What Is Man? MLK Jr. 1958 PDF

WHAT IS MAN? An address delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr..of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, before The Chicago Sunday Evening Club, Orchestra Hall, January 12, 1958. Broadcast over Station WIND. Not proofread by Dr. King. I need not pause to say how very delighted I am t...

WHAT IS MAN? An address delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr..of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, before The Chicago Sunday Evening Club, Orchestra Hall, January 12, 1958. Broadcast over Station WIND. Not proofread by Dr. King. I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here this evening and to be a part of this very rich experience. One of the most important questions confronting any generation is the question, “What is man?” The whole political, social, and economic structure of a society is largely determined by its answer to this pressing question. Indeed, the conflict which we witness in the world today between totalitarianism and democracy is at bottom a conflict over the question, “What is man?” In our generation the asking of this question has risen to extensive proportions, but although there is widespread agreement in asking the question, there is still fantastic disagreement in answering it. For instance, there are those who would contend that man is little more than a misguided and unscrupulous animal. They would agree with the recent materialistic philosopher who said that man is a cosmic accident, a disease on this planet, not soon to be cured. There are those who would probably agree with Jonathan Swift, “Man is the most pernicious little race of ominous vermin that nature ever suffered to walk across the face of the earth.” These are the persons who have projected a sort of pessimistic naturalism. But then there are those, on the other hand, who would lift man to idealistic proportions. They would agree with Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!” Then, on the other hand, there are those individuals who would seek to be a little more realistic, avoiding the extremes of a sort of pessimistic naturalism and an optimistic idealism. They see something of a dichotomy within man, a strange dualism, and so they would cry out with Carlyle that “there are depths in man which go down to the lowest hell and heights which reach the highest heaven, for are not both heaven and hell made out of him, everlasting miracle that he is?” One day the Psalmist looked out and he noticed the vastness of the cosmic order. He noticed the infinite expanse of the solar system. He noticed the stars as they bedecked the heavens like swinging lanterns of eternity. He noticed the moon as it stood in all of its scintillating beauty, and he says now in the midst of all of this, “What is man?” He had an answer. He could cry out, “Thou hast made him a little less than God, and crowned him with glory and honor, and madest him to have dominion over the works of Thine hands.” I would like to take this passage as a basis for our thinking together, as we seek to work out a realistic doctrine of man. Let us notice first that man is an animal with a material body. I guess this is why the Psalmist says, “Thou hast made him a little less than God.” For you see we do not think of God as a being with a body. God is a being of pure spirit, lifted above the categories of time and space, but man, that being made a little less than God, is in nature caught up within the limitations of time and space; and so man can never disown his kinship with animated nature. The facts in favor of a doctrine of evolution are so conclusive that to deny them would mean standing in the face of the most obvious evidence. Man is an animal with a material body. 1 Now that passage goes on to say that God made man that way, and if God made him that way it’s all right, because back in Genesis we read that everything God made was good. So there is nothing wrong with having a body. This is the one thing that distinguishes the Christian doctrine of man from the Greek doctrine. The Greeks under the impetus of Plato felt that the body was inherently depraved, and that somehow the soul could never reach its maturity until it broke loose from the prison of the body. But this was never Christian thought. Christianity has contended from the very beginning that the body is sacred, and that the principle of evil is the will not the body. The body is significant. This means that in any doctrine of man we must forever be concerned about man’s physical and material well-being. It is true that man cannot live by bread alone, but the mere face that the “alone” is added means that man cannot live without bread. So as a minister of the Gospel I must not only be concerned about “mansions in the sky”, but I must be deeply concerned about the hundreds and thousands of people who go to bed hungry at night. I must not only be concerned about streets “flowing with milk and honey”, but I must be concerned about the millions of people who live in slum areas. And any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and fails to be concerned about the social conditions that corrupt them, the economic conditions that damn them, and the slums that somehow cripple them, is a dry, dead, do- nothing religion, in need of new blood, and