Whatever my political and theological differences with him, I have great respect and affection for Jimmy Carter. I was his campaign manager at the Woolmarket Elementary School 1980 mock election, and cried when he lost. As a little boy in Mississippi, I was as happy as all my relatives and neighbors to have a President without an accent. I believe Carter to be a genuine and sincere Christian, with a testimony of faith that doesn’t seem to be political posturing. That’s why it is all the more disappointing to me when he does some of the things he does.
President Carter recently launched a peace initiative not for North and South Korea or the former Yugoslavia, but for Baptists in North America. The only problem is that the Baptists involved in his North American Baptist Covenant are all on the same side, the left side of the spectrum. To be fair, the Baptist left is the only side of the spectrum interested in these kinds of manifestos. I would have been outraged had conservative Southern Baptists signed on to such a thing. The question is, though, why is this newsworthy?
James A. Smith Sr, editor of the Florida Baptist Witness, editorialized that the Carter summit itself demonstrates why a “convocation” can’t solve the divide among Baptists in America. Smith points out that the leaders of the effort are the former and current presidents of Mercer University, a school that holds to Baptist identity the way some people claim Indian ancestry, as a conversation piece but not much more. As Smith notes, former Mercer President Kirby Godsey, one of the architects of the event, is an out and out heretic. In a much discussed book of a few years ago, Godsey tossed aside centuries of Christian orthodoxy including the deity of Christ and embraced universalism. In a commentary more recently, Godsey further speaks of God and faith in pantheistic and universalistic terms.
It doesn’t matter how many summits are held. Baptists who don’t even agree on who Jesus is or whether one needs salvation at all are not going to be able to work together. I would hope that President Carter could see that, and I’m saddened that he can’t or won’t. Instead, we have one more summit and one more set of press releases.
Just think how much more “successful” the Camp David Accords would have been, if only the Egyptians had been participants?
