martin luther king jr dissertation

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CTS PhD Doctoral Dissertations

Unearned suffering is redemptive: the roots and implications of martin luther king, jr.’s redemptive suffering theodicy.

Mika Edmondson , CalvinTheological Seminary Follow

Date of Award

Document type.

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

First Reader

Ronald J. Feenstra

Second Reader

Mary L. Vanden Berg

Third Reader

Lee P. Hardy

Fourth Reader

Rufus Burrow, Jr.

This dissertation analyzes the roots and implications of Martin Luther King Jr.'s redemptive suffering theodicy, reconsidering its continued relevance to contemporary discussions about theodicy among black theologians and within the black church. Through his home and church influences, King inherited a nearly 250-year-old black redemptive suffering tradition that traces back to early Negro spirituals and abolitionist works. King carefully developed these traditional theodical themes through critical engagement with Protestant liberal sources before applying his redemptive suffering formula during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. With a view towards the cross and the omnipotent personal God's good purposes in the world, King held that persons have the freedom and responsibility to agapically engage their suffering to help bring about personal and social transformation. I argue that King's redemptive suffering theodicy successfully answers the challenges raised by its contemporary black humanist and Womanist critics. Among black humanists, William R. Jones and Anthony Pinn allege that King's theodicy undermines black resistance to oppression by calling blacks to wait passively for God to deliver them rather than actively strive for their own social liberation. However, through its emphasis on the moral responsibility of God's free agents and the matchless power of God, King's theodicy provides powerful motivation, guidance, and hope for liberative social action. Womanist theologians Delores Williams and Jacquelyn Grant suspect that King's cruci-centric theodicy promotes a dangerous martyr mentality which valorizes suffering, makes black -women acquiescent in the face of their own oppression, and prioritizes the redemption of oppressors over the dignity and wellbeing of the oppressed. King's theodicy addresses these concerns by emphasizing a moral influence approach to the cross which calls black women to learn from and resist experiences of oppression as empowered moral agents. By identifying their suffering with the suffering of Christ, King's theodicy also protects the dignity of black women who have suffered while resisting oppression, describing them as empowered witnesses rather than as mere victims. Finally, King's theodicy provides a powerful and practical resource to help guide the black church and community in its redemptive engagement with contemporary forms of suffering.

Recommended Citation

Edmondson, Mika, "Unearned Suffering Is Redemptive: the Roots and Implications of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Redemptive Suffering theodicy" (2017). CTS PhD Doctoral Dissertations . 14. https://digitalcommons.calvin.edu/cts_dissertations/14

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The papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Dr. martin luther king, jr. archive, finding aid and content.

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Download the Dr. King Collection finding aid and inventory [PDF]

About the Collection – Scope & Content Notes

The Martin Luther King, Jr. collection, donated in 1964, consists of manuscripts, notebooks, correspondence, printed material, financial and legal papers, a small number of photographs and other items dating from 1947 to 1963.

Manuscripts include class notes, examinations and papers written by Dr. King while a student at Morehouse College (1944-1948), Crozer Theological Seminary (1948-1951) and Boston University (1951-1953). Among the notable documents are: a paper entitled Ritual (1947), composed at Morehouse; An Autobiography of Religious Development (1950), an assignment for the “Religious Development of Personality” class at Crozer taught by one of King’s mentors, George W. Davis; and notes and drafts of his doctoral dissertation, A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman (1955). Additional manuscripts in the collection include drafts of speeches, sermons and three books: Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (Harper, 1958), about the 1955-1956 bus boycott; Strength to Love (Harper & Row, 1963), a collection of several of his best-known sermons including “A Knock at Midnight,” “Shattered Dreams,” “The Death of Evil Upon the Seashore,” and “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life;” and Why We Can’t Wait (Harper & Row, 1964), which includes the famed “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Dr. King’s office files, which date from 1955 to 1963, make up the bulk of the collection and consist primarily of letters, but also include itineraries, financial and legal documents, printed items, news clippings, and similar documents. There is material related to both the Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. Additionally, there are extensive files related to the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Other organizations which prominently figure include the American Friends Service Committee, which helped to finance Dr. King’s 1959 trip to India; the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA).

Notable correspondence from figures in the Civil Rights movement includes letters from Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X, Adam Clayton Powell, Ella J. Baker, Medgar Evers, Roy Wilkins, Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, William Sloane Coffin, Allan Knight Chalmers, Sidney Poitier, Jackie Robinson, A. Philip Randolph, Harry Belafonte, and Ralph Abernathy. Distinguished U.S. Government correspondents include Alabama Gov. John Patterson, Robert F. Kennedy, Sargent Shriver, Paul Douglas, Prescott Bush, Ralph Bunche, Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, Richard M. Nixon, Dean Rusk, Walter Reuther, Adlai Stevenson, Earl Warren, Harry S. Truman, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Other eminent correspondents include James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Jawaharlal Nehru, Linus Pauling, Nat King Cole, Cass Canfield, Ralph Ginzburg, Julian Huxley, Paul Tillich, and Stanley Levison.

Photographs in the collection include images of King with his family and congregation, a formal portrait, a photograph of the knife with which he was stabbed in 1958, and his coffin being transported by airplane.

