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Howard Thurman For Our Time with Myles Werntz · Christians Reading Classics

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_03: This episode is sponsored by Crossway.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_03: Curated by award-winning hymn writers Keith and Kristen Getty, the Sing Hymnal Personal Edition features timeless hymns without musical notation to help readers meditate on lyrical excellence and biblical truths.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_03: Find it at crossway.org.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_03: There must be for me a deep sense of relatedness to God.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_03: This relatedness is the way by which there shall open for me more and more springs of energy and power, which will enable me to thread life's mysteries with life's clue.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_03: It is this and this alone that will make it possible for me to stand anything that life can or may do to me.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_03: I shall not waste any effort in trying to reduce God to my particular logic.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_03: There, in the quietness, I shall give myself in love to God.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_03: Thou shalt love thy neighbor.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_03: How I must seek ever the maintenance of the kind of relatedness to others that will feed the springs of kindness and sympathy in me.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_03: I shall study how I may be tender without being soft, gracious without being ingratiating, kind without being sentimental, and understanding without being judgmental.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_03: Here in the quietness, I shall give myself in love to my neighbors.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_03: Thou shalt love thyself.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_03: I must learn to love myself with detachment.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_03: I must have no attitude towards myself that contributes to my own delinquency.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_03: I shall study how so to love myself that, in my attitude toward myself, I shall be pleasing to God and face with confidence what he requires me.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_03: Here, in the quietness, I give myself over to the kind of self-regard that would make me whole and clean in my own sight and in the sight of God.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_03: So wrote Howard Thurman, an American classic, but perhaps a lesser-known one today.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Mare Orthodoxy.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_03: I am Nadia Williams, managing editor at Mare Orthodoxy, and today it is a delight to talk about Howard Thurman as an American classic and especially an American theological classic with Miles Burns.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_03: Miles is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_03: He is the author of a pretty large stack of books, including A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence and From Isolation to Community.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_03: And today we're talking about Howard Thurman because he has just put together a delightful plow spiritual guide titled Nothing Can Separate Us.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_03: And it is a collection of the writings of Howard Thurman.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_03: So, Miles, welcome.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, thank you so much for having me.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_03: So typically I start with the question, what is a classic?
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_03: But today I want to ask specifically, what is a theological classic?
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_03: Like what kind of books do you consider theological classics?
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_03: Since you're a theologian, I have to ask you that.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: That's such a good question, is to what counts as a theological classic.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: So my immediate answer to that is that theological classics are those which have contributed to the the life and discipline of theology over a long time.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so there are there are kind of those those deep lodestones that Christians continue to return to and have returned to for centuries, things like uh Thomas Aquinas's Summa or say Augustine's City of God, or maybe more recently something like Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Discipleship.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um but I think that's only maybe one dimension of what it means for something to be a classic is whether or not it's contributed for better or for worse to the study of theology.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: I think the other measure for thinking about a classic is does it bring up these kinds of themes that are perennial, that need continual revisiting, and which reward our rereading.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: So there are some things that have contributed to the discipline of theology that are pretty much what they are on the surface.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: They're the kinds of things that I would consider historically important and classic for that reason, but not the kind of thing that necessarily reward like rereading.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um I would place Howard Thurman's work in the second category.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe not even in the first category.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think that he is the kind of thinker that was very pivotal in his own day, has m somewhat been forgotten about and lost in our day, but is definitely the kind of thinker who informed his own day and was deeply influential on thinkers in his own day, and also rewards rereading.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a great quote from uh the late Alice Walker where she talked about the way in which she kept Thurman at her bedside table.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: Or there's kind of this uh this legend, which I think is actually true, about uh Martin Luther King Jr.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: that while he was on the road early in his career, he carried a copy of Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman around with him.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it was the kind of thing that for both of these figures, both Walker and King, Thurmond became the kind of thing that that that grew on rereading, right?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: So he I think that Thurman counts as a classic in that maybe the second sense.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that he's the kind of figure that the more you turn to him, the more you kind of gain from his insights and from his prose.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so yeah, I think that's that's a great question.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: What counts as a classic?
