In 1977, it was my privilege to be invited to participate in the White House Interfaith Conference on Aging.
My particular contribution was a paper entitled "Enabling Wholeness in Elderly Religious Liberals." Today I think I
would amend that title, modify it somewhat, to perhaps "Enabling Wholeness in Seasoned Religious Liberals"!
There were many fine and informative presentations, and I came away with many new and valuable insights about
the process of aging, but the emotional high point, the peak experience, was a wonderful keynote address delivered
by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr., "Daddy King."It was a remarkable testament to both the man and his
religious faith that he was able to say, after he had lost both his son and his wife to assassins’ bullets (you may
remember that she was gunned down while playing the organ in Ebenezer Baptist Church), not only that he feared no
man, but that he hated no man. Remarkable, too, when one considers the very many slings and arrows of outrageous
racism which the man and his family had to endure during those darker days of bigotry and prejudice.

I have a story to add to those we heard earlier about Martin Luther King, Jr.'s motivation. His father
recounted his son's first experience with racial discrimination; how a young white chum had invited "Mike" to his
home to play, how his friend attempted to bring Mike in through the front door, only to be denied entrance, and told
in no uncertain terms that he would have to go around to the back door. He didn't have a clue! He was hurt, he was
confused, he was scared. He ran home, tears streaming down his cheeks, into his father’s arms for comfort and an
answer. His father did his best to comfort him and try to explain this unfairness, this injustice. It is said that the child
is father to the man, and certainly this critical experience continued to burn within his breast for all of the brief 39
years that he was with us.

But it's a testament, not only to his upbringing, but to the transformation that he experienced, that he was not
consumed by the flames of hatred; neither was he left with cold gray ashes of resignation. By the time of the
Montgomery bus boycott, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was morally and intellectually equipped to assume
the mantle of leadership, which he did somewhat reluctantly.

Now, a great deal goes into making an individual's mind, shaping a person's attitude's and convictions, and
although King had been tremendously impacted by both Tolstoy and Ghandi, he was also instructed by the example,
by the work and wisdom, of two Unitarians, one a citizen of the nineteenth century and another, lesser known to us,
more of our own time. By the time that Mike graduated from Morehouse College in 1948 at the tender age of 19, he
had already been introduced to the concept of passive resistance. You see, he had been given a class assignment in
Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, and he was infatuated with Thoreau's provocative argument that a creative minority,
even a minority of one honest man, could set in motion a moral revolution. And it was later in life that Thoreau's
words comforted and encouraged him as he faced the horrible prospect of having to go to jail on account of his
beliefs and his moral stance. Had not the prophet of Walden Pond written, "Under a government which imprisons
any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison"?

And it was in Crozier Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, as a young ministerial student, ever
more the scholar, that in a class on the psychology of religious personalities he was introduced to Ghandi's
philosophy of nonviolence: satyagraha. And the Mahatma's conception of satyagraha converged with Thoreau's
passive resistance and became an even more powerful moral vision and strategy for change.Now, while Thoreau's
and Ghandi's approaches dovetailed, reinforced, and complemented each other very nicely, Martin's mind was also
shaped by the reconciliation of opposite points of view. Time and again in his intellectual development thesis and
antithesis combined to become a new synthesis which informed his outlook. He called himself, for instance, not an
extrovert or an introvert, but an "ambivert," a synthesis. He was fond of quoting a French philosopher, who wrote,
"No man is strong unless he bears within his character antitheses strongly marked.”

While at seminary King encountered the antithetical Christian views of Walter Rauschenbusch and
Reinhold Niebuhr, names you may remember. Rauschenbusch was The foremost exponent of the social gospel
movement. He believed, as did the Universalist Clarence Skinner, that evil was social rather than personal, and that
the kingdom could be established here and now on earth, that social sin could be eradicated. Niebuhr, on the other
hand, held that evil could never be eliminated, humankind had limited capacity for self-improvement, and despite
the coming of the redeemer, we could not save ourselves without divine intercession.

"It has been my conviction," wrote King, "ever since reading Rauschenbusch, that any religion that
professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the social and economic conditions that
scar them, is a spiritually moribund religion." He did agree with Niebuhr that evil was essentially personal, but that it
could be cast out from the world, and social salvation attained by confronting our own sinfulness and opening
ourselves up to, as he put it "the father's incandescent love and good will."In an attempt to reconcile the concepts of
these bitterly divided theologians that he studied at Crozier, he became a student of a philosophy known as
"personalism," for which personality is the bottom line, the fundamental category. Personalism is a philosophical
perspective or system for which "person" is the ontological ultimate, and for which personality is the fundamental
explanatory principle. (Ontology refers to a theory about the nature of being.) Now, as far as King's brand of
personalism, he held that a personal god operated in and on every human life, and that the clue to the meaning of
ultimate reality was thus found in personality. "This personal idealism," King said, "became my basic philosophical
position. Personalism's insistence that only personality, finite and infinite, is ultimately real strengthened me in two
convictions: it gave me metaphysical and philosophical grounding for the idea of a personal god, and it gave me a
metaphysical basis for my belief in the dignity and worth of all human personality."

One of the leading exponents of personalism of the day was the Unitarian theologian Henry Nelson Wieman,
who exerted a tremendous influence on an entire generation of Unitarian and Universalist ministers. And it is said
during King's days in theological school that, aside from the Rauschenbusch_Niebuhr debate, he spent more time
discussing and deliberating the peculiarly upsetting ideas in the theological behaviorism of Wieman than any other
topic. Writes one biographer, "Mike was negatively fascinated by Wieman, by the fundamental questions his
philosophy posed which the conventional theologians utterly failed to answer. In Mike's discipleship to advancing
truth and to finding answers to the questions that Wieman raised, he chose to devote his doctoral dissertation at
Boston University to a comparison of the divergent theologies of the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich and the
Unitarian Henry Nelson Wieman.