Awards for King in the collection include an honorary Doctor of Divinity diploma from the Chicago Theological Seminary (1957); a certificate from the Alabama Association of Women’s Clubs (1957); Man of the Year Award from the Capital Press Club (1957); the Social Justice Award from the Religion and Labor Foundation (1957); the New York City proclamation of May 16, 1961 as “Desegregation Day” in honor of King, by Mayor Robert Wagner (1961); a citation from Americans for Democratic Action (1961); a certificate from the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (1963); an award from the Institute of Adult Education, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, Bayonne, New Jersey (1964); and King’s certificate of membership in the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity at Boston University.

Audio in the collection includes recordings of King delivering a speech at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina (1958); an interview with Bayard Rustin (1963); King’s visit to Boston University in 1964 to donate his papers; King giving a speech at the Golden Jubilee Convention of the United Synagogues of America (Nov. 19, 1964); King speaking to District 65 DWA; and King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Other items in the collection include telephone log books (1961–1963); King’s diary regarding his arrest on July 27, 1962; numerous clippings, pamphlets, flyers, articles, and other printed items; and a monogrammed leather briefcase owned by King. An addendum to the collection includes correspondence pertaining to the Joan Daves Agency’s dealings with King and the King Estate. These letters date from 1958 to 1993 and cover advertising and promotion, King’s Massey Lectures (1967), publishing rights, permissions, and other subjects.

Facsimiles of select materials are available on permanent display in the Martin Luther King Jr. Reading Room on the 3rd floor of the Mugar Memorial Library .

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The Theology of Martin Luther King, Jr.

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American prophet: martin luther king, jr. public deposited.

• In August 2011, after more than two decades of planning, fund-raising and construction, the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial— a four-acre tract south of the Mall featuring a granite statue of King — has opened to the public. King is officially enshrined in granite in the National Mall. A black preacher became a monument, a monument represents America. King is the prophet of American Civil Religion. This paper examines Martin Luther King, Jr. as the prophet of America and in the context of American Civil Religion. To begin, I will explore the concepts and definitions of the prophet, the civil religion, and the American Creed by analyzing Max Weber, Robert Bellah, Martin Marty, and Richard Hughes’s works. King’s thoughts, words and acts in the light of prophetic traditions and the Civil Religion will be further discussed. The concept of the Beloved Community will be the main clue in order to interpret King’s commitment to his social actions. King’s outlook on American Civil Religion will be sketched by analyzing the center concept of Civil Rights Movement, Anti-Vietnam War Campaign, as well as Poor People Campaign. Lastly, I will explore how King is recognized in the United States today by examining the establishment of King National Memorial in Washington D.C. and the speech of the president delivered at the dedication ceremony. Further, the link between King’s idea/actions and the Occupy movement in 2011, which is referred even by the president, will be discussed.
• Semba, Sakuma
• Religious Studies
• Chernus, Ira
• Johnson, Greg
• Whitehead, Deborah
• University of Colorado Boulder
• Martin Luther King
• Martin Luther King National Memorial
• Robert Bellah
• American Civil Religion
• Masters Thesis
• In Copyright
• English [eng]

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Plagiarism Seen by Scholars In King's Ph.D. Dissertation

By Anthony de Palma

• Nov. 10, 1990

Torn between loyalty to his subject and to his discipline, the editor of the papers of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reluctantly acknowledged yesterday that substantial parts of Dr. King's doctoral dissertation and other academic papers from his student years appeared to have been plagiarized.

The historian, Clayborne Carson, a professor of history at Stanford University who was chosen in 1985 by Dr. King's widow, Coretta Scott King, to head the King Papers Project, said that analysis of the papers by researchers working on the project had uncovered concepts, sentences and longer passages taken from other sources without attribution throughout Dr. King's writings as a theology student.

"We found that there was a pattern of appropriation, of textual appropriation," said the 46-year-old historian, who was active in the civil rights movement and has written extensively on black history. He spoke at a news conference at Stanford, called after an article in The Wall Street Journal yesterday disclosed details of the project's findings. "By the strictest definition of plagiarism -- that is, any appropriation of words or ideas -- there are instances of plagiarism in these papers." A Lack of Answers

Although he said that he believed Dr. King had acted unintentionally, Mr. Carson said that Dr. King had been sufficiently well acquainted with academic principles and procedures to have understood the need for extensive footnotes, and he was at a loss to explain why Dr. King had not used them.

Mr. Carson and other scholars who have seen the papers declined to say how great a percentage of the material had been plagiarized, but they said it was enough to indicate a serious violation of academic principles.

Officials at Boston University, which awarded Dr. King his doctorate in 1955, announced yesterday that a committee of four scholars had been formed to investigate the dissertation. But it is not likely, even if plagiarism is proved, that the Ph.D. degree in theology would be revoked, because neither Dr. King nor his dissertation adviser is alive to defend the work.

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The Theses of Martin Luther King, Jr.

N ews stories of recent months underscore the fact that the place of Martin Luther King, Jr. in our national mythology is still not secure. Perhaps that should not surprise us. Myth-making in a nation so large and various as ours takes time. In that light, the twenty-three years since Dr. King’s death is not a long time. It may not be bad that we are slow to elevate a historical figure to the status of national exemplar. When we so elevate a figure, we are saying something not only about that person but about ourselves. Among the many things that make us who we are, we are whom we admire and teach our children to emulate.

