Word: faithfulness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa., where he was elected class president and outstanding student, he discovered the works of Hegel and Kant. Here also he was exposed to the writings of Mohandas Gandhi, whose mystic faith in nonviolent protest became King's lodestar. "From my background," he said, "I gained my regulating Christian ideals. From Gandhi I learned my operational technique." Indeed, Gandhi's word for his doctrine, satyagraha, becomes in translation King's slogan, "soul force...
Undeniably, one major task of theology today is to define what it means to be a Christian in a secular society. For millions, of course, there is no real problem. Baptism and church membership are the external criteria of faith, and a true follower of Jesus is one who keeps his beliefs free from heresy and tries to live a decent, upright, moral life. Yet to the most thoughtful spokesmen of modern Christianity, these criteria are not only minimal, they are secondary and even somewhat irrelevant. Instead, they argue that faith is not an intellectual assent to a series...
...have always taught that Christ was both God and man, Christians have hardly ever seemed to accept his humanity. Historically, preaching has emphasized the Risen Christ, who sits at the right hand of God, and will come in glory to the Last Judgment. This is a basic premise of faith, but it is equally true that Jesus was emphatically a man-a lowly carpenter who walked the earth of Palestine at a specific moment in human history, and whose death fulfilled Isaiah's prophesy of the Suffering Servant. Jesus, as Bonhoeffer memorably put it, was "the man for others...
...Testament is a very secular book, and there is an unmistakable social concern in Jesus' moral teachings. In Matthew 23, for example, Jesus condemns as hypocrites the scribes and Pharisees who ostentatiously tithe their possessions but neglect "the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith...
What this means, in essence, is that a commitment to love in worldly life cannot be separated from faith in Christ, who demanded that commitment. One argument against trying to build Christianity on moral action alone is that Jesus' teachings, unlike those of, say, Confucius, make sense only when understood as counsels of perfection in obedience to God rather than as workable guidelines of behavior. The Rev. David H. C. Read, pastor of Manhattan's Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, points out that in facing many problems of life the behavior of the Christian and the humanist might well...