This is the latest on the controversy:

X wrote: "The question is not: is white America racist? Not even: is
America racist? Even if the answer is yes, in aces and spades. Rather the
question is: What was the content of MLK's character? As a Christian? As a
minister? As a father and a husband? You tell me. In 25 words or less, if
1Tim.10 won't do."

Dear X,

Of course, I cannot give you an answer to that in twenty-five words or less,
and I would be a fool to try. It's like all the times a reporter has taken
a sentence or two of mine and placed the sound bite on the evening news or
in a newspaper story. The only way that I know how to get a point across is
to lay out what I believe and why I believe it, and that usually takes more
than twenty-five words.

Was Martin Luther King, Jr. guilty of adultery? Sure. So am I, and so are
you. Have you never entertained adulterous thoughts? Our Lord's point in
Matthew 5:28 is not to trivialize sin, nor is it to level all sins as if
they were all equally heinous; it is to cause us to take stock of ourselves
lest we become bloated with self-righteousness as we evaluate the conduct of
others. Would I bring disciplinary charges against someone in my
congregation or presbytery who refused to repent of adultery? Absolutely, I
already have on more than one occasion.

I do not excuse or wink at the theological errors that Dr. King evidently
embraced, any more than I excuse the theological errors of those who deny
justification by faith alone or who teach that everyone who is baptized with
water is regenerated. But I am not ecclesiastically connected with anyone
like that. I have already unequivocally stated that I could not ordain
Martin Luther King, Jr. into the gospel ministry -- among other reasons, for
the same reason I could not ordain Martin Luther into the ministry: I am
Confessionally bound to the Westminster Standards. But I count both Martins
as heroes, just for different reasons. I despise some of Luther's vitriolic
anti-Semitism, but I evaluate this not by the standards of the twenty-first
century West, but by the cultural period in which he spoke. I despise the
idea that Dr. King likely committed adultery, but I evaluate this by the
culture from which he came. The African-American Church, sadly, has tended
to be more tolerant of pastors' sexual sins; whereas, sadly, the
European-American Church has tended to be more tolerant of gluttony and
unforgiveness. We all have feet of clay.

I do not march because I celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. as a paragon of
everything that a Christian minister ought to be any more than I participate
in patriotic activities on the Fourth of July because I endorse the
Democratic Ideal as the summum bonum of civil government, or salute the
American flag because I celebrate the state sponsored terrorism of General
W. T. Sherman toward the civilian populations of Georgia and South Carolina
or the genocide of the U. S. Calvary in the last half of the nineteenth
century toward the Native Americans of the West. I march on that day to
show solidarity with African-Americans as we celebrate the fact that one
hundred, sixty-seven years after the framing of the United States
Constitution it finally began to be applied to all Americans.

Martin Luther King Day isn't fundamentally about an individual human being;
it's about a series of events that began with the United States Supreme
Court's overturning _Plessy v. Ferguson_, 163 U.S. 537 (1896) with _Brown v.
Board of Education_, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), continued on through the victory
of the Montgomery Bus Boycott a couple of years later, the March on
Washington in 1963, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Martin
Luther King Day celebrates those victories and memorializes the martyrdom
not only of Martin Luther King, Jr., but also that of four Black children,
Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carol Robertson, when
Birmingham, Alabama's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed by a White
terrorist.

Why Martin Luther King, Jr.? Of course, Dr. King had no part in the
original cases that were combined in _Brown_; he didn't live either in
Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia or Delaware. But King's shadow extends
over the rest of the civil rights movement, beginning with Mrs. Rosa Parks'
arrest on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a White
person. Even though Dr. King had been the pastor of the Dexter Avenue
Baptist Church for only a year, he was thrust into the leadership of what
became the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Why? It was his advocacy of the methods
of non-violent confrontation with power:

"We have no alternative but to protest. For many years we have shown an
amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling
that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be
saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than
freedom and justice."

Several years later, Dr. King was incarcerated in Birmingham and he wrote:

'You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth?
Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for
negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent
direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a
community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront
the issue.'

Just as a Christmas Tree functions to symbolize all the things that so many
people celebrate at Christmas, Martin Luther King, Jr. functions to
symbolize this struggle non-violently to force this nation 'live out the
true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that
all men are created equal."'

I hope that helps.

Cordially in Christ,
Bob

"Justification is an act of God's free grace unto sinners, in which he
pardoneth all their sins, accepteth and accounteth their persons righteous
in his sight; not for any thing wrought in them, or done by them, but only
for the perfect obedience and full satisfaction of Christ, by God imputed to
them, and received by faith alone." (The Larger Catechism, 70)

Robert Benn Vincent, Sr.
Grace Presbyterian Church
4900 Jackson Street
Alexandria, Louisiana 71303-2509