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe there's two ways to think about that.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: And Thurman definitely falls into the second category.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_03: I like that.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_03: And your answer brought brought up something that I think just about everyone has brought up that a classic, a true classic, one of the signs of it is it grows on you as you reread, you get something new from it every time.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_03: It's something that has depth, the sort of depth that you could keep rereading it over the course of a lifetime and still gain new insights every time.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_03: So tell us about Howard Thurman.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_03: It feels like we have to take a step back with some of the classics on this podcast.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_03: Whenever uh listeners start, you know, you've heard of Aristotle, you've heard of Homer, uh, and so on and so forth.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_03: So with some of the classics, people tune in and they immediately know, oh yes, I may have read this, or I may have heard of it at least.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but with Howard Thurman, I think for a lot of people, maybe they heard the name mentioned, but they probably haven't read him.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_03: So give us the case.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_03: Who was he and why did he need to pick him up today?
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: Why, why should you include Thurman in the canon of uh of the classics?
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so a little bit of background to how I'll tell you like the thing that most people might know about.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: If you know about Howard Thurman, I'll tell you the thing that most people know about him.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: But then making the case for like why he's such an interesting and pivotal figure, I think will require a stepping back from that.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: So the thing that most people know about Thurman is that he exercised kind of he he had a he was influential on the development of one of America's best-known uh theologians and activists, Martin Luther King Jr.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: So they intersected when so Howard Thurman, at the time that they met, that they were, that they they met and had some interactions, was the dean of the chapel of Marsh Chapel at Boston University in the 1950s.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um that was around the time that King was there as a graduate student, uh working on his own doctorate.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so um, again, kind of later on, King will talk about the way in which Thurman impacted him, though Thurman himself will say, yeah, we really didn't talk that much.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: We'd really we met like a couple of times, but King definitely felt the impact of having learned from Thurman and heard Thurman, um, maybe much more than kind of the reverse.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that's kind of the thing that most people know about Thurman is that he is deeply influential on uh the spirituality of the civil rights movement.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: If you go and if you read Thurman and then you go and read King's early writings and his early speeches where he's talking about the need for self-purification.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: So he talks about like in his letter from uh from the Birmingham jail, or in his early his early work where he talks about loving your enemy or the need for spiritual discipline.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then you go back and you read Thurman, you're like, oh my gosh, yeah, it's all there.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like all these things that Thurman has been had been talking about for decades.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: You could just see his fingerprints all over King.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but Thurman is, I think, a really interesting figure for more reasons than just kind of his direct influence on King.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: So Thurman was born at the at the cusp of the 20th century.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: He was born in 1899 in Daytona Beach, Florida.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um he his his grandmother had been enslaved.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so this is not that far from uh this period of American history.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: So Thurman grows up in segregated and segregated South, attends one of the only schools available, one of the only high schools in um in Florida available for African Americans, um, goes from there to Morehouse College, where he graduates at the top of his class.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: He uh is ordained and begins his ministry out in Virginia while also attending seminary uh at uh Rochester Theological Seminary, now Colgate Roster Rochester Croiser Divinity School.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um serves as a pastor several different places.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: He goes to Oberlin, he spends time in Atlanta before finally landing at Howard University in DC, where he spends about the next decade or so as there uh serving on faculty, but also as uh the first dean of the chapel there.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: So along the way, Thurman is developing this very contemplative way of thinking about theology, this very spiritual uh vision.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: The passage that you read early on um I think exemplifies Thurman's approach to his own spirituality, which is so many of the ways in which we are tempted to think about the good of theology is its instrumental use.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: What can theology do?
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: How can theology be put to work?
