Table of Contents Chapter 1: Biography and Theology……………………………………………….6 Chapter 2: The Quest for Peace…………………………………………………..70 Chapter 3: Creative Encounter(s): Thurman‘s Spirituality of reconciliation…….127 Chapter 4: ―The Word‖—Thurman‘s Spiritual Idiom…………………………..164 Chapter 5: ―Whole-Making‖: Howard Thurman as Peacemaker………..………209 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………..252 iii INTRODUCTION As a Baptist minister, pastoral theologian and ―spiritual father‖ of the American Civil Rights Movement, Howard Thurman (1900-1981) made significant contributions to the religious and ethical life of twentieth-century America. He began his career serving in various pastoral and academic posts at Spelman College, Morehouse College and Howard University between 1929 and 1943. During these tenures, Thurman began a lifelong friendship with Mohandas Gandhi and the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore in addition to studying under the Quaker mystic-philosopher Rufus Jones. As a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Thurman helped establish the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco in 1944, serving as its first pastor. ―Fellowship Church‖ was one of the first racially integrated, intercultural churches in the United States. From 1953 to 1965 Thurman served as professor of spiritual disciplines and dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University, the first black man to serve as dean of chapel at a traditionally white American university. Thurman authored more than 24 books of cultural criticism and pastoral meditations and over 50 articles on religious life and mystical experience. The most famous of his works, Jesus and the Disinherited (1949), deeply influenced the thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black leaders were particularly interested in Thurman‘s treatment of nonviolence within a Christian perspective. Thurman wrestled throughout his career with the nonviolent imperative he understood as emerging from mystical experience. His unique spiritual ―idiom‖ was heavily influenced by Gandhi‘s program of satyagrahi, Quaker pacifism, Eastern philosophy and religion, and the black church. For Thurman, mystical experience encouraged a profound unity that he 2 termed ―community‖ at both the intrapersonal and interpersonal level. Maintaining that social violence and chaos could be overcome only through mystical experience of Divine Love at the personal level, he encouraged ―community‖ through the cultivation of mystical consciousness in the lives of his students and parishioners. For Thurman such consciousness may allow individuals to become ―apostles of sensitiveness‖—agents of radical change in their social contexts. The year 1981 witnessed both Thurman‘s death and the publication of Luther Smith‘s Howard Thurman: The Mystic as Prophet. In this seminal text Smith argued that Thurman‘s greatest contribution to religious life and thought lay in his analysis of the transformative effects of mystical experience. While many of Thurman‘s contemporaries within the Civil Rights Movement dismissed his growing emphasis on the inner life with such comments as ―he has gone ‗mystic‘ on us,‖ Smith contends that Thurman‘s mysticism, which he [Smith] terms ―critical monistic realism,‖ allowed Thurman to develop a critical understanding of the relationships between mystical consciousness and life in the world. Claiming Thurman as a ―holy man for the new millennium,‖ Martin Marty has recently suggested that Thurman‘s unique ability to tutor the ―religious quest for freedom‖ demands that scholars afford his efforts at spiritual and societal reconciliation the same consideration as those of his better-known contemporaries Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day and Evelyn Underhill. Thurman‘s work on the ―whole-making‖ tendency of mystical experience in which an individual, through surrender to God, reorients and reintegrates innate spiritual energy within her/his personality merits further study. Akin to the writings of Merton and, more recently, the feminist theologian Dorothee Sölle, Thurman‘s voice may rightly be considered as a neglected source of Christian pacifism promoting, to borrow from Sölle, 3 ―resistance‖ to any personal or social relations that are not ultimately rooted in and incarnating Divine Love. Since Marty‘s call to scholars in 1996, significant events and developments in American and global culture and the academic study of religion and theology have made his call that scholars better attend to Thurman‘s life, thought and ministry all the more relevant. Three vital signs of the times that first emerged within the general culture of Thurman‘s later years and have continued into the present are: 1) increased interest and participation in interreligious encounter and community; 2) a growing spiritual and ethical awareness of the natural world as vital to humanity‘s relationship with and responsibility to the Divine; 3) a serious return by many individuals and faith-based organizations to the mystical and contemplative roots of religion. As the academic discipline of spirituality gains greater purchase in religious studies and formal theology, many scholars in this field thinking on issues of peace are working to recover and re-present spiritual wisdom and practices from our axial faiths in their work of diagnosing contemporary social ills and offering vital insights concerning the place of religion and spirituality in our postmodern, multilingual polis and global village. 