The Preacher King

This fall, my alma mater, is hosting one of the more exciting conferences in the U.S. I'm working on a film right now for this conference. Make plans to attend. David Fleer is using his gift, once again, to bring men and women of all different stripes to study and challenge each other. This event is for ministers, pastors, and scholars alike.

I wrote this review in preparation for the conference. It's a bit long. If you are a reader (and nerd), enjoy.



Review of Richard Lischer’s The Preacher King
ISBN 978-0-511132-3

Richard Lischer, scholar and professor at Duke Divinity, supplies both the student of history and local pastor a wonderful gift with his work, The Preacher King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Word that Moved America. Combining history, theology, New Testament scholarship, politics, and narrative criticism as very few can—Lischer paints a detailed yet complete picture of the life and legacy of one of America’s great religious leaders.

I suggest Richard Lischer’s Preacher King in preparation for the 2008 Lipscomb Preaching Conference for two reasons. First, Lischer has the rare ability to capture the tension and ethos of 1960’s America. The Civil Right Era has become a source of nostalgia for some. Lischer refuses to buy into this hype-machine by closely immersing himself back into the world of those who marched in Selma, Montgomery, and Memphis. “Despite the enforced intimacy of the races, a rigid caste system, buttressed by dozens of local statutes, forbade blacks and whites to acknowledge the life they in fact held in common. A local statute went so far as to bar whites and blacks from playing cards, dice, checkers, or dominoes together. Restrooms and drinking fountains were clearly marked. By law, a white person and a Negro could not share a taxi. The segregation of restaurants and public transportation was carried out with a routine cruelty that left the black citizens of Montgomery, like those of most southern cities, humiliated and burning with resentment.” You will find an absence of over-sentimentalized anecdotes and conversations: Lischer understands all too well how the stakes were during this tumultuous period in American history.

Second, Lischer paints a nuanced portrait of Dr. King as the Civil Right’s Moses-figure. Lischer pays close attention to Dr. King’s ethos, rhetorical skill, knowledge of the teachings of Jesus, historical context, intellectual heroes, as well as his intense personal connection to the African-American church. Unlike some depictions, Lischer avoids the pitfalls of depicting King a secular humanitarian or as a mere social insurrectionist with an axe to grind. Rather, Lischer clearly demonstrates the manner in which Dr. King sees his own life as a holy improvisation, living out the dangerous love of Jesus in marches, prisons, restaurant sit-ins, and church bombings. With racism (Pharaoh) pressing in, Jim Crow government laws forming insurmountable walls on all sides (Red Sea), King (Moses) led his people to the other side. Dr. King prepared the people for what God was going to do next (Canaan) though he himself, like Moses, would not experience the land “flowing with milk and honey.” Lischer presents Dr. King for what he was: a young black Baptist preacher-prophet who named, exposed, and in his death, unmasked the systemic powers of darkness. This book will prepare you to re-imagine the God who liberates (all) his people from oppression and domination.