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas for Thurman, that was not the first and for like the first or the most important thing that theology could do.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: The thing that theology does is it puts us into it gives us language for our relationship to God, a relation which for Thurman is just part of being a creature in the world.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: There is no for th for Thurman, um, it's an intuitive relationship that people enter into just by virtue of having been created.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: There's lots of stories and things that he'll talk about in his early life about uh being a young child and being out in nature or seeing Haley's comet and just being overcome with this sense of grandeur and awe that he gets to be a part of this universe, a universe through which God is communicating and speaking to us all the time.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um so this is kind of like the backbeat of his entire of his entire world.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: So he's developing all of these things, his early years through his time at Howard University.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: So after his so he spends time at Howard until 1944, but during that time, he actually took a about a year off from his job to be a part of one of the very first delegations to go to India, and particularly like the first African-American delegation to go to India to meet with uh Mahatma Gandhi.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so he and three others spend like six months and they talk about uh segregation in the South, they talk about spirituality, they talk about Christianity.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: Thurman himself was like a little uncomfortable with it.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: He was very much interested in uh getting to know India with meeting with Gandhi, with with talking about with them about what he called the religion of Jesus.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: And here he wants to distinguish it from the marks of Christianity, which for him had contributed to segregation and the rise of slavery.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but wanting to also preserve like this revolutionary message of Jesus, that Jesus is the one who invites us to love our enemies, Jesus is the one who invites us to um love God and to love our neighbor and to be known by God.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um that for him, that was what he wanted to carry with him to India.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why he wanted to talk with Gandhi to say, okay, how might the things that that Gandhi is doing resonate with uh an African-American audience that's also interested in like retrieving this radical core of the gospel, um, but maybe minus a lot of the the institutional trappings which had in Thurman's uh in Thurman's view led to a lot of really pernicious stuff like colonialism and like uh slave, he and he and Gandhi and they're they met once for a conversation, and that was like almost all of what they talked about, is kind of Christianity's legacies politically with respect to colonialism and slavery.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Thurman, even in that conversation, is very much wanting to defend again the religion of Jesus, or defend Jesus over against what Christianity had become.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um so anyway, he he he has that experience and he brings this back with him to the United States.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh during that time, he becomes very like almost like uh he could becomes for like very uncomfortable with his own institutional position at Howard, leaves his tenured position at Howard University to go found what's called what he called the Fellowship of uh the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: He served alongside uh a white minister, white Presbyterian minister there, and they there they found one of the very first American intentionally interracial churches in San Francisco in the in the mid-40s.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um he'll do that for a number of years, and then after that, he accepts the position back at Marsh Chapel in Boston in 1953, where he where he meets up with King.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: So during this whole time, he's kind of he's just he's definitely developing this account of what it is to be a lover of God, which is very personalist in nature, it is one which is very deeply contemplative in nature, it is one which is very capacious.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so while he is uh pastoring this this uh this inter uh interracial church in San Francisco, it's also one that is kind of almost interfaith in that they have lectures on other religions, they have lectures on kind of practitioners in other faiths.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um Thurman himself continues to use very Christian language.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: He never gets away from using Christian language his entire career.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: Even very late in his life when he's writing his own autobiography a few years before he dies, he continues to narrate it in terms of uh God and God the Father and the scriptures.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um that for him becomes kind of a a touchstone for for his for his contemplative work.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: So that's that's kind of that Thurman's story very very shortly.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: He's a really fascinating figure who is just ahead of the curve in America theologically in lots of kinds of ways.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: He prefigures um a lot of our contemporary world in which people are maybe spiritually curious, but less institutionally committed with respect to religion.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: He prefigures a return away from, and this is kind of, I think this is something that's happening now, people wanting to move away from a Christianity which politically does things, or a theological theology that can be uh instrumentalized and getting kind of back to more contemplative practices and devotional practices.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: He prefigures a kind of uh a Christianity that's very curious about its connections to other faiths in particular.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm thinking here of like it's not till the late 40s on through the 60s that you start to see really the development of like interfaith thinking.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: And Thurman is like at the very like the very edge of that with like founding this church that's committed to uh helping people connect with God and kind of not being afraid to turn to other texts and other kind of faith traditions to kind of augment the things that Christianity is also talking about.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: So um he's just a really fascinating figure.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_03: The instrumentalizing uh of theology is something I'm realizing is all around the whole which I guess is partly modern education.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_03: It's sort of like, what can the liberal arts do for you?
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_03: It's not enough for them just to exist.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's not enough for them to just exist.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: They have to also make you uh quantitatively happier or uh better at your job or um wealthier or something like that.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: They can't just be good for their own sake, yeah.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_03: And I guess that does bring us to reading theology.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_03: Like why read theology?
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_03: Why why do we need this?
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_03: And the question of why do we need Thurman's voice?
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, I think that Thurman's voice is um, I think Thurman's voice is significant.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's significant in maybe two ways.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's significant historically, because it's hard for us to understand, I think, the spirituality of the civil rights movement apart from figures like Thurman, who help us to see the deep contemplative, um, meditative roots in a lot of the early civil rights movement.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: But I think it's also important, I think Thurman is also a significant voice for us today, because he gives us a way to be able to think about what it means for people to connect with God in a way that also calls what you are to account.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: So it's really I so Thurman writes a lot about contemplation.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: In the the passage that you read, um, I was just I was struck with how similar this actually reads to a very different kind of figure, Bernard of Clairvaux.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: That there's a lot of overlap between the way that uh Thurman is describing a person's relationship to God, not just with like cultivating love for God or love for neighbor, but also love of oneself.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that Bernard of Clairvaux, in his for in his uh what's it called?
