Martin Luther King Jr.

What did Martin Luther King Jr. mean by agape love?

Agape is a Greek word for love. The Greeks had several, and this is the one King wanted. It is not affection and not liking someone. It is a steady commitment to the good of every person, including the person doing you harm. His reason for it was practical. Hate would put you inside the very thing you are fighting, so you could win and still lose. He also refused to split love from power. Power without love turns abusive. Love without power gets nothing done. Put them together and you can push hard on an injustice while still treating the people on the other side as people.

• Agape is unconditional love that seeks the well-being of all without requiring anything in return.
• Love and power are not opposites but must be joined: power without love is abusive, love without power is ineffective.
• Agape makes it possible to resist injustice while still honoring the humanity of opponents.

Listen to the story “Agape Love”

What is creative tension?

Creative tension is King's word for pressure that makes a hidden problem impossible to look away from. A town says there is no real trouble here, so nothing moves. A march, a sit-in, a boycott turns that quiet into a public crisis, and now the trouble has a name and a date. The tension was already there. The action only brings it into the open, where somebody has to deal with it. King learned the principle from Gandhi, that hidden injustice has to be made visible, and rebuilt it for American cities from Montgomery to Birmingham. The discipline matters as much as the pressure. Without nonviolent training the same crisis just becomes a brawl.

• Creative tension makes hidden conflict visible so it can be resolved rather than endlessly denied.
• Entrenched injustice rarely yields to persuasion alone. Strategic pressure that creates crisis is needed.
• Nonviolent discipline channels conflict productively rather than destructively.

Listen to the story “Creative Tension”

What did Martin Luther King Jr. teach?

Martin Luther King Jr. taught nonviolent resistance, and three ideas hold it together. Agape is love that seeks the good of everyone, including the people who harm you. He took it from Christian theology and from the Boston Personalism he studied for his doctorate. Creative tension is the method. Nonviolent action makes a hidden injustice impossible to ignore, so a town that has refused to talk has to talk. The beloved community is the goal, a society where conflict is settled by justice and repair instead of by defeat. He set it down in Stride Toward Freedom (1958), Strength to Love (1963), and Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963).

How did Martin Luther King Jr. tell a just law from an unjust one?

King took the test from natural law, the tradition of Thomas Aquinas. A just law matches the moral law and holds human dignity up. An unjust law degrades the person, or binds one group while another goes free, or is imposed on people who were never asked. That is why he treated disobeying such a law as an obligation rather than a crime. You break it in the open and you take the punishment, and for King that is the highest respect a person can show the law. He laid the argument out in Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963).