Dr. Martin Luther King's 'Pilgrimage To Nonviolence'

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Within Dr. King’ speech “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” the reader can acquire the theological and ethical notions that influenced King to accept nonviolence as a more perfect way to actualize the Kingdom of God. In the following I will briefly explicate these notions to show how these major themes contributed to his pilgrimage to nonviolence.
Towards the beginning of the article King acknowledges the role that liberalism played into his overall theology. He writes, “I hope to cherish always: its devotion to the search for truth, its insistence on an open and analytical mind, its refusal to abandon the best light of reason.” It was in liberalism where he found comfort in its unrelenting quest for truth, a truth that enabled him to fully engage …show more content…
The these two notions; the quest for truth and the acknowledgement of humanity’s capacity to sin provided the intellectual wherewithal to question liberalism’s intrinsic optimistic that overlooked sin’s capacity to cloud reason. “Reason, devoid of purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations.” Through King’s interaction with liberalism we are able to see that he could tease out some of the core notions within the school of thought while disregarding some of it’s weakest aspects. This tendency is also true with his interactions with neo-orthodoxy. Whereas King saw Liberalism as too optimistic and overemphasized God’s indwelling, neo-orthodoxy was too pessimistic and overemphasized God’s hidden or …show more content…
King writes, “The gospel at its best deals with the whole man, not only his soul but his body, not only his spiritual well-being, but his material well being.” King found the answer to his quest for ridding the social evils he and many other blacks were experiencing in America. Moreover, it was in Gandhi where he saw not only the practicality but also the effectiveness of love to tackle such issues. King saw Gandhi’s method of nonviolence providing the means to acquire freedom through a stance grounded in love. This ideal became embedded in King through the practice of nonviolent resistance in the midst of protest. It was only in such a context where the legitimacy of such a love was realized to where he could fully surrender himself to the art of love. Because of his personal experiences and his notions of the human condition combined with his experiences in India, King seems keenly aware of how this approach would be a long transformative process. However, even with his understandings of Niebuhr’s doctrine of sin I do not think he fully realized the depth and complexity of sin that was embedded within the systems that perpetuated the precepts of black inferiority and white superiority. Nonetheless King had a deep sense that the effects of love through nonviolent resistance were needed to actualize
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