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: The Onloving God, I think it's what it's called, um, talks about like one of the highest degrees of love is where you are able to love yourself, right?
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: You're not just able to love your neighbor.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of a like a lower level of love for Bernard.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not just love of God for God's own sake, but it is love of God and love of one like being able to love oneself.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um for Thurman, this was something very essential to recapture because so much of what happens to us in the world is that we are taught not to see ourselves as those creatures that should be esteemed.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we're taught not to see ourselves as those creatures to maybe put it in very like in very Christian language, not to see those ourselves as creatures that are beloved of God and God's beloved creatures.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um for Thurman, this is probably.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Precisely what segregation did to everybody involved.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: For the ones for the African American, segregation taught them that they were not beloved, or that they could they could relate to structures, like they had to be very um, they they had no equality before the law, or that they had no equality before those that were oppressing them or causing segregation to happen.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: But on the on the flip side, and he writes about this in a really good book called The Luminous Darkness, and which is kind of like his own account of segregation and what it does, um, he also talks about that segregation was bad for white people as well.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: It taught them to think about themselves as um only valuable insofar as they had someone to subjugate, or only loved insofar as they could exercise power over another person.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: Thurman gives voice to the way in which God uh allows us to like love the lives that we actually have, to love ourselves as um as creatures of God.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: I was reading um this very good book by Kent Dunnington recently on gratitude to God, and he makes a very similar point.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: That part of the key to gratitude to God is being able to be grateful for yourself, being able to be grateful for the life that God has given you to lead.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: That if you despise that and if you hate that, it produces a very, it makes it very difficult for us to be grateful to God.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I think this is therm something that Thurman like really keys into is that it feels very counterintuitive to say that part of what is in part of what the spiritual life does is it helps us to love the life that we have or it helps us to love ourselves.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: But again, for Thurman, this is like pivotal to being able to love your neighbor as well.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: You can't love your neighbor unless this like the love of self is also somehow something that we're doing.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_01: So anyway, I think Thurman is Thurman has a lot of in a lot of things to give us.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um a lot of things to give us today.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of things that would commend him as kind of a a a classic, not just to be appreciated for what it did in the past, but for what he offers us today.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_03: I'm thinking of the rich theology of suffering in like this civil rights thinking and um just in general, the African-American tradition, which is as we were talking, I was reminded of Job, who keeps blessing God and thanking God for his life, even as he is being repeatedly struck by even after he's even while he's suffering, yeah.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: Within Thurman, um, he's very careful not to say that suffering is a good in and of itself, but he is able to see the way in which even the deep suffering of uh African Americans has produced uh or at least given given them the capacity to be able to see this, to like see this spiritual vision of like what um what it means to love God and to love oneself, or to see the ways in which uh suffering dehumanizes and causes us to despise ourselves.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: And that that actually is an that actually for him is an offense to God, to despise the life that you've been given, or to despise one's own constitution.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: And if it and part so part of the reason that he is adamantly like he worked to undo segregation kind of in his own way, is precisely because of what he saw it doing to the human soul.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we could talk more about that, but I think that's for him, yeah, the the the value of suffering is is tricky that he sees it as having done actual productive work.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it's also something that uh can easily dehumanize us.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_03: And I guess another caveat for instrumentalizing things.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_03: Don't instrumentalize suffering.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's right.
• 26:12
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• 26:19
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• 26:26
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• 26:38
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• 26:55
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• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: And you can find that link in the show notes.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_03: Can you walk us through um the main works he has written and um if possible, maybe connect this also to your new book because you've put together this reader of selections, essential selections from Thurman, which is a great intro, like what a great resource, great introduction.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_03: Um but give us kind of this big picture, especially for those who pick up this little book after that.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so I think the main thing to know about Thurman's writings is that most of what he wrote were uh the what most of what he wrote was intended for um contemplative audiences.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: So he has so if you go on any of you, like look at his bibliography, there's tons and tons of titles, and I'll just pick like a few here.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um Meditations of the Heart, The Creative Encounter, The Growing Edge, The Inward Journey, Disciplines of the Spirit, The Centering Moment.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: Like these are all generated out of either talks that he gave in his work as the Dean of Chapel at Howard or at uh at Boston University, or uh meditations that he would write on a weekly basis while he was pastoring churches in Ohio or Virginia or San Francisco.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: So most of his writing is very kind of devotional in nature because that was the first audience that it was written for, is for ordinary uh folks that he was pastoring to give help them to see the vision that he saw of what it means to love God and through God to be able to like love oneself, right?
