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This is no detached report of "lived religion" by a scholar who is keeping himself at a safe distance. "As many participants later testified," Burns writes, "the holy spirit was alive that night, and in a hundred such nights to come, with a palpable power and crystal clarity that overwhelmed the freshly minted doctor of theology." Indeed, it was "by some uncanny act of grace" that "the breath of Spirit that [King] drew in that evening burst out of him in a jeweled torrent of unscripted words, a Lincoln-like synthesis of the rational and the emotional, the secular and the sacred. The faithful, King now among them, had conjured the kingdom of God in that place."

As is evident from this passionate passage, Burns uses theological language freely, without apology, and yet the reader is often unsure of its precise meaning. What's not in doubt is the arc of the story as Burns tells it. From this point on, and increasingly as the struggle deepens, King experiences an intimate, personal relationship with Christ even as he often stumbles.

While Burns is candid about his subject's failings, by largely avoiding King's personal life, except for the briefest references, he dodges the sort of reckoning that is a biographer's sometimes unwelcome responsibility. (There is an oddly equivocal sentence in a penetrating analysis of King's pervasive sense of guilt, speaking of one of the "compartments" of that guilt: "In another, one can imagine, was searing guilt about his alleged extramarital relationships.")

Some readers may be stunned, as I was, by Burns' account of the Six-Day War, "when modern Israelites trounced Egypt and its neighbors in a six-day blitzkrieg and reconquered Jerusalem after two millennia of exile." Whatever one thinks of the subsequent history of Israel and the Palestinian question, it is simply grotesque to use a term inextricably associated with Nazi conquests to describe a war against Arab states determined to erase Israel's existence. But Burns likes it so much he uses it again on the next page.

This is suggestive of a certain slack acceptance of stock notions of "peace and justice." Yet Burns' engagement with such matters is grounded in the particulars of a confrontation in which peace and justice nonviolently overcame evil—a victory sealed by Martin Luther King's willingness to give up his own life.

John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

To the Mountaintop is available from Christianbook.com and other book retailers.

Books & Culture Corner appears every Monday. Earlier editions of Books & Culture Corner and Book of the Week include:

O'Connor v. the Antichrist (Jan. 12, 2004)

Moody, the Media, and the Birth of Modern Evangelism | A cautionary tale. (Jan. 05, 2004)

A Few Coming Attractions from 2004 | Plus: What to buy with those gift cards, and some of the books in my to-read stacks. (Dec. 29, 2003)

The Top Ten Books of 2003 | Plus: The Worst Book of the Year, more good reading, digital books, and a little Christmas music. (Dec. 22, 2003)

Books at Warp Speed | We continue our annual roundup of noteworthy books. (Dec. 15, 2003)

Is "Sensual Orthodoxy" a Contradiction in Terms? | Read this unconventional collection of sermons and judge for yourself. (Dec. 8, 2003)

Books, Books, Books! | We begin our annual roundup. (Dec. 8, 2003)

Urban Eden | In City: Urbanism and Its End, a new history of New Haven, Connecticut, the city (in its late 19th-century form) is an ambiguous heaven-and the suburbs that relentlessly followed are hell. Which leaves us where, exactly? (Dec. 01, 2003)

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January (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48