Traveling in Place

Am I an Evangelical?

Yesterday, I heard an interview with former President Jimmy Carter. He’s just published a new book entitled Faith: a Journey for All. I’ve read and heard Carter address the importance of his Christian faith many times.

I’ve always admired Jimmy Carter. Did he “succeed” as President? Not in the way most people define success. He was never comfortable playing the game of Washington politics. He championed human rights around the world and brokered a Middle East Peace deal that is still in effect, but economic problems at home and the Iran hostage crisis doomed his chances of re-election. He left office deeply unpopular.

Sounds like a failure. But Carter never compromised his personal integrity. He never wavered in his faith. And his post-presidency, the most consequential in American history, has redeemed his image.

As I listened to him yesterday, I was struck by how easily he defined himself as an “evangelical born-again Christian,” even though the vast majority of those in our country who share this identity espouse a world-view that is directly at odds with his own.

For Carter, being an “evangelical” is not a matter of politics. He asserts that there are many evangelicals who are politically moderate and even liberal. This claim sounds archaic in an era when white evangelicals are now regarded as a reliable voting block. But I know whereof he speaks. Growing up as a Southern Baptist (like Carter), I understood the importance of being born again – of awakening to the reality of Jesus Christ in a personal way and committing myself to follow him. To be an “evangelical” in those days simply meant that you believed the gospel of Jesus Christ was an urgent message that needed to be shared with the world. It meant your Christian faith, while personal, was not a private matter to keep to yourself, but something to be shared with others because it had universal significance. It also meant that, since the Bible is the only written witness to the life, teachings, and ministry of Christ, you regarded the Scriptures as the final authority for all matters of faith. (The early evangelical confessions qualified biblical authority by saying that all of scripture must be interpreted in the light of Christ.)

My Lenten Musical Discipline

“How’s your Lent going?” a colleague asked me a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t know how to respond at first. My eventual honest answer was, “It’s going fine for the church, but I haven’t really internalized it.”

Fortunately, that simple but penetrating question was posed early enough to give me an opportunity to develop a Lenten discipline, or rather, repeat a discipline I have adopted the last four Lents. In each of those years, I have chosen a classical piano piece to learn – not to perform, mind you, but only to learn. (DO NOT ASK ME TO PLAY THESE PIECES IN PUBLIC!) I’m far from proficient on the piano. I cannot “sight-read,” which means I have to spend a lot of time finding all the notes and learning how they all fit together. And there is a decided limit to how much difficulty I can manage. I don’t have the virtuoso talent of others who are blessed with the uncanny ability to master the works of composers who pressed the limits of what an 88-note keyboard could produce.

But, for lesser musical mortals like myself, great composers mercifully produced slower movements of otherwise challenging sonatas, and short, relatively simple pieces that, while not easy, are at least accessible – and often achingly beautiful.

So, one year I learned the second movement of Beethoven’s “Pathetique” Sonata. Another year I taught myself a Rachmaninoff “Moment Musicale.” I’ve also picked up a “Nocturne” by Ottorino Respighi and one of Mendelssohn’s “Venetian Boat Songs.” This year, I’m working on Liszt’s “Consolation No. 3.” None of these come easily for me. They are just hard enough that I have to struggle with them, but not so hard that I cannot learn to play them well enough to enjoy them.

Each year, this has been a spiritual experience. When I begin, I have to break through the frustration of finding every note and coordinating all of them as