James K.A. Smith Quote
Through his embedded experience in the Montgomery bus boycotts, Reverend King came to see the limits of Niebuhr’s abstract public theologizing. Abstractions cannot empower acts of compassion and sacrifice, Marsh summarizes, or sustain the courage to speak against the day. Niebuhr’s much-heralded Christian realism was about working out ethical problems within the framework of options provided by Western liberalism. It was not about having a dream.18 That dream was the kingdom of God, and King learned it at church. But it wasn’t just for the church: it was a vision of what the world was called to be. For King, the realization of this was not some merely evolutionary development but rather a divine gift. God remains from beginning to end the ultimate agent of human liberation, not only in America but throughout all the nations and in creation.
Through his embedded experience in the Montgomery bus boycotts, Reverend King came to see the limits of Niebuhr’s abstract public theologizing. Abstractions cannot empower acts of compassion and sacrifice, Marsh summarizes, or sustain the courage to speak against the day. Niebuhr’s much-heralded Christian realism was about working out ethical problems within the framework of options provided by Western liberalism. It was not about having a dream.18 That dream was the kingdom of God, and King learned it at church. But it wasn’t just for the church: it was a vision of what the world was called to be. For King, the realization of this was not some merely evolutionary development but rather a divine gift. God remains from beginning to end the ultimate agent of human liberation, not only in America but throughout all the nations and in creation.
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