prey to this is if you and I are disagreeing on social media, we know that at a minimum 100 people are looking on to that conversation. And who wants to look like they were wrong or the fool in that type of setting?
I mean, the best thing that can happen if you post something that I think is absolutely wrong is for me to DM you and to say, "Hey, let's have coffee. Let's meet. Let's have a conversation face-to-face." The worst thing that can happen is for me to go public in response, in your comment section and tell you how wrong you are. How many of us, by the show of hands, are embarrassed to admit that we've lost hours if not days, trying to have social media fights and stuff? And there's been times when my wife has said, "Are you with us or are you not?"
Because I'm thinking about what am I going to post next that's witty and we'll win this argument, hands down. So, I think that the answer to social media is this, is that if we're going to use it at all, use it for the purposes of demonstrating something that's countercultural and that is self-deprecation. I think that the more that I can be honest about my own struggles as I watch the hypocrisy of the world that I legitimately criticize, but yet too often emulate and identify with.
The more that I can go online and say, "You know what? I struggle so often showing humility or I understand what it's like to miss the mark in this way in this form, the more you disarm your critics because you're not simply pointing out the wrongdoing of others." I think the problem that so often happens in this generation is that there's right virtue, like the desire for justice with the wrong content, filling that container, that virtue container. And so, we have truncated the definition of justice as simply the act of calling out bad actors.
And if justice is only the act of calling out bad actors, you got a problem in that all have sinned and fallen short of glory of God. Eventually, everyone's a bad actor if that logically plays itself out. But the other problem you have is that you constantly lobbing bombs at other people when you're living in a glass house. And so, it's a game that no one wins. And so, I think that if we're going to use social media, use it to be self-deprecating to show how truth has worked itself out in your life, the journey of sanctification, and I think you'll win a lot more people while still being able to make solid points about how we all fall short.
Scott Rae:
That's really helpful, I think, to take our task seriously, but not ourselves too seriously.
Tim Muehlhoff:
G.K. Chesterton just came to mind that he would laugh at himself and he was ...
Scott Rae:
Let's go back to his moral theology for a minute. Tim said he is one of the greatest moral philosophers. I think we would say he is one of the greatest moral theologians of our generation as well. Other than the image of God, which you've talked about at length in chapel this morning, what are maybe one or two other key components of his moral theology that stand out to you?
Chris Brooks:
Yeah. I would strongly recommend Dr. Michael Honey's book, All Work has Dignity. The work that Dr. King does on faith work and economics is so vastly underappreciated. How many have heard his quote about being a streetsweeper. That if you're going to be a streetsweeper, sweep like Michelangelo painted, like Beethoven made music. Do it as if all of heaven is looking over at you as you sweep streets. So, that when you die, heaven might say there was a great streetsweeper. Who says that?
But he's speaking to, and I've been a part of the faith work in economics movement for some time and get a chance, the privilege of sitting on a board for this great organization called Made to Flourish. But so often the videos and the thrust and the literature of that movement targets white-collar entrepreneurs and stuff. And the task that I often feel I have is to be a translator for the urban context to translate to a blue-collar environment.
But Dr. King had a way of making sanitation workers feel like they were advancing the kingdom of God. And so, we all have maybe heard that a little quib about the three bricklayers. A man walks by three bricklayers and he asks the first one, "What are you making?" And he says, "About 15 bucks an hour." Then he asks the second one, "What are you making?" He says, "Well, I'm building a wall." Then he asked the third one, "What are you making?" He says, "Well, I'm building a church where families will come, be restored and worship God."
All three were working on the same project. All three had different perspective on it. Dr. King had a way of taking the conversation from paycheck to purpose. So, I think when it comes to his work in moral philosophy, his ability to recognize the effects of not just racism but classism and to uplift the dignity of the poor is something that's profound even for today.
Tim Muehlhoff:
You've said that Christians are called to run to the hard places, not from them. Why do you think some churches or Christian institutions of higher education don't make diversity an issue? They don't make it a priority. What keeps them from running to what I think today is a pretty big hard place that people want to avoid?
Chris Brooks:
Let me use a practical example of this, but let me just first say because it's hard. I think diversity is one of the coolest phrases of our day. But as a pastor, we have 14 campuses, and I think what makes our church somewhat unique is that typically multi-campus movements are in similar or the same socioeconomic context. So, all suburban or all urban, but our 14 campuses are urban, suburban, rural.
We have some predominantly Black campuses, some predominantly white campuses, very socioeconomic. So, when I do the roadshow of visiting our campuses, it's in very different contexts and I'm grateful for that. But it's extremely hard, especially when you come through political years like what we just went through where you're not going to please anybody, or let me put it a different way, 50% of what you do, everything you do will be pleasing the 50% of people and not pleasing the 50% of people.
You just got to decide which 50% you're going to take off on that day. But one just practical example of how hard this is, I don't know how many of you live in homes that are multi-generational. But my mother-in-law, who's a widower, lives with us. So, there's three generations at our dinner table. And so, one of the things that we decided is that we're going to rotate who gets to pick dinner.
So, if my kids pick dinner, we're having pizza every night, because what they want. If me and my wife pick dinner, we're going to have a different menu than the kids. If my mother-in-law picks dinner, she's Ethiopian by heritage and she loves home-cooked meals. She loves cooking those traditional foods from her particular background.
So, in order to survive, we rotate. So, nobody's fully happy, but you know your day is coming. And I think that that's what it takes in order, at least so far, this is what I'm learning. I think that's what it takes in order to venture into those places. It takes the ability to say something that we don't like saying, and that is I'll be inconvenienced for the sake of the gospel. Make no mistake about it.
I think that corporate America has done far more for race reconciliation in the church. And I think it's because when we go to work, we know we have a common mission, we have to work with one another. My job depends on your job. And so, there is a built-in forced incentive. I think that in a society like ours, a free market society, and I'm not against a free market. I'm a capitalist raising capitalist children, but I also recognize the downside of it. And that is that church becomes elective.
And it's far easier for me to say, "I didn't like that music. I didn't like that sermon." And when we don't think of ourselves in the context of a group, and this goes ... I don't want to be too long-winded, but this goes back to how we even teach the gospel. I mean, the average person will explain it in your typical local church, Jesus came for me. He died for me so that I might be saved. And we don't teach as pastors, and I criticize my own guild for this and even myself in that.
So, often, we don't teach that you are a part of a redemptive community, a covenant community, a family of faith, and we are to live on mission together. And so, we don't have those strong group bonds, it becomes very easy to be driven by preference and just simply to walk away. And if I am defined by my elders as only being successful based off of nickels and noses, then I'm going to have as my greatest failure people leaving. And my greatest success people coming instead of people maturing.
So, if I'm not defining myself in terms of formation and I'm defining success simply quantitatively, not qualitatively, then it continues to inadvertently feed division. And so, this homogenous unit principle that drives the church growth movement even to today is successful because it works. You won't mature being in isolated segmented groups, but you will grow numerically. So, you'll have to decide if diversity and the glory of Christ in a local church is worth limited growth. And if it's worth limited growth, then stick to it.
Scott Rae:
As I read the Gospels, I don't see Jesus losing a lot of sleep when people decided to stop following him.
Chris Brooks:
Yeah.
Scott Rae:
You enjoy today's conversation with Tim Muehlhoff and Chris Brooks, give us a rating on your podcast app and share it with a friend. Thanks for listening and remember, Think Biblically about everything.
