Prophet, priest and King: understanding the real MLK
For over half a century, we’ve been misunderstanding Martin Luther King. Our secular minds are programmed to see him as a civil rights activist, but as another MLK Day comes and goes, it is time to see King as he saw himself: as a priest and a prophet. Today, we tend to understand prophecy as focused on prediction. The nature of biblical prophecy and the word’s classical origins have been forgotten. Pro, the prefix of the Greek word prophetes means ‘fore’, but also ‘forth’. To be a prophet is to ‘fore-tell’ but equally to ‘forth-tell’ – to be a divinely-inspired forecaster or to preach moral, spiritual and political messages. King saw his role as the latter.
