Editorial

There he goes again.

Former President Jimmy Carter – ever the enthusiast of summits, peacemaking and (certain) Baptist meetings – helped two Mercer University executives call together Baptist leaders April 10 for a four-hour dialogue at The Carter Center in Atlanta resulting in the announcement, with great fanfare, of “A North American Baptist Covenant” signed by 18 participants, including one leader whose views have been found to be heretical.

“The meeting was historic,” Mercer President-elect Bill Underwood said in a university news release. “It was historic because of the diversity of Baptists represented. North and South. Black and white. Conservative, moderate, and progressive. Canadian and U.S. And it was historic because of the resolve of the participants to create a new Baptist witness for Christ in North America.”

Signers included representatives of the Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Convention; National Baptist Convention of America, Inc.; National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc.; Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc.; American Baptist Churches, USA; Canadian Baptist Ministries; Cooperative Baptist Fellowship; Mainstream Baptists; Mercer University – and two state Baptist conventions that are increasingly estranged from Southern Baptist life: Baptist General Convention of Texas and Baptist General Association of Virginia.

“The leaders of these organizations affirmed their desire to speak and work together to create an authentic and genuine prophetic Baptist voice in these complex times,” the covenant asserts. “They reaffirmed their commitment to traditional Baptist values, including sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ and its implications for public and private morality. They specifically committed themselves to their obligations as Christians to promote peace with justice, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick and the marginalized, welcome the strangers among us, and promote religious liberty and respect for religious diversity.”

The signatories also agreed to hold a future “convocation of Baptist people to celebrate these historic Baptist commitments and to explore other opportunities to work together as Christian partners.”

This confab is not the first time Carter has convened Baptist leaders resulting in a joint statement – signatures and all. Promising cooperation on racial reconciliation, religious persecution and treating each other with mutual respect, at Carter’s initiation in 1998 a declaration was signed by 24 Baptist leaders, including Southern Baptists, making it truly diverse – contrary to Underwood’s claim about the North American Baptist Covenant which does not include any recognizable conservatives.

There can be little doubt that the North American Baptist Covenant is part of Mercer’s attempt to claim preeminence over Baylor University as the flagship “Baptist” university in America. The covenant comes after a “Baptist Summit” organized by Mercer in January in which 200 participants were asked to strategize with Godsey and Underwood on ways to transform the school into a national Baptist university after the Georgia Baptist Convention disowned Mercer last year in the wake of a series of conflicts in recent years, culminating in the revelation that Mercer condoned the existence of a homosexual student organization.

“Mercer’s role in organizing the [North American Baptist Covenant] meeting at The Carter Center evidences Mercer’s emergence as a truly national Baptist university that will continue exploring opportunities to relate to a wide diversity of Baptist groups and organizations,” said Underwood, who previously was a law professor and interim president of Baylor. Godsey will conclude next month his 27-year tenure as Mercer president.

It’s also clear that the North American Baptist Covenant hopes to counter the preeminence of the Southern Baptist Convention.

“The Baptist voice has certainly been muted by the Southern Baptist Convention,” said Godsey in the university news release. “While none of these groups by themselves has a large voice, together, they have a very significant voice. Their willingness to work together to become a unified voice of Baptists is a very important step.”

Just how diverse can Baptists be and still seriously be considered truly Baptist? The involvement – and, in fact, leadership – of Kirby Godsey calls into grave question the “Baptistness” of the North American Baptist Covenant, contrary to the grandiose claims of its organizers. And, Carter and Underwood are also theologically suspect.

Carter has regularly taken swipes at the Southern Baptist Convention and evangelical theology – from his rejection of the Baptist Faith and Message to his claim that Mormons are Christians and criticism of evangelism plans during the 1998 Salt Lake City SBC annual meeting to his equation of SBC leaders with Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in his recent book. (For more on these matters, see Morris Chapman’s article, “The SBC: A democracy Jimmy Carter cannot support,” Dec. 8, 2005, and my editorial, “What did Adrian Rogers tell Jimmy Carter,” Dec. 8, 2005).

