The Arc of Truth (Lewis V. Baldwin) - a Review
THE ARC OF TRUTH: The Thinking of Martin Luther King Jr. By Lewis V. Baldwin. Foreword by Beverly J. Lanzetta. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2022. Xxiv + 384 pages.
Martin
Luther King, Jr announced to the world that the arc of the moral universe bends
toward justice. That is a vision that gives hope to many, including me, that
someday justice will be experienced by all. Getting there has been difficult.
In part that is due to our unwillingness to embrace justice, and our unwillingness
is often rooted in our unwillingness to embrace truth. That is especially true
in this moment of history where many who reside in the United States embrace
“alternative truth.” One of those alternative truths has to do with the legacy
of racism in our land. For Dr. King, this movement toward justice was rooted in
his commitment to the pursuit of truth. It’s a commitment that emerged during
his youth and continued throughout his life.
We
haven’t heard as much about Dr. King’s pursuit of truth but in Lewis V.
Baldwin’s The Arc of Truth, we are introduced to the various ways in
which this prophet and activist pursued the truth. It is a message that is
worth considering as we navigate what many call our post-truth era, an era
exemplified by Donald Trump and many of his supporters who have embraced the Big
Lie concerning the 2020 election (and now the 2022 election) as well as the
anti-woke efforts to bury America’s problematic history when it comes to race.
The
author of The Arc of Truth, Lewis V. Baldwin, is an emeritus professor
of religious studies at Vanderbilt University. During his long career, he has
devoted significant time and energy to studying Dr. King’s life and legacy.
This has resulted in his authorship of a number of books about King’s life and legacy, including The Balm of Gilead: The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther
King, Jr.; To Make the Wounded Whole: The Cultural Legacy of Martin Luther
King, Jr.; and Never to Leave Us Alone: The Prayer Life of Martin Luther
King Jr. Although I haven’t read the earlier books, it is clear that The
Arc of Truth adds another layer to Baldwin’s work regarding King and his
legacy.
In this
particular book, which I found to be especially informative, Baldwin focuses on
King the thinker. In doing this Baldwin focuses his attention on King’s
thinking regarding the Bible, theology, and philosophy, all of which he studied
in college, seminary, and his Ph.D. work. However, it’s not just the academic
side of things, as Baldwin also shows how his thinking about these subjects
influenced King’s work on civil rights and social justice. What we see in this
book is the connection between the scholarly and the practical application of
what King discovered in his studies, making his efforts deeply rooted
biblically, theologically, and philosophically. As Baldwin notes, he seeks to
show how King "organized truth into a strategy and method to fight social
evil and injustice, a point not sufficiently explored in the extant works of
King's ethics, philosophy, and theology" (pp. xviii-xix). Thus, this is a
book that looks not only at King's commitment to pursuing truth wherever it
would lead but how he put that commitment into action.
One of
the challenges of our era is that a commitment to truth often devolves into
dogmatism. In other words, it is an embrace of a narrow view of reality. While
King sought to embrace absolute truth, that commitment was not rooted in
fundamentalism. In other words, he was open to new discoveries and new
understandings. Therefore, Baldwin offers us a book that focuses on how
"King's life and thought must be understood largely in terms of an
enduring search for and commitment to the truth" (p. 2). In this search for
truth, according to Baldwin, King followed in the footsteps of such figures as
Mohandas Gandhi, whose own efforts influenced King's work. Baldwin traces this
commitment to truth back to King's childhood when he began questioning what he
was being taught, especially at church. He continued this quest for answers in
the course of his education beginning at Morehouse College in the late 1940s.
This commitment to the pursuit of truth was coupled with a call to ministry so
that he could serve God and humanity.
In
laying out the nature of King's life-long commitment to truth and the way he
brought that commitment into his ministry calling, Baldwin begins in chapter one
by laying out the important developments in King's life that contributed to
this search. As I’ve noted, this began in the context of his family and the
church culture in which he grew up. Thus, King’s pursuit of truth was
understood, by King, to be a spiritual quest. As he grew up in a household in
which his father was his pastor, he struggled with the biblical fundamentalism
that was part of his Black Baptist context. This struggle with fundamentalism
led to his early embrace of liberal theology. That embrace included questioning
the virgin birth. This was further reinforced during his college years at
Morehouse, and later during his graduate education at Crozer Theological
Seminary and Boston University. In these contexts, he encountered higher
critical studies of the Bible as well as an introduction to liberal theology
and philosophy. I found this chapter to be extremely helpful in gaining a deeper
understanding of King's religious foundations and the changes he underwent as a
result. This prepared him for the work he would take on as a young pastor and
civil rights leader.
With
chapter one focusing on King's educational formation and early engagements in
social justice work, chapter two takes us deeper into King’s intellectual
development, especially concerning his thinking about the convergence of
religion and science. As he pondered the relationship between religion and
science, he wrestled with questions about relative and absolute truth. While he
was committed to the idea of absolute truth, he came to understand that he
needed to be open to new insights concerning the nature of truth. This work on
truth involved his training in philosophy, especially the philosophical system
known as personalism that dominated Boston University, where he did his Ph.D.
work. All of this was combined with his pastoral and social activist
commitments.
