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.To eradicate reason was to eradicate choice, and to eradicate choice was to eradicate the obligation to do good, which in turn eliminated hope for the kind of dramatic social transformation that King ultimately envisioned.For King, a thinking mind must possess the ability to think about God, self, and others, and that capacity to think must in turn be demonstrated by one’s capacity to choose a moral good based on the conviction of one’s reasonable thoughts.Whatever else might be said about humans and their imperfections, human beings must above all retain the ability to choose and act accordingly.To eliminate the human elements of reason and choice as agents of potential moral good74t h e o l o g i c a l m e d i t a t i o nwas to see the image of God as a symbol of what once was without assigning the moral substance to imagine or implement what could be.For King, little could have been more troubling or theologically defeatist.In the fi nal analysis, any conception of human depravity that undermined humanity’s freedom to choose that which represented the moral good failed to satisfy King’s theological sense of what being made in the image of God entailed.His view regarding human capacity is shared in an assignment prepared for Harold DeWolf’s Old Testament course at Boston University:Here it is implied that goodness is a foreign thing to human nature.In fact men don’t even know how to do good.They are only skilledin doing evil.We may question such a conclusion.Does man everbecome so corrupt and wicked that he can have no conception ofthe good? I think not.It seems to be that no matter how low anindividual sinks in sin, there is still a spark of good within him.22King, of course, understood that his critique was not without historical precedence.In many ways he simply assumed the privilege of a modern-day reformer by asserting his theological questions and claims in the tradition of the orthodox and Reformation thinkers who preceded him.Far from a monolith of opinion sanctioned through an ecclesial hierarchy, the fi fteenth-century Reformers, though unanimous in their desire to reassert the fundamental premise of humanity’s utter depravity and dependence upon grace as the only means of human restoration, varied in their conclusions and implications regarding the image of God.As King examined the ways in which patristic and reform thinkers framed what it meant to be made in the image of God, he too felt obligated to exercise the need to critically refl ect upon, clarify, and describe what it meant to be human within the context of this image of God framework.While the sobering doctrinal positions offered by the reformers werefound acceptable to many earlier thinkers, King was too compelled by the weight of current scientifi c theory and its apparent incompatibility with literal biblical interpretations to consider the viability of theological positions thatignored its newfound truths.23 In lieu of the kind of Biblicism that supported a historical approach to the Genesis narrative, King allowed for in-depth conversations between various intersecting disciplines of thought.Insofar as he was concerned, psychology and science offered essential and indispensable truths that could assist in leading one to a more thorough theological understanding of human nature.This after all represented the responsible role of the theologian/scholar, namely, to acknowledge his theological limitations and progressively adjust his theological outlook to bring greater light and truth to bear.Biblical positions and theological orientations had to shift when it wask i n g a s c r i t i c a l t h i n k e r75discovered that the world was not fl at and that the universe was not trileveled.This kind of syncretic approach to biblical interpretation, however, required the kind of critical and probing literary analysis that King brought to the text.As Richard Lischer explains:Given the theological climate in which King was trained, his ownanalytical step back from the text frequently led him to the authority of psychology.By mid–20th century, psychology had become thesecular successor of pietism and had established itself as an objective science of human behavior.The laws of psychology were premisedupon an idealized essence of humanity that can be known apart fromthe authority of biblical revelation.This is the credo of liberalism, and insofar as King was a participant in that theological subculture, it isdiscernible in many of his sermons [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]