it justly deserves the criticism of the Marxists, it is nothing but an opiate of the people, for it fails to see one basic fact: that man is an animal with a material body, and that that body is sacred, and that we must forever be concerned about man’s material well-being. But we must not stop here. Some people stop right here. The Marxists would stop here. Certain materialistic thinkers would stop here. They would argue that the whole of life is nothing but a physiological process with a physiological meaning. Some years ago a group of chemists who had a flair for statistics got together and decided to work out in terms of the market values of that day, the worth of man’s bodily make-up. After a great deal of research and work they came out with this conclusion: that the average man has enough fat in him to make about seven bars of soap, enough iron for a medium sized nail, enough lime to whitewash a chicken coop, enough sugar to fill a shaker, enough phosphorous to make about twenty-two hundred match tips, enough magnesium for a dose of magnesia, and a little sulphur, and when all of this was added up in terms of the market values of that day it came to ninety-eight cents! That was all that could be gotten out of man’s bodily stuff. Now I guess in these days we have higher standards of living, and maybe you could get a dollar and ninety-eight cents for him. But let us look at this. Can we explain the poetic genius of a Shakespeare in terms of ninety-eight cents? Can we explain the musical genius of a Beethoven in terms of ninety-eight cents? Can we explain the artistic genius of a Michelangelo in terms of ninety-eight cents? Can we explain the spiritual genius of Jesus of Nazareth in terms of ninety-eight cents? Can we explain the magic of the human heart and the mystery of the human soul in terms of ninety-eight cents? O no! There is something within man that cannot be reduced to flesh and blood. There is something within man that cannot be explained in materialistic terms. Man is more than a tiny vagary of whirling electrons, or a wisp of smoke from a limitless smoldering. And this brings me to the second basic point that must go into any real doctrine of man, and that is that man is a being of spirit. He has a mind. He has rational capacity. This is the thing that distinguishes man from his animal ancestry. It seems that throughout nature mind and matter run on two parallel lines, but when it comes to man they intersect, and this has created a great problem for philosophy, the mind-body problem. This is the uniqueness of man, that he is in nature, and yet above nature. He is in time and yet above time. He is in space and yet above space. And so he can do things that other animals cannot do. Man can think a poem and write it. He can think a symphony and compose it. He 2 can think a great civilization and create it. He has a mind, and for this reason you can’t quite hem him in. You may put him in prison. Yes, you can put him in Bedford jail, but in the midst of that his mind will break through the bars, and in the person of a John Bunyan scratch across the pages of history a “Pilgrim’s Progress”. You may bring him down in his wretched old age so that his body is all but worn down, his vision all but gone, but with his mind he looks up and imagines that he hears the very angels singing, and in the person of a Handel scratches across the pages of history a “Hallelujah Chorus”. You can’t hem him in because he has a mind. He has rational capacity. And this is man’s uniqueness. Man is God’s marvelous creation. Through his mind, his ability to reason, his power of memory and his great imagination, he can leap oceans, break through walls and transcend the categories of time and space. The stars may be marvelous, but not as marvelous as the mind of man that comprehended them. This is what the Bible means when it says man is made in the image of God; man has rational capacity. He has the unique capacity to have fellowship with God. Man is God’s marvelous creation. He is a being of spirit. But we can’t stop even here, because if we stop here we will end up in an idealistic optimism, and not really in a realistic position about man. Christianity insists that we go on and set forth another basic point; Man is an animal injected with spirit, made in the image of God; but man has lost some of God’s Image. Man is free, not guided by instinct as the lower animals. Now I don’t have time to go into a justification of man’s freedom. Let us accept at this point man’s freedom as a philosophical presupposition. Man has the ability to choose between alternatives. He can choose the high or the low, the good or the evil. But man has misused his freedom. And so this evening I must make it clear that man is a sinner, in need of God’s divine grace. We hate to hear that. We have tried many times to avoid using that word. We use other words for it. We turn to the new psychology and we say, “Well, it’s phobias. It’s inner conflicts. It’s inhibitions.” Or we turn to Freudian psychology and say, “Well, it’s really a conflict between the id and the super ego.” But in the midst of all of this, Christianity comes out and says, “The conflict is between God and man, that at bottom man is a sinner.” There is something within all of us that causes us to cry out with Ovid, “I see and approve