The Great Commission should not be used to make enemies

 by Steve Kindle

Most of the foreign missionaries I talk to hold in common a belief that God always precedes their arrival at the mission field, and prepares the way. This notion is fraught with theological insights. Not the least of these is that God is with people whom we may consider “lost,” yet, there God is. With charity, we can call this a relationship.

A human characteristic we all share is the tendency to regard our culture superior to all others. This would include our religions. In America, we regard democracy as the best form of government and actively seek to democratize the rest of the (backward) world. This is certainly true for most adherents of Christianity—we want the whole world to adopt our faith.

This is, of course, an extension into the modern world of ancient tribalism. Not only do we find the presupposition of “We are the best,” but also the accompanying fear of those who aren’t like us. Couple this with the capitalistic notion of “win or lose” and you have the recipe for constant and continuing strife among the religions and peoples of the world.

What’s to be done about this? If you are a hardcore tribalist, you will insist on winning over all. “We have the truth and you must come to us for salvation,” is the rallying cry. Nothing will change if this predisposition dominates, and it dominates throughout the world. I find it ironic, if not humorous, that those who most exemplify this attitude are the very ones most upset when they find it in others. “Radical fundamentalist Muslims” deplore evangelistic Christianity. Fundamentalist Christians deplore “radical Muslims.” They are two sides of the same coin.

It has been said often that the only hope for world peace is that people give up exclusive claims about their own religion and accept that they are not the only ones with the truth. This is surely at least partially true. Religious strife is as ancient as Cain and Abel (the proper way to sacrifice), and as recent as ISIL. Yet it is an impractical solution; it will never happen, at least for the foreseeable future. But this doesn’t mean that the adherents of these religions can’t take this step.

Gandhi is reputed to have said, “Be the change you want to see.” If you feel that the answer to world peace is acknowledging the value of other’s truths, at least for themselves if not for you, then by living this out, there is one less person in the world agitating for division. Who knows? It might catch on.

When I read in the Bhagavad Gita, for instance, “They alone see truly who see the Lord the same in every creature, who see the deathless in the hearts of all that die. Seeing the same Lord everywhere, they do not harm themselves or others. Thus they attain the supreme goal,” I marvel at the truth therein, and my soul is enlarged. I love meeting people of other Books, and often find my own self failing in comparison to their lives and loves.

Now I know the objections to this approach are many. “The Bible says…” and “We have been given the Great Commission,” just to name two. Fundamentalists will never abandon these “truths.” It’s true that the Great Faiths are not teaching the same thing, but I believe that they are capable of producing the same kind of person—loving, considerate of the earth, peaceful—and that is the point, after all, isn’t it? In fact, if Christianity produces hateful people, willing to kill others for its “truth”, who condemn all who disagree, and hold them in contempt, why bother with it?

If I must go into all the world and preach the gospel, I will affirm that God loves all people, that God wants all people to love each other, and that God supports all who obey the Great Commandments regardless of where it is found or who said it. And you know what? God will already be there ahead of me, teaching the world through its own culture the way to Truth.

I recently published a short book that looks at why we disagree about the Bible and what to do about it. Order I'm Right and You're Wrong! here: https://energiondirect.com/biblical-studies/im-right-and-youre-wrong It's only $4.99.

A Reader's Selection of Noteworthy Snipits

 A reader of my book, I'm Right and You're Wrong: Why we disagree about the Bible and what to do about it, submitted some of the remarks that are especially meaningful to him. I'd like to share them with you.
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No, the world is not set up with us in mind. The child’s whine that “It’s not fair!” is our first recognition of this reality. 

Pluralism encourages understanding and celebrating differences rather than anathematizing them as in the past.

None of us is born with perfect vision; we all suffer from worldview myopia, and unlike physical eyesight, there is no corrective lens that can make us comprehend the world perfectly.

