Great Commission Baptists? Really?

The Southern Baptist Convention is a Christian denomination founded upon racism and the defense of slavery. That's not a slander of the SBC, it is merely a statement of historical fact. It took the Southern Baptists until 1995 to renounce slavery and until 2009 to apologize for their earlier support of it. The Southern Baptist Convention is one of the most theologically Fundamentalist denominations in the country. In recent times it has tried to drive women out of the pastorate. It has tried to enforce a narrow, anti-intellectual Biblical literalism on its seminaries. It was the only American denomination to endorse President George W. Bush's illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is adamantly opposed to equal civil rights for sexual minorities. In short, the Southern Baptist Convention is and has been consistently reactionary in its politics and in its theology.

For all that, the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. At its recent national gathering in New Orleans it elected a Black man as its leader. We can hope that that election represents a true change of heart on the part of Southern Baptists, although I suspect that it actually represents no more of a change in racial attitudes in the denomination than the election of Barack Obama as president represents the end of racism in the country at large, which is to say not much.

At that recent national gathering the Southern Baptists did something else that I find more interesting and more revealing about that denomination. The delegates at the gathering voted by a narrow margin to permit Southern Baptists to call themselves “Great Commission Baptists.” They didn't change the name of the denomination, and use of Great Commission Baptists is permitted not required. Still, there is apparently some unease in the denomination with its association with the South. Apparently some Southern Baptists think that association is an obstacle to evangelization, to the growth of the denomination in the country as a whole. So they wanted something else to call themselves. What they chose is Great Commission Baptists. That choice, so far from being an improvement, points to the profound ways in which the conservative theology of the Southern Baptist Convention is out of step with the world today and is still in a reactionary stance against the changes taking place in the postmodern world.

The term “Great Commission” may mean something to many Southern Baptists, but I'm sure it means nothing to most Americans. The phrase refers to the end of the Gospel of Matthew. There the risen Christ says to his Disciples: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” Matthew 28:18-20 This commandment of the risen Christ in Matthew has long been known in the church as the “Great Commission.” It is the primary biblical foundation for missionary work among non-Christians that has as its aim converting them to Christianity. It has been a charter for Christian imperialism all over the world. It was one thing when the author of the Gospel of Matthew wrote those words in and for a small and powerless community of Christians near the end of the first century CE. It became quite another thing when Christianity became the established religion of the Roman Empire and remained the de jure or de facto established faith of western Europe and North America. Backed by the power of empire, Christian missionaries across the centuries and across the globe stopped at nothing to get non-Christians to convert to Christianity, using not only moral persuasion but on occasion force to effect the Great Commission. Yes, they thought they were doing good. They thought they were doing God's will. They thought they were saving the souls of their converts. Yet they destroyed indigenous cultures around the world, trying to make native peoples not only Christian but essentially European or North American in their culture as well as their religion. Worse, they were operating from a modernist mindset that believed that salvation was possible only for professed Christians, that people who worshiped using other myths and symbols, other faith traditions, were doomed to spend eternity in torment in hell. The Great Commission is the biblical warrant (or at least one of them) for Christian exclusivism of the narrowest sort. It is one of the Bible's blood stained verses, of which there tragically are quite a few.

The world has moved beyond that kind of religious exclusivism. So has the more enlightened part of Christianity. Christian exclusivism cannot be maintained in the light of post-modern ontology and epistemology.¹ It cannot be maintained in the world today where we are in daily contact with people of other faith traditions, people we know to be good, moral people of faith who just happen to practice faith in a tradition other than ours. Christian exclusivism is a relic of an earlier time, a time that has passed.