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um there were very few things that he wrote which would fall under the category of like essays or more analytical work.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: Probably the best known one is Jesus and the disinherited.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: There's a couple of others in which he that are more kind of essay-driven.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there's one that he wrote called Deep River, which is a book that he wrote about uh black spirituals.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: There's um a couple of biographies that he writes.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: He writes his own autobiography called With Head and Heart.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: He writes a book that's more narrative-driven, more analytical about his time pastoring this church in San Francisco.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: But those are relatively few compared to the so the bulk of his work.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: If you pick up the book, most of it's going to be very short, uh a few pages at most for a chapter, precisely because that was the intent behind the writing.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: He wasn't writing for a big general audience first, but he was writing for kind of church audiences first.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's I mean, that's maybe a way to help get your hand get our hands around how to read Thurman is just knowing that he's not trying to like he was deeply, he was a he was a very educated man and could write for a more educated audience, but just specifically chose not to.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: That most of his writing and his effort in writing were given toward um kind of these lay audiences that he just wanted to help them kind of cultivate this spiritual vision that he was um that he was putting forth.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_03: So, how did you go about selecting um pieces for this reader?
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: So I started by just reading everything, uh, starting at the beginning chronologically and just working my way all the way through.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: It took me a it took me a few months.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, some some things were much quicker than others, but there's an old saying that basically every preacher, and I think Thurman is no exception to this, every preacher has about 10 sermons in them.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: That's about all they have.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: And they will continue to riff on those themes their entire career.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: So very quickly, when you read Thurman, there's several of these themes that continue to bubble up, regardless of whether you're reading him, whether you're reading his meditations from the 1970s or you're reading his meditations from like the late 1940s or the 50s.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so those were the kinds of things that became readily apparent as I was reading through and began to take note.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so from there, it's just a it was a process of trying to find passages which seemed to encapsulate the most most clearly what that theme looked like.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: So in the book, um, I try I organized it around nine different themes or not, which were also like nine practices of spirit of the spiritual life, um, that he just continued to return to.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh knowing knowing yourself, loving your neighbor, learning to pray, uh attending to nature, living in community, um very kind of perennial Christian themes.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: But again, these are the kinds of things which Thurman saw as really uh essential in terms of develop in terms of cultivating this contemplative life.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_03: One of the themes, of course, is choose nonviolence, which is why uh this is a good fit for plow books.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_03: But I also want to ask you you're a Baptist.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_03: This is an awkward question, but Baptists are not known for embracing nonviolence.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_03: So talk to us about it.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I first encountered Thurman when I was working on a book that I co-wrote in 20, uh, that came out in 2022, uh, on the varieties of Christian nonviolence that had appeared throughout the 20th century.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh my co-author, David Kramer, had written an article for sojourners like a few years before that, like in 2019, and kind of laid out these different approaches that he saw as really indicative of how Christian nonviolence was working in the 20th century.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's where I first became introduced to Thurman, is in doing the research for that book.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so putting him into conversation with other figures for whom the mystical encounter with God and the life of prayer were very central to the work of nonviolence.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that comes through very, like very evidently in Thurman's own work.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: That for Thurman, uh violence is what happens when we think that we are in control of our own lives or the lives of others.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so the way that that begins to be undone is by unlearning fear.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: And the way that you unlearn fear is through prayer and through encountering God and realizing that with God there is nothing, you have nothing to fear.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_01: That God uh has created you to be with like this inherent dignity, you are this person of inherent value.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so you have no need for for his for those that are suffering from segregation, they have no reason to fear uh the the their oppressor.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: They have no reason to fear segregation, right?