Now these two theological giants of their day had held center stage at a ten-day religious retreat in Vermont
in 1935, showcasing their disagreements. This real-life encounter became the starting point for King's dissertation,
and by the end of the first year of his research (and you'll have to follow this closely) he had reached this conclusion:
"Wieman's ultimate pluralism fails to satisfy the rational demand for unity. Tillich's ultimate monism swallows up
finite individuality in the unity of being. A more adequate view is to hold a quantitative pluralism and a qualitative
monism. In this way oneness and manyness are preserved." He did ultimately reject the approach of both Tillich and
Wieman as impersonal, but I think you will appreciate from the brief look at the theologies of both of them that he
was greatly impacted by Tillich, and perhaps even more so by the Unitarian Wieman.

According to Tillich, theological exploration does not properly start with the question of God, but rather
humanity's experienced predicament. By following this method, we can go from the "below" to the "above" in order
to reach an idea of God which avoids literalism. And the literalism to be avoided in this case is an idea of God as
existing. "Arguments about the existence or nonexistence of God, as if God were something beyond man or
humanity," said Tillich, "are empty and meaningless." "God" for Tillich was the name of "that which concerns us
ultimately." And our ultimate concern is what? Our own being and our non-being.

"We must go beyond the God of literalism and mysticism and theism," said Tillich, "to the God above God."
Absolute faith belongs to that person for whom God himself has disappeared, and yet who will affirm life in spite of
the threat of death. Absolute faith is that which says "yes" to being without seeing anything concrete that could
conquer the non-being in fate and death. Since God, according to Tillich's definition, is being and non-being, then
"absolute faith is a life that is lived courageously before God, who is both man's life and death. Thus this life, so
lived, knows the God above God, for he is the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt."
Just a brief sampling of Tillich's approach.

Now, it was Wieman's contention that religion should be defined by the problem it tries to solve. And that
problem, he contended, is exposed when we notice two features of human existence, the first being our capacity to
undergo radical transformation -- not just minor changes, but radical transformation. Human beings can be
transformed to the depths of cruelty and misery, or to the heights of saintly virtue and blessedness. We are capable of
experiencing horror and boredom, but also ecstasy and a sense of glory. We have this capacity for radical
transformation. The question is, what can transform us in such a way to save us from the bad, from the depths of evil,
and deliver us to the good?

According to Wieman, the moral aspect of the problem was all that we can do to transform ourselves. The
religious aspect was that something other, something greater, something beyond, which we cannot do entirely for
ourselves. The religious aspect was the self-giving of ultimate commitment to what the individual believes has the
power to transform him or her, as s/he cannot transform him or herself.The second feature of human existence that
reveals the religious aspect from another angle is the awareness of what Wieman referred to as "our original
experience," or "our true selves," as contrasted with the superimposed patterns caused by social adjustment û the
individual as he or she truly is. And it is awareness of this original experience which leads to the question, how shall I
be saved from the death of my true self under the suffocating imposition of this automatic and trivial existence?
What ultimate commitment will bring forth the full flowering of my true self or my original experience? What is
evil? What is good? What is that saving power? How is it activated?As you already may have construed from
listening to the reading, the "good" for Wieman was creative and creativity. The process which delivers us from evil
to good he labeled "creative transformation," and he thought a great deal of change was possible for us. "Creative
transformation is the result of creative interchange, that kind of interchange which creates in those who engage in it
an appreciative understanding of the original experience of one another. You express your whole self and your entire
mind freely and fully and deeply and truly to other persons who understand you most completely and appreciatively,
with joy in what you are as so expressed." And you, of course, may reciprocate. “

Creative interchange can provide a standard for judging good and evil in this life. The good is what sustains,
promotes, and favors the creation of appreciative understanding between individuals and peoples, and evil is what
hinders or prevents that kind of interchange.""This is the answer," wrote Wieman, "to the searching question of
religious faith. The kind of interchange which generates appreciative understanding, with all the unsearched
mystery in it calls for the ultimate commitment of man because it saves him from the processes which impoverish
and destroy the distinctive characteristics of his humanity. When he commits himself to it, it transforms him in the
direction of the fullest development of his humanity and what lies beyond the merely human, if there be such."

The creative transformation that is the result of creative interchange is not merely the work of those
individuals involved, but the result is something different and larger than the sum of its parts û that's what Wieman
was talking about earlier. "Creative transformation that is the result of creative interchange can be equated with the
work of God in human life," said Wieman. And if we understand and appreciate enough Wieman's way of looking at
things, we can certainly say, and we can say with certainty, that according to Wieman's framework, God was at work
in the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Martin Luther King, Jr. was doing the work of God.

Now perhaps young Mike read these words, which I will share with you, or words similar by Wieman. They
are from his book Man's Ultimate Commitment, from almost the last page of the last chapter, which is entitled "The
Decision Required of Us." Human history has scarcely yet begun. Millions of years have yet to run. Man is yet to be
created in the fullness of his being. No form of life, so far as we know, has ever been the carrier of this creativity of
history. Surely this is a destiny immeasurably beyond any other in the grandeur and tragedy of what has happened,
and in the glory of its possibilities. Each individual, by proper action, can become a participant in this grandeur, in
this tragedy, and in this glory. To undertake such action is the decision required of us.