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.
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