A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE:
Thoughts on Healing and Justice
By David R. Currie,
Coordinator

You can sometimes tell a great deal about a person by looking at someone’s office. I want to tell you about mine.

One, my office is a mess all the time. There are piles of folders all over the desk and all over the floor. Ideas excite me and motivate me. Details bore me. I could never keep up with anything without Charlotte, our office manager.

Two, the walls are covered with symbols of things I love. There are pictures of my wife, Loretta and my sons, Lance and Chad. Their pictures surround a wood carved plaque that reads “To store up treasures in Heaven, invest yourself in people.” It is a quote from the late author, Creath Davis. The plaque was made by some of my friends in First Baptist Church, Gorman, where I served as youth minister in the mid 70s.

There are plaques honoring Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams. I love baseball with a passion.

I try not to make a big deal of my degrees because an old college professor told me to get them and not act like a big shot, but I do hang them on my wall surrounding a picture of Russell Dilday handing me my doctorate. I am very proud of that degree and the man who presented it to me.

There is a picture of me finishing the Rocket City Marathon on December 15, 1979, in Huntsville, Alabama. Next to that picture is a framed cover of my book On the Way which Broadman published in 1982.

There is an oil painting done by my sister years ago, and pictures of me on a horse at the ranch, my brother-in-law drenching sheep and a picture of sheep on our ranch. I love that piece of dirt and all that it symbolizes about my family heritage. I am writing the first draft of this column on March 31st, which would be my father’s 89th birthday if he were still alive.

Finally, there is a picture of the Lincoln Memorial. On one side of the picture is a framed poster picture of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, with the caption, “Freedom has always been an expensive thing.” On the other side of the picture is a framed copy of King’s speech, “I Have a Dream.”

When King was assassinated in 1968, I thought little of it. I was a fifteen year old kid who lived in a small West Texas town and did not even know an African-American personally. I understood little of the civil rights movement. Most people I knew considered King a trouble maker. Some of my teachers had used the label Communist to describe him.

I do not remember when or why I started to study the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. I suppose it was at Howard Payne. I remember writing a paper about him. All I do know is that at some time during my life journey, I came to appreciate Dr. King as a truly remarkable individual.

In January, I took my son Chad with me to Atlanta for the CBF Coordinating Council meeting. I have been to the King Center there several times, but Chad had not been.

We prayed at King’s grave and toured the museum. I purchased several books for myself and my sons and posters which they now have on their walls.

In reading anew some of King’s speeches and writings, several thoughts came to mind. Let me share a few quotes with you from King’s famous Letter From A Birmingham Jail and then make a few comments on the subjects of healing and justice.

“You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. I just referred to the creation of tension as a part of the work of the nonviolent resister. This may sound rather shocking. But I confess that I am not afraid of the word tension… So the purpose of the direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.

“But as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist in love — ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.’ Was not Amos an extremist for justice — ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.’ Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ — ‘I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.’ Was not Martin Luther an extremist — ‘Here I stand; I can do none other so help me God.’ Wasn’t John Bunyan an extremist — ‘I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.’ Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist — ‘This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.’ Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist — ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’

So the question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice — or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?

In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill, three men were crucified. We must not forget that all three were crucified for the same crime — the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thusly fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. So, after all, maybe the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

“First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

“Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

King was embroiled in an epic struggle against the evil of racism. Following the example of Jesus, he sought to love his neighbor while at the same time confront the evil doer. Read Mark chapter 12 where Jesus said the greatest commandment was to “love the Lord your God with all your strength and your neighbor as yourself” and then ten verses later warned of the evil of the Pharisees. King followed that model.

We are embroiled against an evil not unlike racism — the evil of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism fights tolerance, the equality of women, and the religious “human rights” of the priesthood of all believers and local church autonomy. It seeks to deny religious freedom to non- Christians. To ignore these truths and accept a peace which is the absence of tension but which is fundamentally unjust, is a great evil in my opinion.

We at TBC who point these things out are not the creators of tension. Rather we are trying to bring to the surface the hidden tension already there in Baptist life so that healing can occur. We shine a light on the darkness of fundamentalism because of its inherent danger to the Kingdom. We are extremists for Baptist principles because we believe the world and the church need these principles in order to be healthy and build the Kingdom of God.

Healing in Baptist life will not happen as long as we deny the reality of what has occurred over the last 20 years; unless we acknowledge the tension that exists and bring it out in the open where it can be seen and dealt with.

April 1997