When we
come to chapter three, Baldwin focuses on the dialectical nature of King's
thinking about truth This chapter should prove helpful to our own efforts to
navigate our current context, where we experience the contradictions of living
in a country where it is presumed that all humans are equal even as equality
has yet to be experienced by all. As King wrestled with the contradictions he
experienced, seeking to make sense of them, he sought to challenge those he
engaged to live up to these ideals. In doing this, King drew on Hegel's
analysis of the dialectical process of history as well as Reinhold Niebuhr's
insights as to the nature of humanity. King sought to reconcile his belief in
the goodness of humanity, which was a central belief of the liberal theology
that he had imbibed at Crozer and Boston, with Niebuhr's insights as to
humanity's fallenness. He built upon both, which contributed to his engagement
with the founding documents of American life: The Declaration of Independence, the
Constitution, as well as Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. While he valued
the message found in these documents, he recognized that the nation had not
truly lived up to the ideals present there. Therefore, he sought to call on his
fellow Americans to commit themselves to truly embody the principles enshrined
in the documents.
In chapter
four, Baldwin builds on what he discussed in chapter three. Here he focuses on King’s
sense of calling to be an ethical prophet. It is here that we begin to see how
he brought the principles and ideas from his education into his pastoral
ministry as well as his involvement in the civil rights movement while serving
as a pastor in Montgomery, Alabama, and beyond. When we turn to chapter five,
we see how his commitment to truth became embodied in his leadership of the
civil rights movement. In this chapter, Baldwin discusses many of the myths
embraced by white southerners regarding race, along with King's refutation of
the myth that the north and the south were two different nations where segregation
was present in one nation and not the other. While King dealt with overt
segregation and discrimination in the South, he sought to uncover the more
covert racism and segregation present in the northern states. It is here that Baldwin
also King's encounters with purveyors of the idea that a new south was
emerging. While change was occurring in the South, the so-called New South that
was being proclaimed still had many of the trappings of the old South. As he
takes us on a tour of these realities, Baldwin also begins to develop King's
use of nonviolent action as an expression of truth as well as King’s developing
global vision, a vision that led to his opposition to the Vietnam War. He saw
this as a further expression of his embrace of nonviolence. All of this was a
reflection of a belief in the kingdom of God, which he understood “in terms of
the now and the not yet, the present and future, or the real and the ideal.”
Baldwin notes that King “envisioned the ideal of the kingdom of God—or the new
world order or globalized beloved community—as ‘a time when God would reign
supreme in all life and love, brotherhood, and right relationship would be the
order of society’” (pp. 269-270).
In chapter
five Baldwin brings a close to his study of King’s pursuit of the “arc of truth.”
When we turn to chapter six, we encounter a discussion of what Baldwin titles “A
Distorted Legacy.” Here Baldwin offers us an important and insightful look at King’s
legacy, including how that legacy has been distorted by those who proclaim a “color-blind”
society and seek to undermine the protections that King and others fought for, such
as the right to vote and live wherever they please. These efforts to use King’s
words, often taken out of context, such as King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech,
are used to support agendas that run quite contrary to King’s vision. To decouple
the word about “the content of one’s character” from race is to reject King’s
own commitment to truth-telling. Because this book is about King's commitment
to truth, Baldwin doesn’t shy away from addressing the revelations of King's
extramarital affairs and charges of plagiarism. He notes that King was a deeply
flawed human being, though he cautions us to be careful about taking everything
we are told at face value since most of these allegations rest on FBI reports
that were designed to discredit him as a communist agitator. While King was
flawed in terms of embodying his commitment to truth, that need not undermine the
pursuit of truth that drove his call to ministry and civil rights leadership.
It’s the legacy of this commitment to truth that is needed at this moment in
time when it appears we have entered a post-truth era, where facts need not
apply, especially when it comes to racism and equity. With that in mind,
Baldwin closes the book with these words, noting this about Dr. King’s legacy.
Truth marches on because nothing can stop or defeat it. It marches on because it is imbued with the power and spirit of no surrender. It marches on because it has a date with destiny. It marches on in this post-truth era with the people of all races who raise the banner of Black Lives Matter, with women who comprise the Me Too crusade, with youngsters involved in the March for Our Lives against gun violence, with those who struggle against voter suppression and intimidation, and with those who refuse to bow to Trumpism, post-truthism, or any other form of spiritual and moral perversion and antidemocracy. It marches on with those who honor and celebrate King’s legacy not simply with words but also with deeds that change lives, structures, and institutions for the better. Truth marches on because only truth can have the last word in history (p. 317).
While it is important to remember Martin Luther King the
person, if we do not embody the pursuit of truth that leads to justice for all,
then we have failed to embody the legacy of King’s message and work.
Martin
Luther King was assassinated when I was ten years old. I knew very little about
him and his work at that point in life. I have learned much in the years since,
but there is always to be learned. Since we live in this post-truth era when
King’s message and legacy are being hijacked in service to this post-truth
agenda that denies the reality of America’s history when it comes to race, we
need books and resources like Lewis Baldwin’s The Arc of Truth. This is
a scholarly, detailed, focused look at Martin Luther King’s commitment to
truth, revealing that King was not only a civil rights leader and pastor, but
he was a deep thinker. In an age that seems to devalue education and
intellectual development, here is a good reminder that Dr. King embraced the
intellectual side of life. As we walk through this book, Baldwin invites us (as
I read this excellent and at times dense book), to embrace truth, and follow it
wherever it leads, knowing that truth continues to march on even when some resist
and distort the truth.
Comments