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: It has no power over them.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: But also for the for the white person, they have no reason to fear the black person.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so the violence which is is playing itself out because of the fear that is that is ubiquitous within our social relationships, um, like you can really only get you'll really only get at that by prayer.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: You only get at it through the spiritual life, through through realizing that God has given this world in abundance and uh fecundity, and you have nothing to fear.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, as a I mean, he he himself was Baptist of us of a particular kind.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: This is we're gonna have a conversation when we launch the book on the 22nd, and I think that's that's part of what I'd love to explore with kind of the with Vincent Lloyd, who wrote the introduction, but also with Paul Harvey, who wrote who's written a really good biography of of Thurman.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: Is um yeah, how much do we how much do we make of Thurman as a Baptist?
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he pastors Baptist churches for the first part of his career, um, never quite gets away from, I think, a lot of those themes.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: But so I count, I'm I'm I'm gonna count him.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'll count him as like a good exemplar of of Baptist nonviolence.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: There's actually another, there's another good book uh by a guy named Paul Decker, D-E-K-A-R, that kind of offers a lot of other examples of Baptists who have also been deeply influenced by nonviolence.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um maybe one another more well-known 20th century example is a guy named Clarence Jerdon, uh, who founded Quantinia Farms in uh in Georgia.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: So um, yeah, they're they're there.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: They're not there's there's not many.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: But uh but they are there.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: But they are there.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_03: I suppose, of course, this is uh complete theorizing, but if Thurman had met Augustine and they could talk about Augustine's views on this subject, nonviolence, what do you think what do you think Thurman would tell Augustine?
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I actually wrote an article about this um for Plough several years ago now, um, because I th I think that there's actually quite a bit of overlap for Augustine and Thurman on this question when it comes to the spiritual life.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_01: So Augustine repeatedly will turn to the Sermon on the Mount as what he calls the charter of the Christian life, and that for Augustine, the apex of the Beatitudes, and he's not unique in this, but it does, it was it was pretty interesting to see Augustine frame it this way that the apex of the beatitudinal life is being willing to suffer for the sake of the faith in a way that doesn't cause suffering for your neighbor.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: So um I think that there's a lot of overlap with that with Thurman, actually.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think that they're they're on they're they're they're traveling similar paths with respect to the personal spiritual life.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: Where Augustine will deviate, and Augustine scholars I'm I'm happy to be corrected on this, is that Augustine creates a distinction between one's like interior spirituality and uh one's public life.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: And he tries to square the circle in a lot of his writing on like his early writing on this question, particularly writing that will become influential in like the development of the just war tradition, where he he wants to preserve, like he doesn't want to let go of the soul's love for God.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_01: And he wants to say this is in play, even when you are confronting your enemy, and even if you have to cross swords with your enemy, that love that you have for your enemy is still there.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: I am more skeptical, skeptical of that.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know that that necessarily works.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: Augustine certainly thinks that it does.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: But insofar as Thurman and Augustine both hold that the beating heart of the Christian life is recognizing the love of God and inhabiting that love of God to the point that it makes you unafraid to be able to suffer on behalf of your neighbor.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like I think that they deeply resonate with one another on that point.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: Even if they disagree then with like what that means with respect respect to politics, um, I do think that they agree on that.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_03: And that's a good reminder that theologians that we greatly esteem can disagree, and these are not necessarily essentials.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, I actually I wanted to ask you about that.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, because you immersed yourself in the work of a single thinker.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_03: So I wanted to ask, what um in what ways has this project changed you?
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_03: But also have you found areas of disagreement with Thurman?
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: Oh gosh, yeah, that's a good question.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think the the areas that I've found disagreement with Thurman largely have to do with for Thurman the role of the church.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um so Thurman wants to pretty clearly distinguish between what he calls the religion of Jesus and Christianity.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm less certain that you can make that hard and fast distinction um for a lot of ways.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh for a lot of reasons, perhaps.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so that may be one area that I would want to maybe differ with Thurman.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that I think that he wants to try to to retrieve kind of the the mystical heart of Christianity and to say that it has it, you know, we need to differentiate between that and maybe some of the the outward workings of this.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um But the the problem is that the very things that he wants to preserve are also the very things that have been carried forward institutionally and historically.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not quite the case that you can just read the text and then um start over.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: But the way even the the very even the very way that Thurman comes to think about the deficits of institutions are themselves the product, like these are inheritances that he's been given by the institutions.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: That he's introduced to Jesus and he's introduced to the scriptures, he's introduced to the centrality of this the Sermon on the Mount for him, or to the to the spirituals.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like he's been introduced to all these things by this very institutional body that he also has issues with.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: So they kind of go, they kind of go together.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: I so that's that's one maybe one strong area of disagreement that I have with Earn.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um I found myself very compelled by his uh his very capacious vision of how what you see with this message of Jesus is is also true of the cosmos as well.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: So in one of his this is a book that I'm actually leading a, I'm gonna I'm gonna have host a discussion on later uh later this month, but it's a book called The Search for Common Ground, and it's probably one of his weirdest books, um, because he takes this notion of the soul's union with God or the way in which um a person is meant for not like not fragmentate a person is not meant to be fragmented within themself, but people are also not meant to be fragmented from one another, right?
