Carter - Faith a journey for all

ALSO BY JIMMY CARTER

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A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety

A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power

NIV Lessons from Life Bible: Personal Reflections with Jimmy Carter

Through the Year with Jimmy Carter: 366 Daily Meditations from the 39th President

White House Diary

We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work

A Remarkable Mother

Beyond the White House: Waging Peace, Fighting Disease, Building Hope

Palestine Peace Not Apartheid

Our Endangered Values: Americas Moral Crisis

Sharing Good Times

The Hornets Nest: A Novel of the Revolutionary War

The Nobel Peace Prize Lecture

Christmas in Plains: Memories (illustrated by Amy Carter)

An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood

The Virtues of Aging

Sources of Strength: Meditations on Scripture for a Living Faith

Living Faith

The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer (illustrated by Amy Carter)

Always a Reckoning and Other Poems

Talking Peace: A Vision for the Next Generation

Turning Point: A Candidate, a State, and a Nation Come of Age

An Outdoor Journal: Adventures and Reflections

Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life (with Rosalynn Carter)

The Blood of Abraham: Insights into the Middle East

Negotiation: The Alternative to Hostility

Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President

A Government as Good as Its People

Why Not the Best?

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Copyright 2018 by Jimmy Carter

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The Pasture Gate, 1995 by Jimmy Carter. Illustrations Copyright 1995 by Sarah Elizabeth Chuldenko; Miss Lillian Sees Lerosy for the First Time, and A Contemplation of What Has Been Created, and Why from ALWAYS A RECKONING AND OTHER POEMS by Jimmy Carter, copyright 1995 by Jimmy Carter. Used by permission of Crown Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition March 2018

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Interior design by Paul Dippolito

Jacket design by Pete Garceau

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Carter, Jimmy, 1924author.

Title: Faith : a journey for all / Jimmy Carter.

Description: First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.|New York : Simon & Schuster, 2018.|Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN2018003986 (print)|LCCN2018005243 (ebook)|ISBN 9781501184420|ISBN 9781501184413 (hardcover : alk. paper)|ISBN 9781501184437 (trade pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Faith.|Christianity and culture.|HistoryReligious aspectsChristianity.

Classification: LCC BV4637 (ebook)|LCC BV4637 .C346 2018 (print)|DDC 234/.23dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018003986

ISBN 978-1-5011-8441-3

ISBN 978-1-5011-8442-0 (ebook)

This book is dedicated to my wife, Rosalynn, who has shared all kinds of faith with me for more than seventy years.

These are some people of faith whose works I reviewed before writing this book. I do not claim to understand all their theological or philosophical premises, but over the years I have jotted down and retained excerpts from their voluminous works with which I agree. Their quotes in this book will help us understand their basic beliefs.

My admiration for Reinhold Niebuhr (18921971) is well known. I quoted him in 1975, in Why Not the Best?, my first book. He was an unusual theologian, who, through his writings, exerted a great influence on American public affairs. He certainly had a powerful effect on my attitudes toward politics.

Reinholds brother H. Richard Niebuhr (18941962) engaged less in public affairs, but he also was a distinguished American theologian and ethicist. His book, Faith on Earth: An Inquiry into the Structure of Human Faith, was given to me by his son, Richard, when it was published posthumously in 1989. It was especially helpful for this book.

Two American Christian thinkers and activists, whom I knew personally, were William Sloane Coffin (19242006) and Clarence Jordan (19121969). Both were controversial. Coffin had supported the civil rights movement, but he became best known as a leader of the peace movement during the Vietnam War. He served as chaplain at Yale, and later became senior minister at Riverside Church in New York, where he invited me to speak. He wrote a popular book, The Heart Is a Little to the Left: Essays on Public Morality.

Clarence Jordan was a fellow Georgian. In fact, his nephew, Hamilton Jordan, was one of my closest aides and became my White House chief of staff. Clarence Jordan was a New Testament Greek scholar who translated New Testament books into Cotton Patch versions, using Southern colloquial language. His book of Matthew was adapted into The Cotton Patch Gospel, an off-Broadway musical. A collection of his sermons has been published as The Substance of Faith: And Other Cotton Patch Sermons . I contributed the foreword. In 1942, Jordan founded Koinonia, a racially integrated religious community in southwest Georgia near Plains. As the civil rights movement advanced in the 1950s, Koinonia was perceived as a threat and suffered boycotts and violence. To me, Jordan was a model of courage and faith.

I studied two influential Swiss theologians, Karl Barth (18861968) and Emil Brunner (18891966). Barth often has been described as the most important theologian of the twentieth century. As a professor at German universities, he opposed Hitler and the Nazis. Of all the theologians I have read, Barth has been the most difficult for me to understand. His discussions of election, or predestination, have been enlightening if I understand his writings: that Jesus was predestined to be born as divine, but that God does not decide in advance which persons are destined to be saved or condemned. Brunner also has had an international impact. He respected but disagreed with certain teachings of Barth. I was especially interested in his discussion of the divine aspects of Jesus life.

Three German theologians whom I read were Dietrich Bonhoeffer (19061945), Rudolf Karl Bultmann (18841976), and Jrgen Moltmann (b. 1926). Like Barth, Bonhoeffer was a theologian and founding member of the German Confessing Church, which opposed the Nazis. However, he remained in Germany during the war, was arrested, and executed. The knowledge of Bonhoeffers personal courage has made me feel inadequate in my Christian life but has been inspirational in its impact.

Bultmann also supported the Confessing Church, but he did not directly oppose the Nazis. As a scholar, he critically analyzed the Gospel writings. He came to the conclusion that Christian faith is not about the historical Jesus, but about the transcendent Christ. What is important to faith is the resurrection and the proclamation of the New Testament. The explanations of Bultmann about the truly significant aspects of Christ have been helpful to me in dealing with arguments about the historical Jesus.