The Seminarian

by Patrick Parr

ML may have been young and still in search of a preaching style that suited him, but as he put in more appearances in Rev. Barbour’s church, his skills began to develop. Barbour’s daughter, Almanina, witnessed ML’s slow transformation firsthand. “A lot of things happened to Martin Luther King in [Chester]. He learned how to preach here.”8

  ML’s Class Schedule

  Year I, Term 3, February 22–May 6, 1949

  Time

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Friday

  8:00 AM

  9:00 AM

  The Gospels

  The Gospels

  The Gospels

  The Gospels

  10:00 AM

  10:30 AM

  Chapel service

  Optional service

  Devotional pd.

  Christian Mysticism

  Christian Mysticism

  Christian Mysticism

  Christian Mysticism

  11:00 AM

  11:30 AM

  Practice Preaching?

  Practice Preaching?

  Public Speaking

  Practice Preaching?

  12:00 PM

  12:30 PM

  1:00 PM

  2:00 PM

  3:00 PM

  4:00 PM

  Vespers service (4:15 PM)

  5:00 PM

  No classes on Monday | Eighty-first commencement: May 8–10

  ML’s GPA for the term: 3.40

  The Gospels

  Morton Scott Enslin, BD (Andover Newton), ThD (Harvard), DD (Colby)

  Course Description: “The Synoptic Problem; Gospels as sources of knowledge of the life of Jesus and of developing Christian thought.” (Credit hours: 4; ML’s grade: B+)

  Christian Mysticism

  George Washington Davis, BD, ThM (Colgate-Rochester), PhD (Yale)

  Course Description: “The history, nature, value, and psychology of Christian mysticism; the place of mysticism in the total structure of religion. Readings from Dionysius the Areopagite, John Tauler, Thomas a Kempis, St. John of the Cross, St. Theresa, Madame Guyon, Brother Lawrence, George Fox, Toyohiko Kagawa, and others.” (Credit hours: 4; ML’s grade: B+)

  Practice Preaching

  Robert Elwood Keighton, BD, ThM (Crozer)

  Course Description: “Delivery of sermons in the classroom with criticism by the instructor.” This class was listed at 10:30 in the course catalog, but as that overlaps with ML’s Christian Mysticism course, I speculate that it was actually at 11:30. (Credit hours: 4; ML’s grade: A-)

  Public Speaking

  Robert Elwood Keighton, BD, ThM (Crozer)

  Course Description: “Fundamental physical and psychological elements of public speaking.” (Credit hours: ⅓; ML’s grade: C)

  On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, a half-hour period was set aside at 10:00 AM for services in the chapel. On Tuesdays was a mandatory service led by Crozer president E. E. Aubrey. Wednesday services were optional, generally led by a member of the faculty or an invited pastor from an evangelical institution. The Friday devotional period was run by the students themselves and presided over by the chairman of the Devotions Committee. On Thursday, the 10:00 AM slot was a free period, and a vespers service was held at 4:15 PM. This tightly planned service featured a speaker from a prescheduled list, usually a Crozer professor or a guest speaker from another institution.9

  Classes and Professors: The Gospels of Sacrifice

  Practice Preaching; Public Speaking

  “The congregation sings Amen; the last notes of the organ quietly die away. There is a settling of the congregation into the mood and manner of an audience. The minister stands quietly behind the pulpit, waiting for the excitement within him to subside so that his voice may have only the calm compulsion of the pastor. The moment has come; he is to preach his first sermon to the people of his first church. For these are his people now, as he is now their pastor.”

  —Robert Keighton10

  Not only did ML preach his “Facing Life’s Inescapables” sermon to the Calvary Baptist congregation early in his third term, he also delivered it in front of his fellow students in Robert Keighton’s Practice Preaching class. As ML spoke, Keighton would determine whether he was following the formatting and organizational guidelines the professor had been teaching the class over the course of their entire junior year. ML apparently gave Keighton what he was looking for, as he finished the course with a grade of A-.

  The same couldn’t be said of his performance in Keighton’s Public Speaking class, where his grade dropped from a C+ in term 2 to a C in term 3. Once again, I suspect that ML’s connection to Rev. Barbour was the reason the course caused him so much trouble. By term 3, word must have circulated around Crozer that ML, Horace Whitaker, and Walter McCall were frequent guests in Barbour’s home. The faculty were quite familiar with their school’s first black graduate, and some of them had a less than favorable opinion of the man. Dr. Pritchard, for example, called him “almost a buffoon,” who made jokes and didn’t trust Catholic priests. It’s possible that Keighton responded unfavorably to signs of Barbour’s influence, and ML’s grade suffered as a result.11

  By the end of ML’s first year, it was clear that his preaching style had been influenced by both Barbour and Keighton. From Keighton he’d learned how to shape his sermon in a manner acceptable to a northern white congregation, while at the same time he’d gleaned from Barbour the sort of rumbling sophistication that was perfect for southern black audiences. Both would prove vital to King down the road when faced with the responsibility of crafting a message meant for everyone. As Addie Cheeks, a Calvary Baptist parishioner, once said, ML “wasn’t just concerned about black people. He was concerned about all people.”12

  The Gospels

  Crozer’s program of mentally excavating the Bible and stripping away its myths continued in term 3 with The Gospels. In this course, Professor Morton Enslin returned to focus his intensive scrutiny more narrowly on the books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, attempting to change his students’ perspective on three of the most quoted chapters of the New Testament.