1 I believe that a fresh assessment of Thurman‘s contributions to religion and public life can greatly enrich not only current Thurman scholarship but also add much to the larger conversations concerning spirituality and social transformation. 1 Here I am particularly thinking of the scholarship, teaching and political and social activism of more recent public theologians such as Joan Chittister, Parker Palmer, Richard Rohr, John Dear, Mary Evelyn Jegen, Dwight Hopkins and Jim Wallis, among others. 4 Thesis Statement In this dissertation I will analyze and interpret the interrelations of mysticism, peace and reconciliation in the life and thought of Howard Thurman. Methodology The dissertation is performed in five chapters. In the first chapter I situate Thurman in his socio-cultural context, both as a black American and a mystic-theologian and pastor. Emphasis is given to the particular experiences and relationships (―Sources‖ and ―Forces‖) that tutored the components of Thurman‘s mystical consciousness and mystical theology specifically related to the issues of peace, peacemaking and Christian pacifism. In the second chapter I recover Thurman‘s theology of peace as it evolves from his more established concept of ―community‖ and was more fully articulated in his interest in the solitary individual‘s sense of personal peace and correlative treatment of five primary "signs" of collective chaos—racism and segregation, war, poverty and materialism, religious intolerance and conflict and environmental degradation. In the third chapter I present Thurman‘s mystical spirituality of reconciliation as a means of articulating his understanding of how mystical encounter reorients the individual toward wholeness within her/himself and also in her/his relationship with other individuals, social collectives and the natural world. Vital elements of this chapter are detailed analyses of Thurman‘s concept of reconciliation, the essential transformative elements he argues as inherent within mystical experience and a recovery of his concept of the religious individual as an ―apostle of sensitiveness‖ effecting positive change in her/his social context. In the 5 fourth chapter I explore Thurman‘s ―spiritual idiom‖ as a means of integrating his theology of peace and spirituality of reconciliation with his pastoral rhetoric evident in his speaking and writing. I present Thurman‘s notion of language, explore the form and content of his ―idiom‖ and examine three of his pastoral texts in detail as case-studies. In the fifth and final chapter I integrate findings from the previous chapters, first by using the paradigm of ―whole-making‖ to identity certain strengths and weaknesses of Thurman‘s witness, and then via consideration of Thurman as a ―peacemaker.‖ I conclude this chapter and the dissertation through a brief consideration of potential new avenues of research related to Thurman, peace and mysticism, and spirituality more generally construed. Originality and Contribution Previous scholars (Luther E. Smith Jr., Mozella Mitchell, Walter E. Fluker and Alton B. Pollard) have considered Thurman‘s life and thought in relation to social transformation and activism, and literature and theology in general. Yet there has been no thoroughgoing examination of Thurman‘s life and thought concerning his emphasis on the interrelations of mysticism, nonviolence and peacemaking—particularly at the individual level. Sufficient thought has not been given to how Thurman‘s pastoral praxis illumines the role language and spiritual disciplines play in the vital work of individual and congregational transformation as a prelude to social change. By focusing on Thurman‘s theology of peace and mystical theology of reconciliation, and their practical implications for his pastoral ministry in this context, my study more explicitly demonstrates his contributions to peacemaking, nonviolence and spirituality particularly within a Christian context. THURMAN DISSERTATION: CHAPTER ONE A man‘s life is a single statement. This does not seem to be the case because we measure our lives episodically, in terms of events,