What He Received

This chapter considers the preaching and sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr. Like all preachers, King relied on what had been given him. For the construction of his sermons, what he received was a body of titles, outlines, and formulas from other preachers. The outlines followed the conventional sermon schemes he had learned in the black church and from his seminary teachers. The formulas were what classical orators would have called proofs of the speaker’s arguments. The proofs illustrate or substantiate the often unexceptional arguments with a sensual beauty that overshadows the logic of the ideas themselves. Together, the outlines and the proofs constitute what the classical tradition called the topoi, or “places,” where a culture or religious tradition “stores” its nuggets of wisdom and its basic methods of telling the truth.