Into that world in which Christian exclusivism is no longer tenable (if indeed it ever was) comes the Southern Baptist Convention and identifies itself with a foundational text of Christian exclusivism. The identification of the denomination as Great Commission Baptists says that what is important in Christianity, what Christianity is all about, what Christians are called most of all to be involved in, is conversion of non-Christians to Christianity. The notion that that is what Christianity is mostly about is an anachronism at best. Converting people was never mostly what Christianity was about. Christianity is mostly about God's unconditional and unmerited grace and about God's call to God's people to realize the Kingdom of God on earth. Any non-Christian who doesn't know what the Great Commission is will learn nothing about the Southern Baptists from that appellation. Non-Christians who do know what the Great Commission is will hear in that name a spiritual aggression that denies the validity of spiritual paths other than Christianity. It seems highly unlikely that a shift from Southern Baptists to Great Commission Baptists will do much to improve the Southern Baptists' image among non-Christians or non-Southern Baptist Christians.

If the Southern Baptists wanted to give themselves a new name that refers to one of the so-called “great” statements of Jesus in the Bible there is another candidate that would, I'm sure, be a lot more appealing to a lot of people. It is the Great Commandment. In addition to a Great Commission Christianity has had from the very beginning a Great Commandment. It appears in all three Synoptic Gospels in one form or another. It's oldest and best statement is in the Gospel of Mark. It goes like this:

One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, 'Which commandment is the first of all?' Jesus answered, 'The first is, 'Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.' The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these.' Mark 12:28-31

Jesus' own words put this commandment above all others, including the Great Commission.

Conservative Christians may honestly believe that loving non-Christians means converting them to Christianity in order to save their souls, but whether or not our attitudes toward another truly express love often depends more on how the other experiences us than on our personal justification for what we are doing. Few followers of other spiritual paths, or of no spiritual path, are not likely to perceive aggressive proselytizing by zealous Christians as a truly loving attitude toward them. They will surely experience it as arrogant and as demeaning the path they have been on in their lives. They will, of course, experience it that way because that's what it is.

Seeing another as needing to convert to one's own belief system is arrogant and demeaning. Approaching another out of love of God and true love of the other is neither. Approaching another according to the Great Commandment rather than according to the Great Commission is an approach that respects the other and seeks a relationship of mutuality. Love genuinely seeks to help where help is needed and possible. Love of God and neighbor sees the other as beloved of God regardless of who the other is, regardless of the other person's belief system. It does not put the one approaching the other above the other. It does not claim spiritual superiority over the other the way proselytizing usually does. It's first words aren't “I have something you need.” Its first words are “can we get to know each other and then perhaps see how we may help each other?” A Great Commandment church would be one that could do good things in the world. A Great Commission church mostly isn't.

So I don't think “Great Commission Baptists” is an improvement over Southern Baptists. Rather than make the denomination more appealing it points to the way the Southern Baptists remain out of step with the postmodern world and with the most insightful and constructive developments in contemporary Christian theology. Being southern isn't per se the Southern Baptists' problem. Bad theology is.  A new name isn't what the Southern Baptist Convention needs. A new understanding of Christianity is.

1For an explanation of the claim see Section 3 “THE UNIVERSALITY OF SALVATION” in Chapter 10, “The Dynamics of Salvation,” in my book Liberating Christianity.

The Catholic Hierarchy Has Lost All Credibility

 It was pretty clear that it was going to happen as soon as they elected  the reactionary Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, Pope John Paul II's Grand Inquisitor, as Pope Benedict XVI, Many of us knew that all hope of enlightenment from the so-called Throne of St. Peter (a poor fisherman who became an itinerant preacher with a throne? But I digress) was lost at that point. Ratzinger had made a career of attacking the leading lights of Catholic theology. The wonderful Hans Kȕng is the best example from Ratzinger's days as a cardinal, but there are others. And it’s not that the Vatican has had much credibility with many of us for a long time. Vatican II gave hope, but the all-male, celibate (in theory at least) Catholic power structure began undoing those reforms as soon as they were enacted. John Paul II is much loved in Catholic circles; but let us not forget that Ratzinger worked for him, and he approved of Ratzinger’s reactionary doctrinal policing of the church. Yes, we saw it coming; and yes, the Vatican didn't have much credibility to lose; but now it has totally lost whatever shred of credibility it retained after decades in the heavy hands of Mr. Ratzinger.

