The Martin Luther in Martin Luther King, Jr

You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-48 ESV)

Did you know? From History.com: Civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was born Michael King, Jr., on January 15, 1929. In 1934, however, his father, a pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, traveled to Germany and became inspired by the Protestant Reformation leader Martin Luther. As a result, King Sr. changed his own name as well as that of his 5-year-old son.

Today I remember the life and contributions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man whose compulsion to stand up "for our constitutional and God given rights" cost him his life. His courage and faith were remarkable! He is truly one of my heroes, right up there with Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

If you have not read King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail, written in 1963 in response to eight clergymen in Alabama who published a public appeal to Dr. King to cease and desist in his efforts (the last line of which reads: "We appeal to both our white and Negro citizenry to observe the principles of law and order and common sense."), you need to!

Here's an excerpt:

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

While you're at it, check out Lutherans and the Southern Civil Rights Movement, published in 2006 in the Journal of Lutheran Ethics (ELCA). I think the opening paragraph (my boldfacing) will whet your appetite, so to speak, for finding out more...

One of the most important events in United States history is the southern Civil Rights Movement. Although the Civil Rights Movement involved religious leaders and communities of many denominations, this paper focuses on how Lutheranism interacted with the movement. Lutheran involvement in the movement is a milestone in Lutheran history that will possibly be forgotten, or at a minimum regulated to a few Lutherans who are curious enough to seek out this area of Lutheran political engagement. This paper demonstrates what caused two pastors to develop a Lutheran theology of resistance. Martin Luther did not encourage active political resistance on the part of the church. The traditional Lutheran view, which is shared with other religious denominations, is that there is a distinct separation between religion and politics. Only when laws or orders conflict with Church laws is active disobedience of laws and orders allowed for. Luther expresses this general position in a treatise called Temporal Authority, to What Extent It Should Be Obeyed, in which he presented a view of the sacred character of all temporal rule.

Lutherans have come through history with an aura of resilience that goes back to Martin Luther in the 1520s. He was obsessed by a theological concern based on an Augustinian view of passive resistance (to disobey but submit to whatever punishment might be assigned for disobedience). An interesting article about this was published by Cornell University Law School three decades ago, Luther and the Justifiability of Resistance to Legitimate Authority. A few excerpts:

History being in God's hands, He would take care of His own; and any display of self-help might be interpreted as a declaration of lack of faith in Providence. In other words, Luther was convinced that any Christian who believed in such measures as tyrannicide, deposition, and armed rebellion betrayed a fundamental lack of faith in God, who would Himself punish tyrants, alone, presumably by manipulating the diseases and natural disasters at his command, or through the use of human agents, such as foreign rulers. Even the tyrant's own subjects might serve as God's instruments, but Luther believed that they would be condemned for so doing. Thus no Christian concerned for his own soul would involve himself in resistance of any sort...

[By the 1540s] Luther came eventually to embrace a notion of resistance based on constitutional and positive law and finally even on natural law. He did tend to describe each of the contingencies in which he justified resistance as a strategic exception to an underlying belief in non-resistance, either as a violation of the unique structure of the German Empire or as applicable by definition only to a very special and extreme case. Luther's reluctance and great caution on this issue were evident; and he was always torn between a perfectionist ethic and the necessity of acting in a world in which the existence of his church was endangered by the intentions of the Emperor, the Pope, and Catholic princes. Lack of faith in the use of force intensified his caution...

At the very least, it is clear that Luther himself was not unalterably opposed to the notion that legitimate yet oppressive political authority might be resisted. Hence Lutherans do not share a heritage of submissiveness to the powers-that-be.

Only when laws or orders conflict with Church laws is active disobedience of laws and orders allowed for. Martin Luther King, Jr., was certainly a strong Christian, but I think he made have a little of his namesake in him... Knowing when the time is right to stand firm as a Christian in the civil realm is not always clear, nor is it always easy. The historical accounts of seemingly ordinary men and women with extraordinary faith are more than just lessons to be learned; more importantly, their acts can help us train our compasses as we navigate the complicated issues of our lives and the life of the Church still TODAY.

We must never forget.