All In a Name

LOCH A TUATH NEWS September 2001

A minister is necessarily a historian; and in the reading of history we all have our favourite historical characters. A year or two ago I made no secret of my admiration for the life and work of Martin Luther King, the great civil rights leader of the American south. That brought a barrage of criticism: what was I doing admiring a liberal preacher who liked the philosophy of Gandhi?

Well, that is as may be; but if Scottish evangelical ministry could be fuelled by the same oratorical passion and the same anger against social injustice that marked King's work, the church might be going somewhere. King's was a revolutionary voice against the prevailing classical liberalism, which had denied the idea of sin, and regarded racial inequality as a necessary evolutionary development. On the contrary, King preached: there is such a thing of sin, endemic to human experience, and pervasive in human society.

This renewed interest in King has been stirred by my reading of a fascinating new history of America during the King years. I did not know, for example, that King had applied to, and been accepted at, Edinburgh University for his doctoral training: how that might have affected Scottish theological reflection we can only surmise. As it was, Boston University gained the dynamic postgraduate.

And I had quite forgotten the issue of his name. When King was born in January 1929, he was named Michael Luther King, jr. His father changed both his own name and that of his son some five years later, after he had visited Europe and toured Germany, where Martin Luther's influence had been felt to such a large extent.

Given the history of slavery in the American south and the master's ownership of the slave's name, the change of name was an important event in King's life. It identified him with worldwide movements of religious thought, change and reformation, and let subsequent historians to reflect on the parallels between the reformer of the sixteenth century and the civil rights leader of the twentieth.

Names are important, and reflect both the root from which we have sprung, and the ethos in which we have been reared. The Loch a Tuath News Committee were of the view from the outset that patronimic was as important as surname. It is easier for some people to identify others by a long series of Gaelic names, than by an anglicised surname.

But the names connect us with the thread of history and with the culture in which we live. They are a revelation. And that idea is firmly rooted in the Bible, where the name of God is a primary vehicle for divine self-disclosure. We know God because we know his name. As the early preachers put it so powerfully, there is no other name under heaven among men by which we must be saved.