In 1983, Congress declared Martin Luther King Day to be a national holiday. Aside from the immediate effect of closing federal offices for a day, such an act of Congress is a recommendation, a statement of hope that people will agree that we recognize our better angels in the person and work of Dr. King. As with other national holidays, the observance of Dr. King Day is spotty. It has been a long time since national holidays were observed with any hint that they might be civil holy days. Just as well, some say, arguing that “civil religion” is a very dubious enterprise. Yes, but a society needs something like public piety—common symbols, stories, and rites that evoke respect, even reverence (although never worship).

Congress was right in what it did. It was not, as some claim, throwing a sop to black Americans; it was raising a sign for all Americans. Martin Luther King, Jr. advanced a thesis about America. A thesis is, first of all, a proposition. Dr. King proposed that legalized racial discrimination contradicted fundamental propositions of the American experiment. Of course he was not the first to say that. But he said it with an almost singular power of persuasion. And, beginning with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956, he acted on it in a manner that would, in time, catch the conscience of the citizenry.

With remarkable, although not unfailing, consistency, he channeled anger into the ways of peaceful protest within the context of democratic deliberation. He made clear that his dream was a dream of and for America, not against America. He called us to be the people we professed to be. Most Americans listened to his thesis, and knew he was right. Some of those who view history in the light of providential purpose did not hesitate to acclaim him as God’s instrument. Not since the Civil War had Americans been so compelled to face the most abiding sin of their corporate history. If one can speak of countries having souls. Dr. King led this country to something like repentance and amendment of life, or at least to nobler resolve.

Yet Dr. King and the day set aside to honor his memory remain, as they say, controversial. The reasons are not hard to find. We reject the claim that it is the only reason while readily acknowledging that one reason is racism. It is not only in the recognized fever swamps of extremism that one encounters Americans who never listened to Dr. King, or listened to him and strongly disagreed. They believe that blacks are inherently inferior and constitute a population basically alien to this society. In their view, laws of racial segregation were neither irrational nor unjust. Even if no other questions had subsequently been raised about Dr. King, these Americans would not honor his memory or celebrate his day. Racism may not be the main reason, but it is surely one reason, and it can in devious ways infect other reasons.

M any Americans are no doubt ambivalent about Dr. King because they are ambivalent about the current form of the civil rights movement that is associated with his name. Already in his lifetime, advocates of “black power” countered white racism with black racism, contending that blacks are indeed alien to an inherently oppressive “Amerika.” Today, with significant gradations of stridency, many black leaders who claim the mantle of Dr. King perpetuate that poisonous line of unreason.

The very term “civil rights” has come to be understood not as a cause opening America to a larger and more generous sense of community but as a militantly fraudulent form of special pleading. Thus, for example, in the last Congress the Civil Rights Restoration Act was roundly, and rightly, criticized as the Racial Preference Act. The thesis of Dr. King has been turned into its antithesis. Most Americans do not take well to quotas and reverse discriminations designed to give additional advantage to those blacks who are already doing well. They are disgusted with racialist leaders who adamantly press for such measures while ignoring, denying, or excusing the desperate plight of an isolated black underclass, especially in our urban centers.

The racism of the right, against which Dr. King contended, is familiar. Not so readily recognized are the more recent manifestations of the racism of the left. Much pro-abortion agitation about the “crisis” of teenage pregnancy thinly veils a desire to control and, if possible, reduce the black population—especially the lower part of the population that may turn out to be a “drain” on society. The leaders of the public school establishment are determined to perpetuate a destructive educational system to which they would not subject their own children but which is good enough for “them.” “Progressive” hiring and tenure policies in universities are based on the assumption that “they” cannot meet “our” standards, and therefore compromises must be made in the name of affirmative action.

These and other measures are advanced under the vague rubric of “civil rights.” The result is the opposite of Dr. King’s thesis that people should be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. The result is that many whites, and not a few blacks, are ambivalent about celebrating Dr. King because they, wrongly, identify him with a civil rights ideology that has made a mockery of the movement that he led.

Powerfully reinforcing these reservations are the questions raised about Dr. King’s own character. That he was a philanderer, indulging himself in frequent adulterous relationships, now seems to be established beyond reasonable doubt. This aspect of his character was apparently well known to some who worked closely with him, and has become quite public in recent years. Now another thesis of Dr. King is being widely discussed, his doctoral thesis written at the School of Theology at Boston University. It seems that large sections of the thesis, and much of King’s earlier and later writings, were “borrowed” from others without attribution. The unavoidable word for that is plagiarism.

The revelations about Dr. King’s doctoral thesis do not touch his claim to historical greatness. While a few writers have contended that Dr. King was a scholar and theologian of note, this was generally recognized as hagiographical excess. Strangely enough, however, some among his more distinguished biographers have said that they are shaken by the finding of plagiarism. They were not similarly shaken by his sexual behavior. After all, many great men have been philanderers, but plagiarism is something else. Plagiarism is much more serious than adultery, that is, if your primary universe of discourse is the academy. Plagiarism is a knowledge-class sin. To understand this is to understand why Dr. King’s plagiarism was so prominently featured in the prestige media in a way that his adulteries were not.

