The influence of a liberal homiletic tradition on Strength to love by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Abstract

The sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr. were influenced by a Social Gospel homiletic tradition that included Harry Emerson Fosdick, George Buttrick, Halford Luccock, J. Wallace Hamilton, and Howard Thurman. In his 1963 collection of sermons, Strength to Love, King at times borrowed from the sermons of these Social Gospel homileticians and also from the sermons of Phillips Brooks, a nineteenth-century abolitionist preacher. The influence on King of Social Gospel preaching signifies that King did not form his views about social and theological issues simply by wrestling with intellectual giants, as he suggested in "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence." His ideas and his rhetoric were also shaped by a liberal preaching tradition that attempted to reconcile the various philosophical and theological perspectives that he discussed in "Pilgrimage." Not only did King borrow from Social Gospel preachers, he also added original Social Gospel material to his sources. Even though his language often echoed that of Brooks, Fosdick, Buttrick, Hamilton, and Thurman, King's leadership of the civil rights movement added an original and powerful ethos to his condemnation of segregation, poverty, and war. King's tendency to borrow portions of sermons represents a collision between oral homiletic tradition, which seem to foster borrowing, and a twentieth-century literary tradition, which does not. By deciding to borrow, King chose to satisfy the imperative of oral preaching--to sway an audience--instead of the rules of print culture.