Violence towards black activists during the Montgomery bus boycott led Miller to question commitments to nonviolence as noted by Martin Luther King Jr. himself [1] in letter sent April 1957.
In a day when passions ran high over pacifism, the labor movement, and unemployment, he accumulated an impressive jail record in New Zealand from picketing and pacifist demonstrations.
He also became a huge influence in making the later philosopher and logician Arthur Norman Prior a "quick and keen convert" to Miller's Barthian calvinism.
[4] Arthur Prior and Alexander Miller worked together on the Student Christian Movement magazine Open Windows.
His theology, rooted in the great Reformation traditions and enlivened by the work and personal influence of Reinhold Niebuhr, sought a responsible and intelligible articulation of the Biblical heritage.
Stanford University's 1960 Memorial Resolution reports that Lex Miller "retained a rare humility of spirits informed by a study faith and accompanied by a nonchalance about himself," and they would "remember him as a colleague who combined wisdom with innocence, humor with piety, energetic support of academic freedom with unswerving devotion to Christian truth.
His own life bore eloquent testimony to a quotation from Karl Barth, which he used as a motto for his Noble Lectures: 'Man is the creature made visible in the mirror of Jesus Christ.