S ome commentators took a different tack in response to the most recent findings. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, editorially opined that journalistic explorations into the private lives of public figures have gotten out of hand. The editors compared the attention paid the King disclosures with the exposes that undid Gary Hart, John Tower, and others in recent years. The comparison does not hold. At stake with Hart was his aspiration to be president, and the Tower question was whether he was qualified to be secretary of defense. At stake with Dr. King is whether he should be enshrined and celebrated as an exemplary figure in the telling of the American story. Moreover, the comparison does not hold because a doctoral thesis is not a private act. Perhaps most important, the comparison does not hold because Dr. King was a minister of the gospel.

The significance of the last point generally escapes those who have crafted the public telling of the King legend. A few days following his death in April 1968, a memorial service was held in New York at a large Harlem church. On network news, a reporter standing in front of the church concluded his report with this: “It was a religious service, and fittingly so, for, after all. Dr. King was the son of a minister.” The son of a minister? Dr. King never left any doubt that he understood himself and his movement in terms of Christian teaching and ministry. The public secularization of the King legend has everything to do with the secularistic propensities of our cultural elites. Yet another factor is at work, however.

Even some of those who recognize that Dr. King cannot be explained apart from his religious milieu and self-understanding seem to think that the usual standards for clerical behavior do not apply to the black church. Compare, for instance, the sensationalistic media treatment of white televangelists caught in sexual dalliance. Long and lasciviously, the media slaver over the manifest “hypocrisy” of a Jimmy Swaggart. Dr. King’s sexual derelictions, on the other hand, are discreetly ignored, or even welcomed as evidence that he was not one of those awkward types derisively referred to as “saints.” (The last was the relieved observation of The Nation in response to the King exposures.)

Why this nonchalance toward Dr. King’s moral transgressions? One answer is that Dr. King was on the right side of a great and just cause. Another and less attractive answer is the supposition that we shouldn’t expect as much of blacks. The people who are accepting of Dr. King’s moral failings are, as often as not, the same people who tell us that black rap groups that draw their language from the sewer are “representative of authentic black culture.” The “acceptance” professed by so many of a progressive bent is, in fact, a condescension riddled through and through with racialist stereotypes.

The truth is that for millions of Christians, black and white, there is the perception that Dr. King betrayed their trust. If he is to be accused of hypocrisy, however, it was the hypocrisy defined as the homage that vice pays to virtue. Unlike so many others in the sixties, he did not commend his failings as an “alternative lifestyle.” He knew that he was a sinner, and we can hope that he knew he was a forgiven sinner.

Martin Luther King, Jr. is rightly honored as a hero in the telling of the American story—not because of his personal virtue but because he was the chosen instrument to advance a morally imperative change in our common life. His character was grievously flawed. He was, to borrow from Saint Paul, an “earthen vessel”—a very earthen vessel. For believers this only underscores the truth that, as the Apostle says, “the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us.” We have little doubt that Dr. King would agree with that. And we have little doubt that he would further agree that the thesis he sought to advance needs still to be championed today—against those who opposed him then, as well as against those who fraudulently claim his legacy now. Dr. King, we expect, would not be at all surprised that he and his thesis continue to be cause for controversy.

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Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis: The Mind Of Martin Luther King, Jr.

When you live in Atlanta, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday celebration is not just a one day affair. Here we have King Week activities, galas and marches for days. Morehouse College, Dr. King’s alma mater, puts on several commemorative programs honoring the famed civil rights leader. On Auburn Avenue, the King Center , a local non-profit organization that houses the internationally renowned Center for Nonviolent Social Change, is thronged by crowds visiting the gravesite of Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King. The King Museum, an interactive exhibit run by the National Park Service, sits across the street. A block west is Ebenezer Baptist Church, where both King Jr. and King Sr. preached. But the most profound moments I have experienced in the presence of King memorabilia has been at a display of the King papers, when I realized just how important Martin Luther King Jr.’s academic training and intellectual development were to the success of the civil rights movement.    

The King artifacts were purchased in 2006 by a group of concerned Atlanta citizens from Martin Luther King Jr.’s estate and were subsequently donated to Morehouse College . According to the Atlanta Journal & Constitution , by February 2010, the writings of Dr. King will be fully available to the public at the Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center. The papers have been under lock and key since the purchase, with one exception — a 5 month exhibition in 2007 of 600 documents from the collection.

It was just after the opening of the I Have A Dream: The Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection exhibition at the Atlanta History Center that I had a chance late one weekday morning back in 2007 to check it out. With no opening day or weekend crowds to contend with, I took a leisurely stroll through the wing of the History Center dedicated to the display. Looking through the glass of the first display case at the tattered remains of King’s report cards, my eyebrows raised — “they paid thirty two million dollars for this ?”, I said to myself. It didn’t take long, though, for a wave of nostalgia to set in as I peered at the scrawling handwriting that covered page after page of notes and rough drafts from King’s undergraduate years.

The books, some of them battered and discolored, stopped me in my tracks. Not only could I could see his young mind grappling with the ideas men the world over had wrestled with for centuries — the exhibit, organized so that King’s writings were displayed in a chronological order, often showed how these great thinkers had influenced him.

It wasn’t until I got to the telegrams and the notes from movement organizing meetings that I began to get a lump in my throat.

