Incidentally, in Miller's "Notes," he regularly includes discursive notes. In one of his discursive notes, he says, "Like other liberal preachers, King rarely quoted from Cervantes, Flaubert, Samuel Johnson, Blake, Coleridge, Hardy, Dickens, Twain, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, Shaw, Yeats, Gide, Pound, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Camus, Sartre, Beckett, Kafka, O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Tennessee Williams, and many other prominent literary figures [but King did occasionally quote Shakespeare and other familiar citations that other liberal preachers also quoted]. King eschewed these literary masters precisely because other liberal preachers also ignored them. The lineage of the considerable majority of King's quotations - including familiar quotations - lies largely in popular, liberal sermons" (pp. 228-229).
Now, in the spirit of 2 + 2 = 4, Ong's title words "Voice as Summons for Belief" can be connected with Miller's title words "Voice of Deliverance" to suggest that King's own voice summoned many black Americans as well as many white Americans to belief in him and his message of deliverance to his envisioned "Dream" - rooted in the proverbial American Dream but also resonating with traditional biblical imagery and themes.
In Miller's Chapter One: "Exodus" (pp. 13-28), he begins with King's May 1956 sermon "Death of Evil on the Seashore" that he delivered from the pulpit of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Yes, it is about how God intervened to free his chosen people from their slavery in Egypt to go to the promised land. Exodus 14:30 says, "And Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the seashore."
King's "The Death of Evil on the Seashore" is published in his 1963 book Strength to Love (Beacon Press, 1981, pp. 75-86).
In Miller's Chapter One: "Exodus," discusses what is known in biblical studies as typology at length (pp. 18-25). Among other things, he says, "Next to typology, [argument by] analogy serves as a makeshift and almost random form of argument" ("Notes," p. 220).
For further discussion of argument by analogy, see G. E. R. Lloyd's 1966 book Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought (Cambridge University Press).
Because the media made King one of the most widely known Americans in the United States by the time that Time magazine named him "Man of the Year" in its first January 1964 issue, we may wonder if American journalists were working with their own spirit of typology in touting him (the fact that he had changed his name to Martin Luther King may have contributed to their spirit of typology).
In any event, Miller says, "While published sermons are important wellsprings for the ideas of [King's] 'Death of Evil,' King's pivotal source was not [Phillips] Brooks' 'Egyptian Dead Upon the Seashore,' [George] Buttrick's Parables of Jesus, sermons of [Harry Emerson] Fosdick, or any other printed source. The main source for King's theme of deliverance from oppression - which he propounded in virtually every sermon, speech, essay, interview, column, and book of his entire career - was the old folk religion of American slaves. His equation of black America and the Hebrew people revived and updated the slaves' powerful identification with the Israelites suffering under the yoke of the Pharaoh. And his interpretation of the Exodus as an archetypal event expressed the distinctive worldview of those who longed for a new Moses to emancipate them from an American Egypt.
"King learned about slave religion from his father, a folk preacher, and adopted its vision of deliverance as the foundation of his thought and oratory. Indeed, the worldview of slaves proved far more important for King than anything he learned at Morehouse College, where he earned an A.B. degree; Crozer Theological Seminary, where he obtained a Bachelor of Divinity; and Boston University, where he received a Ph.D." (p. 17).
Miller also says, "Over long decades, slaves exercised their religion under extremely difficult circumstances. Laws usually prohibited them from learning to read and write, leaving most unable to read the bible. Sermons thus served not only as an important means of religious instruction but, for many blacks, the only means of instruction apart from music. Like their fellow slaves, most preachers had no recourse but to imbibe religion from other preachers - not from the Bible or other texts.
"Ignoring print culture, folk preachers nurtured and polished their highly oral form of religious art, which they perfected despite the harshness of slavery. White observers often noted the awesome oratorical skills of popular slave preachers" (pp. 17-18; Miller's italics).
For an instructive analogy with the slave preachers' oral tradition, see Albert B. Lord's landmark 1960 book The Singer of Tales (Harvard University Press). Ong's review of Lord's landmark 1960 book is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Hampton Press, 2002, pp. 301-306).
Subsequently, Miller says, "Of necessity, the language of black oral culture is highly repetitive. Reiteration ensures that knowledge, which cannot be transcribed, will be remembered by both speakers and audiences. In the absence of print, people rarely develop a sense of words as a species of private property. Folk preachers borrow partly because their culture fails to define the word as a commodity and instead assumes that everyone creates language -- and no one owns it" (pp. 25-26).
In addition, Miller says, "Originality, on the other hand, precludes reenactment and thus can easily spell failure to deliver the Word, which is known, shared, confirmed, and reconfirmed by a large historical community. A speaker's uniqueness is not problematic; after all, no two persons are identical. But a speaker's worthiness to represent a sacred tradition is problematic. When preachers merge their voices with earlier spiritual leaders, they practice a form of self-making that resembles, supplements, and reinforces their system of Biblical typology" (p. 26; Miller's italics).
Now, Miller says, "By identifying with the Hebrews in Egypt and with other biblical heroes, slaves telescoped history, replacing chronological time with a form of sacred time" (p. 20).
Miller also says, "Because their God-ruled universe of sacred time was reliable and ultimately just, it bolstered slaves' confidence that the deity who liberated the Hebrews would eventually free Southern blacks. Slave theology and slaves' invocation of sacred time served as exceedingly astute and imaginative responses to their situation" (p. 21).
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