  The course addressed the Gospels’ “synoptic problem,” which was, quite simplified, Which book was written first? Like other scholars at that time (and today), Enslin believed that Mark should be considered the original gospel. “For centuries this was denied,” he wrote in his 1938 opus Christian Beginnings, “and Mark was regarded, as it had been by Augustine, a colourless epitome of Matthew and Luke.”13

  Christian Beginnings could serve as a window into Enslin’s process as a scholar. Its richness lies in his ability to source, source, and source. He analyzes the analyzers and critiques the critics. After an almost biblical amount of processing, Enslin concludes that Mark was not only written first but also stands tall as the most intense Gospel. Enslin’s love for Mark seems naked in its pureness. He calls the gospel “highly dramatic. . . . Constantly [Mark] falls into the historic present, so real to him is the scene.”

  If Beginnings is any indicator, discussing the Gospels is where Enslin came alive. “There is only one way to read this gospel, and that is at a sitting, and it leaves one tense and exhausted.” With his pipe at hand, pacing back and forth, he would have emphasized the power of Mark to his class, needing them to respect Mark’s story: “As the narrative [of Mark] proceeds, the tone of excitement heightens, until in the last pages—the dreadful days in Jerusalem—there is no let-down or breathing-space till the very end, the death. . . . The curtain falls with the audience speechless. Then after a quick moment the curtain rises again for an instant.”14

  As for Matthew and Luke, Enslin felt differently. He would have described Matthew to ML and his classmates using less-than-thrilling words such as “systematic,” “comprehensive,” and “intended for church use.” He imagined Matthew the author creating rounded, perfectly structured text—easy to grasp and, more important, easy to remember. Whereas Mark is a thrilling roller coaster ride, Matthew borro
ws Mark’s framework but creates a milder attraction suitable for the whole family. “[Matthew] implies an organized church life,” wrote Enslin, “with a well-defined moral code.”

  Enslin gave Luke the same underwhelmed, matter-of-fact treatment, describing it as “biographical,” a “carefully prepared account of Jesus’s actions and teachings.” He would have impressed on the class that the Gospel of Luke was not capable of standing alone, that it needed to be considered alongside with the same author’s Acts of the Apostles to produce a transcendent vision. “It is distinctly unfortunate that through the years these two halves of a single whole have been divorced from one another.”15

  Overall, Enslin attempted to show the class that although Mark probably drew from existing sources himself, they should consider him principally responsible for igniting the flame of the New Testament. Matthew and Luke then took up Mark’s fire and expanded the story of Jesus.

  For ML, the in-depth analysis must have seemed far removed from Daddy King’s passionate, plainspoken overtures of strength and hope. In just two courses, Enslin had widened ML’s biblical views. The New Testament could now live inside his mind far more dynamically than it did in his father’s. ML was maturing “offstage”—away from his family. And he wanted more. Later, Enslin would say of ML the student that when it came to absorbing a concept or thought, “all is grist that comes to his mill.”16

  Christian Mysticism

  “We must understand how to fail. Jesus was willing to fail so that He might establish a better social order. I repeat that: It is necessary to fail to establish a good society. If anyone wants to be the chief of society he must first be a leader of the common people. . . . If we want to have real progress, we need to be subjected to pain and suffering to make us want to fight for the cause of righteousness.”

  —Toyohiko Kagawa17

  Through Enslin, ML was called on to critique the words of the Bible in a way he had never before attempted. Through Keighton, he honed his skill behind a pulpit. There was, however, a curricular gap left to fill, and that was the fundamental experience of being a Christian.

  This was where George W. Davis’s Christian Mysticism came in. Whereas his Great Theologians course had been dedicated to introducing central figures in Christian history, this class would delve deeper into the hearts of the Christian mystics, men and women who dedicated themselves to experiencing, in as real a way as they could, the presence of God within human life.

  Nowadays, the word mysticism may bring to mind things such as meditation, New Age beliefs, finding one’s inner self, and so on. But these practices, often of Eastern origin, are concerned primarily with a state of mind. Christian mysticism, on the other hand, concerns itself with the state of living. The mystics are those who decided to follow Jesus’s example of sacrifice in order to fulfill what they believed was God’s will.

  From what materials are available, it appears that Davis taught his class about the topic using larger-than-life figures in Christian history. The mystics Davis mentioned in class all actively pursued a connection with God, usually through privation, persecution, and devotion. Many spent time in prison, or devoted long periods to monastery or convent life. Davis’s course descriptions may have read like a collection of Christianity’s greatest hits, but his lectures provided ML and his classmates with essential examples of faith in action.