Since that visit, I’ve read a couple of books about King and the civil rights movement, but none of them dovetailed with the experience I had that day in the Atlanta History Center the way David Garrow’s book Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference did. The account Garrow produced turned the stacks of books I’d seen from King’s college and graduate school days, as well as the books he received from leaders around the world, including Mohandas Ghandi, into a narrative that showed just how much King’s scholarship impacted his thinking, and in turn, the practices and policies of the southern civil rights movement.

King entered Crozer Theological Institute Seminary in 1948 as a student who had earned the proverbial “gentleman’s C’s” at Morehouse College.  He left three years later as the class valedictorian. Somewhere during the early part of his tenure at Crozer, King’s intellectual curiosity caught fire, and he spent the balance of his time at the seminary exploring the work of some of the world’s most noted thinkers, including Karl Marx, Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr. The questions his exposure to these influences raised stayed with him when he matriculated at Boston University.

“Regardless of subject matter, King never tired of moving from a one-sided thesis to a corrective, but also one-sided antithesis and finally to a more coherent synthesis beyond both.” L. Harold DeWolf — professor of King at Boston University Bearing The Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

King’s professors at Boston University were impressed with his scholarship, according to Garrow — so much so that they encouraged him to consider a life in academia. But King longed to return to the pulpit, where he could interact with people instead of books. Indeed, if it were not for internal dissension among the members of the Montgomery Improvement Association, King might never have ascended to the forefront of the south’s civil rights movement.

There is no way to measure how much of King’s success in formulating strategies of engagement with the White House, the Attorney General, and the state and local administrations with which he and his followers clashed were the result of a “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” approach. But I am certain his ability to understand on an intellectual level where the divergent interests of the segregationists and the civil rights advocates intersected, and his ability to articulate how these interests could both gain something by moving forward from this crossroad are the direct result of his time spent wrestling with philosophical abstractions in graduate school. 

Martin Luther King Jr declaring the Freedom Rides will continue at a press conference in Montgomery, Alabama, June 1961. Photo by Bruce Davidson/Magnum

All that we are

The philosophy of personalism inspired martin luther king’s dream of a better world. we still need its hopeful ideas today.

by Bennett Gilbert   + BIO

On 25 March 1965, the planes out of Montgomery, Alabama were delayed. Thousands waited in the terminal, exhausted and impassioned by the march they had undertaken from Selma in demand of equal rights for Black people. Their leader, Martin Luther King, Jr, waited with them. He later reflected upon what he’d witnessed in that airport in Alabama:

As I stood with them and saw white and Negro, nuns and priests, ministers and rabbis, labor organizers, lawyers, doctors, housemaids and shopworkers brimming with vitality and enjoying a rare comradeship, I knew I was seeing a microcosm of the mankind of the future in this moment of luminous and genuine brotherhood.

In the faces of the exhausted marchers, King saw the hope that sustained their hard work against the violence and cruelty that they had faced. It is worth asking: why was King moved to try to create a better world? And what sustained his hope?

A clue can be found in the PhD dissertation he wrote at Boston University Divinity School in 1955:

Only a personal being can be good … Goodness in the true sense of the word is an attribute of personality.

The same is true of love. Outside of personality loves loses its meaning …

What we love deeply is persons – we love concrete objects, persistent realities, not mere interactions. A process may generate love, but the love is directed primarily not toward the process, but toward the continuing persons who generate that process.

King subordinates everything to the flourishing of human persons because goodness in this world has no home other than that of persons. Their wellbeing is what makes the events of our lives and of our collective history worthy of effort and care. In order to demonstrate that we are worth the struggle within and among ourselves, King sought to find love between the races and classes on the basis of philosophical claims about personhood. A decade after his dissertation, he was at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement, marching to Montgomery.

Can we still grasp and live the hope that King found? Capitalism, imperialism, nationalism, racism – like iron filings near a magnet, all these historical forces seem to be pulled together today into one fatal, immiserating direction. They teach us hateful ways to behave and promote heinous vices such as pride and greed. Desires flee beyond prudent limits and rush toward disaster. It seems we are not worth all that we used to think we are worth. Can we replace our narcissism with a virtuous self-regard? The philosophical tradition of personalism tells us that we can and do have hope for our future.

K ing’s hope came from his understanding of Christianity through the philosophy of personalism. He largely acquired this line of thought during his graduate studies at Boston. His advisors in Divinity School had been students of Borden Parker Bowne (1847-1910), the first philosophy professor at Boston University. Bowne founded Boston personalism, which, with William James’s pragmatism , was one of the two earliest American schools of philosophy. For Bowne, personhood is not the bundles of characteristics we call ‘personality’. Instead, it is the intelligence that makes reality coherent and meaningful. The core of his thought is that personhood is ‘the deepest thing in existence … [with] intellect as the concrete realisation and source’ of being and causality.

Bowne says that if we dismiss abstractions because they are static and have no force in the world, what is left is solely the ‘power of action’. Action for Bowne is intelligence understood as a force that activates the concrete reality of things. This reality is not static substance but the ceaseless business of the effect that entities have on other entities. Personhood is the non-material and non-biological power of relations among things, which activates all the processes of the world. Reality itself is thus deeply personal. Without personhood, it would be atomised and inactive – and therefore unintelligible. In Bowne’s view, only the concept of intelligent selves is adequate for explaining how things are constituted and inter-related. Being is nothing without causality; causality is nothing without intelligence. Reality is nothing without idea; idea is nothing without reality. This intimate connection of mind and the world means that nothing can be understood apart from the intelligence that perceives and understands it, replacing inert substances with the ever-flowing labours of our human need to find meaning in life as we encounter it.

