into the trap of accepting uncritically everything he wrote." Niebuhr's "critique of pacifism," King later wrote, left him at first in a "state of confusion." Later he decided that Niebuhr had misunderstood pacifism as "nonresistance to evil": but he never repudiated Niebuhr's insights into the "illusions of a superficial optimism concerning human nature and the dangers of a false idealism." He still believed in "man's potential for good," but Niebuhr made him "realize his potential for evil as well." Many pacifists, he decided, took too kindly a view of human nature.

All too many had an unwarranted optimism concerning man and leaned unconsciously toward self-righteousness. It was my revolt against these attitudes under the influence of Niebuhr that accounts for the fact that in spite of my strong leaning toward pacifism, I never joined a pacifist organization. After reading Niebuhr, I tried to arrive at a realistic pacifism. In other words, I came to see the pacifist position not as sinless but as the lesser evil in the circumstances. I felt then, and I feel now, that the pacifist would have a greater appeal if he did not claim to be free from the moral dilemmas that the Christian nonpacifist confronts.

At Boston University, where he completed his preparation for the ministry with a doctorate in divinity, King encountered a post-Niebuhrian version of liberal theology in the "personalism" taught by Edgar S. Brightman and L. Harold DeWolf. He came to the conclusion that Niebuhr had "overemphasized the corruption of human nature." Brightman, DeWolf, George W. Davis of Crozer, and other teachers deplored the neo-orthodox "revolt against reason," as DeWolf called it, and stressed the power of Christian love or agape, which later came to play an important part in King's theory of nonviolence. Sounding a little like John Bennett, King later explained that his studies in Boston enabled him to put Niebuhr's work in perspective. "Niebuhr's great contribution to contemporary theology is that he has refuted the false optimism characteristic of a great segment of Protestant liberalism, without falling into the anti-rationalism of the continental theologian Karl Barth." The Boston personalists enabled King, in effect, to reconcile Niebuhr and Rauschenbusch. He came to reject the "pessimism" he found in Niebuhr, but he never ceased to believe in the reality of sin. In a student paper, he objected

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