Against the Hounds of Hell: A Life of Howard Thurman by Peter Eisenstadt (review)

Peter Eisenstadt's biography of Howard Thurman (1899–1981) is an important addition to the growing academic and public discussion about the mystic, professor, and pastor who contributed much to the spiritual foundations of the Black freedom struggle. The book reflects Eisenstadt's years of work on the Howard Thurman Papers Project at Boston University.

Eisenstadt lays out how Thurman built distance from his Baptist tradition and tried to find a way out of his situation as a Black youth in the Jim Crow South through experiencing God in nature, the trees and the sea, and through education. Eisenstadt characterizes Thurman's mature thought as a political mysticism, at once contemplative and active. Emblematic of this approach was Thurman's advice to Martin Luther King Jr. to focus on contemplating his own commitment after King was attacked in Harlem in 1958. In the time that followed, King withdrew from the public eye and then devoted himself more deeply to the civil rights struggle. Against the criticism that Thurman did not become an activist, the book points out that it was precisely his reflexive spirituality that was his contribution to the Black freedom struggle.

Eisenstadt chronicles Thurman's growing up in Daytona Beach, Florida, where he was raised by his grandmother, a former slave. She conveyed to him that he was allowed to see himself as God's child despite dehumanizing circumstances. He came back to this conviction throughout his life. Eisenstadt's account pays close attention to the impact that expectations of masculinity and economic and racial marginalization had on Thurman's (inner) life. Thurman excelled at high school, at Morehouse College, and at Howard University. He received his theological education at Rochester Theological Seminary. Eisenstadt shows, by chronicling Thurman's experiences at Rochester, how even progressive theological education in the North remained entangled in racist routines.

Thurman's academic appointments at Howard University (1932–1944) and at Boston University (1953–1965) were interrupted by an important experience. For almost ten years (1944–1953) he worked for Fellowship Church in San Francisco, in which he tried to give form to his mysticism and countered every form of segregation through an interracial, interdenominational, and interfaith community.

With his book Jesus and the Disinherited (1949), Thurman made a theological contribution that can be interpreted as a Christological paradigm shift. In this work, Thurman did not ask the classical question of what meaning Jesus has for those who are sinners. Rather, he was concerned with the question of what Jesus has to say to those who are oppressed by others. Thurman understood Jesus's message for the oppressed as a struggle against the inner "hounds of hell": fear, deception, and hate. Such a struggle of one's own is necessary to arrive at a transformative practice of inclusive love that overcomes all politics of segregation.

Eisenstadt points to the politics of twentieth-century decolonization as an important factor in the development of Thurman's thought. In 1935, for example, Thurman went on a trip to South Asia and met with Mahatma Gandhi. The trip raised in Thurman an awareness for both the global power of white supremacy in the form of British colonialism and the religiously based nonviolent resistance of the colonized.

Overall, I found it very instructive that Eisenstadt presents Thurman's numerous connections to representatives of the so-called Black Social Gospel tradition, for example, Benjamin E. Mays, James Farmer, Martin Luther King Jr., and Pauli Murray. With great interest, I also read the references to Thurman's relationship with Reinhold Niebuhr, who worked together with Thurman for the Delta Cooperative Farm, an interracial project in Mississippi (1936–1956). To my knowledge, their relationship is ignored in the literature on Niebuhr.

In a helpful way, Eisenstadt identifies fields that deserve further research. Starting with Thurman's relationship to Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, it might be interesting to look...