Personalism always begins its analysis of reality with the person at the centre of consciousness

Bowne’s ideas had many predecessors, from Latin Christianity through Immanuel Kant, using many different theories and concepts, about what a human being is and about the personhood of God in its relation to our own personhood. His forceful argumentation influenced James, who helped found the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism shortly after Bowne’s first books were published and who drew increasingly close to personalism, as did the idealist philosopher Josiah Royce. Bowne was at the centre of this troika of canonical American philosophers at the turn of the 20th century. His teaching rippled out through personalist philosophers on the West Coast and through his students at Boston, notably Edgar S Brightman and Harold DeWulf, both of whom later became teachers of King.

Many other forms of personalism had been developed in Europe in the previous century: theistic and non-theistic, socialist or communitarian and libertarian, abstractly metaphysical and concretely ethical. It is more an approach to thinking than a method, doctrine or school. Personalism always begins its analysis of reality with the person at the centre of consciousness, to which it attaches the most profound worth. Some versions develop this through ontology or metaphysics; some, through theologies associated with most denominations of the Abrahamic religions; and some, through the intersubjective and communitarian nature of human life. My own version makes the structure of moral meaningfulness the first step and first philosophy, as I will explain below. All versions seek an integrated, ethically strong comprehension of personhood as the heart of the life of humankind.

Though personalism continues to be a field of robust philosophical research, in American academic philosophy after the Second World War it faded under the hegemony of analytic philosophy. But in King’s hands it became forceful as a practice for justice and other moral ends. Its resources have not been exhausted. Careful revision and updating can make it a source of illumination and hope in the circumstances we face a half-century after King.

W hy should we update personalism, and what useful purpose will this serve? Our ideas about the nature of human beings are today undergoing a severe challenge by the new philosophies of transhumanism. Through personalism, we can understand and appreciate our purposes and obligations, as well as the dangers posed by transhumanism.

The best known of these transhumanist philosophies is effective altruism (EA). The Centre for Effective Altruism was founded at the University of Oxford in 2012 by Toby Ord and William MacAskill; largely inspired by Peter Singer’s utilitarianism, EA has been an influential movement of our time. As MacAskill defines it in Doing Good Better (2015):

Effective altruism is about asking, ‘How can I make the biggest difference I can?’ And using evidence and careful reasoning to try to find an answer. It takes a scientific approach to doing good.

This is not as clear cut as it might seem, and it has often led to the uncomfortable conclusion that the accumulation of capital by the wealthy is morally necessary in order to affect the world for the better in the future, largely regardless of the consequences for living persons. Its proponents argue that society does not sufficiently plan for the distant future and fails to store up the wealth that our successors will need to solve social and existential challenges.

Other transhumanist theories include longtermism , the idea that we have a moral obligation to provide for the flourishing of successor bioforms and machinic entities in the very distant future, at times regardless of consequences for those now living and their proximate next generations. There is also a kind of rationalism that justifies the moral calculations on which provision for the future instead of for the living is based; cosmism , the vision for exploration and colonisation of other worlds; and transhumanism , which aspires to assemble technologies for the evolution of humankind into successor species or for our replacement by other entities as an inevitable and thereby moral duty. All of these, including the various versions, are sometimes named by the acronym TESCREAL (transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, longtermism). Here I refer to these as ‘transhumanism’.

The core argument common to these lines of thinking, according to the philosopher Émile Torres writing in 2021, is that:

[W]hen one takes the cosmic view, it becomes clear that our civilisation could persist for an incredibly long time and there could come to be an unfathomably large number of people in the future. Longtermists thus reason that the far future could contain way more value than exists today, or has existed so far in human history, which stretches back some 300,000 years.

From this point of view, human suffering today matters little by the numbers. Nuclear war, environmental collapse, injustice and oppression, tyranny, and oppression by intelligent technology are mere ripples on the surface of the ocean of history.

This idea of the agency of the inorganic is one of the key arguments for decentring the human

Each element of these transhumanist ideologies regards human personhood as a thing that is expiring and therefore to be replaced. As the longtermist Richard Sutton told the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in 2023: ‘it behooves us [humans] … to bow out … We should not resist succession.’ Their proponents argue for the factual truth of their predictions as a way to try to ensure the realisations of their prophecies. According to the theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky, by ‘internalising the lessons of probability theory’ to become ‘perfect Bayesians’, we will have ‘reason in the face of uncertainty’. Such calculations will open a ‘vastly greater space of possibilities than does the term “Homo sapiens”.’

A personalist approach deflates these transhumanist claims. As the historian of science Jessica Riskin has argued, a close examination of the science of artificial intelligence demonstrates that the only intelligence in machines is what people put into them. It is really a sleight-of-hand; there is always a human behind the curtain turning the wizard wheels. As she put it in The New York Review of Books in 2023:

Turing’s literary dialogues seem to me to indicate what’s wrong with Turing’s science as an approach to intelligence. They suggest that an authentic humanlike intelligence resides in personhoo d, in an interlocutor within, not just the superficial appearance of an interlocutor without; that intelligence is a feature of the world and not a figment of the imagination.