The child abuse scandal in which Ratzinger and his ilk have put the power interests of the hierarchy above the safety and care of children should have made even Pope Ratzinger blush at having the temerity to issue moral proclamations, but it hasn’t.  Now in a naked power play aimed at stilling the voice of independent thought in the Catholic Church, especially the voice of independent thinking women, the US bishops and the Vatican have lashed out at American Catholic women religious in general and at their leading theologians in particular.  The all-male Catholic power structure has attacked the Leadership Council of Women Religious, an organization that represents most women religious (commonly known as nuns) in the United States  generally and Elizabeth A. Johnson, Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham University and Margaret Farley, Gilbert L. Stark Professor Emerita of Christian Ethics at Yale University Divinity School in particular.  Professors Johnson and Farley are two of the most widely read, most prominent, and most insightful theologians of all American Catholic women religious, and the Vatican and the US bishops have chosen them as their special targets.

What are the church hierarchy’s complaints against these brilliant, faithful women?  One is that they pay too much attention to social justice and not enough attention to the Vatican’s reactionary teachings on the issues of abortion and gay marriage.  I have not read Professor Farley’s book that has just come under attack, Just Love, A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics.  I have read that the church has attacked it for having the gall even to ask questions about the church’s obscurantist teachings about masturbation and homosexuality.  In that attack the church is saying that a faithful Catholic can’t even ask questions about things that are simply everyday realities of human life.  No church worthy of the name can prohibit its people from asking such questions.  If the faith can’t relate in constructive and life-giving ways to undeniable human realities it deserves to die.  A faith that does not permit free and open discussion of human realities, including the realities of human sexuality, cannot relate in those constructive and life-giving ways to those realities.

The attack on Professor Elizabeth Johnson hits closer to home with me.  I was a student of hers briefly when she was a visiting professor at Seattle University in the summer of 1998.  She read the manuscript of my book Liberating Christianity, encouraged me in having it published, and wrote a generous cover endorsement of it.  I consider Beth Johnson’s book She Who Is, The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, to be one of the true classics of contemporary theology, and not only of contemporary Catholic theology.  A recent attack on the central thesis of that book raises concerns for the Catholic hierarchy’s relationship to the entire theological enterprise.

The central thesis of She Who Is, or part of it, is that human language can never define God, can never capture the essence of God, which remains always ultimate mystery; but that the language we use about God matters.  Johnson repeats throughout the book almost as a mantra the phrase “the God symbol functions.”  This wonderful phrase points to the reality that our human language about God can only be symbolic, it cannot be literal.  And it points to the fact that the symbolic language we use about God matters.  If we think of God using only masculine symbols like Father and the pronoun He the male is elevated above the female.  Men become more like God than women are.  The result is the diminishing of women and the perpetuation of patriarchal domination. 

In one attack on Johnson’s work the American bishops have said that Johnson’s thesis is that the names the Catholic Church uses for God “are metaphors that do not apply to the reality of God within the Catholic understanding” and that that thesis is false.  There are at least two things wrong with that attack on sister Elizabeth.  Johnson, as I understand her, does not claim that our language about God does “not apply to the reality of God.”  Rather, her thesis (and mine) is that our metaphorical or symbolic language about God points to the reality of God or to our human experience of the reality of God without being able to capture or ultimately to define that reality.  Our language about God applies to the reality of God as symbol, just not as fact.  Our language about God applies to the reality of God as something that suggests, that directs our attention in a certain direction, that expresses an experience of God.  It never captures the reality of God. 

In She Who Is Beth Johnson expresses this truth at one point with the marvelous statement that human language about God is at best “legitimate and inadequate.”[1]  It is legitimate because it is the best we can do when we speak about God, and as humans we must speak about God.  It is inadequate because it can never capture the essence of God.