the better things of life, but the evil things I do.” There is something within all of us that causes us to cry out with St. Augustine, :”Lord, make me pure, - but not yet.” There is something within all of us that causes us to agree with Plato that the human personality is like a charioteer with two headstrong horses, each wanting to go in different directions. There is something within all of us that causes us to agree with the Apostle Paul: “The good that I would I do not, and the evil that I would not, that I do.” So when we look at ourselves hard enough and lay our lives bare before the scrutiny of God, we discover that the “is ness” of our present nature is far our of harmony with the eternal “ought ness” that forever confronts us. I don’t know about you, but when I look at myself hard enough I don’t feel like crying out with the Pharisees: “Lord, I thank Thee that I am not like other men”, but I feel like crying out, “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.” We know truth, and yet we lie. We know how to be just, and yet we are unjust. We know how to be honest, and yet we are dishonest. We are unfaithful to those that we should be faithful to. We are disloyal to those that we should be loyal to. We stand in the midst of the high road and we deliberately choose the low road. All we like sheep have gone astray. As the results of our sinfulness we have allowed our mentality to outrun our morality. We have allowed our civilization to outdistance our culture. We are producing a world of guided missiles and misguided men. We have made of our world a neighborhood though our scientific and technological genius, but through our moral and spiritual genius we have failed to make of it a brotherhood. Yes, we are sinners. Man’s sinfulness rises to even 3 greater heights when we turn to him in his collective life. This is why one theologian could write a book entitled “Moral Man and Immoral Society.” When man interacts in his societal existence his sin rises to greater dimensions See how we live! Nations trample over other nations with the iron feet of oppression. Racial groups trample over other racial groups, plunging men into the abyss of exploitation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging injustice. Look how we solve our problems in the world today, - just as men solved them a thousand or two thousand years ago. We try to argue that we are getting better, but the only thing I can say is that we are getting progressively evil. We used to kill each other with bow and arrows and now we do it with atomic bombs. This is our tragedy. This is the problem we confront. We leave the battlefields of the world painted with blood, stack up national debts higher than mountains of gold, send our men home psychologically deranged and physically handicapped, and fill our nations with widows and orphans. I can see nothing but the fact that man in his individual and collective life is a sinner, in need of God’s divine grace. But when we turn around and look at ourselves hard enough, there is something deep down within that says to us, “Man is not made for that.” There is something crying out within saying, “Man is made for the stars, created for eternity, born for the everlasting.” And so long as we live on this low scale we will be frustrated, disillusioned, wandering through the seas of life like a ship without a compass. Now I say this evening that we have the great responsibility and the great challenge to repent, mend our ways as nations and as individuals, and turn back to God. If we fail to do this we will destroy ourselves by the misuse of our own instruments. There is a boy standing before his father saying, “Father, give me my goods.” He goes running into a far country, and a famine breaks out. This is what happens when man leaves his true home. A famine always breaks out. Then that boy comes to see that he is not made for that. He comes to see that he is not made for the hog-pen. So he comes to himself and decides to rise up and go back home. And the beauty of that parable is that at the end of the road as that boy runs up the dusty road there is the father back home saying, “Come home! I want you to come home! And we will have a great feast tonight!” God is saying that to western civilizations, “You’ve strayed away to the far country of colonialism and imperialism, and you have trampled over more than one billion, three hundred million of your brothers, but if you will rise up and come home I will accept you.” He is saying that to America, “You have trampled over sixteen million of your brothers, but come home and I will accept you, and you will be the great nation that I have called you to be.” This is our challenge, and the job ahead. “To every man there openeth A Way, and Ways, and a Way, The High Soul climbs the High Way, The Low Soul gropes the Low, And in between, on the misty flats, The rest drift to and fro. But to every man there openeth The High Way and the Low, And every man decideth The Way his soul shall go.” God grant that we will choose the high way, and when this happens, figuratively speaking, the morning stars will sing together, and the sons of God will shout for joy. 4 (The end.) © The Dr. Martin Luther King Estate Special Collection/Boston University Libraries 771 Commonwealth Avenue Boston, Massachusetts 02215 5