Longtermists’ notions of future entities lack everything we know about conscious intelligence because they use consciousness or living beings as empty black-box words into which even meaningless notions will fit. Effective altruists dismiss the worth attributable to every human, squashing it by calculations that cannot prescribe moral value, whatever these proponents claim. As we can see in the theories of longtermists such as Nick Bostrom and effective altruists such as Sam Bankman-Fried, instead of working with human ethical values, they work with numerical values, ignoring the massive body of thought from anthropologists such as Webb Keane and from phenomenologists such as Rasmus Dyring, Cheryl Mattingly and Thomas Wentzer showing that values are neither empirical nor quantifiable but nonetheless real forces in human affairs. Transhumanism as a whole assigns agency to alien beings and electronic entities that do not exist – and perhaps are inconceivable.

This idea of the agency of the inorganic is one of the key arguments for decentring the human. Consider, for example, salt. Salt affords certain effects in certain conditions: it produces a specific taste, it corrodes other materials, it serves certain functions in organisms. But it is humans who organise these events under the concept of causality. What salt does, it does without consciousness. Consciousness neither starts nor halts its effects, broadly speaking. What sense is there, then, in saying that salt has agency when it is more illuminating to say that it is a cause of effects under some conditions?

In ordinary language, we frequently speak of machinery or ideas ‘doing’ things in our lives. But they do nothing. People – human persons – produce, operate and apply their creations. The problem with assigning agency, even informally, to the nonhuman is that this disguises the strength of human control, limited though it is in other respects. It leaves us unaware when a more toxic and cunning human drives to take control because we are busy trying to control the world rather than ourselves. Although some people think that machines or ideas are in control of them, it is really other humans. If we overlook this truth, we accept an untruth – an untruth that condemns us to the mercy of our worst drives and behaviours. When we devalue humanity, we unleash our self-destructive drives, thereby turning reason into destructive irrationality. In this way, we are in fact governed by our own human drive for self-destruction.

This drive seems to differentiate us from other animals as much as language or historicity do. If we provoke this drive too much, we shall have nowhere else to turn in our struggle to flourish in the natural world. We must, instead, search out our integrity and worth because the alternative is despair.

The great and encompassing thing that humans create is our story: human history, the sum of our behaviour and our deeds. We create it with and amid the world around us out of our need to make sense of the world. This need, which builds our moral life, is part of what drives everything we do. It drives the ways we pursue survival, for, without a sense of meaning, we have little will to survive. The pursuit of survival can lead us to meaningfulness but, if it fails to do so, the pursuit itself ceases. We guide ourselves by the stories we choose, for storytelling inhabits all ways of knowing and acting. If the meaning we seek as human persons is overtaken by the story that our self-destructive drive presents in the form of transhumanism, we shall not survive.

P ersons are worth more than even justice and goodness are, because it is for the sake of persons that we fight for justice and goodness. In the face of possible profound changes, it often seems we must choose between being good and just to ourselves, and being good and just toward nature. The possibility of these radical changes legitimately requires that we profoundly deflate our anthropocentrism, since overblown self-regard has served us poorly. But how do we do this while encouraging our fraught capabilities and appreciating the worth of our flawed species?

The kind of personalism that I have developed out of Bowne’s ideas as a response to this and other questions I call moral agency personalism. Moral agency is the activity of judging and choosing between good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice. In my view, every thing that has such moral agency is a person, and all persons are moral agents. (The evidence that some nonhuman species make moral choices , sometimes based on memory and history, has been accumulating.) Adding this possibility to personalism formally recognises worth in all persons, nonhuman as well as human. As a belief and a practice, it can ground a virtuous, as opposed to vicious, self-regard that human and nonhuman persons can exercise for themselves and for other persons. This kind of self-regard is distinct from self-importance.

We can develop a moral agency personalism that has some of the resources we need in facing the human future. We can find these by altering some fundamental concepts of personalism. These updates include: accepting the fact of nonhuman moral agents or persons; including the body in our understanding of individual lives and of interpersonal relations; and rethinking the idealist ontology in personalism in order to make it an ethics-as-first-philosophy approach, with less emphasis on ontology. The guiding idea of these changes is that, in making moral sense out of experience, personal moral agency enlarges our relations to the whole range of our lives and our care for all beings.

We need to respect ourselves as persons with the power to decide not to continue to harm

Personalism gives us robust resources for identifying our worth and for believing in it. It can encourage us to enhance our worth by our acts in seeking goodness, compassion and justice, and guide us to the richest possible moral life. Because our personhood is the home base of our point of view, there is no way forward other than to maintain our integrity while learning what we must in order to thrive.

The initial and most basic of these resources we should tap is the strength not to do more harm. We are the ones who deploy transhumanist projects into the only world that sustains us. We are the ones degrading the environment. And we are the only ones who can stop us from doing both. For this, we need to respect ourselves as persons with the power to decide not to continue to harm. This is the minimum we must do.