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: So that's kind of I mean that's that's part of what it is to to love God is to be reunited with all that which God has created.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_01: So he takes that in a direction in this book that incorporates like evolutionary biology, it incorporates uh like he gets into like the development of cells and organisms, and he brings in some kind of like early eco-theology that's just really kind of weird, but for him is totally consistent.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_01: Because if this is what God does to the soul, why would we not anticipate seeing this within the breadth of creation?
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: Why would we not want to see why how could we not see uh God's loving care played out in the way that um species interrelate or that's uh the the cosmos kind of unfolds?
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like, if this is what God would do with the soul, why would we not see it everywhere?
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so he has pushed me to kind of to think about the interrelatedness of theology and other intellectual disciplines a lot more.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I think that's pay that's probably one way in which I I think he is he like I'm much more willing now, I think, than I was before I read Thurman to think about the like the interrelationship between theology and psychology, or the interrelationship between like theology and political science.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um that that's something that that Thurman does for for good theological reasons.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's kind of it's caused me to kind of approach them in a very similar sort of way.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think the other thing that Thurman has done for me in a very practical sense is he really he just really makes me want to pray.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's hard to come away from Thurman and just not want to just go spend an hour in prayer.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_01: Because his his his writing is such that it it has a lot of space in it, it is um evocative in all the good kinds of ways.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: He's not trying to be like provocative with his claims, he's just trying to like open up space for us to see that God is the one who, as a you know, to put it in Augustine's language, is closer to us than we are to ourselves, um, that God both goes before and after us, and that so many of our ways of living in the world have just forgotten God, right?
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_01: We put up, we do things to to try to defend ourselves from things in the world, which Thurman wants to say, you know what?
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: There's nothing you have nothing to fear.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_01: You shouldn't be, you can't be afraid.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: You can't be afraid and live in the world because God is with you, right?
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: What it what what have you to be afraid of?
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_01: So really encouraging.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that's that's where Thurman has.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's some there's places if I'm reading him with like my theologian's hat on, or I'm trying to to place him in like other conversations that I have, like there's all sorts of places that I think you could disagree with Thurman.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: But I just can't but be compelled by his vision of the way in which God is knitting uh a whole host of things together, or the way in which his writing just compels me to pray.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_03: That's beautiful testimony.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_03: There's not a lot of writers we read where we say this is the response that we have to do.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, very f very few, very seldom do I read theological text where that's my takeaway, or where I'm just kind of uh I'm compelled to to awe.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: So, but that that is that is nearly always the case with Thermoth.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_03: Well, as we conclude, I have one final question for you, Miles.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_03: What uh what work of theology, classic work of theology from any period, do you wish you had written and why?
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_01: Oh oh my gosh.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_01: Do I wish I had written?
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: And why?
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_02: Oof.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_02: Hmm.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_02: I think that if there were any single work of theology that I wish I had written.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_02: It would be Golly, that's such a good question.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_01: And one that I don't have a ready.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna give I'm gonna give the answer off the top of my head.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_01: I wish that I had written Life Together by Bonhoeffer.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: For me, that is also one of these works that it's a classic because it is one which rewards rereading.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: Not only is it it's it's maybe less historically significant, um, because there's lots of writers that have written about the nature of Christian community.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_01: There's a whole tr stream that life together kind of fits in in that way.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: But as far as the the work itself, it is one that I've read multiple times and continually reward is continually rewarding.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: I always gain new things, I always see new parts that I didn't see before.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_01: I'm always challenged in kind of fresh ways when I encounter that book.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's one that I wish I'd read.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_03: Miles, thank you so much.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_03: And we have been talking about nothing can separate us healing for souls and nations.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_03: A reader of Howard Thurman's theological writings that Miles Warns has just edited for plowbooks.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_03: So thank you, Miles.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thank you so much.