What is the Beloved Community?
The “beloved” community phrase has been used by social philosophers to describe the culmination of world history in some kind of universal brotherhood. But King believed in original sin, so he didn’t share that understanding of beloved community. He understood beloved community as something that is a gift of God. He often tied that to the new order, which came in to time in the event of the Cross and the Resurrection. For him, the beloved community had a distinctively Christian understanding. The very possibility that there can be reconciliation between black and white, for King, was grounded in the Incarnation. Your book talks about Christian radicals who worked to create beloved community. What is a Christian radical? I get that term from the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I think of the wonderful term he offered in Cost of Discipleship, “costly grace.” Cheap grace is that sense that we are entitled to the benefits of our salvation and can luxuriate in it and not do anything in terms o