Respecting the moral worth of persons also ignites our capacity to care for others. We respond with aid to calls for help when we learn to recognise moral obligation pertaining to every person, including ourselves, and toward every other person. Furthermore, our humanitarian disposition is frequently a sure way to developing sympathy for the natural world and the life within it.

Understanding our personal moral agency enables a wise combination of the two general forces of moral action: power and compassion. Power is the logic by which we carry ideas and lines of thought to fulfilment in activity. Compassion is the potentially unbounded lovingkindness with which we temper power and extend love to widening spheres in our lives. So far as we know, we are the only living beings who can use these forces in moral decision-making. But even if other beings have moral personhood, nothing of the sort relieves us of the moral obligation that our possession of these two capabilities makes it possible to accept and to follow.

We possess our history, just as we make it – another resource that is unique to us, so far as we know. History is the engine of self-awareness. As the substance of all that we have done and the actual conditions for the possibility of all that is and will be, historical consciousness serves us as the indispensable locus of reflection and deliberation. No unchanging and antiquated images of ourselves restrain our understanding of history because we create the past anew whenever we study it and reflect on it. It is therefore the great endowment for a renewed humanistic extension of personhood to all humankind and to all life.

T here are two more resources, pointing to opposite ends of the spectrum of our concerns. The first is that the personalist grasp of what we are worth supports democracy. Democracy has depended on a powerful conception of personal agency and responsibility that cultural and political changes now challenge, in addition to the material issues of human life in the Anthropocene era. These social and natural developments closely reflect each other. Learning to live together is the worthy goal of democracy. But if we are to pursue concord and peace by that road, we must value ourselves, accept our moral nature with its obligations, submit our desires to what the moral worth of every living being requires of us, and work in response to present and patent human suffering and real human joy.

At the opposite end, on the cosmic scale, lies another possibility for virtuous human self-regard afforded us by personalism. Simply put, it is this: it might become clear to us that the universe is constitutively pervaded by consciousness, or is conscious in all its parts, or is inside of a super-consciousness. These are versions of the notion of cosmic consciousness called panpsychism. Panpsychism is not just about what we can know or do but about reality itself. This appeals to those who have for a moment felt the life of the universe in a small experience and do not want to dismiss what that feeling says and means to them just because it is not empirically verifiable. In our best moments, our lives feel epiphanous.

The moral agency of persons thrives when agents act in obligation to their individual and collective selves

At the same time, however, panpsychism can conflict with the empiricism that is so valuable because it is used to make things that work well for us. And yet other kinds of things, such as erotic love and spirituality, also work well for us and are not conducive to the usual demands of empiricism. For now, it is easy to think that a universal consciousness makes our consciousness unimportant, but there might be ways of getting the opposite outcome. Current advances in physics and biology are starting to support the belief that our consciousness affects reality by working with reality as a consciousness that includes ours. That is, our observing and predicting are inside, not outside, the phenomena we encounter. We are not the crown jewels of creation, but our self-referentiality, our critical awareness and our moral lives form personhood as an important part of a universe that is thereby less alien and cold.

If a suitable form of panpsychism is true, human personhood means more to reality than is usually thought. This kind of personalism puts us into a community or, rather, into many communities made up of conscious beings capable of moral responsibility. The moral agency of persons thrives when agents reflectively act in obligation to their individual and collective selves rather than in seeing themselves through the needs of imagined others in the undetermined future.

What King observed in Montgomery airport in 1965 was actual persons developing their moral purchase with each other. He saw this as the processes of goodness and love at work in their proper sphere: our common existence. King wanted us not only to recognise the unique and infinite value of every person, but to understand it so powerfully that we would feel ourselves obliged to take the action that this recognition requires. As he wrote, we need only look around us at the struggles for a decent and free life that others wage to sense the profundity of human worth and to see that we all depend on one another. That this has the power to inspire us to fight for change sustained his hopes.

We face an urgent present choice. We might prefer that algorithms or despots act for us because our own power of judgment is too explosive to manage. That would suit the purposes of infomaniacal hypercapitalism, which seeks to control consumers rather than to enrich persons. But turning over our judgment to machines does not lock away our power to destroy ourselves and others. We must govern ourselves even as we evolve. This requires an enduring connection to our humanity and a willingness to work hard with one another. This can be successful only if and when we hold fast to all that we are.

Knowledge is often a matter of discovery. But when the nature of an enquiry itself is at question, it is an act of creation

Céline Henne

A novel kind of music

So-called ‘classical’ music was as revolutionary as the modern novel in its storytelling, harmony and depth

Joel Sandelson

Psychiatry and psychotherapy

Decolonising psychology

At times complicit in racism and oppression, psychology has also been a fertile ground for radical and liberatory thought

Rami Gabriel

Meaning and the good life

Beyond authenticity

In her final unfinished work, Hannah Arendt mounted an incisive critique of the idea that we are in search of our true selves

Samantha Rose Hill

Politics and government

Governing for the planet

Nation-states are no longer fit for purpose to create a habitable future for humans and nature. Which political system is?

Jonathan S Blake & Nils Gilman

History of ideas

Baffled by human diversity

Confused 17th-century Europeans argued that human groups were separately created, a precursor to racist thought today

Jacob Zellmer

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King submits dissertation to Boston University

April 15, 1955

King delivers the final draft of his dissertation to Boston University.

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