Religion & Law

As part of my current research, I've been reading a lot of books by and about Martin Luther King Jr.  Many of these works are familiar to MoJ readers, but one that might have escaped your radar screens, but is well worth checking out, is Martin Luther King Jr. and the Image of God by Richard Wayne Wills Sr (Oxford UP 2009).  Rather than focus on the more particular (and often analyzed) elements of King's theology (e.g., agape, personalism, realism), Wills traces the extent to which King's ministry was shaped by his belief that we are created in God's image.  He writes that "the image of God provided the question of civil rights with an ontological reason for reinforcing the meaning and experience of just political and judicial affairs," and that "a conversation concerning rights and the political documents that prescribed them necessarily backed into a conversation about that which preceded sociopolitical reality."  In this regard, the Declaration of Independence was enormously valuable to King's work because, by "underscoring this theological fact [the Imago Dei] as a fundamental truth," it was an expression "of sacred design" with significant sociopolitical implications.