  The only living mystic in the Christian Mysticism course description was Japanese Christian Toyohiko Kagawa. His legacy is difficult to reckon with, which may be why Davis chose him for the class. Kagawa loved America dearly; in 1936 he traveled all over the United States and even declared to a group of supporters that the “Emperor of Japan once said the greatest personality in the world’s history is Abraham Lincoln. Even the Great Emperor of Japan considered himself inferior to Abraham Lincoln.”18

  But when World War II broke out, according to Kagawa scholar Robert Schildgen, the mystic chose not to speak out against it, instead broadcasting radio messages that supported the Japanese government’s military strategy. To Kagawa, cooperating with his country’s government was necessary to preserve the Christian message in Japan. Mahatma Gandhi disagreed, and his advice to Kagawa at a religious conference in 1939 had been direct: “I would declare my heresies and be shot.” Kagawa chose not to follow the path of a martyr.19

  By the time ML entered Professor Davis’s class, he and his classmates had most likely heard about Kagawa’s wavering stance. By delving deeper into why a man like Kagawa would fall into line during the war to save himself, Professor Davis may have provided the twenty-year-old King with a warning sign. ML was attempting to figure out a way to change society for the better. He needed all the real-life examples he could find, positive and negative, to help him along the way.

  Blue Mondays: “In This Experience, I Saw God”

  As ML began to log more hours preaching at Calvary Baptist Church, he would have benefited from Crozer’s policy of not holding classes on Monday. The practical reasons for such a policy are fairly straightforward: many of the students and faculty would be spending their Sundays preaching at churches across the area or even farther afield (recall Marcus Wood, who commuted to Woodbury, New Jersey, to preach), so it would be hard to ask them to be present and prepared for class the following morning. For divinity students, even just attending a service at a new church meant studying the congregation, the preacher, the choir, and the dozens of other factors that they’d be expected to consider when they had their own church to run. Visiting a new place of worship was an immersive, thrilling experience—a short peek into another world. For the seminarians, Sunday was their Saturday night.

  But there was another reason Crozer gave students and faculty the day off . . .

  It’s called Blue Monday, a condition that is said to affect ministers after they deliver a sermon. Sermonizing requires every ounce of spiritual energy a preacher can muster. For most of the week, ML or any preacher with a Sunday engagement planned an approximately fifteen-minute sermon, crafting and tweaking it for maximum impact. For that one moment in time on Sunday morning, the minister labored to hold the spiritual attention of dozens, sometimes hundreds of people using such devices as current news (I think we’ve all heard about the tragedy in Anytown a few days ago . . .), personal anecdotes (I was talking with a friend the other day, and he told me . . .), and shocking first lines (I’m going to go ahead and say it, and you’re not going to like it, but . . . we’re in trouble, y’all . . .), with biblical and literary passages threaded throughout.

  It’s a workout, a performance, an offering to God of blood, sweat, and tears. Once the preacher steps away from the pulpit, he or she does not usually feel fulfilled. Rather, the preacher has been emptied of light, and Sunday night becomes an exercise in shadow fighting:

  One Sunday evening I left my pulpit with a sense of the most utter frustration I had ever known. The sermon had been terrible in its inadequacy, the delivery pitiful in its awkwardness. Every sentence, every word, seemed to have come only after the most appalling struggle. I literally perspired with the effort to be convincing. Floating through my consciousness were the thoughts: “Why did I ever choose this sermon? What did I ever see in it? Will I get through this side of a complete breakdown?”20

  This was from, of all people, Robert Keighton. During the week, Keighton taught ML and other students the art and format of the sermon, but on the weekends, Keighton did his best to walk the walk. But as with all preachers, ML included, self-doubt crept in—Were they listening? Are they even trying to see a new perspective?—and this neurotic bender would remain with Keighton through sleep and into the following morning. To Keighton, Blue Monday moods grew “out of the fact that what we wanted did not happen; the change we sought did not come.”21

  Thankfully for ML, he’d always had help and support in dealing with this condition that made Monday classes untenable. His earliest preaching experiences had taken place within the sheltered atmosphere of Daddy King’s church in Atlan
ta. And now as he ventured beyond the protective walls of Ebenezer Baptist, he had the Crozer community and its many amenities to lean on. Just outside his second-floor dorm room was a tennis court where he could work off his anxieties. If he wasn’t in the mood to move, the second floor had a student lounge—a perfect location for melancholic preachers to gather and bond over common miseries, This one man just wouldn’t stop snoring! or They’re all looking at me, but are they hearing me? There was also the rec room down in the catacombs of Old Main, a place to play with friends who knew exactly how you felt as cigarette smoke billowed, the dark and empty chapel directly above.22

  If what ML needed was solitude, there was the Pearl Hall library only a minute’s walk away. He also had his own place of refuge—a temporary Walden Pond, a safe haven from criticism, discrimination, and the spiritual pressure to be not just a great man but incredible. As King described it:

  The seminary campus is a beautiful sight, particularly so in the spring. And it was at this time of the year that I made it a practice to go out to the edge of campus every afternoon for at least an hour to commune with nature. On the side of the campus ran a tributary from the Delaware River. Every day I would sit on the edge of campus by the side of the river and watch the beauties of nature. My friend, in this experience, I saw God. I saw him in birds of the air, the leaves of the tree, the movement of the rippling waves . . .23