In his January address to the “Baptist Summit,” Underwood castigated “spiritual masters” and “denominational politicians” in the Southern Baptist Convention who limit freedom with the Baptist Faith and Message and use the confession of faith as an instrument of doctrinal accountability. Perhaps among the most aberrant and troubling claims made by Underwood was his statement, “If we are to be a great Christian university, we cannot be afraid to pursue the course of truth, wherever that course might lead. Indeed, if our pursuit of truth leads us to question our existing view of God, it may just be that God is trying to tell us something” (emphasis added). Underwood also made this assertion in his final address as Baylor University interim president during its December commencement.

But Kirby Godsey is unequaled in his assault on Christian truth – including questioning “our existing view of God.”

Most infamously, Godsey published in 1996 a book, When We Talk About God … Let’s Be Honest, which resulted in a finding by a special committee of the Georgia Baptist Convention Executive Committee that Godsey’s views “deviate significantly from historic Baptist doctrine and are, in fact, considered heretical.”

Chaired by Nelson Price, a widely respected Georgia Baptist leader and now retired pastor of Roswell Street Baptist Church in Marietta, the special committee engaged in a nine-month study, including an exhaustive examination of the book, Godsey’s written responses to 30 questions, and an interview with the author. The committee expressed most concern with Godsey’s views on the authority of Scripture, deity of Christ, substitutionary atonement, salvation and universalism.

“The committee’s opinion is that Dr. Godsey’s book and his written answers to these questions dramatically deviate from orthodoxy. That being true, it is our opinion that it is punctuated with heresy. At best the book is written in a reckless fashion so that it misrepresents the truth. The answers provided by Dr. Godsey represent a more cautious and more conservative response than the committee heard in the interview or read in the book. It is the committee’s opinion that Dr. Godsey has thus failed his spiritual fiduciary responsibility as leader of Georgia Baptists’ largest institution,” the Price Committee concluded.

Negative responses to Godsey’s book came from across the SBC.

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president R. Albert Mohler Jr. wrote a lengthy critique, “When We Talk About Heresy … Let’s Be Honest” (available online, www.sbts.edu/mohler/fidelitas.php).

Closer to home, Florida Baptist Convention executive director-treasurer John Sullivan told a Southern Seminary chapel audience in 1997, “I’m ticked at what some folks are saying about Jesus,” referring to a “Baptist college president.” Sullivan confirmed after the address that Godsey was that president.

Referring to a passage in the book which dismissed core doctrinal truths as “clanging buckets of nonsense,” Sullivan told the seminarians, “If that had been written by a secular, liberal press, I would not have been disturbed. But the fact that it was written by one who claims Baptist heritage and comes to the conclusion that the focus in the life of the church on Jesus Christ is nothing more than a bucket of myths, that the substitutionary death and the virgin birth has little value, if any, I was absolutely appalled.”

Lest one be willing to give Godsey a pass on his book, the censure of the Georgia Baptist Convention and the heresy finding as irrelevant relics of a decade ago, Godsey has continued his heresy in recent days.

On a Web site sponsored by Universal Studios in connection with the April 28 release of the movie “United 93,” which tells the story of the fourth hijacked airplane on September 11th in which passengers foiled the plot of Muslim terrorists, Godsey contributed an article “Lessons from 9/11” (http://u93.org/why_do_they_hate_america/lessons_from_9_11/).

Among his concluding observations, Godsey writes, “Our life together must reach for a wider embrace. Let us remember. God is not a Christian. God is not a Muslim. And God is not a Jew. God is above all our little gods. God is with us. God is in us all. God is for us all” (emphasis added.) This is pantheism and universalism, heresies clearly outside Christian orthodoxy.

Baptist diversity – whatever it may mean – cannot reasonably accommodate certain beliefs which are beyond the pale of core Christian truth. It’s clear that Kirby Godsey long ago abandoned any meaningful claim to Baptist identity, heritage and doctrine. If Carter, Underwood and the signatories of the North American Baptist Covenant have any hope as a consequential Baptist voice, they would do well to start with some basic doctrinal truths on which they can be founded.