In their critique of Elizabeth Johnson’s work the American Catholic bishops seem to be calling that understand of the nature of human language about God, including the names used for God in the Catholic tradition, false.  If they think that understanding is false they are guilty of idolatry.  Any claim that human language captures the essence of God is idolatry because it reduces God to an element of created being, namely, human speech.  Such a claim is idolatry because it claims to capture the infinite in something finite.  For example, saying that God is Father without at the same time understanding that God is not Father in anything like our human understanding of father because God infinitely transcends our human understandings is to make the name Father for God into an idol.  Any human statement about God that fails to recognize that, while it may in some significant way be true, it is also necessarily false is idolatry. 

The bishop’s suggestion that Catholic names for God apply to the “reality” of God at least tends toward this idolatry.  Clearly the male bishops don’t like Beth Johnson’s insistence that feminine metaphors are as appropriate for God as are male ones.  So they claim that the Church’s traditionally exclusively male names for God apply to the reality of God, apparently in a way as to actually define God.  They make that claim to exclude the use of nontraditional feminine images, like Mother.  They are saying that in God’s essence God is masculine, and that is an idolatrous statement pure and simple. 

This particular attack on Beth Johnson is especially worrisome.  The bishops are arrogating to themselves the power to define what is appropriate theological inquiry and what is not.  And they are doing it in a way that, if they succeed, will lock Catholic theology into an idolatry from which it will never recover.  This attack on something as fundamental as the nature of human religious language must cause significant concern in all Catholic theologians.  Since Vatican II Catholic theology has blossomed in new and exciting ways that have meaning for all Christians and even for all people of faith, not just for Roman Catholics.  The bishops and the Vatican seem intent on crushing the blossoms of Catholic theology for the purpose of preserving their own power, the power of an all male hierarchy.  In doing so they have lost all credibility.  They have lost whatever moral authority they had left. 

I say these things about the Catholic hierarchy with a heavy heart.  I have written elsewhere in this blog about the many things I love about the Roman Catholic Church.  I was trained for ministry at Seattle University primarily by Catholics.  I learned from brilliant Catholic scholars and teachers.  I studied with faithful Catholic men and women who were my classmates.  I came highly to value the great spiritual traditions within the Catholic Church and the wonderful lay men and women, women and men religious, and priests who were my teachers.  Yet I cannot remain silent in the face of these latest attacks by the Catholic hierarchy on people I know to be first rate scholars, highly effective teachers, and persons of great Christian faith.  The attacks are too painful.  The stakes are too high.  I know that I cannot influence the Catholic hierarchy in any way, and they don’t care what I think.  Still I must speak my mind, even if doing so makes no real difference in the world.

I don’t know what faithful Catholic theologians like Elizabeth Johnson will do in the face of this attack.  It is not for me, a non-Catholic, to say that they should leave the Catholic Church, but I won’t be surprised if some of them do.  If they leave, or if they stay with their voices muted, the loss will be not only the Catholic Church’s.  It will be all of Christianity’s.  The only ones to gain will be a male Catholic hierarchy devoid of all legitimacy, of all credibility.

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[1] She Who Is, p. 112.

A Dangerous Misstatement: President Obama and the Role of the Supreme Court

“Ultimately I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” President Barack Obama

The role and function of the Constitution in the American system of government is badly misunderstood.  We don’t teach civics any more, and people graduate from high school with no understanding of how our system of government actually is supposed to work.  That lack of understanding is bad enough when we’re talking about the public in general.  It is appalling when we are talking about the President of the United States who used to  be a professor of constitutional law.  Yet that is what we’ve got.  Or at least we’ve got a President who is willing to play to the general public misunderstanding of the role and function of the U.S. Constitution for political purposes.  We see that circumstance in the statement quoted above that President Obama has made in connection with the case currently before the U. S. Supreme Court concerning the constitutionality of the reform of the health insurance system that Obama got through Congress and signed into law.

