Spring Issue 2008
1 Apr 2008
The recently convened “Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant” in Atlanta speaks to us of the spiritual deception so typical of our times. According to its prime mover, former president and ex-Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter, the purpose of the “New Baptist Covenant” is to “persuade conservative Southern Baptists and other Christians to end divisions over the Bible and politics.”
Why do liberals like Carter always blame conservatives for division? After all, it’s never conservatives—who continue to adhere to traditional values and beliefs—that separate themselves from liberals, but liberals—who abandon our traditional values and beliefs—that separate themselves from conservatives. To hear Carter tell it, however, the only cause of division in America today is conservatism. Still, Carter, like all liberals, fails to explain why division is my fault for refusing to compromise my beliefs rather than his fault for refusing to compromise his.
The typical liberal line of our times goes something like this: If mean and narrow-minded conservatives would only recant of their rigidly held conservative convictions and conform to loving liberals’ broadminded and ever-shifting ideology then all would be right with the world. To liberals, it is nothing more than the unreasonable refusal of us conservatives to compromise our sincerely held beliefs that is the source of all division in the world today. If we conservatives would just become like liberals—who don’t really believe in anything except that no one should really believe in anything—then we too could conform our never to be firmly held convictions to the latest public opinion poll. By doing so, we would not only purge our society of all division, but also perpetuate unity, thanks to our forfeiture of principle and espousing of pragmatism.
To simple-minded liberals, unity is as simple a proposition as the universal adoption of flexible and changeable convictions that can be conformed to ever-shifting public opinion. Anyone refusing to immediately abandon their minority opinion in order to adopt the majority opinion is therefore accused by liberals of being mean-spirited and divisive. Only people with Play-Doh principles and rubber band beliefs really care about world peace and their fellow-man. All others are vilified as malicious malcontents.
According to Jimmy Carter, the recent three-day meeting of new (politically correct) Baptists in Atlanta, which drew more than 14,000 people, was “the most momentous event in [his] religious life.” During the meeting, Carter’s new Baptists were exhorted to save the planet by our planet’s most popular global warming antagonist, former Vice President Al Gore. Gore, like Carter, is an apostate Southern Baptist who claims to have departed from his former denomination over its conservative stands on issues like the inerrancy of Scripture, salvation by faith in Christ alone, denunciation of homosexuality as sexual immorality, and opposition to abortion.
Gore’s presentation on global warming was intended to challenge the new Baptists to rescue our planet from automobile exhaust, which Gore’s book Earth in the Balance calls our most “mortal threat…more deadly than any military enemy.” Forget about saving lost souls from sin, today’s church needs to concentrate on saving our planet from the internal combustion engine. We don’t need more evangelism; we need more ethanol.
Another popular speaker at the Atlanta meeting was bestselling author Tony Campolo. According to Religion News Service, Campolo, an American Baptist, spoke to the gathering while wearing “a bright colored stow to show [his] solidarity with gay and lesbian Baptists.” To Tony Campolo, homosexuals need not repent of their sin in order to come to Christ. Instead, they may come to Christ and into His church while still clad in the gaudy garments of their old man (Colossians 3:3-9). Thus, in Campolo’s mind, Christians are obligated not only to welcome Gay Pride Parades down their city’s Main Street, but also down their church’s center aisle.
Although event organizers denied the requests of homosexual-friendly groups to have exhibitions at the meeting, it appears that these denials were all accompanied with a wink and a nod. For instance, Ken Pennings, the executive director of a homosexual-friendly group called the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists, assured Religion News Service that groups like his had no need of acting like “outsiders, trying to get in.” “We’re already in,” Pennings insisted, “Some just don’t know it yet.”
The grand finale to Jimmy (Rev. Leroy) Carter’s meeting of the “Church of What’s Happening Now” was the keynote address of former President Bill Clinton. Clinton, like Carter and Gore, left the Southern Baptist Convention over its refusal to allow modern-day Jehoiakims to whittle away at the Word of God until the whole Bible is inevitably burned on the hearth of today’s political correctness (Jeremiah 36:20-26). These high profile and politically correct apostasies—Carter, Gore and Clinton—remind me of the words of the Apostle John. According to John, the reason “they went out from us” is because “they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us” (1 John 2:19). While Carter, Clinton and Gore may argue that Bible-believing Southern Baptists became too conservative for them, the truth is, none of them were ever conservative, Bible-believing Southern Baptists.
The religion of Carter, Clinton and Gore is like their politics. Everything is negotiable. The only nonnegotiable in their faith is that there are no nonnegotiables. In other words, they are dogmatic about no one being dogmatic. When it comes to new Baptists like Carter, Clinton and Gore, everyone is free to change their religious convictions as often as they do their socks.
A great prospect for Carter’s new Baptist convention is Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean. Dean’s father was an Episcopalian; his mother was a Catholic; his wife is Jewish; the two of them considered becoming Unitarians; their children attend a synagogue; and Dean is now an inactive Congregationalist, having left his former denomination because of a dispute over a bike path. What does it matter that Dean, a former Planned Parenthood physician and proud signer of America’s first civil union law, mistakenly believes that the Book of Job is in the New Testament? After all, when it comes to Carter’s new kind of Baptists, defending the rights of bicyclists is far more important than knowing your Bible.
