Book Review: Sources of Strength

Book Review: Sources of Strength

Author: Jimmy Carter

Date: 1997

Publisher: Random House / Times

ISBN: 0-8129-2944-6

Length: 241 pages plus indices

Quote: “Al­though I began teaching Sunday School classes when I was eighteen years old, I’ve retained...transcripts of entire texts only during the past twenty years. I asked Karl Weber, a fine editor, to help me choose some of the more interesting ones...abbreviated...down to a few pages.”

That’s how the 52 brief chapters of this book came to be written. Although they’re not written in the Bible-study-workbook format to which Southern Baptists, Seventh-Day Adventists, and perhaps some church members are accustomed, each one contains enough Bible references that if you dig up your own nuggets of religious knowledge you’ll get quite a course of Bible study out of Sources of Strength. Former President Carter was always been known for his bland and mild public personality; if you want more salt’n’pepper on your daily Bible studies, the original texts and classic commentaries will supply that too. What the book tries to convey is a sense of what you’d hear if you’d visited the Maranatha Baptist Church where, Carter modestly admitted, Sunday School classes taught by a former President of the United States became quite a tourist attraction.

Carter’s politics were considerably to the left of many Southern Baptists’—consider Jerry Falwell. I have to say that while I read Sources of Strength I kept thinking, “Methodist...Methodist...” but no, Carter was still a Baptist. Right-wing Baptists may have wondered about this. Studying his Sources of Strength won’t convert you to the left wing—it may in fact inspire you to be more active on the right wing, if that’s where you feel at home—but it will help you understand what’s going on in the minds of left-wing Christians. Christianity is timeless, and cannot be truly divided between the “wings” of passing political reactions to specific times. We need to let the quest for real truth reunite us, even if we have disagreed sharply on political questions.

The texts he chose for study will be familiar to long-term churchgoers. I’m thinking now of my late “Aunt Dotty,” a family character who sustained some permanent brain damage from cancer treatment at age 50, but retained a good memory, and announced around age 55 that as a lifelong churchgoer she felt as if she ought to have graduated from Sunday School. Aunt Dotty learned a great deal in her ecumenical life; she remembered most of it into her late eighties. I don’t want to endorse the Catholic understanding of what makes us remember some Christians as saints, but in her way I think Aunt Dotty was that kind. I mention her because I had the thought, reading Sources of Strength: “Is this a book for people who come to churches as tourists? Is there anything in here for Aunt Dotty?” The answer to both questions is yes. Yes, it’s written partly for those who visit celebrities’ churches as tourists, and yes, there’s at least one lesson that might have had something new to offer even Aunt Dotty. It’s too late to ask her, but I think Carter’s story of how he reconciled himself to a personal enemy will be fresh for most Christians.

Although it does contain a couple of Carter’s long original poems, overall this book is well edited, easy to read, and warmly recommended to all Christians and to all historians studying the 1970s.