President Obama, rightly or wrongly, considers that health care reform law to be the major accomplishment, or at least one of the major accomplishments, of his Administration.  That reform has been attacked on the grounds that it is unconstitutional.  Among the arguments made against the law’s constitutionality is the claim that the federal government exceeded its Constitutional power when it enacted the insurance mandate portion of the law, the portion that requires every American to carry health insurance or to pay a penalty for not doing so.  The constitutional challenge to the law is currently pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, which is expected to make a ruling later this month, June, 2012. 

Legal experts are divided on the likelihood that the Supreme Court will invalidate the health care reform law.  President Obama, of course, is trying to put the best face he can on the constitutional challenge to his pet achievement.  Regardless of how the Court rules, however, Obama’s statement about the pending case quoted above is something I never thought I’d hear a professor of constitutional law say.  Obama has reinforced the public ignorance about the role the Constitution plays in our system of government, something that he probably did for political purposes but that he should never have done at all.

Go back to the top of this post and read that statement again.  In it Obama suggests, indeed he says flat out, that the political support that his health care reform legislation received in Congress is a reason why the Supreme Court should not rule it unconstitutional.  Lots of people voted for the law in Congress, therefore the Supreme Court should defer to the politicians and decline to rule the law unconstitutional.  That position totally misrepresents the roles of the Constitution and of the Supreme Court in our system of government.  Coming from the President, and from a President who was once a professor of constitutional law at that, this statement can do no good and has the potential to do a good deal of harm.

So what is the role of the US Constitution in our system of government?  It actually functions in various ways, all of which however are foundation for our government.  The Constitution first of all creates the three branch system of government.  It creates the executive branch with the President at its head.  It creates the legislative branch, the two houses of Congress.  It creates the judicial branch, the head of which is the Supreme Court.  Beyond that, our Constitution establishes the extent of the authority of each of these branches and of the federal government generally.  In its Bill of Rights, the first ten Amendments to the Constitution that were adopted very shortly after the Constitution went into effect, the Constitution guarantees certain personal rights and liberties and sets limits to the power of the executive branch in judicial proceedings.  The Bill of Rights originally set limitations only on the federal government, but after the Civil War most of its provisions were applied to the states as well through judicial interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

What is the role of the Supreme Court?  One major role of the Court is precisely to rule on the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress.  In 1803 the case of Marbury v. Madison established the Court’s power of judicial review of the constitutionality of acts of Congress.  That authority has been the law of the land ever since.  The power of the Supreme Court to rule acts of Congress unconstitutional is one of the principal checks and balances in our system of government that keep any branch of the government from becoming dominant over the others and that function to preserve the liberties the Constitution reserves to the people.

The issue before the Supreme Court in the health care reform case isn’t one of personal rights but one of the constitutional limits to the power of Congress.  The issue specifically is whether or not Congress exceeded the power granted to it under the clause of the Constitution giving it the power to regulate interstate commerce when it adopted the insurance mandate.  Whether a law is challenged as beyond the powers of Congress or challenged as a violation of the constitutionally guaranteed rights of an individual, however, the Supreme Court’s role is to determine whether a governmental action, by the Congress or by the executive branch, conforms to the limits of governmental action established in the Constitution.  The extent of the political support that the law received in Congress has nothing to do with it.  A law that Congresses passes unanimously can be just as unconstitutional as one that passes by a single vote in each house, and President Obama has to be at least as aware of that basic truth of constitutional law as I am.

The Constitution functions in many ways to set limits to what the federal government can do.  Those limits are vital, and respecting them is vital to the individual liberty that we Americans so treasure.  The role of the Supreme Court in enforcing those limits becomes particularly important precisely in those cases in which an unconstitutional law has wide-spread support in the Congress or among the American people.  The best examples come from the civil rights movement.

From the time of the failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War into the 1960s many southern states had passed laws that created a system of racial apartheid, the so-called Jim Crow laws.  Among other things those laws created a segregated system of public schools, prohibiting white and Black students from studying together in the same schools using the same materials and taught by the same teachers.  Those laws had wide-spread support among white citizens in those states.  If we had to wait for the white population to get rid of the Jim Crow laws by popular vote, Jim Crow might very well still be the law in at least some southern states. 

