Martin Luther King, was he a Christian?

What made me question the salvation of Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Early this year (1998), my little sister asked me to look up some stuff on the 'net for a paper she was doing on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As I surfed, the Lord put a thought in my mind, "Did this man ever testify of Me?" I thought to myself, "Mmmmm. The world loved this man. If he was preaching the gospel, the world would have hated him." I started looking up Martin Luther King's writings. As I read, I realized that he was a stranger, a foreigner to me. Whenever he mentioned Jesus, it was along with mere mortals like Socrates or Ghandi. In his jailhouse letter, King lumped all religions into the same class. I could not find one "sermon" where he preached Jesus Christ and Him crucified. What I saw is that this man "preached" a social gospel using Black churches as his springboard.

King's philosophy is rather reminiscent of the Catholic Liberation Theology in South America. After several hours of reading of him on the 'net, I told my husband that this man was not our brother in Christ. Someone who called himself "Reverend" and preached in churches was obviously not saved. For 32 years, I'd heard great and favorable things about Martin Luther King, Jr. His name was, and is, synonymous with civil rights. But in 1998, the Lord Jesus Christ has shown me that "Reverend" Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was nothing short of an heretick. It was a strange revelation.

Well, all these months have passed and I thought my meditation on this was over--I was wrong. The Lord wanted me to see something else. Last night, my husband gave me some papers that my sister wanted me to have. It was the stuff that I had printed out for her on Martin Luther King, Jr. I didn't need that stuff back but the Lord wanted my mind to go back to this subject. Lo and behold, yesterday (it is about 3:30 am now) 10-7-98, I was surfing the 'net for information on King Charles I when I came upon an article for Martin Luther King, Jr. I clicked on the link, and amazingly, I was taken to Stanford University's repository for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s writings--they are on line. Their repository is a work in progress, but there is more than enough there for any human being to see that Martin Luther King, Jr. denied the most basic tenets of the Christian faith.

Martin Luther King Sermons

• the deity of Jesus Christ
• the virgin birth
• the resurrection

In his paper he went on to question, practically deny, each of these tenets of the Christian faith. How can you be a Christian and deny the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ? YOU CAN'T BE! Yea such an one is an heretick! Unsurprisingly, Martin Luther King, Jr. did not believe that the BIBLE is infallible or that it is to be taken literally (you can best believe he does now but it is everlasting too late for him). Below is an excerpt of this paper concerning these critical doctrines--

But if we delve into the deeper meaning of these doctrines, and somehow strip them of their literal interpretation, we will find that they are based on a profound foundation. Although we may be able to argue with all degrees of logic that these doctrines are historically and philolophically untenable*, yet we can never undermind the foundation on which they are based.

*According to Webster's, untenable means that cannot be held, defended, or maintained. philology is scholarship or the study of literary texts to determine their authenticity or meaning. So in other words, the divinity, resurrection and virgin birth are undefendable based on the historical facts! Read on...

A King quote from this same paper about the Sonship of Jesus--

The first doctrine of our discussion which deals with the divine sonship of Jesus went through a great process of development. It seems quite evident that the early followers of Jesus in Palestine were well aware of his genuine humanity. Even the synoptic gospels picture Jesus as a victim of human experiences. Such human experiences as growth, learning, prayer, and defeat are not at all uncommon in the life of Jesus. How then did this doctrine of divine sonship come into being?

We may find a partial clue to the actual rise of this doctrine in the spreading of Christianity into the Greco-Roman world. I need not elaborate on the fact that the Greeks were very philosophical minded people. Through philosophical thinking the Greeks came to the point of subordinating, distrusting, and even minimizing anything physical. Anything that possessed flesh was always underminded in Greek thought. And so in order to receive inspiration from Jesus the Greeks had to apotheosize him.

...As Hedley laconically states, "the church had found God in Jesus, and so it called Jesus the Christ; and later under the influence of Greek thought-forms, the only begotten Son of God."

Next, King on the virgin birth--

First we must admit that the evidence for the tenability of this doctrine is to shallow to convince any objective thinker. To begin with, the earliest written documents in the New Testament make no mention of the virgin birth. Moreover, the Gospel of Mark, the most primitive and authentic of the four, gives not the slightest suggestion of the virgin birth. The effort to justify this doctrine on the grounds that it was predicted by the prophet Isaiah is immediately eliminated, for all New Testament scholars agree that the word virgin is not found in the Hebrew original, but only in the Greek text which is a mistranslation of the Hebrew word for "young woman." How then did this doctrine arise?

A clue to this inquiry may be found in a sentence from St. Justin's First Apology. Here Justin states that the birth of Jesus is quite similar to the birth of the sons of Zeus. It was believed in Greek thought that an extraordinary person could only be explained by saying that he had a father who was more than human. It is probable that this Greek idea influenced Christian thought.

A more adequate explanation for the rise of this doctrine is found in the experience which the early christians had with Jesus. The people saw within Jesus such a uniqueness of quality and spirit that to explain him in terms of ordinary background was to them quite inadequate. For his early followers this spiritual uniqueness could only by accounted for in terms of biological uniqueness. They were not unscientific in their approach because they had no knowledge of the scientific. They could only express themselves in terms of the pre-scientific thought patterns of their day.

And finally, King on the resurrection--

The last doctrine in our discussion deals with the resurrection story. This doctrine, upon which the Easter Faith rests, symbolizes the ultimate Christian conviction: that Christ conquered death. From a literary, historical, and philosophical point of view this doctrine raises many questions. In fact the external evidence for the authenticity of this doctrine is found wanting. But here again the external evidence is not the most important thing, for it in itself fails to tell us precisely the thing we most want to know: What experiences of early Christians lead to the formulation of the doctrine?

The root of our inquiry is found in the fact that the early Christians had lived with Jesus. They had been captivated by the magnetic power of his personality. This basic experience led to the faith that he could never die. And so in the pre-scientific thought pattern of the first century, this inner faith took outward form!

Read this paper for yourself here.

Was Martin Luther King a Christian

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