Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Exercise of the Prophetic
The Watchmen and the Witnesses: Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Exercise of the Prophetic M. Shawn Copeland Where there is no prophecy, the people perish. Proverbs 29:18 Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the people of Israel; so hear the word I speak and give them warning from me. Ezekiel 33:6 The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls. Simon and Garfunkel “The Sounds of Silence” Neither Thomas Merton nor Martin Luther King, Jr. would have con- sidered himself a prophet; surely, each man would have rejected this designation. Yet, each man so attuned himself to the Word of God as to recover and to exercise the biblical vocation of prophecy – to serve as a “watchman,” to scrutinize the “signs of the times,” to witness to God’s care for the anguish of the world, to contribute to healing our “body of broken bones”1 in light of a vision of “beloved community.”2 Scholar of the Hebrew Bible Walter Brueggemann writes that biblical prophecy “always confronts us with a basic question: ‘Is history really 1. Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1949) 53; cf. Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1961) 70. 2. Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Current Crisis in Race Relations,” in Joseph Melvin Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1986) 87 (subsequent references will be cited as “King, Testament” parenthetically in the text).
[Show full text]