We didn’t have to wait for the white population to get rid of the Jim Crow laws by popular vote because the US Supreme Court had the power to review those laws to determine whether or not they transgressed the equal protection of the law that the Constitution guarantees to all citizens.  In the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that state laws establishing segregated school systems did violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause and ruled those laws unconstitutional.  It was the beginning of the end of Jim Crow.

The Brown decision was wildly unpopular with the white citizens of the states whose segregated school systems had been declared unconstitutional.  All of us who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s have the images seared into our brains of the hatred white citizens spewed at Black children as the schools were integrated.  The citizens of Little Rock, Arkansas, and so many other places in our country would never have eliminated racial segregation in the schools by popular vote, or at least it would have taken them many decades for them  to do so.  After the Brown decision President Eisenhower apparently regretted having appointed Earl Warren, the author of the Brown  decision, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  That decision was wildly unpopular.

That decision was wildly unpopular, and that unpopularity had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the constitutionality vel non of segregated school systems.  The decision’s unpopularity made it difficult to enforce, but it didn’t make Brown bad constitutional law.  The decision’s unpopularity was simply irrelevant to the legal issue in the case.

Brown is a perfect example of how important it is to have a system of checks and balances in government, to have a Supreme Court that can and will make decisions that protect individual rights guaranteed in the Constitution especially when the deprivation of those rights has wide public support.  One critical function of the Constitution is precisely to protect the rights of a minority against the wants and desires of the majority.  If the individual rights mentioned in the Constitution apply only when the majority approves of them, we might as well tear up the parts of the Constitution that establish such rights and throw them in the trash.  That’s how important having a court that interprets the law not the whims of the voters really is.

The Brown example comes from the realm of individual liberties, but the principle of independent judicial review in cases more directly involving the constitutional limits on the power of one branch of government, in the health care case specifically of Congress, is just as important.  If any law of Congress is constitutional simply because it has broad public support or is unconstitutional simply because it lacks such support, we may as well tear up the provisions of the Constitution that set limits to the power of Congress and throw them in the trash.  We would have dictatorship by Congress.  Rights reserved to the individual would disappear.  Rights reserved to the states would disappear.  The role of the Constitution, and the role of the Supreme Court in interpreting and applying the Constitution in specific cases, is important precisely in those cases where something popular violates the Constitution.

President Obama surely knows all that better than I do.  I was never editor of the Harvard Law Review.  I never taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago.  I did, however, have a teaching experience that sheds a good deal of light on our current subject.  Back in 1986 I taught a course on the law of the Soviet Union at the University of Washington School of Law, a course co-sponsored by the Russian and East European Institute of the University of Washington.  The Soviet Union had a constitution that guaranteed individual rights in much the same way as our Bill of Rights does., but there was one crucial difference.  Individual citizens had no right to raise the Soviet constitution as a defense when they were being prosecuted by the state for some alleged crime.  If Americans who believe that Congress has overstepped its constitutional bounds in a matter that affects them cannot raise the Constitution as a defense when Congress’ act is popular we will be no better than the Soviet Union was at guaranteeing the rights of our citizens and assuring the proper exercise of governmental power.

Most Americans don’t understand this role and function of the Constitution and of the federal courts.  Politicians regularly score points with an uninformed electorate by railing against “activist” judges and unpopular Supreme Court decisions.  Religious and political figures on the right wing of American politics have, for example, raised immense amounts of money and gained immense power by whipping up the people against Roe v. Wade.  Yet the simple truth is that whether you like Roe v. Wade or you abhor Roe v. Wade, the popularity of laws prohibiting abortion has nothing to do with the constitutionality of those laws.  The Constitution and the Supreme Court are most important precisely when they are defending individual rights against public opinion.

President Obama knows better than to say what he did about the Supreme Court ruling on his health care reform law.  We deserve better from President Obama than that statement.  I expect to hear such uninformed drivel from the likes of George W. Bush.  I didn’t expect to hear it from Barack Obama.