According to Howard Dean, he is a Christian; and if anything gets his “ire up” it’s somebody else saying that he’s not. To “Christians” like Dean, Carter, Clinton and Gore, the only thing required to become a Christian is for you to claim to be one. It makes no difference what you believe or practice, as long as you are politically correct. Simply saying you’re a Christian settles it and your confession confirms it. Never mind that Jesus said, “Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but [only] he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 7:21).
Before concluding the inaugural assembly of his new Baptist convention, Carter asserted to the assembled, “We can disagree on the death penalty…on homosexuality…on the status of women and still bind our hearts together in a common, united, generous, friendly, loving commitment.” In response to such flowery prose, one cannot help but pose the question, “Commitment to what?” Is Carter simply calling for Christians to unequivocally commit to commitment itself? Is he, like so many misguided people in our world today, calling for unity for unity’s sake?
Perhaps, in an effort to fill in the blank of Carter’s blanket call for unity, Jimmy Allen, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, explained how Christians are now “cohesing around causes in ways they haven’t done in generations.” Is it various causes that Carter and his minions are calling Christians to commit to and unite around? Are we being charged by Carter and his new Baptists to cast aside the divisive cause of Christ—Matthew 10:34-37; Mark 13:12-13; Luke 21:16-17—in order to unite around environmental causes and commit ourselves to fighting things like global warming? If so, Carter and his ilk should be soundly condemned for the heretics they are and the heresy they espouse.
It is the cause of Christ alone that unites Christians and to which Christians should commit themselves. All other causes, no matter how good or commendable, are secondary and incidental. For instance, as a consequence of our commitment to Christ we may find ourselves fighting along side cultists for the lives of unborn children; however, our mutual opposition to abortion should not lead to the inclusion of cultists in the Christian community or to our reluctance to witness to pro-life cultists.
Too many Christians today are majoring on the minors and minoring on the major. They are involved in a myriad of good causes, but have little or no time left for the cause of Christ. While they feverishly work to clean up the pond, they fail to fish in it, which is actually what our Lord has commissioned us to do (Matthew 4:18-20; 28:18-20).
As Christ’s church, we are in this world to concentrate on the salvation of men’s souls, not on saving the planet or our democratic society. Although we are opposed to pollution and in favor of patriotism, neither should be mistaken for the Christian cause or used as a rallying point for Christians. Instead, the sole rallying point for Christians should be the propagation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth. Anyone who refuses to profess or proclaim the Gospel is outside the fellowship of Christians and unsuitable for Christ’s service, no matter how involved they may be in other good causes.
Like a multitude of other modern-day Pied Pipers, Jimmy Carter wants to escort our world into unity at any price. Yet, some prices are far too high to pay. Take World War II for an example; it could have been avoided if the world had only been willing to unite under the Fuher Adolf Hitler. The world recoiled at such an extravagant price tag; however, rightly believing that not even world peace was worth joining hands with Hitler’s Third Reich. Just as the world once refused to purchase peace at the asking price of Nazi fascists, it refuses today to purchase it at the asking price of Islamofacists. In the past, as in the present, men understood that some prices are just too high to pay, even for things as precious as peace and unity.
There are things more important than peace and unity. Take truth for an example. Christians should never be willing to purchase unity at the price of Biblical truth or doctrinal compromise.
No one more boldly advocated or better exemplified contending “for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” than the Apostle Paul (Jude 3). When called upon to compromise the Gospel for the sake of unity in the early church; that is, when asked to compromise the Gospel by conceding to Jewish Christians and circumcising Gentile Christians, Paul refused to give in to the “Jimmy Carters” of his day for one moment (Galatians 2:5). His reason for such rigidity was the preservation of the purity of the Gospel. If Paul had proven any less resolute in his defense of the faith, Christianity would have developed into a mere sect of Judaism rather than the international faith it is today.
Ironically, in interviews with both The Los Angeles Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jimmy Carter referred to Paul and Peter’s “public disagreement” in Galatia (see Galatians 2:11-21) as an example of the kind of divisiveness that should be avoided among modern-day Baptists. Exposing his Biblical ignorance, Carter insinuated that Paul got in Peter’s face during a silly spat over “temporal” affairs. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. The real reason for Paul’s in-your-face confrontation with Peter was Peter’s jeopardizing of the purity of the Gospel. By hobnobbing with his fellow-Jewish believers and disassociating himself from Gentile believers Peter created the false impression that Gentile converts needed to become Jewish proselytes in order to be full-fledged Christians.
Unlike Jimmy Carter and his new kind of Baptists, the Apostle Paul wouldn’t stand for the slightest deviation in the Gospel’s declaration. He understood that mankind’s only hope of salvation was the preaching of a pure and unadulterated Gospel. With the eternal souls of lost humanity hanging in the balance, Paul was totally intolerant of any tweaking of the Gospel message, regardless of the high-sounding arguments offered by others for its justification. To this ardent apostle of Christ, any corrupting of the Gospel or compromising of its message imperiled the immortal souls of men. Needless to say, to the Apostle Paul, nothing, not even unity, was worth that.
In Galatians 1:6-9, Paul calls down damnation on anyone, angel or man, who is found guilty of perverting the Gospel or preaching another way to God besides faith in Christ. Talk about divisive. If Paul was alive today, there’s no way Jimmy Carter would invite him to join the new Baptists. After all, while Carter’s new Baptists are learning how to get along with other faiths and teaching each other that Jesus’ words in John 14:6 are open to interpretation due to the fact that “it is never appropriate to be dogmatic in one’s convictions,” the Apostle Paul would be anathematizing the whole lot of them.
Don Walton
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