Kairos as God's Time in Martin Luther King Jr.'s Last Sunday Sermon

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to advance the discussion of kairos by developing it as a theory of divine timing. While some critics have noted kairos' potential for understanding “God's time,” we lack a grounding of this interpretation in the close analysis of religious texts. This paper does so and asserts that kairos can be understood not only as a hermeneutic for considering temporal constraints, but also as a theory for the production of revelatory discourse and its political implications. Ultimately, the article tries to enrich our comprehension of kairos (a figure we thought we had understood) by examining an unknown text from Martin Luther King Jr. (an orator we thought we had read) as a foray into an area of our discipline that we have neglected to develop: the rhetoric of revelation.

Acknowledgments

The author owes a debt of gratitude to the following individuals for their professional, generous, and invariably useful feedback on this manuscript: the editor and the anonymous reviewers at RSQ, John Hammerback and Leah Ceccarelli of the University of Washington, and Eric King Watts of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Notes

¹See Cox, Lee, and Patton for representative examples.

²While most scholars tend to believe, as I do, that Pythagoras and Gorgias do not diverge widely in their interpretations of kairos, it may be worth noting that Sullivan argues that their interpretations are significantly different. Nevertheless, the differences he draws are not fundamental to the argument made in this article.

³“The faculty of observing in any case the available means of persuasion” (Aristotle's Rhetoric Book I, chapter i, 14, p. 1354b13.)

⁴Kinneavy (“Kairos Revisited”) claims that kairos has a mostly political origin; but in defending this statement, he recognizes Kairos as originally a “God.” Kinneavy also acknowledges theologian Paul Tillich as the one who revived his interest in kairos as a concept worth studying in rhetoric.

⁵One excellent article is Riu Zhu's fairly recent piece, which interrogates the relationship between kairos and agency and has rich implications for the way we understand agency within the context of religious kairic discourse.

⁶One useful way of conceptualizing the spatial metaphor in kairos is to consider Bakhtin's “chronotope,” which conceives of the intersection of time and space as a means to constrain narrative power.

⁷I hope the reader will pardon this gender non-neutrality. Because I later allow the term “God” to assume the charge of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s own interpretation of who God is, and for the sake of stylistic coherence, I adopt the masculine pronoun.

⁸These parenthetical citations note the page (1) and the paragraph (1) of the reference in question. Therefore, “(3.2)” would indicate page three, paragraph 2. A transcript of the address can be obtained from the Washington National Cathedral Archives office in Washington, D.C.

⁹Rip Van Winkle is notorious because he “slept” through a revolution.

¹⁰Sullivan comments insightfully that one way of interpreting kairos is to view it as “loaded” time. I intend to unravel this insight a bit further in the discussion section.

¹¹The reader may recall the earlier reference to Pythogorean kairos as means to generate harmony.

¹²The notion I adopt here is not much disputed. But for useful introductory scholarship on this subject, see Talmage, Chiat, and Williams.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard Benjamin Crosby

Richard Benjamin Crosby is Assistant Professor