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King Came Preaching:
The Pulpit Power of Martin Luther King Jr.
Mervyn A. Warren
IVP, 223 pages, $19.99

When students enroll in my "Life and Thought of Martin Luther King" course, they expect to encounter his learned theological treatises. They are surprised to discover that in his mature years he wrote no sustained theological reflections on love, justice, suffering, or reconciliation. What he did do was preach sermons. In fact, until the day of his assassination, King never stopped preaching. In his sermons, mass meeting speeches, and civil addresses he articulated his theology and his vision for America. He admitted as much in an Ebony magazine article: "In the quiet recesses of my heart, I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher."

In the last 15 years, more than a few commentators, including James Cone, David Garrow, Keith Miller, Taylor Branch, and Lewis Baldwin, have acknowledged and celebrated King the preacher and his roots in the black church. Before he was a thinker or an activist, King was an orator who skillfully transposed his message from beneath the sacred canopy of the black church into the arena of American law and public policy.

King Came Preaching is by Mervyn A. Warren, a veteran preaching teacher at Oakwood College, a Seventh-day Adventist institution in Huntsville, Alabama. Warren looks at King's sermons through the lens of current speech and communication theory. Warren promises to avoid the two extremes of "a mere biographing of a preacher with only incidental references to his hands-on process of bringing a sermon to readiness … and a flooding of readers and practitioners with homiletical assumptions whose vagueness and impalpability would be mere shadows for chasing around discussion tables in ivory towers."

Before King and After King
Warren tells the familiar story of King's life and his ascendancy as a black preacher. With King in mind, he quotes William Sangster's admonition that preachers should wear their learning lightly, as King did in his best orations. Because of the legitimacy King lent the black pulpit (in white eyes), Warren divides black preaching into two eras—Before King and After King.

Warren is at his best discussing the audience's reception of a sermon. He uses the observations of several speech theorists. In comments on the sermon "Our God is Able," Warren demonstrates how King scrupulously followed the standard steps in communication: attention, need, satisfaction, visualization, and action.

Warren includes a long chapter on King's language, which yields interesting quantitative information but also a certain disappointment. He analyzes King's speech in light of Rudolf Flesch's "difficulty score" ("First, determine the average length of sentences and multiply that number by .1338. Second, take the number of affixes per 100 words and multiply that by .0645"). But this is a bloodless method of encountering one of the most moving poets and prophets of the 20th century. There must be a more passionate means of encountering King than the quantitative analysis of his sentences.

Neglecting King's Borrowings
Warren's book began as a doctoral dissertation first published in 1966. Its great strength is that Warren was researching in the 1960s, when King was preaching. Warren once interviewed King and had the opportunity to hear him preach three times. Thus he brings to his book the enviable perspective of the informed eyewitness.

The downside is that he does not explore the many discoveries that have emerged since 1966—for example, King's unattributed use of other preachers' material. Warren includes a table of King's sources in his sermons, but he does not acknowledge Keith Miller's amazing detective-like investigation of King's borrowing from other Protestant preachers, such as Phillips Brooks, Wallace Hamilton, and Harry Emerson Fosdick. To list the sources of literary quotations in King's "The Drum Major Instinct," for example, is beside the point; nearly the entire sermon is borrowed from Wallace Hamilton's "Drum Major Instincts."

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January (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46