Regardless of the theological positions held, they mostly spring from one or more of the areas expressed in the Wesleyan Quadrilateral: scripture, tradition, experience, and reason. How one finally interprets the Bible is determined by which of the four is most emphasized.

Experience, for Wesley, was the verification of biblical teaching in the lives of believers.

Among liberals was the belief that God is love. That is to say, that love is not simply an attribute of God’s nature, but that the essence of God’s being is love. This love means that God is primarily immanent, close to the creation, rather than transcendent and remote. This produced a belief in universalism, that God would not condemn anyone to a literal hell. A God who is love would not, therefore, condemn all at birth (Original Sin), either. But it is the idea of progress, that “every day, in every way, the world is getting better and better,” that typifies liberal Christianity through the 19th century. There was great optimism that a truly Christian society could be created. Prosperity was at its highest, the Theory of Evolution was seen as progressive and continuous improvement, the world was largely at peace, nature was being subdued, medical advances were ending many diseases with the promise of ending many more, and humanity was on the way to perfectibility. Sin, it seemed, was no longer a useful description of the human predicament.

Fundamentalists often fall prey to the notion that, “Since I derived this meaning straight from the Bible, it is equal in force to the Bible itself.”

Liberalism, they argue, lost contact with the heart of the Christian story in an effort to accommodate Modernism. It defined Christianity in such a way that it became undifferentiated from a social movement, and transitioned from a religion into a philosophy of religion.

The Progressive corrective is to reclaim the heart of the biblical story as our story (admittedly reinterpreted), ground our theology in the incarnation of God in Jesus, and return the church to be servants of the world. It also sees the Bible and tradition as authoritative voices that must be listened to critically, while understanding that both are human products, full of wisdom as well as fraught with danger. The foundational belief that the incarnation holds the interpretive clue to understanding ourselves, our world, and God, leads many Progressives to Process Theology. 

So our disagreements are less about what the Bible means than with the various milieus from which they spring. Since there is no such thing as a certifiably perfect milieu, we should welcome another’s interpretation as a necessary contribution to the whole. The foregoing chapters are intended to make this clear. Given this reality, we are better able to address one another as an equal rather than as an “other.”

“When in Doubt, Shout!: Paradoxical Influences of Doubt on Proselytizing.” [Note 3] Disagreeing can be either a learning experience for one or both, or another way of missing the point of loving one’s neighbor as one’s self. As Henry Neufeld put it, “You are never more God-like than when you open your heart’s door to another person. The more different they are, the more God-like that action is.” Neufeld’s understanding of God makes possible such an outcome. Another view of God, much less grace-full, might wish for a more violent outcome, as for those who want gays and lesbians executed in the name of their God. Once again, what we take to the Bible informs what we take out of the Bible.

Not getting the Bible right in some of its particulars is hardly on the level of not getting our lives right. It seems that some in Matthew 25 got their lives right without knowing the particulars of why.

The best that we can do is choose wisely among the options and live with humility in the presence of others. Another way putting this is that we listen to what to us sounds like the voice of God and subordinate all other voices to it. We may as well, because that’s what we do anyway. Now it’s official!

Yes, the Holy Spirit is our teacher, but we can easily slip into the error of believing that anything we think we understand is a direct imparting from the Spirit.

Follow the Golden Rule. Don’t allow differences of outcomes to come between you and another created in the image of God. Always bear in mind that you are not the one another is called to please.

Martin Buber taught us the difference between treating a person as a human being (a Thou—one like yourself) or an object (an It—a thing to be used). If our purpose in biblical discussion is to win someone over, we no longer treat our conversationalist as a person, but as a thing to dominate. If, on the other hand, our objective is to discover something valuable and give our conversation partner an opportunity to teach us, we and our partner are one, or I/ Thou.

We learn not to appear scholarly, or erudite, or to win arguments, but to follow Jesus as a faithful disciple. That’s the difference between being right and righteous. It’s also the point of why we study the Bible in the first place.